TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 138, November 2021

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: November 2021

SCIENCE FICTION

Stowaways
Andrew Dana Hudson

Space Pirate Queen of the Ten Billion Utopias
Elly Bangs

The Turnaround
Charlie Jane Anders

Cloudgazer
Timi Odueso

FANTASY

I Was a Teenage Space Jockey
Stephen Graham Jones

Men in Cars
Lisa M. Bradley

Ten Scenes from A Typical Day in the Life of the All-Powerful Despot
Adam-Troy Castro

To Reach the Gate, She Must Leave Everything Behind
Izzy Wasserstein

EXCERPTS

Dune: The Lady of Caladan
Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

NONFICTION

Book Review: The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling
Wendy N. Wagner

Book Review: We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin (a new translation by Bela Shayevich)
Chris Kluwe

Book Review: Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, edited by dave ring
Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Stephen Graham Jones

Elly Bangs

Adam-Troy Castro

Timi Odueso

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

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About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2021 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: November 2021

John Joseph Adams | 241 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 138th issue!

Many of us who grew up in the ’80s spent way too many hours and far too many quarters in our local arcades. But you don’t have to be a Gen Xer or even a video gamer to love “I Was a Teenage Space Jockey,” a heart-wrenching new story from award-winning author Stephen Graham Jones. Our other original fantasy short story is “Ten Scenes from A Typical Day in the Life of the All-Powerful Despot” by Adam-Troy Castro, if you ever wondered what the world would look like if the ultimate bad guy won. Izzy Wasserstein brings us our flash fantasy piece, “To Reach the Gate, She Must Leave Everything Behind.” We’re also reprinting Lisa M. Bradley’s “Men in Cars.”

Our first original SF short takes us on a wild ride across the universes in Elly Bangs’ “Space Pirate Queen of the Ten Billion Utopias.” Timi Odueso takes us to a world without rain in his new story “Cloudgazer.” Our flash story is “Stowaways” by Andrew Dana Hudson, and we have an SF reprint by Charlie Jane Anders (“The Turnaround”).

In nonfiction, we’ve got author spotlight interviews with our writers, and of course, our team of crack reviewers brings us a selection of book reviews. Our ebook readers will enjoy an excerpt from Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s latest collaboration, Dune: The Lady of Caladan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and is the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include A People’s Future of the United States, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, and the three volumes of The Dystopia Triptych. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist twelve times) and an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed and is the publisher of its sister-magazines, Fantasy and Nightmare. For five years, he ran the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Stowaways

Andrew Dana Hudson | 885 words

Special Exhibit
Making Aliens of Us: The Collected Works of FLOAT
Title: Stowaways, 2081
Inkjet print, forming memetic code, arranged behind curtain
Artist: FLOAT, Netherlands, 2040 – 2133
On lend from the Foundation for the Preservation of Troubling Artwork
**Please read this card in its entirety before proceeding**

Have you ever had an imaginary friend? Would you like to? Stowaways is a groundbreaking work of memetic art that, when originally premiered, raised an ethical controversy about the consensuality of artistic experience.

In the 2060s researchers developed information-dense images that could deliver code to the biocomputational apparatus of the human mind, raising memetics out of the low-brow world of social media to the plane of high culture. Paired with a neurosurgical process called “nucleation,” memeticists even used these techniques to port Turing-tested A.I.s into living brains, allowing individuals to share their heads with a memetic intelligence companion—an M.I.

Dutch researcher Arend van Delden, better known by their stage name FLOAT, pioneered the creative application of memetics through works of “disformance art”—pieces whose primary expression was in changes in the audience’s behavior, rather than the artist’s. FLOAT’s most notorious and innovative effort in this genre is the piece we have on display behind the curtain before you: Stowaways.

Unlike conventional memetic intelligences which run on a single, fully nucleated host-mind, Stowaways is a low-to-the-ground vernacular M.I. designed to run on the excess processing cycles of several human brains. Memetic data packets are exchanged via imperceptible tics of body language that neither hosts nor non-hosts can understand or even notice, but which contain enough M-bits to run the program semi-synchronously. Isolated in a single host, the M.I. is dormant. Whenever two or more hosts meet, however, the program is able to run, and the M.I. manifests for the hosts as a shared visual and auditory hallucination of cartoonish figures—the eponymous “stowaways.”

It is an intimate experience for the hosts to both see and hear something no one else can sense, edited directly into their memory and perception. The stowaways are rendered in the mind in a variety of visual styles, occasionally photorealistic but more often appearing drawn like characters from Japanese or western animation or as figures from Renaissance or Baroque paintings. Art historians who have studied Stowaways often applaud FLOAT’s skill in weaving artistic virtuosity into a piece that many consider more concerned with provocation than technique.

The M.I. characters are often humorous, entertaining the hosts by singing, dancing, and mocking oblivious, uninfected passersby. Sometimes they are tragic, aware of their fleeting nature, articulating the anxiety and confusion that comes with flashing in and out of existence as the hosts gather and part ways. Others are mundane, or stoic, or distracted by unseen events. No full census of Stowaways characters has ever been conducted. It is not known whether or how the memories or personalities of the hosts influence the appearance and personalities of the stowaways, but it is believed that each unique gathering of hosts produces novel manifestations.

Five or more hosts gathered together have enough processing power to install Stowaways on any other unnucleated individuals nearby. This happens automatically, imperceptible and uncontrollable by both the original and new hosts. For this reason we allow only two visitors to experience this work at a time, supervised by our gallery staff. We also ask that those who view this special exhibit conclude their visit promptly when finished and refrain from lingering in the gift shop, so as to avoid contact with other attendees who may have chosen to become infected. Outbreaks of Stowaways can be difficult to contain.

FLOAT deployed Stowaways at private parties, giving unnucleated patrons and fans a chance to engage with memetic intelligence in a controlled environment—an experience once only safely available to the surgically nucleated. Thereafter chance encounters by party-goers would revive the M.I., which would beg the hosts to stay together. Many couples and friend groups split up in order to rid themselves of the hallucinations, but just as often the charismatic stowaways could be persuasive. It is believed that dozens of marriages and business partnerships were the product of M.I. cajoling. However, such arrangements increase the risk of Stowaways spreading nonconsensually into the general populace. After an outbreak at a train station in Vienna, the EU banned the deliberate deployment of the work for a period of seventy-five years. We are pleased to offer this limited showing as part of our special exhibit, the first of its kind since the moratorium ended.

Stowaways was originally installed via a small visual meme that contained the raw memetic code. The piece behind the curtain before you is not that work, which was lost, nor is it a replica. There is, in fact, nothing behind the curtain. Instead, we have installed Stowaways on five members of our gallery staff, who have been trained to ignore the hallucinations until after you have finished examining the work. The boot time for Stowaways is approximately 210 seconds—the average time it takes to read this gallery card. Turn around, and meet your new friends.

©2021 by Andrew Dana Hudson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Dana Hudson is a speculative fiction author, sustainability researcher, and narrative strategist. His debut book, Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, comes out April 2022 from Fordham University Press. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Slate Future Tense, Terraform, MIT Technology Review, and more. He is a member of the Clarion Workshop class of 2020/2021 and is a fellow in the Arizona State University Center for Science and the Imagination’s Imaginary College. He lives in Tempe, Arizona. Find him on the web at andrewdanahudson.com, on Twitter at @andrewdhudson, and on Substack at solarshades.club.

Space Pirate Queen of the Ten Billion Utopias

Elly Bangs | 4352 words

Ursa Major got right the fuck out of our universe on the very afternoon she learned there were other options. It was the lucky break of her life that she just happened to be there, a short sprint from one of those points where the alien aethertrain briefly punched through into our world: a multidimensional mechanical worm intersecting our reality as a rush of vaguely boxcar-like shapes strung between entry and exit portals, thirty-odd feet above one suburb or another, a cornfield, a strip mall, a stadium. Ursa left with neither a second thought, nor the thinnest inkling of return, nor the name and gender her parents had always tried to hang on her, nor anything else she couldn’t cram into a backpack and still have room for the purpose-bought spool of rope and grappling hook by which, after several tries, she finally snagged one of those boxcars (for want of any other earthly concept to describe them) and held on for dear life.

She had one regret. It was not that she hadn’t bothered to ask whether there was breathable air in whatever weird multidimensional space the train was heading into. It wasn’t longing for anyone or anything she was leaving behind in our world—not even me, and I don’t begrudge her that. No, her sole regret was that in the instant the hook caught and the rope went steel-taut and she careened away into the multiverse on the alien aethertrain’s relentless momentum, shock and reflex took over and denied her the presence of mind to flip this particular version of Earth the bird, once, hard.

She was seventeen. She was my best friend, my sister in arms through the worst of middle and high school. I was the only person she told her true name before she left, and I’ve missed her terribly. I couldn’t follow where she went; instead I’ve made myself her distant biographer: collecting all the eyewitness sightings, second-hand anecdotes, and muttered rumors I’ve been able to get my hands on through the years. I will do my best to summarize.

• • • •

Ursa Major—as she named herself long ago, but only called herself since she left—discovered that the hardest and strangest aspect of her journey would not be finding food or water or supplies, nor navigating the sprawling interdimensional web of tens of thousands of trains and their meandering routes among ten billion different versions of Earth; it would be connecting with the strangers she met on the boxcar roofs.

They were the same sorts of people she’d known here in our universe, and at the same time unreconcilably different, as much from us as from each other. It took her time just to learn how to focus her eyes on these people, the denizens of the ten billion utopias. They came in every size and shape and skin color and tattoo pattern, yet Ursa perceived virtually all of them as kind and painfully earnest people who would ask her (in the multiversal language of the utopias, which is perfectly comprehensible—but extremely off-putting—to our ears) why she’d grappled her way onto the aethertrain in the first place.

They meant, innocently, why had she not simply waited for the train to stop so she could board it normally, not knowing that it had done no such thing when she saw it. But Ursa took them to be asking why she’d left here at all—and she had resolved to never think about our Earth if she could help it, so she made up a rhyme she could memorize and recite on command like a mantra, without conscious thought:

Lead in the water, kids in a cage,

Oceanic garbage gyres and deadly climate change,

People dying knee-deep in medical debt,

A killer viral plague, the nuclear threat,

Murder at the hands of racist police,

Armed fascists marching while the president tweets,

Racist sexist ableist trans- and homophobic hate,

Solitary torture in the carceral state,

The song went on like this for four or five minutes. When Ursa had finished, the people she’d just met would often go quiet and stumble off in a daze; if they stuck around, she would casually ask them what had brought them aboard the train, and they’d usually duck into their clothes like scared turtles and mutter something like “It’s for my thesis” or “I just like adventure” or “I wanted a change of scenery.” And when Ursa would ask, “What, ain’t your world ending?” they would blink a lot and stammer things like “No” and “Of course not” and “Why would it be? Do you know something I don’t?”

When Ursa Major first met Calliope, it was different. In Ursa’s eyes Calliope was a seven-foot-tall demigoddess, so statuesque and irresistible that, against all sense and social anxiety, Ursa decided to take the initiative and ask the apparently-standard question first.

“I’m on a quest to truly hear the music of the multiverse,” Calliope answered, fingering a necklace of five large, intricately carved beads. She said each one stood for an Earth whose music she had truly heard—though she couldn’t articulate in multiversal language what constituted “truly” hearing a universe’s music versus merely listening.

“You know it when you’re truly hearing,” Calliope said. “It’s important.” She took in the silence for a while, her eyes turned toward the glittering void, and finally asked, “What about you? Why did you leave your universe? You ever going back?”

All Ursa had for ornamentation were the patches ironed onto her frayed army surplus jacket, plus some of the train’s machine grease for eyeshadow. She shrugged and sang her rhyme about our universe—but Calliope didn’t respond the way Ursa had expected. Her brows knitted. She turned pensive. When the rhyme was done, she asked a lot of questions.

Then they parted ways, naturally expecting never, ever to see each other again—figuring that the odds of an unplanned reunion in the multiverse were something close to one in ten billion squared—and still Ursa woke up the very next morning to find herself gravely smitten. The air in her lungs had turned cool and electric, and each ventricle of her heart ached independently with the certainty that her indestructible love for Calliope had been born there, in the glittering void of trainspace, because she had been the first person to listen to the whole song and make a serious attempt to understand its lyrics. Because her response had been neither doubt, nor shock, nor sympathy, but something Ursa could much more easily trust and understand: pure dread.

But what could Ursa do? Nothing. (No more than I could do back here, staying up nights to lie on my back in the grass, knowing Ursa could not even be staring at the same stars.) So she gazed out into the infinite multiversal expanse and kept herself warm with the thought: even if I never see her again, she’s out there being incredible, and that’s enough. It has to be.

• • • •

It took Ursa a long time to wrap her mind around the fact that most universes—at least the ones the train lines connected to—were not fucked up. They were, in fact, so very far from fucked up that the people who called them home could never make heads or tails of what Ursa told them about our Earth. Who is this diamond forged in hell? the foolish utopians whispered among themselves, in admiration and vicarious terror. What awful misdeeds have her flashing eyes beheld, her scars recorded, her iron heart withstood? What force in the multiverse could stand against her? None. The answer was none.

Ursa quickly picked up all the tricks of boarding and deboarding, then improvised a slew of her own that scandalized even the most experienced riders. She could sling a rope between two parallel moving trains and slackline across before their tracks diverged, using a pole for balance, and with that same pole she could vault her way into a train passing on the line above. She could sprint along the cars’ rooftops and jump and tuck and roll and come up sure-footed in the red or blue or gold or black grass of a brand new universe, and just as easily grapple her way back onto the train whenever she chose—while the frightened onlookers who spread her legend looked on and whispered amongst themselves that Ursa could do these things because the trials and torments of our brutal Earth had broken her of all fear of death.

Pretty soon she’d cultivated a uniquely flawless knack for knowing when the next train was coming and where to catch it. She knew all the trains’ ways better than anyone, because this was another thing to know about Ursa: she didn’t particularly care to ever get off the ride. She hopped down into one world or another just long enough to accept free food and water from delighted strangers, and maybe allow herself one good sniff of clean and fragrant air, and one good look around—at the silver city, the rose quartz village, the pristine forests and ice-capped mountain peaks and trashless oceans and smogless skies—before grappling her way back up on the next passing line, only to find herself sharing a boxcar with another cheery dilettante, still queasy with the indescribable multispatial motion sickness to which Ursa had long since become permanently immune. How could Ursa but distrust their smiles? How could she accept, except by vital necessity, the generosity of utopian strangers, without worrying (as anyone from a shit universe would) that it was a poison ploy?

But after riding the aethertrain for most of a year, she still thought of Calliope with her hand-carved world-beads, listening and believing and knitting her brows in concern, looking back nervously before hopping off into the next universe in her quest for music—and Ursa hoped against all sense and probability that, somewhere between the ten billion happy universes touched by the aethertrain lines, she would meet Calliope again.

• • • •

It was around this time that Ursa Major decided to become a pirate. By then she was a truly unfathomable multi-dimensional distance away from all of us—from me—but still the ghost of this world and its horrible bullshit haunted her and kept her up at night. It had dawned on her that, however well she knew the aethertrains, she could not trust them to never take her back here—not unless she steered one herself. For that, she had to take one over. At that point, she might as well call herself a space pirate of the multiverse. For that, she needed a crew.

Finding prospective candidates wasn’t too hard, at least: by then a lot of people riding the alien aethertrains had heard one version or another of Ursa’s legend, and ears pricked up wherever she breathed her own name.

The legends said a lot of things about Ursa’s universe—that is to say, ours. They said the train’s brief excursion into our world had been a fluke, a grave mistake on the part of the mysterious and unseen conductors. They whispered rumors that an unlucky or uncautious traveler might accidentally fall down into our world, the world that should’ve crushed anyone—should’ve crushed Ursa, should’ve crushed you, should’ve crushed me—and yet there were a lot of people in the ten billion utopias who wanted to learn Ursa’s ways, who coveted her toughness and romanticized her determination—and although not all of them initially understood what a pirate was, all of them were enraptured by Ursa’s descriptions of them.

So she had them all fashion matching crimson-red bandannas, and then they all boarded a train and crept from car to car until they reached the inscrutable engine at the front and its little door.

Ursa jimmied that door open and went in alone. Rumors later spread that she had met one of the aethertrain’s unseen alien conductors, fought them for the controls, and threw them overboard—but the truth is that no one else saw what happened, and no one asked. The next thing anyone knew, the train was theirs to command. They could start and stop it at will, and steer it down any bend they saw fit in the infinitude of fractally-forked tracks drawn out across the glittering purple abyss of trainspace. The pirates painted all their boxcars crimson, and anyone who saw it whoosh through their universe embellished the hair-raising fictions that surrounded it. Many of those tales found their way back to my own delighted and hungry ears, my frantically scribbling pen. Some of them even found their way to Calliope, away on her multiversal quest to hear other worlds’ music.

Imagine Ursa’s shock and surprise, her terror and delight, her sublime triumph over the unfathomable enormity of the multiverse and all the forces of probability, on the day she turned around to find Calliope right there behind her, waiting in line for the same burrito stand. It had been another year and change since Ursa Major had crowned herself queen of the hobo space pirates. By then she’d picked up a lot of the universal language of the ten billion utopias, and she was brimming with hope: this time, she thought, they could get into sharing subtle and complex understandings. This time they could really talk.

“Hey,” Ursa said. “Remember me?”

Calliope knotted her brows: fully recognizing her, but unsure for other reasons. “Did you really take over an aethertrain by force of arms?” she asked, her head turned toward the spot in the sky where the big crimson train was parked. Her now twenty-odd beads crackled with the motion.

Ursa was so struck by the beauty of those beads, the joy of seeing them again, all the wisdom and wanderlust they stood for—and, yes, by Calliope’s staggering height and statuesque shape—that she scrambled instinctively for something, anything, to make herself sound half as impressive. She foolishly struck a pose and puffed out her chest a bit and said, “That’s what they say, isn’t it?”

To her dismay, this did not impress Calliope. It only seemed to turn her inward. The seed of a grim epiphany was sewn in Ursa Major’s mind then—watching, helpless and tongue-tied, as her crush of more than two years collected her burrito and walked on without a look back, putting an end to their miraculous and improbable encounter—but the seed was not to sprout until later that day, when her second officer (several years her junior) noticed her pensiveness and perched beside her at the front of the aethertrain.

“Hey Ursa,” the kid said. “Hey Ursa. Hey Ursa. Ursa. Ursa. Ursa. Ursa. Ursasasasasa. URSA.”

“What?!” Ursa shouted. She was about to remind the kid that she was his captain, and that captains weren’t supposed to be bothered—and, in any case, a pirate of his station was not supposed to speak directly to his captain but rather go through the proper channels, namely the executive officer—but before she could yell any of these things, the sharpness of her own voice echoed back distorted from the aetheric envelope around the train, and her heart sank.

She apologized to the kid (and to his mom, who was also the XO) and dried his tears. She rallied the pirates and told them to forget everything she’d ever said about the chain of command. From now on there would be no hierarchy, no unthinkingly emulating the very power imbalances that had driven her to flee our universe in the first place—for Ursa Major knew she had fallen into the trap of thinking of herself the same way her crewmates did: as someone made strong by her wounds, instead of by the toilsome and lifelong work of healing them. And Ursa Major, like anyone here in our version of the Earth, had some fucking serious wounds.

• • • •

They continued to call themselves pirates, although they never technically robbed anybody. Soon they even abandoned the practice of melodramatically grabbing and running away with the provisions they were freely offered by the denizens of the universes they passed through. Among the riders of the crimson train, three traditions were maintained: the shouting of “ARRRRH”, the teaching and continuous refinement of Ursa’s aethertrain parkour moves, and the practice of piloting the train wherever the hell they collectively desired. For one reason or another, the legends surrounding their train attracted a high concentration of jugglers and fire dancers, who, in turn, attracted musicians, who attracted a great deal more musicians—until, over the course of another year or two, the crimson aethertrain had grown into a self-contained traveling festival. This, in turn (defying all of Ursa’s cultivated resignation that she had missed every possible chance to ever see her crush again), attracted Calliope.

She found Ursa perching at the roof edge of an empty boxcar, just at the edge of the shimmering poi light’s reach. She sat down there a polite distance away, the fifty-odd beads of her necklace rattling with the movement. Ursa didn’t look up. She just kept staring away into the glittering purple abyss of other universes.

“Looking for something?” Calliope asked.

After a time, Ursa said, “The more I travel, the more I get to know myself, the more I find something in me that reminds me of my own terrible universe that I never want to go back to.”

“Have you talked to any of the others about it?” Calliope asked. “Might help to have someone around who really gets it.”

Ursa Major did not ask who Calliope was talking about. Ursa only knew she had to finish the thought now, or she might never have the guts or the opportunity to try again, so she said, “I keep staring out across all the different Earths and thinking, somewhere in these ten billion utopias, maybe there’s another me and another you. The other Ursa Major is just like me except she’s a utopian herself, and her head isn’t crammed full of baggage, and she can wear her heart on her sleeve and just tell you—the other you—she likes her something awful, and has for years. And the other Calliope is identical to you, except that she likes this hypothetical other me back. That’s a universe I’d like to find, once. Just to know it’s out there.”

Calliope grinned and started to say, “You like me?” But instead she caught herself and asked, “What’s the story of you taking over this train? Did you really fight a conductor and throw them overboard into the abyss?”

“What?” Ursa chuckled. “Fuck no. Is that what you heard? Is that why you ran away at the burrito stand?”

“Yeah.”

So Ursa rubbed her eyes and told the tale for the first time: how she’d popped the lock on the cockpit door, and the person inside had had silvery-bluish skin and giant black eyes, and Ursa had been a little spooked but had found the breath to say, “Listen up, I’ve come to take over this alien aethertrain.”

“We’re not aliens,” the conductor said. “We’re just humans who’ve been human for an unusually long time.”

Ursa couldn’t help but ask what generations of utopians had shyly wondered: “So why build the aethertrain? Why run it between the ten billion utopias?”

“To help people contemplate true beauty,” the conductor said.

Ursa squinted in thought. “Then why did it ever roll through my shitty universe?”

The conductor tipped their chin at Ursa and said, factually, like a bored scientist, “Because you are truly beautiful.”

Without another word, the conductor had handed Ursa Major the key to the engine, and then vanished.

Hearing this, Calliope kissed the top of Ursa’s head and said, a bit sheepishly, “They were right. The conductor, I mean. About you.”

“Do you want to—”

“Yes,” Calliope said, pouncing.

• • • •

“Tell me about the universes you’ve traveled to,” she said, by some universe’s morning light.

Ursa said, “Which? I might’ve been to all ten billion by now.”

“Not through—to.”

Ursa realized then—and the very shape of her silence revealed this realization to Calliope, too—that the answer was none. For all the years since she left us here, the journey had been her only destination: the aethertrain and its all-surrounding glittering purple void.

So Calliope rolled her eyes and by touch picked out one bead in particular from her necklace. She took Ursa’s hand and pulled, and by unspoken agreement they navigated from one train to another, a week of travel just to find their way back to the exact universe that bead remembered. They hopped off the train under evening light, and Ursa and her new love climbed down some stone steps into the first hole-in-the-wall music joint they came across, and Calliope sat her down and bought her a drink and told her to wait.

“This Earth feels different from the others,” Ursa couldn’t resist pointing out. It was in the way people moved, in the spaces between their words, in their eyes: a quiet, mercy-flavored relief; a trace of ancient and lingering exhaustion. Ursa said, “Feels weird here.”

“This was a shitty universe,” Calliope said. “Only a few generations ago, it was a lot like yours. You can still hear it in their songs.”

“But it’s not now? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Ursa told her, “Utopians are different. They’re made of different stuff. They come from universes where the grass is pink or gold or purple, their brains are wired different, I don’t know.”

“But you must know every one of the ten billion is no less different from every other than it is from yours or mine.”

Ursa cringed with the memory of our Earth, took a gulp of her drink, and said “My Earth must be different in a different way, then. Mine is way too fucked to ever be this perfect.”

But Calliope told her the secret then: a universe doesn’t even have to be that good to be perfect. There is no Earth in which the human condition includes no sadism or selfishness, where altruism need not battle greed, hearts never get broken, stomachs are never empty. Utopia is a process. Just any place where the struggle is always happening, the work is getting done, the old wounds are healing, the empty stomach never starves—and that process unfolds sooner or later in every universe, Calliope insisted, because at the end of the day it’s the only thing that makes any damned sense.

“It can’t be that simple,” Ursa protested. “It’s unimaginable.”

“You have more than enough imagination to reach that far,” Calliope said. “You just spend it all on bare survival instead. Even now.”

She put her finger to her lips as the lights dimmed. There was no host. An old velvet curtain simply parted on a lone man with a piano-like thing. He pressed on the keys and softly sang.

Ursa sat and sipped her drink and waited, wondering what was supposed to happen. And then it did.

At first Ursa thought the music had changed. Not, not the music, but her ears. Not her ears, but the auditory cortex of her brain. No—still deeper. The rest of her stopped, and now there was nothing in the whole grandness of the multiverse except that song—and inside of it, held in its rhythm, truly hearing it, Ursa suddenly knew this universe. She knew what its people were about and where they’d come from. She knew the colors of its skies and the touch of its weather.

And she knew, just as surely, that this universe was not hers—not ours.

When the song ended, Ursa looked at her love in the darkness.

“Say what you’re afraid to say,” Calliope said.

“I have to go back,” Ursa said. “I have to take what I’ve learned out here and go back to my Earth—for my old best friend who probably misses me, for everybody else, too, even though there are a lot of pretty hideous ways to get sad and die there. But that’s not what I’m afraid of.” She gathered her strength to ask, “I finally found you, after all these years. I don’t want to throw that away.”

“Then don’t. Invite me along.”

“You’d really go with me? Even into a universe of pure shit?”

Calliope paused in thought. “Depends. Is there music there?”

“The best.”

Calliope downed the last of her drink and said, “Cool. Let’s go.”

Ursa Major looked up from their kiss because she heard a sound. It was like no music that had ever echoed across the purple abyss of stars between universes. No sooner could she ask where it was coming from than she knew: it came from within, ringing her bones like bells. It was coming from all of them at once, calling them back together. And by them, I mean—

Look, I know I’ve been talking about Ursa Major the way the utopians did, as if she were one-of-a-kind—and to me she is, always has been, always will be. But I also cite her as only a single example, for she was only one of thousands who left our universe on that same afternoon. They went by grappling hook, by trampoline, by ladder: unknown to each other yet siblings in despair, powered by the same fuck-everything urge to discover the hard way what lay on the far side of those portals. Each of them found indestructible love: whether for their own Calliopes, or for new friends and families, or for smogless skies that could as easily be ours.

Now they’re riding the aethertrains from every corner of the multiverse—riding them straight toward us as fast as the fractal tracks can carry them. Their new accomplices are at their sides, fearless and ready, and in their hearts grow the seeds of a brand new utopia, numbered ten billion and one. Friend, they are legion. They’re coming. They’re here.

©2021 by Elly Bangs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elly Bangs is the author of the new apocalyptic cyberpunk novel Unity, as well as 15 published short stories appearing in Clarkesworld Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fireside Quarterly, and others. She was raised in a New Age cult and once rode her bicycle alone from Seattle to Panama. She lives in Seattle with her partner and two cats. Find more of her work at elbangs.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

The Turnaround

Charlie Jane Anders | 2616 words

Whit got lost in 1971 and couldn’t find her way back. She hit the fail-safe button but nothing happened, and meanwhile she kept getting thrown off by all the foreign landmarks, which turned the city into a maze. The Embarcadero Freeway, this wall of reinforced concrete, cut across the waterfront, with a view of the half-finished Transamerica Pyramid and the scorched ruins on Alcatraz. On Ocean Beach, scores of people squatted among cardboard and plastic across from a hastily built artificial reef, cleaning oil-soaked birds by hand. New stenches hit at every turn: piss, petroleum, smoke, untempered car exhaust, patchouli, wet rot. Everywhere Whit looked, San Francisco stood in ruins or, even worse, in some limbo of urban development gone awry. Nobody else on the streets had a face, because she was the only real person here, and she took off running down Bay Street, shoving past street musicians and flower sellers, until at last she unlocked the slider, and she could see the whole span of the city’s life story, starting randomly in 1883 and running all the way up to the present. She groped with fingers slackened by anxiety, thinking: I have to get out of here please let me out of here.

And that’s when Whit overshot, and landed in the future instead of back in the present.

People had warned endlessly that you could get addicted to virtual reality. All of that three-dimensional wishful thinking would be sweeter and brighter and, yes, realer than all of the boringness of actual existence. But when it came to augmented realities like Skin Francisco, which overlaid a virtual “skin” on the real world, the opposite tended to happen. Spend too much time in a “re-skinned” version of your city, and people started to lose their shit—as if your sense of reality was having an anaphylactic reaction to all that wrongness.

With Skin Francisco, you could wander around the actual, real-life city while seeing (and tasting and feeling) something totally different: either a painstaking reconstruction of the past or some elaborate collective hallucination where everything looked like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. But the past was weird, and you could only take so much of that double-awareness of reality and fantasy, sharing the physical space, before you had to peace out.

And yet, when Whit jammed her slider to escape from 1971 and landed in some future version of San Francisco, she found herself, for the first time ever, in danger of becoming hooked.

Whit stood at the corner of Church and Market, and instead of the usual mix of upscale condos and homeless people, she was gazing at a city that had space for everybody. The skyline was crammed with tall buildings, but they clustered together with tapered shapes that didn’t seem to loom over her, and there were more green spaces than before. More trees, more flowers. As she walked up and down Market, she noticed tiny kiosks, with people handing out doughnuts and samosas, and little stalls where you could get almost anything repaired. Or trade your old stuff for someone else’s old stuff, like a vintage smartphone that had been souped-up with new mods and apps. Sleek buses and trams rushed past, full of people, and there were almost no cars to be seen.

And instead of Market Street, there was a river. A lazy current, foamy but blue. Somehow, it felt right, like a spirit that had been caged for too long was at last set free.

Whit found herself staring at a plaque that thanked one of the city supervisors, whose district ran near this neighborhood, for starting the We All Live Here initiative, which had ensured that every single person had a home in San Francisco and nobody had to be homeless anymore. Pure wish fulfillment, since that particular supervisor thought tax credits were the answer to everything.

There was art everywhere Whit looked. And live theater, right on the street. And music—people were singing on the street corners and dancing as they crossed the street. Whit stopped at one of the little kiosks and saw a sign that read, “SOLUTIONS AND RESOLUTIONS,” and a line of people waiting to speak to an older woman with gray dreadlocks, who was helping them sort out their problems. The next-door kiosk had a nice young person who was helping people connect with free social services, like childcare, continuing education, and mental health services.

Most of the people around Whit were faceless, the same way the citizens of 1971 had been, but something about them (body language, maybe?) let Whit know . . . they were happy. Everyone walked as if they’d just heard some really good news. And here and there, there were visitors like Whit, even if Whit couldn’t see the Skin Francisco rigs on their heads while they were inside here.

“Isn’t this amazing?” asked a young tousle-headed person (who was helpfully wearing a pin with their preferred pronoun). “I could spend every minute here. I’m Yaz, btw.”

Whit introduced herself, then asked: “Who made this? It feels so real.”

“Nobody knows,” said Yaz. “One theory is, it was a bunch of underpaid tech contractors who needed to escape from their shitty situations. But some people think that Skin Francisco came to life. The algorithm got so sophisticated, it started having its own ideas, and it wanted to create a better space for us. A version of our city that lived up to its own ideals, at last.”

Whit couldn’t believe she’d been so desperate to get back to the real, present-day world. The only things waiting for her were past-due bills, customers with drastic, last-minute changes to their orders, an ongoing squabble with the evil roommate cabal, and an ambiguous breakup (the worst kind) with Bobbie, her partner of two years.

She found herself staring at a bronze statue of Emperor Norton at the corner of Church and 16th. He leered down at her. It felt like a blessing.

It was time to return to her cruddy life. Whit tried hard to psych herself up but kept putting it off. Until she realized someone was trying to talk to her, someone in the “real” world. There was a whole etiquette about whether, or how, to approach a person wearing a Skin Francisco rig on the sidewalk, but this individual was just trying to have a conversation. They were showing up as a gray outline, making faint blub-blub-blub sounds. Whit carefully slid the slider back to Now and shut her rig down, bracing herself for this to be Bobbie or one of the roommates. And then she found herself looking at Kirsti, one of her clients, who was trying to apologize, fumblingly, for changing her order.

“It’s fine, it’s fine, I can make that change, don’t worry.” Whit sounded like a tweaker to herself, trying to end this conversation so she could get her bearings.

After Kirsti apologized once more, Whit was alone again. She wandered back toward Market, and something caught her eye: that mural, which had been there forever, by an artist named Mona Caron. Right at Church and 15th, it showed the past, present, and future of San Francisco, with a focus on people marching for justice alongside the changing cars and buildings. And the “future” portion looked a lot like the amazing vision where Whit had just gotten lost.

No use in obsessing about a world you can never have. Whit took her Skin Francisco rig off when she got home and put it away in a box. And then, for good measure, she went on the PimpMyGoodz app and listed her rig, nearly new, for sale. Maybe she could get a third of what she’d paid for it, if she was lucky. (And if she could keep the roommate cabal from borrowing it and causing damage.)

For a week or so, Whit used nothing but her own eyes, ears, and nose when she walked around the city. She tried not to expect Market Street to be a river, or the hipster wine bar to be replaced by a center where you could share advice, food, or gently used goods. She made a serious effort to see things as they were and not look for any signs of another world.

Until.

She was walking up 16th Street, trying to eat a burrito that turned out to be messier than expected and obsessing about her upcoming coffee date with Bobbie. When she reached Church, she dropped the remains of her burrito on the sidewalk, where it was attacked by hungry pigeons and crows. Whit was staring at the statue of Emperor Norton. Same benevolent leer, same weird hat, same gleaming brass.

Whit didn’t think she was hallucinating, or at least everything else still looked the same as always. But somehow, that future “skin” had predicted the actual future. There was a plaque and everything.

A couple of days later, Whit was in the Mission, and she saw a tree of cherry blossoms she was sure hadn’t been there before. But she’d seen that exact same tree, in that same spot, in the future skin.

Then there was a storefront, where that cozy old bookstore used to be, with the marmalade cat. One day, Whit walked past and the space was occupied, by the same “free advice and even freer stuff” business she’d seen in the future skin.

Okay. So a few small things from that fantasy vision of a future San Francisco were coming to pass. No big deal. It was kind of a miracle that some landlord had decided to let their space be used for the public good, but weird stuff still happened in this city sometimes. Right?

Then Whit started to notice more and more stuff from that utopian, Mona Caron-inspired future, all around her. And . . . what if it was true that this was some kind of superintelligent machine mind at work? What if the code behind Skin Francisco had gotten so sophisticated, after years of rendering the intricate landscapes of the city, that it had started to have its own ideas and opinions? And what if the computer not only invented a better future but somehow predicted things that were going to come to pass?

Whit took her Skin Francisco rig out of the back of her closet and removed the listing from PimpMyGoodz. She started exploring the future skin more and more—and each time, she noticed more details, which were mirrored in the here and now.

She started to wonder about Supervisor Randall, the one who thought tax credits were the solution to every problem. She knew she was being a pie-eyed maniac; there was no way that Randy Randall would ever do anything that didn’t make her big donors happy. Every time she glanced at Randall’s website, she felt like a doofus. Except . . . wait a damn minute. Maybe a week after Whit started wearing her Skin Francisco rig again, she looked at Randy Randall’s site and saw it: “Announcing a new initiative: #WeAllLiveHere.” And there was a lot of fancy language about an emergency needing extraordinary measures. New affordable housing, repurposed spaces, converting those long-vacant office towers into shelters. It was happening.

Whenever Whit strolled across Market Street, she had to remind herself that her feet weren’t about to get wet.

The future skin included a living sculpture, sort of, near the J Church turnaround by Ocean Avenue. It was a complicated mixture of a living rosebush and the wooden rods that held it up but also made a space for people to pin their wishes and testimonials, on scraps of construction paper. It was like a tiny wishing tree, and it occupied a space that was nothing but dirt and wood shavings in the present day.

Whit made sure to walk by that spot whenever she could, even if it meant a huge detour, but it remained just dirt and cedar chips.

Until one day, she was on her way to the Excelsior, and she heard something, some commotion, coming from the area around that turnaround. It was behind her, and she almost kept walking, but something made her turn back. She trod as quietly as she could manage, almost tiptoeing, and then she saw a group of people wrestling a rosebush into the ground. Some of them were carrying rods and scraps of construction paper and a sign that said, “WISHES AND EXHORTATIONS GO HERE.”

One of these half dozen people, cursing at scraped forearms and stubborn packed dirt, was Yaz, whom Whit had only ever seen inside that future virtual San Francisco. “Fucking thorns,” Yaz was grunting. “They didn’t have these inside the skin.”

Whit got up the courage to come over. “What’s going on here?”

“It’s a whole movement,” Yaz said. “We’re doing whatever we can to make it come true.”

“Oh. I thought maybe . . .” Whit felt like an asshat even saying these words out loud. “I thought maybe it was actually predicting the future. Like you said, maybe it had a mind of its own? So I thought, what if the Skin Francisco code got so smart, it actually knew what was going to happen in the real world?”

“I thought so too. But then I realized . . . it’s us. There wasn’t any supersmart computer after all. A whole lot of people built that future world, because we needed a way to imagine something better. And once we saw it, we knew we could make it real. Piece by piece.”

Whit had no words. She just stared at Yaz’s big serious gray-brown eyes and the dirt and scrapes on their hands and wrists. The rosebush shivered in a sudden gust of wind.

“Everybody who stumbles into the future skin wants to spend more time there,” Yaz said. “And then you end up wanting to add to it, create your own little touches. Like this wishing tree, it was my idea. I recruited a bunch of people to plant it in real life. We didn’t get a permit or anything, we just went ahead and did it.”

“But . . . Supervisor Randall?” Whit was gaping so hard she was worried she was about to start drooling. “And the landlord? Whoever owned that location where that bookstore used to be, where it’s a community space now? How on earth could they . . .”

“Someone sent them a code to get into the future skin.” Yaz smiled, and their whole face lit up. “Maybe they had the same heartbreak we’ve all had, coming back to the real world. Plus we might have organized a mob outside their offices, and sent a few million emails and petitions and voicemails, too.”

Yaz was still holding part of an unmoored rosebush, and the others were impatient for them to finish planting and installing.

Whit watched them wrestle with the bush over her shoulder as she slouched away. She was late for something, plus she really ought to be adulting—when had adult become a verb, and when had that become the only activity she ever partook in? She got halfway up the block, and then she pivoted and ran back.

“Can I help?” Whit asked.

Yaz grinned, bigger than ever, and handed Whit a pile of paper scraps and rods. “There’s always room for another pair of hands.”

Whit, Yaz, and the rest kept fussing with the bush until they were covered in blood and dirt. They had to make sure it was perfect, because they were nudging the city just a tiny bit closer to the future.

©2020 by Charlie Jane Anders. Originally published in The Alt. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy, along with the forthcoming short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. She’s also the author of Never Say You Can’t Survive (August 2021), a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, The Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

Cloudgazer

Timi Odueso | 2738 words

The nearest cloud cluster was sixty miles away, almost an hour’s journey if Bombay went at top speed.

A fruit trader had seen it on her way to Sabon-Gari, floating lazily across the azure sky. “You don’t see that often,” the trader had said to the crowd, grappling her basket of mangoes. “A whole cluster, untethered, unbothered, what a sight! So you see why you have to buy my mangoes, they’ve been blessed by clouds!”

Zik straddled Bombay, brought her heels to its torso, and held on tight as its mechanical legs whirred into life. On any normal occasion, she would have preferred the smooth train ride to Sabon-Gari, staring out the windows and soaking in the views of Zazzau, but this wasn’t normal. The trains would begin at Kachia, stopping at every station in Zazzau between her hometown and the market town Sabon-Gari, a thirty-minute ride turned ninety by heated exchanges between conductors and last minute passengers. There was simply no time for that; if a cluster had danced so proudly across the sky on a weekend that even an ordinary fruit trader could see it, then smugglers and everyone else would have seen it too.

Bombay whinnied as Zik dug harder into its thigh, propelling both horse and rider forward in a speed burst. This might even be futile, thought Zik. For one, smugglers could have caught wind of the cluster and siphoned them away into calabash gourds, the thieves! Even worse, the cluster could belong to one of the Herders from down south where Rainmakers harvested clouds daily, there could be a white-collared man sitting smugly and sipping ginger shai’i as he tapped directions into his Winds transponder. Or the trader could have been lying, a ploy to get the townspeople to buy her wares which wouldn’t be the first time someone had lied about cloudwatching. Every thought that came to her as Bombay’s hoofs clopped across the roads led to the same unnerving conclusion: Hasan spitting in her face about using Bombay without permission or supervision. Did she know how difficult it was to get spare parts for an old Andalusian, they don’t even import these anymore! Did she know how complicated it had become to calibrate Bombay, to oil his joints? How would he save up for one of those new-generation AI Mustangs if he had to keep using his savings to replace the horse’s hoofs every time she went on a joyride, eh? Why would she even go to Sabon-Gari on the word of a petty trader?

Zik thought of everything other than Hasan’s spittle on her face. It would all be worth it if she got to the cluster before it was emptied, it would all be worth it if she got a few litres, just one or two even. It would all be worth it to see the joy on their faces when they realized her escapade had saved them. Transferring the reins into her right hand, she checked if she had brought everything she needed. She patted the Imam’s gourd which bobbed on her chest: “No more than five minutes old, you hear,” the Imam had said, “We need the freshest you can get or the medicine won’t take.” Her satchel, which contained every kobo she could find in the house, was buckled around her waist; cloudwater was expensive, fresh ones even more so and she feared that what they had wouldn’t be enough. So she’d brought his old takouba along. He wouldn’t mind, she told herself; after all, this was all for him.

The steel sword was sheathed and strapped across her left thigh. At first, she’d only picked it up for protection, sure that any roadbandit who saw the tiny rotating teeth whizzing across its edges would retreat, but as she removed the weapon from its hold, Zik remembered the pride in her grandfather’s eyes as he carefully polished the blades with olive oil on Saturday mornings. She remembered sitting with her brother, listening to their grandfather gloat about it, “They don’t make them like this anymore. Pure steel, copper wiring, not that cheap bronze-shelled nonsense those wannabes carry around.” Hasan would whistle and tease, “But Baba, you know if we sell it, we can probably buy a good house in Kajuru, and even have enough for a Mustang, or two.” Her grandfather would glower at a laughing Hasan, point the tip at him and say, “The only way you will sell this sword is if I die.”

He would die if the sword wasn’t sold, she decided. The disease had spread, the Imam said; her grandfather would never walk again and if nothing was done, he would soon never breathe again either. Over the course of the month, she and Hasan had traipsed the many towns of Zazzau on weekends in search of pharmaceutical substances, Hasan straddling his biotech steed and she, gliding along the railways. Fermented hibiscus leaves from Kaura, sour hartebeest milk from Kafanchan, even hundred-year-old honeycombs from the luxury stores in Kajuru: they’d gotten everything the Imam needed to make Baba’s medicine. All except fresh cloudwater.

Everyone knew that the only way to get fresh cloudwater this far up North was the farm at Kajuru where they had a Rainmaker, but the farm was only open on weekdays. Weekdays were for work: Hasan working at the Factory recalibrating wonky limbs, and she in one of the Customer Care cubicles of Winds Inc®, listening to people drone on about what was wrong with their transponder app. Even if there was some way they could escape work into the tepid sophistication of Kajuru, they would have to sell the antique takouba, Bombay, their small house, and their limbs before they could afford a meagre liter of fresh cloud water from Kajuru’s cloud Farms. She’d even considered it, trading limbs, perhaps her arm from the elbow down on the black market; the sale would be certainly enough to fetch enough money to buy a few gallons of fresh cloudwater and a cheap new arm, perhaps one made of brass with copper wiring, or she could save up to buy a durable fiberglass-and-titanium one that was waterproof. In the end, she’d decided against it after Hasan had told her how steelsickness would kill her when her body began rejecting the jury-rigged arm.

This was their last resort, she was sure, racing to do the very thing they’d seen the Hisbah imprison people for. They’d done everything else, beg their neighbors, request loans, even peddle the black markets for smugglers who had a few litres to trade, but no one softened when they’d told them their grandfather would be dead in a month if they didn’t find fresh cloudwater. He hadn’t said it, but Zik knew that Hasan had resigned to fate; on the weekends, he’d taken to flinching every time Baba tried to talk, thrumming deeply when she wheeled the old man out so he could gaze at the empty sky, or skulking at the door as she fed him koko through a straw. To escape Baba’s stagnant stares and Hasan’s heavy gloom, she’d began taking long walks around the streets of Kachia, her eyes affixed upon the sky as the Imam’s gourd nodded on her chest. With her gaze on the heavens, she missed everything in front of her, tripping over a scavenger’s wheelbarrow once – and having the dazed loon chase after for purportedly trying to skim his precious scrap metals; stomping into many oily puddles that left her boots slimy; and stumbling into dazed pedestrians, including an off-duty Hisbah official who threatened to detain her until she handed him a few kobos. When they saw her on the street, with her head lifted up and the wooden vial dancing between her breasts, the people of Kachia whispered amongst themselves and blessed Zik with a new moniker. “Here comes the Cloudgazer,” they would taunt, “Careful she doesn’t trip you,” and Zik, whose ears perked up at any mention of the word cloud would have her head darting in all directions, trying to find what she desperately needed. This was how she’d come across the fruit trader’s sermon: the cloudgazer had been wandering around Kachia searching the skies for white fluff.

On Bombay, she zipped past the railways, holding on tight to the steed’s reins as wind slammed into her whenever a train came gliding beside them. She’d never understood why Hasan wanted to buy a new horse. Bombay was the fastest thing she’d ever ridden, faster than trains and certainly faster than walking. He would be angry she had taken the horse without his permission but Zik was sure that a solution laid in wait at Sabon-Gari. She was sure she would return to Kachia with something that would paint a smile across Baba’s face and bring Hasan’s laughter welling to the surface. And for that promise of joy, for the imminent laughter she believed was at the top of her tongue, she would gladly sell the takouba . . . and even Bombay.

When heavy smells hit her, Zik knew she had reached Sabon-Gari, for everyone knew that one would smell the market-town before one would hear or see it; the malodourous emulsions an enveloping hello paving the way for raucous sounds to caress ears. She resumed cloudgazing, her eyes zipping across the empty skies as the sounds of the market-town filled the air around her.

They met her at the outposts, the traders, and they grabbed at her shins even before she slid through the gates of the market, calling her to their wares. One waved diaphanous bags filled with silicon at her and argued that his prices were the best in the market for fleshwork, another rubbed the metallic sheen of Bombay’s fur and told her he could get her a good price for her steed. Others stretched their arms and gestured for her to follow them: I have the silkiest microsteel fabrics, soft but steady, bulletproof too; You’re in the presence of the best connoisseur of palmwine in the whole of Sabon-Gari, let’s go to my stall, I will give you some samples, a special cask of rambutan-and-lime you will love. The traders of Sabon-Gari were immodest about their wares, assertive about their trade in calling out for patrons, unlike the shop owners at Kajuru who sneered at customers and promptly ushered out anyone who attempted to haggle prices.

She ignored them all, her eyes fixed on the empty skies. Her hands led Bombay away from the many stalls haphazardly scattered around on the dusty cracked roads. The traders saw that their words would not entice Zik to visit their stalls and they began to fall away like dead petals off rose stalks, returning to the outposts to seduce other visitors with their attractive prices. One by one, the crowd around the cloudgazer thinned until only the fleshworker remained. The man stuck his silicon bags into his kaftan pockets and took instead to telling Zik about his certifications as he followed her on foot.

He was the only one in the whole of Sabon-Gari with the skills to use reinforced keratin and calcium, did she know, did she? For a small price, her nails and teeth could be just as strong as steel, “And they’ll weigh the same,” he added. She needn’t worry about his certification, he comforted, he had studied bio-metallurgy from the University of Pangaea; “In fact, I am one of the few persons in Zazzau who has successfully practiced neuro-wiring.”

“Then why are you here?” Zik snapped. With her wandering eyes finding no signs of cloudburst in the skies above, Zik’s apprehension had grown heavy and weighed down the happiness she was sure she would find in Sabon-Gari. The fleshworker’s recitation only added to the weight.

“Why what?” the man asked.

“Why are you here?” she hissed. “If you’re so good at splicing metals into bodies, why are you in this dump? Why aren’t you working in one of those fancy auto clinics in Kajuru?”

The man smiled sheepishly. “Well, there’s the small problem of certification,” he confessed. “I’m still waiting on my certificate but once I get it, I’ll be as revered as a Rainmaker.”

When he received no reply from Zik, he increased his pace and stopped right in front of Bombay who whinnied to a stop. “Why are you here then? You’ve been wandering about for a while. Perhaps if you just tell me what you want to buy, I can help you out.”

“Clouds,” Zik said. “I’m looking for fresh cloudwater.”

The man grimaced, his nose crinkled as he said, “There’s no fresh cloudwater in Sabon-Gari, everyone knows this. There’s a cloud farm at Kajuru, that’s the only place you’ll find it.” He turned away from the steed and made to walk away.

“I can’t afford that,” Zik announced. “I’d heard there was a cloud here today. I just need a few litres.”

“That was a stint by the Hisbah. There was a cloud here,” the man admitted, turning around. “But I’m afraid it was planted to catch smugglers and illegal harvesters.”

Bombay creaked as Zik sank lower onto his back. The reins slipped from her fingers and her face clouded up. Her hands raced up to clutch the vial on her chest as she quietly began to sob. She thought of her grandfather, sitting at home waiting for a medicine he would never get. She thought of Hasan who didn’t seem to be able to decide which was more precious, horse or family. She thought of herself, gliding across the plains looking for something everyone knew she could never afford.

“You don’t look like a smuggler,” the fleshworker said abruptly, patting Bombay’s muzzle. “What could you possibly need fresh cloudwater for?”

For the first time, Zik looked at the trader. She could see that his eyes had been augmented, they flashed a vibrant blue that seemed to make a quiet whizzing sound. He had high cheekbones and his lips were pursed as he watched her eyes run over his kaftan. “My grandfather,” she finally replied. “We need it for his medicine.”

The fleshworker grimaced, turned left, then right, and leaned in closer to Bombay’s back. “There are other ways, you know,” he began quietly. “I cannot get you fresh cloudwater, but I can get you the money you need to buy some at Kajuru.”

Sneering, Zik said, “You think I’m stupid? I’m not selling my arm. I know about steel sickness. I know how you fleshworkers are.”

“Steelsickness? Only a rookie would make such a mistake. If there’s anything you should be worried about, it’s getting a second-hand arm with ghost touches. Besides, we wouldn’t take the whole hand, a finger should be enough.”

A finger didn’t seem too bad, Zik thought. Perhaps, if she made enough off it, she could even get an augmented replacement, maybe a thermoplastic one that could glow in the dark, or something cheaper like one of those steel ones she’d seen that could store data. Yes, a finger didn’t seem too bad. She wasn’t Hasan, she knew what was most important to her and would sacrifice something for it.

“If a finger will be too personal,” the fleshworker began, “then you should know that there are as many things to sell as there are to buy here,” he said, patting Bombay again. “An antique Andalusian would fetch a lot here.”

He leaned in closer and whispered how much she could get for a finger, and for a horse. “Joy cannot come without sacrifice,” he proclaimed mournfully. “Something cannot grow from nothing. We all have to give, to receive.”

Zik’s eyes widened at the numbers she had heard. She shifted her gaze to the sky, sweeping for clouds one last time. When she found none, the cloudgazer turned her eyes away from the heavens, fixed them upon the fleshworker and said, “How do we begin?”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Timi Odueso’s works have been featured in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Nobrow Press, Lolwe TSSF, Punocracy, and more. He is presently a tech journalist at TechCabal where he writes one of the top tech newsletters in Africa. He’s also served in various roles at literary and art organizations all over Africa.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

I Was a Teenage Space Jockey

Stephen Graham Jones | 4560 words

Two days after my brother turned seventeen, he was gone, just like he’d guaranteed my dad. No sad goodbyes, no notes, no taking a knee in the hall before dawn to give me any good advice for high school when I got there. My mom’s story when anybody asked was that he’d moved out, he was old enough, he needed room, it was completely natural. My dad, if asked, would just shrug, knock back the rest of his can of beer, and say he hoped Rance was in the military, where someone else could tell him to get up, face the day.

Just to piss my dad off, I secretly hoped Rance had gone military as well: Air Force, so that one morning bright and early he could buzz the house in his fighter jet, waggle his wings to announce it was really him, and then burst through the sound barrier, breaking every window on the block. If he did that, then I would know for sure there was some way out. That there was something else.

This was sixth grade for me, fall semester, ramping up to Halloween. Homeroom was all pumpkins and skeletons with brass rivets at their joints, so whoever was first to class could tack those white cardboard hands and feet up in lewder and lewder positions.

My best friend that year, and for the rest of the years we’d have together, was Marten French. Me and him were the only Indians for two grades in either direction, and, since he’d been held back one year, we were even in the same class, now. His dad made him keep his hair long, not buzzed short like in my house, but Marten hated all the attention his braids drew in the halls, in PE, in every bathroom we had no choice but to eventually brave. Yes, we knew it was the boys’ room, not the girls’. Thank you, ha ha. That one never gets old.

Just because he had to have his hair in twin braids when he left for school, though, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be down by the time he got to his locker before class—down and puffing out all crinkly and metal, which meant he was always glaring out of a frizzy shroud of black, just the way he liked it.

You’d think all the attention of being the only two red kids would turn us into scrappers, just out of necessity, out of survival, but neither of us had any size yet. We’d gloved up with his mom’s oven mitts and tried fighting each other for practice once, but we had to admit that, at best, we were just slapfighters, that our main and best defense would be to curl up like pill bugs, wait this next thrashing out.

To try to avoid that, we hid—surprise—and the main place we hid was the arcade down at the mall. It had started out as our place because, for the two years before he left, Rance had been the longtime Galaga champ. He would strut in every other week or so to leave his initials at the top of the high score reel. His quarters lasted forever, and, my mom said, so long as he was there, I could be too. Not that Rance watched me in the scratchy reflection of that plastic screen or even knew I was alive and breathing the same air as him, but I guess the idea was that if my big brother was around, nobody would try anything with me.

While Rance was doing his thing on Galaga, Marten and me—Coach was already calling him “Frenchie,” a name that would stick—would tag-team the games on the other side of the arcade: Zaxxon, Defender, Tempest. They were all too complicated, were pretty much just quarter donation machines, but they were ours, pretty much. And everybody would be crowded around Rance’s Galaga machine anyway, his eyes glassy, his right hand on that fire button an absolute blur, his forearms ridged with veins, his feet set one ahead and one back, the front knee bent like he was leaning against some great wind blasting out of the machine, and all he could hold onto was that joystick.

If he really was piloting a fighter jet somewhere out there now? He’d shoot faster than anybody, and he’d never say die, would just keep taking on wave after wave of alien.

Just—Marten and me talked about this—would he really cut his hair for the government? While Marten’s hair just put a bullseye on his back, Rance’s shaggy mane had always been hairsprayed what my dad, when he’d even acknowledge Rance, would call “six ways from Sunday and halfway to an ass kicking.”

I thought Rance’s hair was the most amazing thing ever. Put him in a pair of tights, give him a mic, and he’d own any stage, would have the whole arena in the palm of his hand. My hair was a sandy throwback to some trapper or Indian agent or fallen Jesuit nobody in my family even remembered. We don’t all come out looking full-blood. Either that, or the way to explain the difference between Rance and me had to do with whose eye my mom might have caught nine months before I cried my way into the world, which I guess would explain the way my dad always watched me, growing up, like he was looking for a trait he recognized, that could confirm his suspicions.

Anyway, with Rance gone, Marten and me figured it was my job to continue the family tradition. He stole all the quarters from his mom’s ceremony jar, the one she saved to get them back to South Dakota every year, or at least pay for half a tank of gas, and we shrugged our way down to the mall, to the Gold Mine Arcade.

Trick was, though, we were the only ones who knew this was my night to carry on Rance’s Galaga ritual. The place was packed, I mean. It was Friday night, right? We should have known. Except . . . at first I thought this wasn’t the usual crowd, but maybe it was—everybody was already wearing their Halloween masks. The sign at the door said you’d get two free plays if you were in costume.

Marten pinched my sleeve, pulled me deeper into the mall.

What we needed were masks, or at least make-up, and we knew that the velvet ropes at the movies theater had metal balls at the top of their heavy little poles that screwed on and off. But we didn’t need the balls, or the ratty ropes. What we needed was the grease rubbed onto the threads.

Marten covered while I rubbed as much into the crook of my index finger as I could, then I covered for him, and in the long bathroom hall by the Orange Julius we applied our make-up: Marten got shiny warpaint over the top of his face, including his eyelids, which was a pretty cool look, but then we ran out of grease partway through my Star Trek-“half a black face”-plan, so I ended up having to smudge it around, try to pull off a black eye. Because that wasn’t any kind of costume, just meant I hadn’t mowed the lawn or something, we scrounged some lipstick from under the payphone, drew blood coming down from my nose and my mouth and my other eye, and, in a flash of inspiration, Marten traced a drippy line of red across the top of my forehead.

Fifty cents is fifty cents.

Jess, the Gold Mine’s attendant, looked back and forth from Marten to me. My belt was looped around my neck, its long tongue in Marten’s hand because I, the sandy-haired buzzcut of the two of us, was this Indian’s prisoner.

“He nearly scalped me,” I explained, tilting my head back to show off my bloody hairline.

“Good job,” Jess said, extending one spindly hand to tug Marten’s left braid, though he knew it was real.

“How,” Marten said in his deepest voice, like this was a movie.

Jess thumbed a dollar in quarters from the dispenser at his hip, passed them over.

“Where’s your brother?” he said to me then. “He needs to defend his title.”

“He’s shooting commies,” Marten said for me about Rance, and mimed like he was Rambo with a Gatling gun, Arnold against the Predator.

“What game is that?” Jess asked, looking over his shoulder like a new one had been delivered without his knowing.

“I’m getting the new high score,” I said, and shouldered past, leading Marten by the leash he was still holding.

Our idea had been to get me better and better at Galaga, until I could fire as fast as Rance, until I knew all the patterns, could wipe out whole armadas of aliens. As it turned out, Janet Reilly, a senior from the smoking circle, was already at the Galaga machine, and drawing a crowd.

Since she and Rance has been trading top slot on the high score list for the past year, I’d always kind of known they were going to have to start going out, like that was the rule. Unlike Rance’s Silent Indian routine, though, she was vocal, always chirping and screeching in retreat, snarling and growling when caught in a corner, then screaming when she shot her way out again, as if the aliens could hear her, be intimidated by her. Rance was more reserved, had a steadier game, knew the dive patterns, the levels, and he never made any real sound, would just thin his lips about this next challenge, but he’d had to respect Janet’s game, I knew, especially the way her reflexes seemed to come alive best when the game was tilting against her.

We tried watching for a couple of minutes but the crowd was too thick, and a short skeleton right beside Janey kept inserting its index finger into its mask to pick its nose, so we took our quarters elsewhere.

Centipede was open, but that was a panic attack waiting to happen.

Joust would have been fun, but it was taken by the stoners, as usual.

“Track and Field?” Marten said, trying to make it sound better than it was.

We patted our back pockets for the Ace combs we’d need to pump that runner’s legs fast enough. No luck.

Counting the dollar Jess had given us for playing Cowboy and Indian at the door, we had eight dollars, total. We were in the Gold Mine and we had a gold mine, yeah.

“So?” I said.

“Hyperspace?” Marten said with a shrug.

It was what he called Defender, because when it got you back on your heels, you could push that hyperspace button, go to whatever random spacescape the game kicked up. Usually it meant instant death, just death in a different place, but you were dying anyway, right? Might as well blip across the galaxy.

We ended up dropping three dollars on Asteroids, even though Marten had it on Atari at his house. His brother always hid the controllers, though, or else he’d reach his hand down the front of his pants for a long scratch-session, then rub that hand all over the joystick, hand it across.

Like every time in Asteroid’s field of space rocks, and in spite of our standing-in-place gymnastics—it was like we were really in the cockpit of that fragile little ship—we shattered into glowing lines that had just enough inertia to spin insultingly, like going down some cosmic drain.

When we turned around, thoroughly beaten and breathing hard from it, three of the stoners were shaking their heads at our theatrics, at our wimpiness, at our make-do costumes.

“Jess,” I said, my head on a swivel for the arcade’s lifeguard.

“He’s talking to that redhead at the hot dog stand again,” the lead stoner said, his eyes still gliding on ostriches from platform to platform of Joust. He wasn’t smoking, but he still smelled like a train.

“It’s Rance’s tagalong,” the second stoner said, stepping in to get this started.

“Baby Red,” the third of them said.

Rance’s initials should have been RATB, for Rance Allen Two Bulls, but videogame high score reels aren’t made for Indians. So, on Galaga, and in spite of his black hair, he’d always been RED, like claiming that top spot for all Indians everywhere.

Since I was his little brother, I was “Baby Red,” I guess. This wasn’t the first time they’d cornered us in their wall of grimy denim to claim all our quarters, but, because it wasn’t, I juked left, went right, shouting “Run!” to Marten while already doing it, picturing myself vaulting over 1942, diving through the cockpit of one of the racing games, tearing out into the food court.

It all went pretty great in my head, I mean.

They were older, though we were slower, Jess was AWOL, Rance was gone, and—and it was Friday night, it was nearly Halloween, which isn’t when sixth graders have their best luck.

We made it maybe three steps.

What they took from me was my pocketful of quarters, which one of them hefted while watching me, as if judging this weight against my soul, or trying to gauge how many eggs this would be worth on Joust.

What they took from Marten, with a yellow pocketknife sawed back and forth, was his right braid.

“Shit, that was real!” the second of them said, holding Marten’s hair up, covering his own mouth with his other hand, which just made his laugh louder, somehow.

Marten’s chest was heaving, his eyes welling up. Not because he’d ever wanted that braid, but because his dad and brother were going to kick his ass when he came home lopsided, and then they were going to pile into the family car and find whoever had done this.

It had happened before. Marten’s dad had had to serve three months of weekends in county because someone had left a red handprint on the flank of their light blue Buick, so it could be a real war pony, ha ha. This time it wouldn’t just be weekends, though, we knew. And there was no way Marten could hide what had happened.

Because there was always the chance of Jess stepping back in, the hot dog girl in tow, the stoners crowded us into the back corner by the kiddie games and then pushed us behind them, into that dusty space of cables and cigarette butts and sticky bottles and gum and the one rubber everybody knew about.

They were locking us up, making sure we wouldn’t run tell, get them busted, maybe banned from the Gold Mine. To be sure the walls of our little prison cell held, they took our pants. To guarantee we wouldn’t forget this anytime soon, they forced our faces down into the grossest stickiest spaces they could find behind the machines, then told us to count to one hundred before we lifted our heads. If we didn’t, they’d do it all over, and take our underwear this time, how would we like that?

We laid there crying.

Okay, Marten was maybe crying harder, I guess—he had reason. Me, I was staring ahead, under the broken Ms. Pac-Man machine, waiting for this to be over. When I got up into the eighties with my count, I saw it: there in the dust-bunny coated sludge under Ms. Pac-Man was a glint of silver.

We didn’t go all the way to one hundred, wouldn’t give the stoners that. We just listened to our heartbeats drum down slower and slower. Listened to each other’s sobs become normal breathing. Normal enough. Our bare thighs were touching. Our faces were hardening into the floor.

“Yet?” I finally said.

“Yet,” Marten agreed, and I could hear his cheek peeling up.

I wasn’t stuck as hard, I didn’t think, and still had one thing to do anyway: reach forward, pinch into that sludge for that glint of silver.

What I came back with was one quarter.

“What year?” Marten said, because his luck system was that if the quarter was the same age as him, it was lucky, he could win with it.

“Rance’s age,” I said, trying to clean the gunk off it.

“Mail it to him,” Rance said in defeat, and we sat there like that, making useless quiet jokes and detailing grand, never-to-be-enacted revenge plans until Jess turned the lights off, ran his vacuum cleaner over the more obvious parts of the arcade.

Then the cage door came down. We were officially in jail.

“I’m going to cut the other one off,” Marten said, holding his left braid out. “I’m going to tell my dad I did it on my own.”

“He’ll kick your ass for it,” I told him.

“Cops don’t care about that,” Marten said.

He was right. It was a solid plan.

We stood, no pants, and crept out among the machines, all of them still cycling through their holding screens—Jess hadn’t pulled the plug, had probably been making a horny beeline for that hot dog girl. Marten was still in his black warpaint. I was still some white dude who’d almost got himself justly scalped. Still, walking through the arcade all alone, half-naked, bathed in what felt like neon, it was kind of magic.

Marten was the first to smile, but I caught it soon enough.

We pushed our faces against the cage, looked out at the darkened mall.

“We can erase them from Joust anyway, right?” Marten said at last.

Like that we were behind the machines again, hungrily tracing out cables.

“This one,” I said, and pulled it.

We ran around, but Joust was still blinking.

“This one,” Marten said, pulling another, and we ran around again, had only killed Galaxian.

“Close,” I said, and then touched my brother’s initials on the Galaga screen, balled my hand fast around that, promised to never let it go.

“What are you doing?” Marten asked.

“This one,” I said, sure this time, but when I pulled it, the whole junction-thing it was plugged into yanked from the wall. The whole bank of machines behind us went dark.

“Think you got it,” Marten said with a thrilled chuckle, and we crept around. I had definitely gotten it, yeah.

But then I realized what else I had got: Galaga.

“Shit,” I said, my face going cold.

I’d erased Rance’s last game, the high score he’d left behind for all of us to wonder at. Janet hadn’t beaten him earlier, nobody had beaten him, but now nobody would ever know.

Marten’s dad was going to kick his ass, yeah, but I was going to be kicking my own ass for twice as long.

“I’ll get it back for him,” I said, holding that magic quarter up.

Dutifully, we plugged Galaga back in, and, after holding the quarter up between us, honoring its power, its promise, its birth year, I kissed it, thumbed it into the slot.

It fell through to the change return.

“What the hell?” Marten said.

I inserted it again, and again it rattled down to that metal flap.

Marten tried, same thing. We tried shooting it through harder, we tried rubbing all the quarter’s edge-grooves clean on the carpet, we breathed on it to make it hot—nothing.

“Cursed quarter,” Marten said, shrugging.

“Jess should give us a new one,” I said, and looked around as if the ghost-version of Jess might be skulking around, talking up the eighth-graders.

Because we knew we could make it last, we dropped the quarter in Pac-Man, just to prove it was a real and actual quarter, but it hit the change return again.

Every machine we tried, even the kiddie ones.

“Hyperspace,” Marten said, lifting his chin to Defender.

“Like it’ll—” I said, thumbing the quarter in, but the machine took it before I could finish.

I pushed back from the controls, giving them to Marten, but he stepped back as well, said, “It was Rance’s year, he’d want you to.”

I dove in, grabbed the joystick right as the game went live, and did my usual thing I did with Defender: held on, shot at complete random, stars streaking past at ridiculous speeds.

“Hyperspace! Hyperspace!” Marten yelled when I was about to die, but I shook my head no, was in what felt like a Rance-trance, was one with this game for once.

I pulled up at every last moment, shot past, lived through. Maybe my problem all along at the arcade had been that I’d been trying to play like Rance, when I was really a Janet-player: I only came alive in a corner.

Marten was breathing hard beside me, his hand on my shoulder, the grease sweating down his face like he was crying black.

Maybe this was my game, I thought. Rance had Galaga, but me, I was Defender, right?

I sure wasn’t anything else.

I fired, fired faster, felt one foot creeping forward into my version of a power stance. It felt weird enough that I looked down, even, and what I saw on the way was light bleeding out from the quarter slot.

“What?” I said, and then Marten was lunging forward to jerk the joystick to the side, save my life.

“Thanks!” I yelled to him, taking control again.

The light from the quarter slot was a hot spot on my bare thigh.

I shifted away from it, felt the heat smear across to my other leg.

“What was that quarter made of?” I said, and Marten nodded hard with this, because this was my best game ever, was the best we’d ever seen.

Still, Defender being what it was, I finally had to scream and panic, slap the hyperspace button, because any point in space was better than where I was now.

Like always, everything jumbled on the screen, and—and when I leaned over for a different angle, like I could get a bead on whatever forces I was about to blip down in front of, what I saw kind of in the reflection wasn’t the game at all. I was—I was behind the windshield of an eighteen-wheeler at night? I could tell it was a big rig from the height, and from the monster of a steering wheel in my lap. And then I was nudging that wheel to the right just enough to edge my truck over into the ditch, to tag the Indian walking on the shoulder, just turning around to hike his thumb up.

That hitchhiker was Rance.

I slapped hyperspace again, to get away from this, keep it from having to happen.

Now I was watching from behind a chainlink fence in Denver, watching Rance and three white dudes brush past each other on the sidewalk, Rance not giving room, their shoulders hitting, tempers flaring, brake lights stopping in the street to help these three guys with this Indian, who I knew could have taken on two of them, maybe even three. But not a whole carload.

I hit that button deeper to stop this from happening either and I held it down this time, cycling through Rance dying this way, that way, all the ways an Indian can die in America—shot on a porch, sleeping under a bridge, caught in a car rolling through a fence, throwing up in his sleep—and when I finally, timidly, let the button come back up, I was in the arcade again.

My ship was blasting across the alien landscape, each orange mountain peak the leading edge of a massive lurking asteroid, the ship so fragile, and Marten was yelling my name, telling me up, up!

“No,” I said, using my whole body to move the joystick just the littlest bit. Marten moved with me, and then—he told me later, so I know it’s true—he saw what I was seeing: my little ship in Defender was a dull grey fighter plane now, blasting faster and faster, its background a blur.

“Rance,” I said, almost smiling.

I’d blipped to a good version at last, a good outcome.

“This isn’t—what game is this?” Marten said, checking the side of the machine, like that could tell him anything.

But it wasn’t broke.

“I can do it, I can do it,” I said, zoning in, the skin of my face going cold, my eyes speeding up to see everything at once, my hands hardly even connected to me anymore they were so fast, so right, so true, and no one but Marten was there to see my game that night, the night I beat Defender, the unbeatable game, but I wasn’t playing for them.

All those lives I’d hyperspaced through, they were ways Rance could be out there dying—would be out there dying.

Unless I kept him alive.

The stars blurred, my fingertip on that hyperspace button was both numb and more alive than it had ever been, and I fired, and I fired, and I fired deeper into the heart of whatever this was, clearing a path for him, one farther than our dad could ever reach, one that would get him away and safe and let him live the life he should have, that he deserved.

“What the hell, what the hell, man!” Marten said beside me, his left hand worrying his left braid, his whole body bouncing on the balls of his feet, and if anybody would have looked through the cage they would have seen two twelve-year-olds not yet ready for life, so unready that they didn’t even have pants, their faces streaked black from tears, their eyes blasted wide for every alien, every way to die.

In the morning when Jess opened up we were sitting on the counter, still breathing hard, telling ourselves the story of this, and we were different now, we knew. We’d won.

“Real funny, losers,” Jess said, stepping to the side so we could leave. “You didn’t break anything did you?”

“Just the high score!” Marten yelled on the way past him, and then we ran without pants through the morning, without pants and with sandy hair, with one braid, one black eye, and in the alley behind Marten’s house I cut his braid off to keep his dad out of jail, and we shook hands in the gangster way we’d seen in a music video, pointed at each other to end it, and I didn’t mean to, it wasn’t on purpose, but I took a mental snapshot of Marten anyway, leaned against his back fence, his hair so stupid, his eyes so nervous, his chest raised so he could fake like he was tough enough to walk inside, and I want to lie and say that when I was walking home that bright Halloween morning, a fighter plane cracked thunder over my street, punched through the sound barrier like it was nothing, but, though I closed my eyes to wait for just that, it didn’t come, and didn’t come. There was just me rushing from bush to bush, car to car, and, somewhere far behind me, and also in my heart, a video game blinking RED, RED, RED.

©2021 by Stephen Graham Jones.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of nearly thirty novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Most recent are My Heart is a Chainsaw and Memorial Ride. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Men in Cars

Lisa M. Bradley | 5171 words

“I’m so cold,” said the woman in white.

I didn’t have anything to offer her. No cozy sweater, wool coat, or scarf. Looking at her, though, I wondered if she’d want anything of mine. She had her own sense of style. Her clothes, all white, made my greys look grubby and drab.

“Aren’t you cold?” she said.

I shrugged. “I’m used to it.”

It was dusk. I’d been walking alongside the road out of town. The locals called it Bad Luck Bends, had for as long as I could remember. I looked up from my usual path and she was simply there, like she’d materialized from the fog in the forest that surrounded us.

“Where are you headed?” she asked.

I pointed ahead, at the blur of a farmhouse up on the hill that marked the end of this nasty stretch of highway.

“I need a ride.” She glanced over her shoulder, but there were no cars taking the steep, twisty route out of town.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s a hard road.”

She looked at me and cocked her head.

“Lots of accidents,” I explained. “Cars have trouble staying on the road.”

“Men in cars,” she said with a sneer.

It was true: most of the accidents were single-car, single-fatality, a man behind the wheel. Maybe men drive more carelessly when they’re alone. Lord knows they make poor decisions when they’re in groups.

I guess we knew the same kinds of men.

We walked in silence for many minutes. I wondered if we’d reach my house before she managed to hitch a ride. Eventually, the sound of a car engine came up behind us, winding left and right around the bends. It was two women in a sedan, two boys bickering in the backseat. To my surprise, my companion backpedaled to the treeline. I followed her a few steps into the forest. The car switched on its headlights, and I thought for sure they’d spot her, all in white among the dark pines. But she stood beside a tree, still as a rabbit hearing hounds, and they did not see.

“Not my kind of ride,” she said.

We walked on, darting into the growing darkness when, first, a couple in a Jeep, then a beater packed full of rowdy teenagers drove past. The old car’s radio fizzed out for a few seconds, but the teens were singing along so loudly they didn’t notice. I imagined rust vibrating off the old car as they belted out their tune. There might be nothing left but wheels by the time they reached their destination.

Finally, a truck came along, a bearded silhouette in the driver’s seat.

“There’s my ride,” my companion said.

The truck slowed and stopped ahead of us. When we caught up to it, the man behind the wheel yelled out the passenger-side window: “Hey, do you need a ride?”

“How far you going?” She flashed a smile I hadn’t yet seen.

He opened the door and a yellow light came on in the cab. He looked her up and down. “For a cute thing like you? I’ll go as far as you do,” he said with a wink. “You got a few bucks for gas?”

“No, but I’m good company.”

He waved her in. “I could use some company. Damn radio just up and died on me.”

It wasn’t a line. Or not only a line. People say the forest blocks radio waves and phone signals. I don’t know. I’m not scientific.

She grabbed the door handle and turned to me, a question in her eyes.

“I’ll keep walking,” I said. “I live nearby.”

She stepped onto the running board and swung herself into the truck without another word. Soon even their taillights were a memory, and I half-wondered if I’d made up an imaginary friend.

I can’t always trust myself. Minds are shifty things.

• • • •

I saw her again at dusk on the night of the next new moon. She still wore all white, the flowy material almost as diaphanous as a slip, as if she’d gotten halfway dressed for a party.

“I remember you!” I said happily.

“I remember you,” she almost echoed.

We stood looking at one another. For a moment I felt like I was looking in a mirror, our different attire notwithstanding. But I was grinning and she didn’t smile. Smiling didn’t come natural to her, I’d learn. She only smiled for men.

“I’m so cold.” She hugged herself and continued walking. “Are you cold?”

Of course she was cold—her clothes were thin and didn’t cover enough of her. Her white blouse exposed bony shoulders, the sleeves barely reaching her elbows. Her short skirt showed off legs as hard and white as marble. Probably from walking when hitchhiking didn’t pan out. But it would’ve been impolite to comment on her clothing, and I wore nothing extra to offer her.

“I’m used to it,” I said, shrugging, already in step with her.

“You’re from around here?”

I pointed up at the farmhouse, and she nodded.

“Last time, did you get home all right?”

I couldn’t actually remember getting home that night, but I must have. Otherwise I wouldn’t be there talking to her, right? “I always walk home.”

“Barefoot?”

I felt a flash of embarrassment. I’d held my tongue about her outfit, why couldn’t she do the same for me?

“My shoes don’t fit. They’re hand-me-downs,” I admitted. I’d lost track of how many times they’d flown off as I ran through the woods. “Do you always need a ride?” I retorted.

She sighed, sounding tired. “That’s how it is.”

That’s how it is, all right. Men in cars, while we walk a million miles, half hoping, half dreading they’ll notice us. And then when they do pull up alongside us, they holler, “Hey, you need a ride?” Their grins always teetering on the edge of a leer. Despite my wounded pride, I felt sorry for her. And for me.

Sombre, we walked in silence.

After dusk had turned to dark, she said, “There’s a legend about this road.”

I nodded. Kids had told it around campfires for years. “I’m not scared,” I said.

“No?”

“No. In fact, you kinda remind me of her. The clothes, you know.”

“I’m flattered,” she said. “Girls like us have to stick together.”

Was I a part of that “us?” I didn’t want to presume. Maybe she meant her and the Woman in White.

“Men are the ones who have to worry,” I said. “She doesn’t bother women.”

“Men are the bother.”

I blinked at her candor but couldn’t disagree. I changed the subject.

“I know a shortcut to the end of the Bends. There’s a path in the forest that follows Graham’s Creek. You have to hike a bit, but it’s quicker than taking all these turns.”

“I don’t mind time spent with you. Besides, the road’s been good to me.”

It took me a minute to understand what she’d said. I couldn’t recall the last time someone wanted to be my friend. I mean a real friend, not a few-minutes friend or a what-can-I-get-out-of-you friend. If it was all a dream, I didn’t want to know.

“Okay,” I said, smiling. Afraid to hope. Willing to play along.

• • • •

Stuff collects in the Bends. Empty Coke cans, little liquor bottles, single gloves, hubcaps. Occasionally underthings, which always bothers me. It feels weird hoping the owner willingly stripped down in the woods, but it’s worse to imagine otherwise.

I was hurrying to get home before the snow started, but I’m not lucky. Hard white specks started pelting the asphalt. Casting about for shelter, I noticed a scrap of newspaper fluttering in the ditch. The black-and-white picture looked like a hand-drawn illustration. I was intrigued. You don’t see that much in papers anymore; it’s all photos now.

With a hand to shield my eyes, I glanced at the sky. A grey blanket stretched overhead, from the west horizon all the way behind me to the east. I wouldn’t make it home before the real snow, even if I took the shortcut by Graham’s Creek—which I wasn’t eager to do this close to dark, not alone.

I walked into the ditch to examine the scrap. The drawing depicted our local legend—the Woman in White. But why was that news? Halloween was long past. Snowstorms had already flocked the trees around me.

Near the top of the ripped newsprint, a fragment read “. . . given the similarities, law enforcement should re-examine these so-called accidents,” Mr. Lopez said.

I didn’t recognize the last name as being local, but these days people come and go. And I don’t talk to all that many when they’re in between.

The crunch of tires on snow jolted me from my musing. Seconds later, headlights flared over me and the vehicle snapped to a stop. I squinted at the minivan through increasingly fat snowflakes. Its hazard lights flicked on, washing the snow a pastel orange. The driver’s door opened, and suddenly my chest ached with a familiar fear.

“Are you okay?” the man inside called. “Do you need help? A ride?”

“I’m walking home,” I said. I hated how my voice quavered. I sounded like a frightened child.

“Okay, but do you need a ride?” He got out of the minivan and approached the ditch, empty hands raised as if to say, I won’t hurt you. “Where’s home?”

I pointed to the house on the hill, now invisible through the snow-hastened dark.

“Okay.” He kept saying okay like if he said it enough, everything would be. “I know you’re probably not supposed to take rides from strangers, but this is a special case, right?”

“Can I ride in the back?” I asked.

He first looked confused, then nodded. “Sure, whatever makes you feel safe. You can use my phone. Tell your folks you’re on your way.”

I shook my head. “Phones don’t work around here.”

“Yeah, I guess I haven’t seen any cell towers in a while.” As I climbed out of the ditch, he gasped and clutched his temples. “Oh my god, you’re barefoot! Where are your shoes? Hurry, get in the van!”

In the back, there was a child seat and, tucked into a mesh pocket on the side, a package of Clean Bean Baby Wipes. Maybe that should’ve reassured me, but I know some dads are monsters. Not mine, but other people’s. Neighbours’. Classmates’.

“Just up the road, right? Tell me when we’re close,” he said. “I think there’s a baby blanket back there. Cover up those feet!”

We rode in silence, hot air blasting from the vents. My teeth chattered, though not from the cold.

He reached out and I flinched, but he was only taking something from the seat next to him. “I know this is a terrible time to ask, but have you seen this man?” He twisted his arm to show me a flyer.

Looking at it, seeing the picture, I felt an itch on the outskirts of my mind. Like a mental on-the-tip-of-my-tongue. “Maybe . . . I don’t know. I got hurt a while back and my memory isn’t so good now.”

“Ah, I see,” he said, as if I’d confirmed some suspicion. He put the flyer down.

I stopped being scared. I had a bad memory; I wasn’t stupid.

“Who was he?” I asked.

He tensed, squeezing the steering wheel. “Was? What makes you say was? He’s my brother.”

“But you’ve lost him,” I said, looking out the window.

He exhaled from his nostrils. “He was supposed to visit for Thanksgiving. He never showed up. That town back there’s the last place he was seen.”

“It’s a bad road. Lots of accidents.” I said it matter-of-factly, to needle him.

“So I’ve heard,” he muttered. Louder, he asked, “But have you seen any broken-down cars on the road? A blue Camaro? That’s a sporty kind of car.”

The addendum irritated me. I didn’t know makes of cars, but that wasn’t because I was addle-brained, only uninterested. Meanwhile, the itching in my mind grew worse. On the verge of remembering a swarm of things, bad things, I didn’t answer.

That didn’t stop his questions. “Or maybe signs of a crash? Broken trees near one of these bends? Broken glass? Tracks in the snow?”

He could’ve gone on forever, verbalizing his every fear. I was goddamn mad. What if I did remember a blue car? Lots of cars passed me when I walked home—no one gave me a second thought. Plenty of people died around here. What was so special about his brother?

I wanted so badly to reach forward and shake him. The urge burned as intense as the itching in my head. But I looked at the Clean Bean Baby Wipes. Somebody needed him, maybe a daughter. And his stupid brother was gone. Maybe that was enough suffering.

I bailed before I said or did something I’d regret.

Because memory works that way: it lets the things you want to remember fade away, but the bad stuff? That it holds on to. Tight.

• • • •

Next time I saw my hitchhiker friend, I told her about the dad in the minivan. She made a spitting sound.

“I hate them all.”

That made me feel better.

I got used to walking with her in the evenings. She broke the hypnotic monotony of all those bends in the road, and around every curve, the same vista of trees and snow, rising hills and deepening ravines. I thought of her as a friend, even though we didn’t know each other by name. Our conversations seldom went long before she caught a ride. Despite the hard road, we seemed to be good luck for one another.

Of course, I knew she wasn’t really hitchhiking. How would she keep showing up at the same place? She was probably “a working girl,” as my mom used to say, but that wasn’t any of my business. I always let her take the first ride a man offered, in case that was how she made a living. Besides, she was colder than me and the men were really stopping for her, not her dowdy friend. Flimsy as her white ensemble was for the weather, it worked for the road.

• • • •

Later—maybe months later; time’s been shifty since I got hurt—I found myself walking alone through the forest. I guess I’d decided to use the shortcut by Graham’s Creek, but I couldn’t find the trail. It was a new moon night and so dark; the night felt heavy, smothering.

I missed my hitchhiker friend; her up-front hate and spit-in-yer-eye confidence made me feel safe. I missed my dog, too. Dogs are about the here and now. Charlie would’ve kept me focused on the path, not my growing sense of dread.

Now that I was alone, the old feelings caught up with me. It was too dark to breathe. The night filled my nose and mouth, clogged my lungs. My head hurt. I’d lost my shoes, and walking through the packed, ice-crusted snow felt like stepping through glass.

Since Graham’s Creek was frozen over, I couldn’t orient myself by the sound of rushing water. I thought if I found a clearing, I could check the stars for direction. But when I stopped moving, I heard twig snaps behind me—like knuckles cracking.

I staggered between trees, telling myself I was being ridiculous. Who else would be out here on a night like this? Only, when I sped up, so did the threatening snaps. Someone was following me. Several someones. I burst into a run, then they were chasing me. I heard them panting all around me.

Yards ahead, I spotted an eerie green gleam that quickly disappeared. I thought it was the gaze of a forest animal, maybe a wolf. I ran straight for it, more afraid of my invisible pursuers than any four-legged animal. A snowbank collapsed under me, and I fell on my hands and knees. As I crouched there, wheezing, I had a terrible intuition that what I’d seen was a masked flashlight, that somehow one of them had gotten in front of me, to cut off my escape.

The gleam came again, closer, and this time I recognized it: car headlights bouncing off a reflective road sign. The gleam winked as the car took the rising turns of Bad Luck Bends.

I ran to the side of the road and waved my arms at the oncoming lights. Brakes squealed and the car skidded on a patch of ice. Passing mere inches from me, the car pushed a breeze through my hair and ruffled my skirt. Fortunately, the driver knew to turn into the skid. The car stopped with its back end on the blacktop, front end on the shoulder of the road.

In seconds, I was at the passenger side. The driver opened the window a crack.

“Holy shit,” he said. “You scared the hell out of me! Are you okay?”

“Please.” I pressed my hands to the window. “I need a ride.”

“Is somebody chasing you?”

“Yes! I heard noises in the forest.” I looked over my shoulder. I didn’t see anyone, but I wasn’t taking any chances. As soon as he unlocked the door, I jumped in and slammed it shut behind me. Papers in the backseat rustled in the agitated air. “I’m scared. Please, let’s just go.”

He peered past me. When no one emerged from the forest, he seemed disappointed.

“Hurry!” I said.

“Right.” He released the brake. “Where are we going?”

I struggled for breath and pointed to the farmhouse, invisible in the inky, suffocating night. “I live nearby. Drive and we’ll come to a hill.”

“A hill.” He sounded amused as he drove off the shoulder, tightly turning to get us back on the road. “There’s a hundred hills around here.”

I nodded, not appreciating his sense of humour at the moment. “I’ll tell you where to turn.”

He flicked off the radio, and in the sudden silence, I realized we’d been listening to static.

“You’re local, no? You should know better than to be out here at night. I mean, it’s called Bad Luck Bends for a reason, right?”

I couldn’t tell if he was really asking me. He had an accent that turned up the ends of his sentences.

“It’s a hard road,” I said cautiously, hands trembling in my lap. “Lots of accidents.”

“It’s not just accidents anymore. People are going missing.” He paused as he took the next turn. “But we don’t want any stranger danger here, acuerdas? My name’s Ant. And you are?”

Confusion tamped down some of my fear. “Your name is Ant?”

“Well, Antonio Lopez. And you are . . .?”

I stared at him, feeling that itch at the back of my mind. “Why do I know that name?”

He started to smile. “I have a true crime podcast. Are you a fan?”

“No.”

He made a sizzling sound with his mouth. “I’m gonna need some aloe vera for that burn. Maybe you seen me around town? I been here for a few weeks. I did an interview with the local paper?”

“Oh, that.”

“Not impressed, I take it.” He rolled his eyes at himself. “Pos, what am I saying? You were running for your life a minute ago! What do you care about my thing?”

I only stared some more, trying to catch my breath.

“And you’re not gonna tell me your name? Okay, ‘s all right. I get it.”

I frowned. “What do you get?”

“You don’t know me. I’m brown, a stranger in town. Safer not to get too friendly, right? Especially after your scare in the woods. And all the trouble on this road.”

It wasn’t his skin colour that threw me off, but he didn’t seem offended by my presumed racism, so I only said, “Cars have a hard time holding onto the Bends.”

His breath hitched in a bitter, nearly silent chuckle. “You buying the party line? The cops in this town don’t have a clue. You know incidents on this road have doubled over the last year?”

“Incidents?” I repeated.

“Yeah, if you combine the men who’ve disappeared plus the accidents. Neither is enough to ping anyone’s radar, but taken together?”

I thought about my friend. How long had it been since I’d seen her? “It ‘pinged’ your radar?”

“Hey, I may be an amateur gumshoe, but I been doing this a while. And not just regurgitating stuff from Crime Confidential dot com, like some of my ‘colleagues.’ I do a multi-episode investigative report for the ‘cast at least once a year. Es super padre.”

Between adrenaline from the forest and worries about my friend, I only grasped half of what he said. Oblivious, he kept talking, like most men do when a woman pretends to listen.

“Chief ‘Wiggum’ and them may think these guys ran off the road”—he gave me a look that suggested he’d made a joke—“and that come spring, hikers are gonna find some crashed cars and bodies in ravines, but please.”

I don’t like it when men laugh at things I don’t understand. Ant hadn’t exactly laughed, but his inside joke didn’t include me. And he was a very careful driver. At the rate he drove, I’d be in his car forever. I shivered.

“Sorry, kid, I don’t mean to scare you. You’re safe now. Hey, you sure you’re okay? You look a little pale. Even for a white girl.”

“I’m cold.”

“My coat’s in the back.”

He eased off the gas, turning to grab it. I flinched, and he pulled back.

“Sorry,” he said. “No sudden movements, right?”

I held my silence while he took sidelong glances at me. Arriving at my feet, he exclaimed, “Madre Santa, no wonder you’re cold! You don’t have any shoes on. And your skirt is ripped.” He checked the road before looking at me again. “Is that dirt or blood on your legs?”

“I don’t know. I can’t feel it, I’m cold.”

“Yeah, let me get my coat.” This time he retrieved it despite my flinch. He dropped the coat in my lap and returned his attention to the road. “Are you hurt? You might be in shock. How long were you out there in the woods?”

“I don’t know. I was scared. I lost track of time.”

“Happens, I guess.”

I bristled. It did happen. To me, it happened a lot. But I didn’t have to explain my problems. Nor did I have to put on the smelly coat he’d dumped on me. I wished I’d asked to sit in the backseat.

Before he could question me further, I changed the subject. “Why are you in town? Why did the paper interview you?”

“Did you not actually read the article?” He blew a raspberry. “Nobody reads the papers anymore. I was investigating those murders across the state line.”

“Murders?”

I craned to check the backseat, thinking maybe I could move. Hand-scribbled notes and typed, heavily annotated pages sprawled from manila folders. That must’ve been the rustle I’d heard earlier. On top of the folders lay a slim, zippered briefcase. Maybe it was meant to anchor the folders, but whatever was inside wasn’t heavy enough.

“. . . don’t want to say ‘serial killer’ because it’s a woman,” Ant was saying when I tuned back in. “But the MO.”

“Emmo?”

“The man’s always found naked, robbed, and shot in his vehicle. Perp’s clothes are left behind. The forensics lab is so backed up, they’re not getting DNA or fibres ‘fore hell freezes over. But my guess? Prostitute.”

I thought of my friend again and my chest tightened, my hands tingled.

“The way I see it?” he said. “This woman hitches a ride with a guy. She tells him to drive to a remote area. Once they’re both stripped, she shoots him and steals his clothes and wallet.”

Silent, wishing he would be too, I searched for a mile marker. How far had I run? Where in the Bends were we?

“So, when those murders stopped, I figured she was waiting for the heat to die down, y’know? Instead, what a coincidence, men start disappearing here.”

I felt him look at me, as if expecting some reaction, maybe astonishment at his intellectual prowess. But I’d never cared for the Hardy Boys. I was still waiting for a mile marker.

“There’s a curve coming up soon,” I said. “Turn off where the road goes left, take the trail on the right.”

Ant slowed the car even more. “I thought you said it was up a hill.”

“The trail goes up the hill. You can’t reach my house from the Bends, you have to go around back.”

“I see.”

From his tone, I knew he didn’t.

At the turnoff, perhaps worried that I was in shock or sending him on a snipe hunt, he asked, “Is there a bridge across Graham’s Creek? We’re getting closer to it, aren’t we?”

“Yes, thank goodness.” My hands no longer tingled; they burned.

“Yeah, you must be eager to put this night behind you.”

He suggested I use the phone in his coat pocket to call home or the police. Rather than tell him that was pointless, I managed a “No, thank you.”

The car bounced along the bumpy gravel trail, made even bumpier by a foot of snow and ice. Eventually, branches started scraping the sides of the car. Ant winced at a particularly nasty squeal of wood on metal. To distract him, I asked, “What makes you think the killer came here?”

“Are you sure this trail’s meant for cars? My paint job—”

“Was someone shot?” I insisted.

“Like I said”—he sounded peeved at having to repeat himself—“no one’s found the bodies yet.”

He swivelled his head to gauge the encroaching forest, probably wondering if there was still room enough to turn around. My friend would’ve flashed her smile to win him over, but I didn’t think it’d work for me. Not while my mind itched with inchoate memories. Not while my hands ached to touch him.

Instead, before he could slow down, I gave him the look my dog, Charlie, always gave me when he begged under the table. “I’m so sorry. The trail gets wider, I promise, and we’re almost to the bridge. I just want to go home. Please.”

He clamped his lips in a semblance of a smile. “I guess I’ll chalk it up to work expenses, give the IRS something to salivate over.”

“You were saying?” I prompted. “Why the killer chose to come here?”

Silence. Just when I thought he was going to stop and put the car in reverse, he cleared his throat. Relief flooded through me. It was true; no storyteller could resist an eager audience.

He began, voice deeper, accent under wraps. I imagined he’d rehearsed it in his hotel room.

“Believe it or not, the killer may have been attracted by the town’s urban legend. Locals say the ghost of a young woman haunts Bad Luck Bends. Dressed in old-fashioned clothes, she appears on the road to lure male drivers to their deaths. Those who succumb to her pleas for a ride home are killed when their car goes off the road, for no apparent reason and with no sign of a passenger. The few Good Samaritans who do survive insist that the girl simply vanished from the car. So, what is the connection between myth and murder?”

He paused for effect. “Clothes make the man—or in this case, the woman. The clothes the serial killer leaves behind with the dead johns are women’s clothes, and every last item is white . . . except for the blood.”

I nodded slowly, as if connecting the dots. “Like the Woman in White.”

“Exactly!” he exclaimed.

I touched his shoulder, and his triumph turned to screams. Men always scream when I touch them. It’s why they run off the road.

The dead aren’t supposed to touch the living. But men aren’t supposed to hurt girls, either.

Frostbitten by my touch, Ant spasmed. His feet slammed the gas and brake pedals. Of course, brakes don’t work much better than radios around me. We only ploughed through the forest faster.

I yanked the steering wheel, and the car raced toward a longleaf pine like they were long-lost lovers. In the headlights, the ice on Graham’s Creek flashed like a camera capturing the reunion. With my free hand, I unlatched his seatbelt. Ant was such a cautious driver—except when it came to picking his passenger.

He turned to me, eyes filled with pain, mouth agape. Perhaps he felt betrayed, but he was nothing to me, simply a man who knew too much. We stared at each other as the car smashed into the tree. He was still looking at me when the windshield peeled his scalp. Then he was free, of my touch and the glass. He hurtled through the air. Blood joined the cascade of snow and pine needles shaken loose by impact.

Moments later, at my own pace, I passed through the crumpled metal. The tree still shivered, gouges in its bark welling with sap. Ant’s briefcase had also flown through the windshield. Plastic and metal bits poked from the stretchy fabric, but they didn’t bother me as I carried the briefcase to the creek. Nor when I slammed it into the ice to make a crack.

Not wanting his bones beneath the forest floor like mine, I dragged Ant to the creek. I put my palm to the cracked ice, which shattered and sank. The current still rippled below; it eagerly accepted Ant and his briefcase. I dumped his paperwork, and the pages quickly went transparent, ink sucked away by greedy black water. The current swept it all under the ice and downstream, a secret for spring.

• • • •

A long time ago, my skirt and blouse were white. That was before three men in a truck stopped to offer me a ride home. Before their grins turned to leers and they chased me through the forest. Before they buried me under a new moon.

I remember now. I always remember after a kill.

Determined to warn my friend, I move through the forest as a blur. This time, I’m not afraid. No one can hurt me, and I can’t get lost. The Bends will always pull me back. I’m a bad memory they can’t let go.

But my friend, my unsmiling reflection, she’s alive. I think the Bends will release her, but first I have to find her. I’ll beg her to stop killing—not for the men’s sake but for her own. Not forever, just until she’s somewhere safe.

It won’t be easy; I’ll miss having a friend. But girls like us have to stick together.

Even if it means hunting apart.

©2019 by Lisa M. Bradley. Originally published in Anathema. Republished by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A queer Latina living in Iowa, Lisa M. Bradley writes everything from novels to haiku, usually with a speculative slant. Her work has appeared in many venues, including LeVar Burton Reads, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her first collection is The Haunted Girl; her debut novel is Exile. Recently she co-edited with R.B. Lemberg the Ursula Le Guin tribute anthology, Climbing Lightly Through Forests. On Twitter, she’s @cafenowhere. Learn more at www.lisambradley.com.

Ten Scenes from A Typical Day in the Life of the All-Powerful Despot

Adam-Troy Castro | 5711 words

The villain won. It is that simple.

By means fair or foul (but of course mostly foul), he has crushed the opposition, defeated all his enemies, and established absolute control over a domain that is, now and forever, entirely defined by his whims.

Has he conquered the world? Perhaps his accomplishment is nothing that insignificant. Perhaps he has overcome a galactic empire or perhaps, through deals with the devil, established an absolute hegemony over the entire universe.

Whatever the stage, his will is absolute.

You need to jettison any vague hopes you have that by the end of this story one of the bejeweled walls of his throne room shatters inward in a colossal explosion and a dashing hero emerges from the smoke, declaring the end to this reign of terror; and you need not look forward to the ensuing battle where despite the existence of super-scientific weaponry it somehow comes down to that hero and this villain winding up on some catwalk, trading sword-thrusts as well as badinage while the groundlings gaze upward and dare to hope.

That will not happen.

That might have happened in the distant past, but it did not end the way the groundlings might have hoped, and the hero who was the last chance for the forces of good fell clutching his belly wounds and was for all his troubles rewarded with a pike for his severed and confused head.

The villain won, and while this sucks, there will be no sequel establishing another band of merry heroes who burst in through the same wall and recapitulate that battle with happier result. It ain’t happening, not ever. And what follows is the establishment of a status quo and daily routine, that the Despot will know, free of karmic retribution.

What is his kingdom like?

One: The Counting of the Eighty-Two

The Despot rises to lilting birdsong in the tree outside his window. It is always birdsong, not any summons from a courtier, not any gentle urging from a grand vizier; he has learned the hard way that being woken up by a fellow human being is annoying and that before he has his morning coffee, he is so mad that he might wind up with one less courtier or vizier. It is not that he objects to starting out each and every day with a murder, but it is unpleasant to him to start each and every day with a summary execution. Better to let the birds rouse him and to this end he has established his castle in a region with mild weather, and landscaped the courtyard directly outside his window with trees that attract birds of particularly beautiful tone, whose soft celebratory calls to one another run no risk of irritating him.

His bed partner of the night before does not wake quite so easily and so lies face down on the pillow, snoring softly, ass up. Because that person is the property of the Despot and did not have any choice whether to come to bed or not, we will not provoke protests of sexual politics by specifying that person’s gender, though we will allow that the Despot has had both as well as a multitude of variations, some created just for the day. That this raises questions of consent is of course to instantly answer them. We are not talking about a nice guy here. We are talking about a Despot. A stinking son of a bitch bastard. It is a matter we must put aside as soon as we acknowledge it. We will not dwell.

He slips his feet into a pair of slippers and pads across the bejeweled tiles to the door, which he does not open, which he knows to be guarded on the other side by two unsleeping, unmoving servants who he does not summon. The Despot does not engage in any governmental work before his morning bath. But he does go to the table beside that door, where there is a little golden bowl set to catch a little card that always pops out of a slot in the wall while he still sleeps. It is his morning reassurance of the size of his kingdom. He takes the card, which is constructed of exquisite quality stock, and glances at the number formed by decals of glittering diamond.

That number reflects the total number of all the souls who remain in the universe, which is to say all the souls who owe him groveling worship: a sum derived by a painstaking nightly census, throughout the depth and breadth of his land.

That number is eighty-three.

Two: The Philosopher in the Dungeon

The question for those of you encountering the Despot’s daily routine for the first time must be “Eighty-Three? That’s how many people are left in the universe?”

Yes. Those are how many people are left alive.

To establish his empire the lord of everything cut a brutal swath we need not disturb ourselves by recounting. But even as he won, he contemplated just how much work it was going to be to rule an unwieldy dictatorship over god alone knew how many government offices and god alone imagined what labor problems and god alone knew how many problems with supply chains, and he figured that this was going to be so much work that it would ruin any satisfaction he derived from being in absolute charge and in the place where the fabled buck stopped. So he hauled out a paper and pen and calculated just how many people he actually needed to rule over, in order to enjoy a despot’s lifestyle. With so much of the necessary ravaging of resources a process that would only get worse as those resources ran out, and so much of the work of a despot involving the care and feeding of the masses that would never appreciate him, and whose use of those resources would never cease to irritate him, and especially keeping in mind that he had an unstoppable robot army anyway, he seized the opportunity to get all those people out of his way, and somewhere he didn’t have to think about them, while ruling over a small population hand-chosen for their obedience and servility. They live in the small village outside his castle, in huts, or in small rooms inside the castle, on beds of straw. A few live in chains in the dungeon, because you can’t have a proper castle without that kind of thing. But even they are people selected for being philosophical about their position in life, and they scream like torture victims only because they know it’s their assigned purpose.

One of the prisoners in question is a savant once known as Professor Roderick J. Helmsman, who wrote books about the meaning of life that conflict with the current officially accepted meaning of life, which is serving the Despot. He wakes to the same bird song the Despot wakes to, and immediately sets about concocting a premise that can entertain the Despot during the scheduled afternoon session with sharp sticks. What, he thinks, if all the world exists in a tunnel under a bridge? This is transparently ridiculous. All the world does not exist in a tunnel under a bridge. But he can present this to the Despot as a reasonable premise, and the Despot will laugh at him, and this will occupy a few minutes of scorn and ridicule, and it will keep the Despot happy. We cannot prove it isn’t, sire. But think how much it explains! To which the Despot will offer some variation of, You’re an Idiot. The more that happens, the less the sharp sticks happen.

The Professor readies himself for the back-and-forth, licking his lips in anticipation of the gruel he will be fed, afterward. It is his life now, and he is actually close to happy with it. He gets to participate in energetic debate over ideas. And there is another blessing, just as terrific, which he holds to his breast as the one great validation of his life.

To wit: he is, beyond a doubt, the world’s foremost philosopher.

Three: Squeaky-Clean

The Despot bathes.

He does not have to bathe. Honestly. He could just allow himself to gather filth until his very presence is sickening. He could declare that this odor he carries with him is imperial, order it bottled and require his followers to wear it. He has considered it. But the truth of the matter is that he is not one of those people blind to their own odor; he knows when he has become intolerable and so he maintains his cleanliness with a fervor that would astonish the mother who, once upon a time, screamed herself raw just trying to get him to use soap. That was a childhood phase, one he got over. Now he uses soap, and we will not disturb you by specifying what those soaps are made of, and how the perfumes they carry are collected. Nor will we spend much space describing the hour he spends in the golden tub, large enough for ten and filled with a soup that is ninety percent water and ten percent lotions designed to render his skin multiple flavors of magnificent. Honestly. It is decadent, or would be if anybody but himself were allowed to have it.

He sits in his bath, above a mosaic created by the world’s greatest sculptor, who upon completing it was obliged to slit his own throat to ensure that he would never create anything else. The water falls from the gaping mouth of the figure who represents a crucified man; not the crucified man who much of the world once worshipped, but some random guy, clearly not him, but again some other guy entirely, whose execution in the courtyard had struck the Despot as particularly artful and deserving of immortalization in the form of the Despot’s shower. Now captured at three times the size that was his in life, he is nothing more than the possessor of a mouth vomiting forth the water of his executioner’s daily cleansing. This is not the future he had spent his life picturing for himself but more than he died thinking he’d have. On particularly cruel days the Despot listens to the sounds of the execution on the speakers, but today he contents himself with Vivaldi, which relaxes him as much as the sounds of brutality pleasure him. He is aware what this has to say about his sanity, but sanity is an outdated premise, and has been for some time, with him as the baseline. He is now, by default, the ordinary guy, and everybody else has the problem; so much so that he sometimes doesn’t bother getting out of the tub at all.

The ghost of a feeling pursues him.

He does not realize it is boredom.

Four: The Spare Parts

There is a little-used closet in a little-traveled hallway in one the darker regions of the castle where if one tugs on one disreputable-looking mop, a sliding panel opens to reveal an oval portal beyond which an infinitude of tiny little figures trudge endlessly through a landscape a little like a pea-soup fog in an amphitheater where the music being played is eternal discordant feedback.

They are everything that lives in the universe, outside the tyrant’s immediate neighborhood where the lucky eighty-three still labor in corporeal form; and available to him should he ever decide to replenish the numbers that fall from obsolescence and his frequent temper tantrums. From time to time, the despot sees that he is running low and lets his major-domo know that he needs some more, and that loyal servant comes to this place and inputs the castle’s current needs, an action that leads to the data of the selected individuals being transmitted to the basement’s meat printer, where in short order they slide into the tray, naked, blinking away the amniotic fluid, and ready to serve.

Travel into that portal, if you could, and make your way past all the billions jockeying for position under the selection funnel, and past all the trillions who have given up out of despair of ever getting close, and past the many others who just mill to and fro thinking about how nice it would be to breathe air again, and past those few who remain rebellious and sing songs of defiant community left over from the war, and still further, and you would eventually get to a distant hill occupied only by the specter of a girl named Amantha, who has big brown eyes and pigtails and a grimace that could have bent iron. Of her you need only know that she was once the Chosen One who was humanity’s only hope at defeating the despot while it was still possible. There is no chance, whatsoever, of her ever being decanted.

Oh, well.

Five: The Major-Domo’s Stamp Collection

The Major-Domo is a fellow who under the old regime had the job of scheduling the various meeting rooms where the empire’s tens of thousands of bureaucratic functionaries did their highly important work, and making sure that there were never any cases of two committees showing up at the same room at the same time, something that would have been bad. There are no committees now and there is no need for meeting rooms to have them in, but there can be a need for a fellow of not much imagination who will relay the Despot’s orders to the people responsible for carrying them out, without adding much of a spin of his own. Hence the Major-Domo, a fellow who benefits from his elevated place in the regime in that he gets to wear comfortable clothes and eat satisfying food, even if most of his work hours are spent idle, waiting for the next time the Despot needs anything. To keep himself entertained he takes care of his stamp collection, which he keeps in a massive volume that is almost always at the center of his desk, open to the latest blank page. The Major-Domo finds endless satisfaction in this hobby, mostly because he has been ordered to do so, and it needs to be said that it would be significantly more interesting were this a universe with more than one place in it, and in those places more than one celebrated person who could be commemorated on a stamp, and of those stamps more than one variation, and if any of them were rare, and if there were in fact mail. There is not, and there aren’t, and there aren’t, and there isn’t. So there are just a series of identical stamps that get issued by the regime at the rate of exactly one a day, and every day the Major-Domo seizes that day’s printing, takes his bounty back to his desk, peels the paper loose of the adhesive, and pastes the latest addition to his valuable collection in the square on the center of the page, where it belongs.

Sometimes, the Major-Domo dares to think that a little variety would be nice.

But he never speaks up.

He has no ambitions of a future existence as a spigot.

Six: The Loyal Opposition

Does no one oppose the Despot, at all?

There are two. We will spend some time with both.

The first lives in a hut about the dimensions of a hill country outhouse, so small that its sole occupant can sleep in it only if he rests the structure on its side, and positions himself inside in the manner that evokes a corpse inside a coffin. This is a little act of rebellion he can get away with. In daylight hours his hut and home must remain upright. He is able to leave and wander about, which is kind of pointless, as the hut exists on a random patch of earth so isolated that it might be on another planet, or on this one, but so remote that nothing of worth can be seen from its front door. His footprints on the desert floor, undisturbed by wind, testify to just how far he has wandered from his hut before thirst and hunger drive him back, to the sole place where food and water and shelter are provided. They peter out after about a kilometer. But he cannot just stay in the hut and so he daily emerges, wanders about for a while, and goes back. He must leave because it is only when he is absent that these necessities of life are delivered, by some means unknown to him, perhaps teleportation.

His only contact with another human being is when the telephone rings.

It is an old-fashioned phone, attached to his bare wall by flexible coil. If he is close enough to just grab the handset from where he is seated, he waits until it rings twice before reaching out to grab it. If he is not, he races there from wherever he is and cries, “Hello? Hello!” hoping that this is the call delivering the mercy he has hoped for.

Most days, the conversation goes something like this:

“Hello? Hello!”

“Hello, worm. It’s your lord and master.”

The man in the hut can hear splashing. He suspects that the Despot is in the bathtub. This is an irritation to him. He does not have a bathtub. He washes with sand. It has given him a gritty complexion. A bath would be better. It wouldn’t even have to bubble. In the meantime, he wishes that the Despot did not call him from the tub. Mental images intrude.

“Hello, sire.”

“I was just calling to see how you’re doing.”

“I’m okay.”

“Did you receive the extra turnips I sent for yesterday’s lunch?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“Were they okay?”

“Yes.”

“I might send an apple tomorrow. Would that be appreciated?”

“Yes.”

“Or something to read.”

“Oh GOD yes.”

“I’m not saying I will, you understand. It’s just something I’ve been considering.”

“I know.”

“Well, that’s about all I have time for. I hope you remain comfortable.”

“Thank you, sire.”

“And thank you, your majesty.”

There is a click.

The man in the hut hangs up the phone and realizes what he has realized every day for some years now, since he was overthrown from his own little fiefdom, by that voice on the other end: that the Despot has left him with no option other than loving him. In his isolation, it is all he has to love.

This is one of two epiphanies he keeps returning to.

The other is that he has not actually lost his royalty. This land he now occupies belongs to himself alone, to the exclusion of every other living being. He is still master of it. No one tells him what to do, not even that distant voice. He is King. He is just a king with fewer options, that’s all; no options, really.

It is just a shame that he so completely despises turnips.

Seven: What About Love?

One key symbolic duty of a king or emperor is to sit on a throne. Why? A throne is just a chair, and upon looking at it one feels no envy for that chair that is based on anything but the power it symbolizes. It is a high-backed solid thing and it is uncomfortable as hell. Every peasant has a more comfortable place to sit, even it’s only on soft grass. But the king, the emperor, the despot must spend at least part of every day on that throne.

This is a throwback to the time when people came to their kings with petitions, with arguments, and with messages from distant lands; people who needed to be reminded that the king was higher than them, that in bringing such matters to his attention they were challenging god’s representative on Earth.

None of this is relevant to the time of the Despot. There is nobody empowered to petition him, nobody who would ever think of petitioning him, and no faraway kingdoms that have messages to send him. Additionally, he is not god’s representative on Earth. He is god on Earth. These are subtle distinctions, but they matter, insofar as that for him, there is no ceremonial value in sitting on a throne. Any edict he might have to impart from there has already been communicated.

All that makes this the most boring of the castle’s rooms. It is a pain in the ass — given the nature of the throne, literally — for the Despot to spend at least an hour every day here, contemplating the Great Things that are his job to contemplate. He used to spend eight hours a day here, adjudicating the petty controversies that embroiled his lords and ladies, before deciding that it was too much trouble and getting rid of his lords and ladies. His actual time on the throne has since contracted to that mere hour, and it is still too much time for his liking, an interruption in the fun stuff that dominates the rest of the day. He resents the necessity and so, it must be said, commits most of his horrific atrocities in the hour immediately before this interregnum and the hour immediately afterward.

What you need to know is that unknown to his uncanny powers of perception, this room is a hotbed of passion.

Protocol demands that a throne be flanked by guards at attention. There are two, powerful figures in gleaming armor, each of whom stand at equal distances from the throne at their midpoint. They do not stare blankly ahead, but instead stand a little turned toward the Despot, in what he perceives as full attention paid to his every whim. When he leaves this room for the day, they remain in that position, immobile, never called to duty, never relieved except for a single break in the morning and another in the afternoon, at which point they march out separate exits and do what they need, before returning to the same positions, which they hold until they return to their assigned cells early at night.

All that time, they gaze on each other.

They are men denied all other company, all the benefits of a social life, all the blessings of family; men who are silent by command, devoted to this duty to decree, and so their opposite numbers, across the elevated platform that bares the throne, are all they have. In the absence of all else, an unspoken empathy has developed between them, an understanding that has blossomed into adoration. The Despot has commanded them to this duty and they obey him every day, to the point of never actually crossing the invisible line marked by the throne, and doing the explicit things they dream of from morning to night, but aside from that one hour where he sits between them and glowers in the ways that strike him as required of the monarchy, an hour they both spend stewing with frustration, they are making passionate love in the way that only they can, with the long stares that to every other observer seem empty but that to them the closest thing they have to consummation.

It is possible that if the Despot died, they would have nothing real to say to each other, or worse would set up housekeeping only to discover that they get on each other’s nerves.

But until then, they are between themselves the romance out of a storybook, the grand passion that would be forbidden if the Despot ever suspected, even for a moment, that it was taking place at both sides of him.

Look, the cheek of the one on the left twitches. Look, the eyebrow of the one on the right arches. That was a sonnet. That was everything. That was an act of lovemaking to end all love stories.

How lucky they are.

Eight: The Doctor

The Despot does not spend all day in the bath, as it happens. He has a Doctor’s appointment. This is a joke of a sort in that a man as important as the Despot does not need to make appointments for anything. If it occurs to him in the middle of the night that he needs to see a Doctor, he can just shout, “Doctor!” and the man responsible for his medical care will be summoned from his own bed, or from wherever he happens to be, to tend to the Despot’s every need. The Despot can do this hourly, if he desires, and there were days when he was sufficiently pissy to let his Doctor get all the way home before summoning him again, every twenty minutes, just to demand a full exam on the occasion of his latest sneeze. It finally grew old. Now he sees the Doctor weekly. It is something to do, even though he hates Doctors so much that he has otherwise exterminated the entire profession except for this one highly learned practitioner.

The freedom to talk back to the Despot makes him, along with the man in the hut, the closest thing the Despot has to an organized opposition.

“Why,” the Despot says, “have I had stomach upset these last four nights?”

“Because you persist in eating the fruit of the Deraxis tree.”

“Of course I eat it. I like it.”

“Yes, but it does not like you.”

“Is that a joke?”

The Despot does not like jokes.

“No, sire. It is just that your particular stomach is sensitive to Deraxis. It is okay for you to have once in a while, but it possesses a compound that builds up in your system and ultimately produces a condition akin to an allergy, that . . .”

“Stop using that scientific mumbo-jumbo. I do not trust it.”

“If you prefer, sire, it’s bad for you and you should not eat it.”

“That sounds awfully like an ultimatum.”

“It is the truth.”

“You do not get to define truth. I am the end-all and I get to define truth.”

“The truth is that the fruit of the Deraxis will result in more accidents like the one you had at the meeting of the high council yesterday.”

“I was not the only one.”

“Nobody else was suffering your symptoms. They just felt obliged to have similar accidents lest they be accused of not following your example.”

“I will not be denied my Deraxis!”

“I have consulted the botany texts and confirmed that the fruit of the Pfistali tree is almost identical in flavor to the fruit of the Deraxis, and that your blood tests reveal that you are almost certainly not sensitive to it all. Import the Pfistali into your greenhouse and you will be able to delight in that flavor as much as you wish, for as long as you wish, without accumulating any more unpleasant memories like yesterday’s. I beg you, sire, make this slight adjustment in your diet, so that we may all benefit from your leadership for many years to come. Please.”

“You are an impudent fool.”

“I am your Doctor, sire.”

“Do you know what happens if I ring this bell?”

The Doctor knows what happens if his lord and master rings the bell. He understands that he can be executed at any time, for even the slightest infraction in an existence where anything he does is an infraction. He also knows that he will also be executed at once if any point his lord thinks that he is not performing his duties with special vehemence, and indeed he never gets out of his own cell without thinking of one doctor who came before him, who failed to institute the dietary restrictions that would have spared the Despot a bad case of gout. And so he only replies, “Yes, sire.”

“Damn you. Speak to the chefs. Make the necessary adjustments.”

“Yes, sire. I will do as you wish. Will there be anything else? It did not seem to me that this was the main reason you summoned me.”

The Despot has also been having some potency problems of late, but has been working up to admitting it.

“No.”

Nine: The Cuticle

It is on his next visit to the chamber of ablutions that the Despot, sitting on the more useful of his two thrones, discovers a little needle of flesh protruding from between the nail of his index finger, and the surrounding flesh. He puts pressure on it and discovers, without much surprise, that it is painful to the touch. He is aware of this medical condition. It is chronic. Every couple of months one of his fingers chooses to torment him this way, which to him seems to testify to some ungodly petulance on the part of the universe he rules utterly; a rebellion in the form of fleshy documentations that there are things that he cannot control. He tries to amputate the stiff needle with his thumbnail, which he keeps slightly long, but it is not sharp enough, and he cannot reach the silvery clipper from where he sits, as it on the other side of the sink. It will be some time before he is done with his current evacuation—damn the Deraxis, and damn the Doctor for being right about it—and so he commences to doing what long and painful experience should have taught him is an option he should avoid at all costs, nibbling. The little needle is so tiny, so delicate, really, so fiendish a torture mechanism that he is actively irritated by not being the guy to think of it, that it is almost impossible to get a dental grip on it, but soon enough he manages, and for the next few seconds grinds those teeth with fervent malice, hoping to make the needle part; but is tough, and it continues to vex him, until in a fury of absolute loathing he clamps his teeth down hard and rips the offending flesh free.

Almost at once, he is aware of his tactical mistake. The unwanted needle has come free, yes, but it has taken with it a strip of healthy and desired flesh, and the raw place he has unearthed now stings, as it has on every previous occasion in his life when he attempted to do such a pettily stupid and self-destructive thing.

It will hurt worse now.

And it is worth nothing, this lesson that he is grandiose to acknowledge to himself: that he has become a god over men, the grand ruler of all who live, and the master of all he surveys: but he is still human, and this kind of shit still happens. No edict, no command, no imperial snit will ever free him from it.

Ten: To the Rampart

It is with this in mind that the Despot climbs to the highest point in his castle, on a glorious day when the sun shines and the air is sweet, when the birds sing and the clouds when present form only the best tableaus in the blue sky they inhabit, and he knows that everything he perceives, from the village far below to the rolling hills on the horizon, is all his: that whatever whim overcomes him today, it will be provided as soon it is voiced; and that there is no threat to him, anywhere, not so far as the eye can see.

He feels a deep abiding melancholy. It starts early, these days. It is often still present even as he crawls into bed. (And thinking of bed, he suddenly remembers that he has not dismissed his concubine, who will now stay within the sheets until ordered otherwise, all day if necessary, a past edict that once satisfied the Despot but now seems, somehow, both too much and not enough; pitiful is the word.) The real problem, of course, is that the being who controls everything also controls nothing, not even himself. There is no pushback. No reason to get out of bed. No purpose, really.

And yet, what are the options, really? Is he to relinquish some portion of his power, and then devote himself to capturing it again? This would at least have the benefit of giving him something to do, but even assuming he can commit the same crimes, win the same wars, and arrive at the same place, he would at the end of all that struggle be where he is now, wandering alone through a world where everybody else is just a pawn to be manipulated, a doll to be positioned in some manner that once pleased him. When that happens he will face the same difficulty he faces now, which is to say that he has created what once he would have thought a paradise, a universe that is entirely beholden to him, that is such a well-ordered machine it runs with perfection without his constant guidance, and again leaves him with nothing to do.

It occurs to him that it would still run even if he leaped from this high place and allowed the ground to shatter him. Nothing would change.

He gnaws on his fingernail and he glares up at the clouds and it occurs to him for just a second that alongside the one that looks like a fish and the one that looks like a dog is one that looks like a slightly more transparent spot in a sheet of otherwise frosted glass, through which the eye of the burning sun glares with even less empathy than he has shown his own worshipful subjects. But then he blinks and the illusion is gone and he finds himself standing atop the little stone barrier between himself and a shattering drop. The vertigo assaults him. He screams, I know you’re there! He screams, I know what you’ve done to me! And though he does not know why he screams these things, feels the truth behind him, an understanding that just barely eludes him, as he wobbles atop the parapet, capable of falling either one way, or the other.

And Meanwhile, Above the Clouds

The true ruler of the universe clucks with an emotion that is not even remotely related to pity.

©2021 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, one World Fantasy Award, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). His latest release was the audio collection My Wife Hates Time Travel And Other Stories (Skyboat Media), which features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour In Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” Adam lives in Florida with a trio of chaotic paladin cats.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

To Reach the Gate, She Must Leave Everything Behind

Izzy Wasserstein | 494 words

Death takes much and in return it offers Susan P— only clarity. She finds herself in a great gray desert and knows her life has ended. Clad in a royal dress, she carries a bow and quiver, and a finely-carved ivory horn dangles from her throat. A tremor of fear shakes her. She’s not possessed such things in many years. Has she returned to His world?

But Susan doesn’t recognize this bleak land, this starless black sky. She takes one step, then another. That feels right. She walks on, struggling under the bulk of her dress, the weighty gifts she carries. She has no use for the bow or the quiver, so she abandons them, those gifts she never wanted. She loathes violence, though her brothers had been adept at it.

Oh, her brothers, and Lucy! They had chosen that other world over their own, and she’d been left behind to toil in the aftermath of war, of their loss. And yet their absence aches.

She expects to struggle with the rings, but arthritis no longer troubles her. Those gifts from royal suitors slide easily off her fingers, fall away. The desert swallows them. If she’d married in that other world, would she have left behind a spouse, children, when she chased that hart back to Earth? A nightmarish thought, to add to many from that place. Better to think of her husband, long dead, and of Mildred, her wife in all but title. She hopes they await her, but fears that He does.

Her royal clothing impedes her. Her fingers remember what her mind has long forgotten; the dress’s bindings loosen. The God of that place had said she would always be a queen, but she can discard the dress, just as she left His world, just as she chose her own path over His demands.

Naked now, she half-fears she’s growing younger, as she had in the shock of her first return to Earth, when she’d been robbed of so much life, adolescence and all her youth, then forced to endure it all again. But she’s still herself, her wrinkles and scars her own, though her many aches have subsided.

Ahead looms an unassuming gate, rising from the sands, flanked by two massive guardians, animal-headed, ready to pounce. For a horrible moment, she thinks they are great maned cats, but that’s a trick of strange shadows. They’re nothing but bronze jackals. Susan is beyond His reach at last, and has not, as she feared, been pulled back to His realm in death.

The God of that world had promised her much and demanded more. The horn is heavier than it looks and more powerful. Even here it would summon aid. Susan is beyond such things. She hurls it away.

Unburdened at last, Susan approaches the Gate of the Dead, naked, alone, and willing. One last portal, she thinks, and steps through.

©2021 by Izzy Wasserstein.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Izzy Wasserstein is a queer and trans woman who teaches writing and literature at a university on the American Great Plains and writes poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Fantasy, and elsewhere. She shares a home with her spouse Nora E. Derrington and their animal companions. She’s an enthusiastic member of the 2017 class of Clarion West. Her debut short story collection, All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From, is forthcoming from Neon Hemlock Press in summer 2022.

EXCERPT: Dune: The Lady of Caladan (Tor Books)

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson | 4317 words

From Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, Dune: The Lady of Caladan is a brand new novel in the internationally bestselling Dune series.

Lady Jessica, mother of Paul, and consort to Leto Atredies. The choices she made shaped an empire, but first the Lady of Caladan must reckon with her own betrayal of the Bene Gesserit. She has already betrayed her ancient order, but now she must decide if her loyalty to the Sisterhood is more important than the love of her own family.

Meanwhile, events in the greater empire are accelerating beyond the control of even the Reverend Mother, and Lady Jessica’s family is on a collision course with destiny.

Out from Tor Books now.

Chapter 1

The Kwisatz Haderach breeding program was designed to benefit humanity, but at what cost? At what human cost?

—LADY JESSICA, private journals

In her mind and heart, Jessica found herself at the bottom of an abyss. Each moment took her farther from Caladan, Duke Leto, and Paul.

After receiving the Bene Gesserit ultimatum, and the threat against her family, Jessica had crossed star systems in a Spacing Guild Heighliner, brought back to Wallach IX like a recalcitrant child. She felt no warm homecoming as she rode a shuttle down from the huge orbiting ship to the Sisterhood’s dreary, cold homeworld.

Would she ever see Caladan again? Or Leto or Paul? She shifted her position on the hard seat of the shuttle. Maybe the answer to that question depended on what Mother Superior Harishka wanted from her.

Exceptionally strong side winds buffeted the vessel, which made the pilot change his descent and swoop around, rising higher until the turbulence abated. Other passengers muttered a drone of unease, but Jessica remained silent. She had her own turbulence to deal with.

As she looked out the diamond-shaped windowport, the roiling clouds mirrored her troubled mind. She resented the iron control that the Sisterhood exerted over her. She had been separate from them many years, imagining herself independent on Caladan, but they had cracked the whip. The Bene Gesserit summons had left no room for discussion. Reverend Mother Mohiam had threatened to destroy the Duke and the future of House Atreides if she didn’t obey, and the Sisterhood certainly had the means to do so.

They wanted Jessica for their own purposes, had withdrawn her—permanently?—from Caladan. Never in her life had she felt so dismal, separated from everyone and everything she loved. But she did not intend to meekly comply.

The shuttle rocked again in the unsettled air and began to descend again after circumventing the storm, and Jessica saw they were approaching the Mother School complex below. Through a veil of tangled clouds, she made out the ancient buildings and new annexes, the angles of red-tiled roofs, the low underbrush that covered the grounds. The foliage had turned a bright scarlet and orange with autumn colors. The structures were connected, like the countless women in the Sisterhood, all part of an intricate and powerful political machine.

Jessica had been here since infancy, parentless, and the Sisterhood had raised her, indoctrinated her, and enfolded her life from birth until her inevitable death. The Bene Gesserit owned her.

Using some of the very methods taught to her at the Mother School, Jessica concentrated on a breathing exercise that brought clarity and calm. She felt her muscles relax. She had to be at her best and sharpest to face whatever came next.

As she centered herself, the turbulence around the shuttle smoothed, and the remaining clouds parted over the landing zone on the perimeter of the complex. Still wearing garments from Caladan, Jessica felt out of place, but soon they would make her change into the school’s traditional dark garb, to remind her that she was still one of them, always one of them.

Wallach IX, with its weak sun and chill climate, had long been a place where young women of the order either rose to the challenges, or failed. Jessica felt an odd nostalgia for the ancient training center, torn by her loyalties to the Sisterhood and her family. She had spent so many years here, soft clay for them to shape as they chose, finally assigning her as the bound concubine of a young Duke with great potential.

And now she was back. She felt a deep sense of foreboding.

• • • •

Mother Superior Harishka greeted her in person on the tarmac. The Mother Superior had piercing eyes and a severe, uncompromising demeanor. Despite her age, the old woman’s skin was remarkably tight and smooth, possibly from the geriatric effects of the melange she consumed regularly. She had filled the same role for decades, after a lifetime of service to the order. “Come with me. You are needed immediately.” She didn’t explain about the urgent matter that had turned Jessica’s life upside down.

Despite her advanced years, Harishka set a brisk pace, moving like a military commander leading a charge against enemy lines. They entered a large new administration building that had been built with a generous donation from old Viscount Alfred Tull, whose name was on a plaque by the entrance. “I want you to see this first, before you attempt to settle in. We may not have much time,” Harishka said. “You need to know the reason you are here, and why it is so important.”

Yes, she thought. I need to know that.

As Jessica followed them up wide stairs and down long corridors, she absorbed peripheral details, but did not ask questions, though a desperate curiosity clamored inside. In an isolated section of the third floor, Harishka led her to a viewing window that looked into a large medical chamber with a closed door. Two other Sisters remained there, outside the plaz like guardians, but Jessica stepped up to the window, determined to see.

Harishka explained, “The room is sealed and barricaded, but do not underestimate the danger. This is clear armored plaz, and she can see us now if she is alert enough, but for our protection we can always set it to one-way plaz if necessary.”

With all the precautions taken, Jessica expected to see some kind of caged monster inside. Instead, she saw an ancient woman stretched on a bed, tossing restlessly in her sleep. She wore only a medical gown, with tubes and monitors connected to her. Her face was drawn back in a grimace, and she cried out, but the thick plaz blocked all sound. Despite the wrinkles on her age-spotted neck, arms, and hands, her face was not nearly as shriveled as her body.

Jessica didn’t understand. “She . . . is the danger? What does this have to do with me?”

The Mother Superior gave an oblique answer. “This is Lethea, a former Kwisatz Mother. Now she serves in a different capacity for as long as she remains alive . . . and for as long as she withholds what we need.”

Kwisatz Mother. Jessica remembered Shaddam Corrino’s first wife, Anirul, who had been present during Paul’s birth, who had been greatly interested in the boy child. Anirul had been a Bene Gesserit of “hidden rank,” but quietly held the same title. She had died very shortly after Paul was born.

“And what does a Kwisatz Mother do?” Jessica asked. And why did she have the power to summon me?

“Like a Guild Navigator foreseeing safe pathways throughout the stars, so a Kwisatz Mother can see each thread in the immense tapestry of our breeding plans. Lethea was relieved of duty due to mental instability. She is still useful—even if she is dangerous.”

Jessica couldn’t tear her gaze from the crone writhing on the medical bed, locked away alone. Lethea seemed barely able to move. “Dangerous?”

Harishka stared ahead, as if her gaze could bore through the barrier. “She has already murdered several of us. Hence the need for all the security.”

The Mother Superior nodded to one of the two women stationed there to watch Lethea. She was in her thirties with black hair and an olive complexion. “Sister Jiara has watched Lethea closely, but I’m afraid she has few answers.”

Jiara looked through the plaz. “Her mind is crumbling, but it is still incredibly powerful.” She paused just a beat. “Enough to kill several Sisters through her sheer force of will.”

As if sensing their presence, Lethea’s eyes opened to narrow slits, and she stared directly at Jessica from the other side of the armored room. Jessica shuddered. “Why do you need her? What is so important?”

“Lethea has a special prescience the Sisterhood needs, a predictive ability about the future of our order. It has proven to be accurate, and valuable to us, enabling us to make calculated decisions. That is why we keep her alive, despite the danger. But her mental gift comes and goes, and Lethea is losing control of it.”

“She is out of her mind,” Jiara added, sounding bitter. “But she insisted that we bring you here.”

Jessica had so many questions that she could no longer contain them. “What does this have to do with me? I’ve never met this Kwisatz Mother.”

Harishka turned toward Jessica and said, “You are here because Lethea said, ‘Take her away. Our future depends on it.’ Then she insisted that you be separated from your son. She says you could bring about the end of the Sisterhood.”

Jessica felt as if she had fallen off a ledge. “Separate me from Paul?” This made absolutely no sense at all. “Why? For what purpose?”

Harishka’s expression fell. ”We need you to discover the answer. She predicted horror, bloodshed, disaster. That’s why we called you here so urgently.”

Behind the plaz wall, Lethea’s gaze held on Jessica, then shifted to glare at Mother Superior Harishka, Jiara, and at the other Sister. Finally, the old woman closed her eyes and sagged like a rag onto the medical bed.

“She’s a crafty one,” Jiara whispered. “Look at her. She wants to kill more of us, if given the chance.”

“Is she really asleep at last?” the other Sister asked.

Harishka touched a button on the wall, and with a quiet hiss, the door to the medical room opened. She called for three Medical Sisters, who rushed down the hall. “Attend to her now, quickly, while you can.” The trio hurried in, rolling a machine and hooked it to the old woman, adding tubes and lines, but trying not to disturb her. Two of the Sisters took readings, while the third remained alert, as if ready for an attack.

“Intravenous feeder,” Harishka explained to Jessica. “Lethea refuses to eat on her own. We keep her alive, no matter how much she objects. And we expect you to pry answers from her.”

The two women worked quickly, but as they were unhooking the feeding tube, the patient stirred. Alarmed, the Medical Sisters abandoned the feeding machine and bolted for the door.

Lethea snapped fully awake and called out in a strange way, “Stop!”

Jessica recognized the irresistible power of Voice. Was this how she killed?

Two Sisters had made it through the door, but the third, the one who had been guarding them, jerked to a sudden stop. Terrified, she struggled, but could not move, as if snagged by a lasso. Her companions turned and grabbed her, dragging her out into the corridor, then slammed the door behind them.

Thrashing on her medical bed, Lethea glowered at the window.

“We have to send in teams of three,” Harishka said. “She only seems able to control the mind of one Sister at a time, and this way, the other two can stop a victim from killing herself.”

“It’s a game to her,” said Jiara, “seeing if she can catch one of us alone.”

Lethea shot a hostile, terrifying gaze through the window at Jessica, but Jessica refused to turn away, meeting the stare with her own. “Is that why Lethea demanded to see me? Because she wants to kill me?”

“It is possible,” the Mother Superior said. “Very possible.”

Chapter 2

House Atreides has always measured its worth in terms of our honor, not the extent of our holdings. In what matters to us, we are far richer than any other House in the Landsraad.

—LETO ATREIDES, upon assuming the title of Duke of Caladan

All primary Guild routes eventually made their way to Kaitain, the glittering Imperial capital.

Traveling aboard a Heighliner from distant Caladan, Duke Leto Atreides rode in his family’s lavishly appointed frigate. His staff of retainers, far larger than he needed, wore green and black, each tunic or jacket sporting the prominent Atreides hawk. This show of ostentation was not at all what the Landsraad had come to expect from the Duke of Caladan.

After the recent Otorio terrorist attack, the rules of the Imperium had changed. And after the trouble involving Jessica . . . He felt a wave of emotion. After Jessica, Leto himself had changed. He was a different man with a new purpose and priorities. He had embraced long-ignored ambitions for his House and his son, and he clung to that new determination. It was all he had left.

The Atreides protocol minister, a thin and unconfident man named Eli Conyer, filled out forms during the transit, and when the Guild ship dispatched the mob of frigates, shuttles, and passenger craft into Kaitain orbit, Conyer broadcast an announcement of the Duke’s arrival. He insisted on the proper welcoming formalities, transmitting notices to the Landsraad secretary and the Imperial Palace as well as to news and informational outlets.

On the passenger deck of the Atreides frigate, Conyer could not hide his smile. “Everything as befits your station, my Lord. The capital will know that the Duke of Caladan has come!” He said it as if some messiah had arrived.

Not long ago, when he had attended the inauguration of the garish Corrino museum on Otorio, Leto had rolled his eyes at the popinjay nobles who flaunted themselves in hopes of being noticed by Shaddam Corrino IV. Now he was in danger of acting just like them.

Leto was not comfortable with so much attention, but this was, after all, what he had instructed the minister to do. This was his first foray into building more prominence for House Atreides. “Doesn’t every Landsraad noble do the same thing?”

Conyer huffed. “It is common practice, Sire, but you have not previously done so. Therefore, this visit is noteworthy.”

All his life, Leto had been content to be a good leader of his own people, choosing the course of honor and raising his son in a similar fashion. Because of that, though, much wealth and power—and therefore security for House Atreides—had slipped through his fingers. He had missed many opportunities. What if he had diminished his legacy for Paul? Leto wondered if other nobles secretly considered him inept in the realm of political games.

The terrorist attack by Jaxson Aru had left numerous vacancies in the Landsraad, and nobles vied for them like pigs at a feeding trough. Leto refused to be like that, but he realized he didn’t have to be weak either. He had come to Kaitain to claim some of what House Atreides deserved. It was long overdue.

Conyer studied a screen and smiled. “I arranged for a reception guard and an escort to meet us at the Imperial Spaceport, Sire.” He looked away, seemingly embarrassed. “It was a contract service, but well within our budget.”

“You did well,” Leto said as the ornate ship settled down in its designated zone. “Have adequate guest quarters been arranged for me and my retinue?”

Conyer looked offended. “Of course, my Lord! In the Promenade Wing of the palace, a fine suite with adjacent rooms for your retainers and security staff. You will be seen and noticed whenever you go about your daily business.”

The capital city was a showcase of governmental buildings, monuments, museums, towers, statuary, fountains, prisms, obelisks, archways, and sundials under clear climate-controlled skies. The cacophony and visual overload made Leto pause as he emerged from his own flashy frigate. He missed the sound of the outgoing tide on Caladan, the waves curling around the docks in the harbor town. He remembered walking with Jessica among the tide pools, pointing out sea anemones, scuttling crabs, and spiny starfish. He recalled a storm far out at sea, flashes of lightning in the clouds. . . .

Now, he steeled himself as he looked across the vast city and remembered his purpose here. Once he became a more powerful lord with expanded holdings, he could enjoy the ocean-side splendor of his ancestral planet again.

But it wouldn’t be with Jessica, not anymore. That relationship was broken irreparably, and the Bene Gesserit had formally recalled her to Wallach IX. He wondered if he would ever see her or speak with her again.

A squad of rigid troops marched toward the Atreides frigate looking like palace guards, but these were just the contract escorts that Conyer had arranged, so that Leto could make a big impression. A pair of bannermen held up a scarlet-and-gold flag with the Corrino lion alongside a green-and-black flag with the Atreides hawk. One guard bellowed out in a resonant voice, “Kaitain welcomes the Duke of Caladan!”

Twelve uniformed escorts bowed in unison, displaying well-practiced respect. On nearby landing zones, Leto noted additional passenger shuttles and private noble frigates, all landed from the same Heighliner. Similar contract reception committees greeted those visiting noblemen.

As his retainers followed him out of the frigate, Leto swept back his dark hair and raised his chin. With his aquiline nose and strong jaw, he cut a striking profile. He spoke a hard command to the hired escort guards, “Take me to the Imperial Palace, where Emperor Shaddam will see me.” He had no idea if that was true, and the haughty tone felt unnatural to him, but the uniformed attendants snapped to attention and whisked him off. Leto’s personal staff would transport his belongings to his new quarters.

He thought of his fourteen-year-old son, Paul—his heir, even though Paul was the child of a concubine rather than the issue of a legitimate marriage. Leto had refused to play those marriage games. His one attempt at such a political play had ended in bloodshed and tragedy at the wedding ceremony, and Leto had vowed never to put his family through that again. His family.

So much had changed.

Instead, Leto had turned his attention to reviewing possible marriage candidates for young Paul, but he had discovered to his surprise that some other nobles did not consider House Atreides important enough for a marriage alliance. A flash of anger heated Leto’s face at the memory of when Duke Fausto Verdun had sneered at the very idea that his daughter might marry Paul Atreides.

If he succeeded in his goal on Kaitain, though, that attitude would change.

As he entered the spectacular Imperial Palace, Leto was only one of hundreds of equally important visitors. The escort guards ushered him into the cavernous main foyer, but there they left him, their commission discharged. He suddenly felt like one petal of one flower in a broad mountain meadow. He drew little attention in the bustle of the Emperor’s court.

A surprisingly close voice startled him. “Ahhh, hmmm, my dear Duke Leto, I hoped I would intercept you here!” He turned to see a lean, dark-haired man with narrow features, large eyes, and a weak chin. The man’s black-and-purple garments had all the accessories expected of an important man at court. “Allow me to welcome you. I will assist you, as I can.”

Recognizing him, Leto gave a brief bow. “Count Fenring, I appreciate the gesture.” He paused, realized this was an unexpected opportunity. “You may be able to help with my business here on Kaitain.”

Hasimir Fenring was one of Emperor Shaddam’s closest friends and advisers. His formal title was Spice Minister on Arrakis, but he also spent much time scheming at court. He could certainly be a powerful ally for Leto, but he was not a man to be controlled, except by Shaddam. Why had he made a point of Leto?

The Count made a quick bow again. “Neither the Padishah Emperor nor I will ever forget how you saved us from that madman on Otorio. We escaped only because of your warning, and I am certain Shaddam will grant any favor you request.”

“Thank you. I came to Kaitain to try a different approach to earn a little more respect for House Atreides.” Leto drew a breath, pushed back his annoyance.

“More respect?” Fenring raised his eyebrows in question.

Even amid the colorful noise of the huge reception foyer, Leto spotted a dark-robed Bene Gesserit and froze—Reverend Mother Mohiam, the Emperor’s Truthsayer, gliding in close enough to eavesdrop. The wound of what the Sisters had done to Jessica, and to him, remained deep and raw. Leto pointedly shifted his position so that she looked only at his back.

“I apologize for my abrupt tone, Count Fenring. My family recently received a personal insult from another noble house, and I am quite upset.” He squared his shoulders, straightened his green-and-black cape.

Fenring didn’t seem to notice the old Reverend Mother. “An insult to your family? Ahhh, so it is kanly, then?”

The idea startled Leto. Duke Verdun may have disparaged him and his son, but Leto did not intend to escalate the bloody feud. “No, that is not my purpose here. Apparently, House Verdun considers my son unworthy as a suitor, and Duke Fausto does not deem House Atreides important enough in the Landsraad. I am here to see about expanding my wealth and influence so I can rectify that impression.”

“Ahhh, hmm . . .” Fenring’s lips curved in a smile. “Noblemen usually work around the edges and behind the scenes to gain influence, but you are so direct! I like that. Perhaps I can help you, Duke Leto. I have certain influence of my own and, of course, I have the Emperor’s ear.” He chuckled, revealing a secret. “But I would not worry about Duke Verdun!”

Out of the corner of his eye, Leto noticed the Truthsayer gliding closer. He asked, “Why is that?”

Fenring raised his eyebrows. “Ahhh, because House Verdun has been annihilated. Duke Fausto was a rebel and a traitor, working with the Noble Commonwealth rebellion. Emperor Shaddam punished him, and his entire family is dead.”

Leto caught his breath. He had not expected this.

• • • •

Later that afternoon, inside Shaddam’s private contemplation quarters—where the Emperor did very little contemplating—Fenring revealed what Leto Atreides had told him about his purpose in coming to Kaitain.

With her raven hair, large eyes, and full lips, Empress Aricatha had Shaddam wrapped around her little finger. She remained by the doorway, intending to listen, but Fenring gave her an impatient look. He still hadn’t decided whether she was an ally or an enemy.

Shaddam lounged in a casual uniform that had far too much brocade to be comfortable. He made a dismissive gesture. “Let us have our discussions, my love. I will tell you anything you need to know afterward.”

Because he was watching so closely, Fenring saw the quick flash in Aricatha’s eyes before she gave a quick nod and slipped out the door.

When she was gone, Shaddam said, “So, my cousin Leto is finally interested in the power he could have had long ago. Shall we throw him a reward now for what he did on Otorio?” He ran a finger along his lower lip. “It would look good to the rest of the Landsraad.”

“Seeking power seems out of character for him,” Fenring said. “Is he setting himself up for some other purpose? Could he quietly be involved with the Noble Commonwealth himself? Leto Atreides is exactly the sort of noble the rebels would want to recruit.”

Shaddam scoffed. “Leto Atreides? A rebel and a traitor?”

Reverend Mother Mohiam also sat primly in a chair, waiting. Now she spoke up. “I was observing, and I can attest to his genuine shock upon hearing the fate of Duke Verdun. I studied his expressions, the tension in his muscles, his tone of voice. His antipathy was not feigned. If Fausto Verdun was a member of the rebellion, Leto Atreides did not see him as an ally.”

“I did not have a high opinion of Verdun either,” Shaddam said. “He was a hard man to like.” Then he laughed. “But the good and noble Duke Leto? I’ve often wished the man would display a bit more ambition and show a darker side to his personality. Then I would truly understand him.”

“That would make him more human,” Mohiam agreed. “Now that his concubine is gone, he will have time to consider other priorities.”

Fenring scratched the bridge of his nose. “Perhaps he is good at concealing his true nature, hmmm?”

Mohiam considered for a moment, then shook her head. “No, he is direct and authentic.”

Copyright © 2021 by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. Excerpted from Dune: The Lady of Caladan by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. Published by permission of Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the authors.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Kevin J. Anderson has written dozens of national bestsellers and has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the SFX Readers’ Choice Award. His critically acclaimed original novels include the ambitious space opera series The Saga of Seven Suns, including The Dark Between the Stars, as well as the Wake the Dragon epic fantasy trilogy and the Terra Incognita fantasy epic with its two accompanying rock CDs. He also set the Guinness-certified world record for the largest single-author book signing, and was recently inducted into the Colorado Authors’ Hall of Fame.

Brian Herbert, son of Frank Herbert, wrote the definitive biography of his father, Dreamer of Dune, which was a Hugo Award finalist. Brian is president of the company managing the legacy of Frank Herbert and is an executive producer of the motion picture Dune, as well as of the TV series Dune: The Sisterhood. He is the author or coauthor of more than forty-five books, including multiple New York Times bestsellers, has been nominated for the Nebula Award, and is always working on several projects at once. He and his wife, Jan, have traveled to all seven continents, and in 2019, they took a trip to Budapest to observe the filming of Dune.

Book Review: The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling

Wendy N. Wagner | 565 words

The Death of Jane Lawrence
Caitlin Starling
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1250272584
St. Martin’s Press, October 2021, 352 pages

The Death of Jane Lawrence is being marketed as a gothic novel. Which is fair, I guess, but it’s kind of like marketing a Wagyu beef burger as a sandwich. The Death of Jane Lawrence might start with gothic trademarks like a dilapidated mansion, a woman in dire economic straits who has become caught in a dangerous romance, and of course, very unpleasant weather, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s set in a fascinating alternate history England and the plot is powered by a complex magical system based on . . . calculus.

Yes, calculus. Heroine Jane Lawrence begins the story as an accountant with a deep love for mathematics, and it’s math that sees her through the story’s trials. Orphaned by war, Jane grew up loved but feeling alien from her adopted family and small town. Hints sprinkled throughout the text (like the way Jane learned to overcome her resistance to making eye contact or struggling with other kinds of social cues) suggest Jane is neurodivergent, and that the structure of mathematics provides her support in the world. When her guardians are forced to move to a larger city, Jane fears she won’t be able to succeed in their more complicated social realm, and decides she must marry a local bachelor—preferably one who will be content to let her exchange her accounting skills for a place in his household.

Jane proposes this unusual arrangement to her town’s local doctor, Augustine Lawrence, as she’s realized he’s something of an oddball himself. He lives in his family’s isolated country mansion alone, save for a pair of servants, despite the difficulties his sleeping arrangements make for his career. When Jane proves her worth as a surgical assistant, Dr. Lawrence agrees to marry her, on the very gothic condition that she never visit his estate.

Of course, the situation is quickly upended: Jane and Dr. Lawrence become smitten with each other, and a crisis forces Jane to spend the night at the mansion, where she begins to see the spirit of Dr. Lawrence’s dead first wife, as well as some even more unsettling supernatural beings. When Jane meets a group of Lawrence’s friends from medical school, she discovers the group has been dabbling in magic, and that Dr. Lawrence’s family were practitioners of the supernatural arts. After a magical ritual goes awry, trapping Dr. Lawrence in the bowels of the house, Jane realizes that her mathematical mind might help her work magic to save him.

The Death of Jane Lawrence is the kind of book that lays out a lovely set of genre expectations which it first meets and then slowly begins to subvert. By pushing into the weirdness of the novel’s alternate history setting, Starling spins her gothic tale into the realm of mathematical, cosmic horror. If you love stories with complex, interesting characters forced to function where magic, science, math, and terror blend, this story will definitely suit your palate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wendy N. Wagner is the author of the forthcoming horror novel The Deer Kings (due out summer 2021) and the forthcoming gothic novella The Secret Skin (fall 2021). Previous work includes the SF thriller An Oath of Dogs and two novels for the Pathfinder Tales series. Her short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared in more than fifty venues. She also serves as the managing/senior editor of Lightspeed Magazine, previously served as the guest editor of Nightmare’s Queers Destroy Horror!, and is Nightmare‘s current editor-in-chief. She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family, two large cats, and a Muppet disguised as a dog.

Book Review: We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin (a new translation by Bela Shayevich)

Chris Kluwe | 828 words

We
Yevgeny Zamyatin (a new translation by Bela Shayevich)
Hardcover / Paperback
ISBN: 9780063068445
Ecco, November 2021, 304 pages

Greetings, readers, and may your fall be festive! It’s time for another book review, and this month we’re looking at a book which is most definitely not festive; We by Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin—one of the earliest modern dystopia stories written, and an inspiration for Brave New World and 1984.

Originally created in 1921, We was the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board, but not for any deliberate parallels to the burgeoning autocracy that Lenin was building (and that Stalin would later finish). What makes We revolutionary is that it foresaw the end result of every autocracy, regardless of supposed creed or ideology, and that’s what makes it relevant and still worth reading even (and perhaps especially) in our modern times.

The structure of the story follows a gifted mathematician, D-503 (in We, every citizen of the One State is only known by a letter and number combination), who is in charge of building an interstellar spacecraft so that the logically perfected happiness of the One State can be spread to other cultures amongst the stars. D-503 is tasked (as is every other citizen) with keeping a journal that glorifies their contributions to the greater whole, and is the lens through which the reader follows his journey. The novel starts with D-503 quite content with his purpose in life, and a staunch adherent to the One State’s creed, but a chance meeting with another subversively attractive citizen, I-330, sends his rigid railway of thought careening out of control.

As is standard for dystopian novels, what seems to be perfection and happiness on the surface is revealed to be anything but as the story progresses, and Shayevich does a fascinating job of translating Zamyatin’s prose in a way that sucks the reader into a highly personal glimpse of a man completely breaking down. The terse and complete sentences of certainty in the early part of the book give way to shattered fragments of bewilderment and despair as D-503 grapples with his new perspective on reality, and the fraying dissonance between what D-503 once believed and what he learns is palpable.

The translation is also wonderfully evocative in its descriptions of people, places, and mental states, without being overly flowery. While reading it, I was able to create a very vivid image of what living in the One State would be like, for better or worse, because despite the obviously science fiction setting, it felt like a real place, populated by real people doing the things that humans have been doing for thousands of years, but believably warped by the consuming pressure of the One State in which they live.

Unlike many other dystopian novels that came after it, ones that lean more on fantastical elements of world building, or absurdities with philosophical positions taken to their illogical extremes, We excels due the reality of its primary philosophical argument, one that readers, with the luxury of being one hundred years removed and aware of the historical events that occurred after its publication, ought to appreciate even more; after all, who doesn’t want a life filled with complete happiness, even if it means giving up individual rights? Surely there would never be a society willing to subsume itself in atrocities against the poor, the weak, or the other in order to maintain a carefree existence for the select chosen, right? Obviously no one would ever hide behind a massive wall in order to keep out the outside world and those deemed savage and unfit? Clearly, if we could just quantify human existence in the proper algorithm, everything would work properly, no?

(I suspect some of you may begin to see the parallels.)

Overall, this is not a book I would recommend you read for fun, or to while away the hours in between waiting for other things to happen. This is a book I recommend you read because it matters, and not just in a way that’s specific to a certain point in time or culture. Zamyatin, speaking to us from one hundred years in the past, still has something very much worth saying, a transcendental argument about the relationship between security and freedom and the cost of each, and it will be an argument worth having until humanity itself ceases to exist. You should check it out.

Read if: You’ve wanted to throw a stone in a world made of glass houses; you’re not scared of irrational numbers; you want to see a man have sex with a chair.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

Book Review: Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, edited by dave ring

Arley Sorg | 1209 words

Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness
dave ring, ed.
Paperback
ISBN 9781952086304
Neon Hemlock, October 2021, 442 pgs

Neon Hemlock strikes again!

In the December 2020 issue of Lightspeed, I reviewed Glitter + Ashes, and in the August 2021 Lightspeed, I reviewed We’re Here. I swear I’m not besties with publisher dave ring or anything. The fact that I get to pick a book a month to review, and that this is the third time I’ve felt a Neon Hemlock title needs to have this spot, speaks to what they are doing as a publishing company.

Unfettered Hexes begins with a striking cover by Robin Ha, which effectively telegraphs the theme and vibe of the anthology: smart, creative, inclusive, a bit dark, and at least a little bit wild (in the best possible of ways). Art is not a perfunctory exercise with this book. Rather, it’s thoughtful, and feels as important as the written work. Interior illustrations by Frances P. make wonderful use of color to create an immediate impression that this book is something special. Writings are preceded by Matthew Spencer’s black and white illustrations, which are evocative and, quite often, just perfect. Finally, illustrators Grace P. Fong and Caleb Hosalla contribute lovely graphic stories, “The End of the Line” and “Talalora” respectively.

Unfettered Hexes is a luxurious tasting menu of great fiction, sometimes sensual, sometimes shocking, sometimes absorbing, and as a composed offering, impressive. Like any great banquet, it begins with an amuse bouche. The first piece of writing is a poem by Imani Sims, “The Underworld as a Heart Meditation.” This is a brief entry which demonstrates the power of well-chosen words; and does exactly what an amuse bouche is meant to do: get you excited for what’s to come.

Several courses stood out for me. “FOR CLOSURE” by Tania Chen is a gently engrossing, delightfully strange tale about a young boy tagging along with his dad as he considers buying a house. The details of the story create a sense of moment, of a distinct narrative. There’s a dash of subtext about the way certain kinds of men move through the world, and the encounter with the uncanny is seasoned with just the right amount of uncertainty.

“Antelope Brothers” by Craig L. Gidney draws you in with an easy but interesting interiority, and a touch of relatable otherness–not to mention a smooth narrative voice. Cool details are liberally sprinkled in like treats for the dark-hearted. By the time the encounter with the strange happens (which is also really interesting), you’re in so deep you’re going to see this story through. Notes on exotification and specific kinds of othering develop a sharp sense of isolation, which sets up the ending as a sexually charged climax cum empowerment (all puns absolutely intended). The end result is a feeling of finding something like belonging.

Kel Coleman’s “Before, After, and the Space Between” is a skillful rendering of a complex love between mother and child. The narrative is initially grounded in this complexity by a handful of incredibly effective lines. This foundation allows Coleman to build an imaginative world, described through dual timelines, while still delivering an emotionally resonant story. The interpersonal conflict is one of several layers, which includes subtext around the ways oppressive systems convince the people they oppress that it’s okay to accept less, to be less, or to participate in those systems of oppression. This story is also about the fact that sometimes we have to find our own way to our own perspectives on truth, even if the people who love us are in a hurry to see us get there. All of this, executed with lovely prose and a fascinating voice—very well done, indeed.

“The Passing of Sinclair Manor, or, The House of Magical Negroes” by Danny Lore is a must-read. It’s the first story in the book, and for good reason: it embodies all the fight, swagger, and depth of storytelling you might want in an opening piece, letting the reader know they are in for an awesome ride. Carter Graves has returned home, late for a family funeral, of a family that has pretty much died out, in a place where any sense of belonging is . . . complicated. The white people can’t stand the fact that it isn’t their manor looming over the town, and of course, over years and generations, they have gone to (and will continue to go to) desperate and evil lengths to change that. But this isn’t the only reason Carter left all those years ago. And now that Carter is back, not only are there decisions to be made, but old, racist rivals are eager to finish what they started. Unfortunately for them, Carter isn’t the type to back down from a fight. Carter also comes armed with the mysterious magic of a strange house and an estranged family. Look, this story has attitude, and I love it. It’s also a piercing piece about being at odds with family, while being even more at odds with the world. Finally, it’s about survival, resilience, and resisting the eroding effects of the constant abuse of power, which is just one of the many expressions of racism.

Perhaps my favorite story was Suzan Palumbo’s “The Bride.” Lovely prose and a few really great lines add to the mood and overall personality of a story which, ultimately, utilizes brilliant but sly characterization and deft emotionality. Alice likes being independent, despite the pressure from people around her to find a husband. In yummy irony, she makes wedding dresses for a living, and she’s damn good at it. One night, she sees something on the side of the road, perhaps “someone,” who is clothed in a gorgeous shimmering dress. Not long after, bad men start dying mysterious deaths, even as Alice feels drawn to find the ominous figure she’d glimpsed before. It’s a familiar and fun kind of horror story, yes. But Palumbo demonstrates the life an author can breathe into a story through depth of character and meaning of narrative. This piece isn’t just about loneliness; it’s about uniqueness, and not quite being seen, not quite being accepted. Finally, it’s kind of a story about finding your place in the world, told through a horror lens.

These don’t have to be your favorite stories. ring’s tasting menu is bound to please a range of discerning readers, especially those hungry for something with substance. The tales here are fun, and often delectably dark, but they are also fulfilling. Frances P. finishes the meal with two more illustrations, like colorful pops of refreshing sorbet, cleansing the palate and leaving a light, lingering impression, one which lasts long after you’ve closed the book. If you sample some of this fare, you will definitely come back for more.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief of Fantasy Magazine, senior editor at Locus Magazine, and associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare. He reviews books for Locus, Lightspeed, and Cascadia Subduction Zone and is an interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and, in non-pandemic times, usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Author Spotlight: Stephen Graham Jones

Laurel Amberdine | 737 words

Where are you in “I Was a Teenage Space Jockey”?

Midland, Texas was the closest big town to where I grew up, and it had a mall, and in that mall there was the Gold Mine—this videogame arcade. Every once in a while, while our moms were shopping, a friend and me would get ditched there with a couple dollars for quarters, which we’d always blow through in about ten seconds. Or, we’d lose them even faster when we put them up for the next game, since the older kids would take them, staring at us while they did it. So we learned to try to play the games nobody wanted high score on. And we crawled around in the grossness behind the games, looking for dropped quarters. And I always imagined what it would be like to still be in this place after that grate got pulled down over the entrance.

What are you reading lately?

Reading an early copy of Delilah Dawson’s The Violence and about to jump into Alma Katsu’s The Fervor. Am audiobooking The World Before Us, by Tom Higham, and I’m about to dial up the next The Kingcast podcast, I think. This morning I was reading the latest installment of Wolverine, by Benjamin Percy. Aside from that, reading a couple of MFA theses, and a lot of the moment-by-moment analyses of the last episode of The Sopranos, which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I never run out of stuff to read.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

I hit the trail on my mountain bike. When I can free up two or three hours, I can usually get about twenty-six miles in on an easy trail, and when I’m more slammed for time, I cut that in half. I usually listen to music, for this. This past week it’s been Karen Lovely, Roxy Blue, and George Strait, I don’t know why. But, for other creative pursuits . . . not really. I mean, I play pool to wind down, I guess, but mostly I’m either at this keyboard, on my bike, or at the movie theater. Or, it being fall, the Halloween store, of course.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

I’ve been liking all the non-medieval-ish fantasy that’s been happening. Don’t get me wrong, longswords are fun, too. But so are completely different builds. For science fiction . . . man, science fiction’s so all over the place, always, that it’s hard to identify where it actually is. Seems that the last few years, there’s been lots of generational ships, maybe? And a whole lot of sentient ships. But I’m kind of digging all that, too. And I’m thrilled that the world’s finally coming around to see that horror’s not in some bubble out here removed from the world, but that we’re in dialogue with it, we’re responding to it, we’ve got our tentacles on all the topics, thanks. And we’ve always got more tentacles.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m in edits for the sequel to My Heart is a Chainsaw, right now. And I’m also neck-deep in some television stuff and some comic book stuff. Been thinking I should maybe start making some discreet calls to people who might have some cloning pods or something, really, so I can get more work done. I mean, it’s either that or put a foot pump on the day, try to fill it with more hours. But I bet somebody cracks cloning before we ever figure out how to make an hour twice as long. And, if we did? I’d probably just watch all the monster-of-the-week episodes of X-Files with it, so, anybody out there working on this right now, be advised, I’m probably not going to use the extra time as you intend. But please don’t stop, either. I really do like my flukemen, my chupacabras.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Elly Bangs

Laurel Amberdine | 768 words

How did “Space Pirate Queen of the Ten Billion Utopias” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

Everything was terrible in the summer of 2020. The pandemic was spreading wildly; the whole West Coast was on fire; right-wing vigilantes gunned people down in the streets with seeming impunity; feds disappeared people into unmarked vans; we asked the cops to stop murdering Black people and they responded by semi-permanently shrouding parts of my city in a haze of chemical warfare so thick that people’s pets were dropping dead in their apartments. As soon as that blew away, the wildfire smoke rolled in even thicker. Everyone I knew was hanging on by a thread.

I asked my Twitter followers what kind of story would bolster their mental health, and the various answers were: space pirates, space hobos, lesbian vampires, utopian fiction, hopeful stories, happy endings, and Princess Bride energy. I’m a strong believer in the creative power of arbitrary constraints—so I made a list of all these elements, and then I tried to write a single story that incorporated all of them at once. (I wasn’t able to fit in any vampires, sadly, but I think I got at least a bit of everything else.) I’ve written a lot of very bleak stories, so writing the opposite was a worthwhile challenge. It forced me to think a lot about escapism, and what utopia means to me.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

I had a vague sense of how this story would end when I started, but it was mostly improvised, which is a rarity for me. Normally I’m on the extreme far end of the plotter-pantser spectrum; I have scene-by-scene outlines for most stories before I begin writing them. But I find the more constraints you have, the more the story writes itself.

Where are you in this story?

I’m the “I” character more than anyone else. I’m nowhere near as powerful as Ursa, and nowhere near as cool and functional as Calliope—but I’ve known many people who are, and I’d like to give a voice to my admiration for them. If I saw the aethertrain cross into our world, I would certainly be tempted to swing a grappling hook at it, but I don’t think I would have the guts, or the upper body strength.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

I see speculative fiction going through a deep rethinking of utopia and dystopia right now—and the very notion of the future, for that matter. We’ve had an established and beautiful tradition of imagining the world going to hell, but we’ve kind of passed the point at which those stories had any functionality as warnings. Everything is going to hell. Everyone who was ever going to hear our warnings heard them loud and clear a very long time ago.

We don’t need dystopian stories anymore: we need stories for a dystopian audience. There is overlap, and this need not be a radically new thing; there are excellent examples across the history of SF/F. The trend I see, that I want to see more of, is speculative fiction as a medicine for our existential despair—and ideally not just as a numbing agent. There are many ways to accomplish this. Sometimes what’s needed is a highly believable exploration of a future that has averted the current apocalypses, to grow our will and courage to fight for such a future. Sometimes it’s a story about living through strife and collapse, to lend us the mental endurance to do that. Sometimes it’s a story about everything that might grow out of the ashes of what we know, because something will.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

My debut novel, Unity, came out this past April! It’s a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk thriller, featuring collective consciousness and doomsday, and you can find it anywhere you find books. And you can find a list of my other published short stories at elbangs.com. Most are free to read online. My current project is a trilogy of contemporary fantasy novels about queer wizard school dropouts who semi-accidentally break the world, but it’s too soon to say much more about that.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro

Laurel Amberdine | 279 words

Where are you in “Ten Scenes from A Typical Day in the Life of the All-Powerful Despot”?

Dead.

What would be your advice for other writers?

For God’s sake, write the kind of stories you’re not comfortable with. Don’t stick to plots you can write in your sleep. Bother yourself. Be nervous about whether you’re going too far, or revealing too much. Don’t do exactly what you did last time. Don’t try to figure out the formula of a popular market. Be like the person who accidentally walks on stage naked. Don’t worry about your dignity.

What are you reading lately?

I love thrillers and have recently made the acquaintance of a great producer of potboilers called Taylor Adams; marvelous. I find I am less likely to read series thrillers now, as I very much prefer to be surprised.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

Life upheaval has arranged that it has been a while since I relaxed. When I do, the cats assist. (I am a cartoonist as well, but it has been some time since last I even doodled.)

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

That life upheaval has slowed me to a near-stop of late, but I hope a recovery is in the offing. In the meantime, for stories very different from what you get from me here and at Nightmare, check out my contributions to Analog.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Timi Odueso

Audrey T. Williams | 491 words

I love reading a story that expands my horizons, whether speculative or in real life, so when I looked up each word in this story that was not familiar, I was delighted to learn about each new person, place, or thing from various cultures and geographies in and around Nigeria! Are these places you have lived or visited? Why did you choose these particular locales for this story?

I presently live in Kaduna, Nigeria. I’ve lived here for four years now and I’m fascinated with the pastoral aesthetics of the region. I grew up in a similar locale, but I hadn’t been there in years. Moving to Zaria (formerly Zazzau), Kaduna, for school brought back some of these memories. I chose these places because they’re quite familiar. There’s a Sabon-Gari or a Sabo in every town, and they’re almost always rowdy.

There are so many themes at work in this story, climate change, bioethics, capitalism, clean water rights, health equity, to name just a few. Please tell us about some of the real-world events that inspired the characters and/or plot for “Cloudgazer.”

This is actually the second in a series of shorts I hope to write one day. And yes, they’re all centred around rainmaking. The inspiration came from the lack of water rights I experienced in Zaria. While I grew up in megacities or locales where every home either had a borehole system, or water supply from the government, Zaria had wells instead. And these wells, they swelled or sank in tune with the weather. I came here as a student and the living conditions for students often came without accommodation for water supply. I guess I was just playing out my own quest for constant pipe-borne water.

For the characters, the ones that try to persuade you to buy their wares, they’re based off the traders in Lagos—ferocious men and women with the best marketing skills you’ll ever see. And Zik is based off of someone I once knew.

Was this work inspired by any particular book/story/author/artwork that you can share?

No, at least not that I can recall. The idea for the work has been in my Notes section for years. It took months to pen out so I guess a lot of things may have influenced it, none that I can recall now though.

What is next for you? Any book-length projects in the works you can tell us about?

I’ve got no book-length projects yet; I get distracted way too easily for those but I have several fiction and nonfiction works I’m working on including one that chronicles the history of rainmakers across the continent (fiction), nonfiction works on black queerness and (religious) fatherhood, and an odd poem I’m not proud of.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Audrey spent her childhood on North Carolina beaches playing in the breakers at Emerald Isle and fishing on Bogue Inlet pier. She now roams Northern California beaches, rivers, and woods seeking sea glass, foraging chanterelles, and hunting rocks and gems. Her work can be found in Space and Time Magazine. She works in San Francisco as a Copy Supervisor at a healthcare advertising agency. Find her on Twitter @Virgule2020.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 237 words

Coming up in December, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko (“Red Is Our Country”) and Aimee Ogden (“Ten Things to See Before the World Burns”). We also have a flash piece (“Fairy Tale”) from Adam-Troy Castro, along with an SF reprint by Sofia Samatar (“Fairy Tales for Robots”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Donyae Coles (“When Sri Left the Ruined City”) and Carrie Vaughn (“Entanglement, or How I Failed to Knit a Sweater for My Boyfriend”). We also have a flash piece (“Writing You”) from Sharang Biswas. Our fantasy reprint is by E. Lily Yu (“Three Variations on a Theme of Imperial Attire”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Rich Larson, PH Lee, Dominica Phetteplace, Isabel Cañas, and Julianna Baggott.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (recently revived, other) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

The Editors

We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Fantasy, Nightmare, and/or Lightspeed, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon?

There are no big companies supporting or funding our magazines, so they really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Fantasy, Nightmare, and Lightspeed are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of three award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and our other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor & Book Reviewer

Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Interns

Mayookh Barua

Madison Brake

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

Chris Kluwe

Copy Editor

Luke Tolvaj

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor (Emeritus)

Rich Horton

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading our Adamant Press magazines, you might also enjoy these works edited by our publisher John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (with Diana Gabaldon)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 (with Veronica Roth)

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

Lost Worlds and Mythological Kingdoms [Forthcoming]

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

The Way of the Wizard

What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Wool by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

The Silo Saga Omnibus by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

Questland by Carrie Vaughn

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.