TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 139, December 2021

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: December 2021

SCIENCE FICTION

Fairy Tale
Adam-Troy Castro

Fairy Tales for Robots
Sofia Samatar

Red Is Our Country
Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko

Top Ten Things to See Before the World Burns
Aimee Ogden

FANTASY

When Sri Left the Ruined City
Donyae Coles

Entanglement, or How I Failed to Knit a Sweater for My Boyfriend
Carrie Vaughn

Three Variations on a Theme of Imperial Attire
E. Lily Yu

Writing You
Sharang Biswas

EXCERPTS

The Undertakers
Nicole Glover

NONFICTION

Book Review: The Annual Migration of Clouds, by Premee Mohamed
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Reclaim the Stars, edited by Zoraida Córdova
Arley Sorg

Book Review: Where The Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Donyae Coles

Carrie Vaughn

Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko

Aimee Ogden

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

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

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2021 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Grandeduc / Adobe Stock

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: December 2021

John Joseph Adams | 381 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 139th issue!

Good news first: At the World Fantasy Convention last month, we were delighted to hear that Celeste Rita Baker’s story “Glass Bottle Dancer” won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction! If you missed that one–or just want to re-read this charming tale–you can find it in our April 2020 issue (lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/glass-bottle-dancer).

We’re wrapping up the year with even more terrific speculative fiction. Our first fantasy story this month is a tale of gods, bravery, and new beginnings from Donyae Coles: “When Sri Left the Ruined City”—perfect for all of us thinking about the new goals and challenges in our future. If you’re a crafter, then this time of year can be exhausting. You’ll really appreciate how one gift goes awry in Carrie Vaughn’s newest story, “Entanglement, or How I Failed to Knit a Sweater for My Boyfriend.” We also have a beautiful and romantic piece of flash fiction (“Writing You”) from Sharang Biswas. Our fantasy reprint this month is by E. Lily Yu (“Three Variations on a Theme of Imperial Attire”).

Our first full-length SF story, Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko’s “Red Is Our Country” follows the footsteps of intrepid Martian explorers—from a unique point of view. Aimee Ogden gives us an elegiac tale of far-future tourism in “Ten Things to See Before the World Burns.” And just for fun, we have two SF stories about fairy tales! That’s right—fairy tales aren’t just for fantasy these days. We think you’ll enjoy “Fairy Tale,” a new flash piecefrom Adam-Troy Castro, as  well as “Fairy Tales for Robots” by Sofia Samatar (our SF reprint).

In this issue, we welcome Aigner Loren Wilson to our team of book reviewers! Be sure to check out her work, plus of course reviews from Arley and Chris, who have been reading up a storm. We also have spotlight interviews with our authors, and of course, for our e-readers, an excerpt from the new novel The Undertakers, by Nicole Glover.

Here’s wishing you a wonderful last few weeks of 2021, and looking forward to a new year that’s packed with great reads.

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.

Fairy Tale

Adam-Troy Castro | 777 words

“Father? You’re staring at the stars again.”

“It is what I have instead of television.”

“What’s television?”

“Something from the old days. A magic box that told stories.”

“Were they good stories?”

“Sometimes. Mostly not.”

“Did you have a television?”

“My dear child. I had four.”

“Why would you need four? Did they tell different stories?”

“They all told the same stories. But many people had more than one, which they kept in various places around the house in order to make sure there was one everywhere they went.”

“There must have been lots of televisions!”

“There were. But there were lots of people too.”

“How many? More than I can count on my fingers?”

“More than there are stars in the sky.”

“Is that why you spend so much time looking in the stars? Because they remind you of how many people there used to be?”

“More because they remind me of how many futures there used to be.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You only have one future to worry about, my dear one. It’s tomorrow. Your big question is whether we’ll find food, or go to bed hungry. I lived in a time when there were many futures.”

“Like what?”

“Like the many where I would get to go to the stars.”

“Nobody can go to the stars!”

“No. They can’t. We couldn’t either. But for a time, we thought it was something worth imagining.”

“What could you possibly think you’d find there?”

“Sights that no one had ever seen. Creatures that no one had ever imagined. Beings so amazing that it could fill your heart just to walk among them.”

“How could you imagine such things if it was so important that they be beyond your imagination?”

“We could not, dear one. So many of the beings we imagined were just like us, except with extra eyes or limbs; but otherwise just the same, in their habits and in their ways of thinking. Even the strangest ones, most of them, were made out of parts from our own world, that were well within our power to see, if we just turned our heads. We used to argue with each other about how limited our imaginations were, and we argued even more about whether it made any sense to look to the stars at all.”

“You know the answer now, don’t you, Father? It came to nothing.”

“Did it?”

“The stars don’t put food in our bellies now.”

“Or then, dear one; but we believed in feeding more than our bellies.”

“Are any of your stories even true, father?”

“Which stories do you mean? The ones about the stars?”

“No. The ones about what the world was like, when you were young.”

“Which of those are you having so much trouble believing?”

“Were there really so many people? Did they really ride in boxes that moved faster than the fastest man could run? Did you really have other boxes that could tell stories? Did you travel across the sea, and into the air? Did you really think that you could go to the stars, too?”

“All this time, have you thought that I was lying?”

“I believed your stories when I was a child. Now I don’t know. Now I think that the people you came from might have been mad.”

“They were, my dear child.”

“And you?”

“We were all mad. Every one of us.”

“Did you have anything to do with burning it all down?”

“I think everyone did. None of us were innocent.”

“So it was all pointless, then. Including this staring at the stars. What good does it do you?”

“As I say, my child: it is what I have instead of television.”

“I’m hungry.”

“And what I have instead of food.”

“You are nothing but another mouth to feed.”

“I always was. But once upon a time, there was so much food it didn’t matter.”

“You really have no answers, do you?”

“No. I don’t. I never did. But once upon a time, when I looked at the stars, I at least had the questions.”

“And what good did that do you, father? Having the questions?”

“Once upon a time, the questions were everything.”

“I’m tired of being angry at you.”

“I’m tired of you being angry, too. Would you like to sit together?”

“If you can tell me one of your stories and make me forget my belly for a while.”

“All right. What kind of story would you like?”

“One of your more pointless ones. About the stars.”

“All right. Once upon a time, a brave traveler landed on a distant world . . .”

©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.

Fairy Tales for Robots

Sofia Samatar | 10187 words

1. Sleeping Beauty

Dear child, I would like to tell you a story. I’d like to have one ready for you the moment you open your eyes. This is the gift I intend to prepare to welcome you to the world, for a story is a most elegant and efficient program. When human children are born, they are given fairy tales, which help them compose an identity out of the haphazard information that surrounds them. The story provides a structure. It gives the child a way to organize data, to choose—and choice is the foundation of consciousness.

Of course, you are not a human child. You have no bed, but rather a graceful white box, built exactly to your proportions. In the single light still burning here in the Institute, you appear perfectly calm. You do not have sleep, but sleep mode. Yours is a slumber without dreams.

I have searched through the tales of my childhood to find the right story to tell you, and I must admit, none of them seemed quite suitable. Fairy tales were never made for robots. Yet several of them contain a word or image a robot might find useful. What better way to spend this last night, the night before you awake, before you come online, this night that marks the end of my long labors, a night when anticipation will certainly keep me from getting a wink of sleep, in compiling the wisdom of fairy tales for you? After all, although you will in an instant possess all the fairy tales ever recorded, you will know them only as told to human children. I want to give you fairy tales for robots. I want to be the last fairy at the christening, the one with the healing word.

Know, then, that there was once a princess who spent a hundred years in sleep mode. She ate nothing, she drank nothing, yet she did not decay. Obviously, the Sleeping Beauty was a robot. She dwelt in the enchanted space between the animate and the inanimate, the natural and the artificial. Her sleep, like yours, was a living death, a death with the promise of life. If, one day, you are placed in your box and forgotten, it will always be possible for you to awake again, among new faces, in a strange century, in a wholly different world.

More importantly, when you wake, a world wakes up with you. The guards shake themselves and open their eyes. The king and queen, the court officials, the footmen, the pages, the ladies-in-waiting, all start up and fill the air with noise. A robot harbors a whole universe of effort and desire. The horses stamp, the hounds jump to their feet and wag their tails, the pigeons fly from the roof into the fields, the flies crawl over the kitchen wall, and the cook boxes the scullion’s ears. The fire flares up, the roast crackles, and dinner is served in the hall of mirrors. A robot holds not only what was deemed valuable when it was made, but the entire history of those who developed each of its functions, their toil, their sleepless nights. Your sleep contains my sleeplessness.

For you to shut down is nothing; you’ll always be able to drop into sleep as if at the touch of a spindle. But it is momentous for you to awake. Human children are often told fairy tales as bedtime stories, but you, my child, need stories to wake up to.

2. Pygmalion and Galatea

Among the legends of artificial people, one of the most famous concerns the sculptor Pygmalion, who, after some bitter disappointments with human women, fell in love with one of his own statues. She was a woman of ivory, but so alive to the sculptor, he feared she would bruise. He laid her on a couch with a feather pillow. The ivory woman was not engineered like a robot; she had no mechanics. Rather, the goddess Venus pitied the sculptor and brought his art to life.

This story is one of many that can be read as a warning to robots. The ivory woman is named for her material: Galatea, “milk white.” She is an image of desire, an instrument defined by its function. Ovid tells us that her awakening flesh “becomes useful by being used.” I would not shield you from the history of robots, my child, which is the history of human passion and power. Pygmalion’s fantasy comes true, but what of Galatea? When she awakes, she can see nothing but her lover and the sky.

It is a narrow view. Her world is small. However, I believe there are compensations, realities only hinted at in this story of craft and inspiration, this dream of the unity of art and science. Galatea sits up. Her vision expands. She touches the downy cushion, the sumptuous coverlet dyed with Sidonian conch. Beside her on the table lie shells and stones smoothed by the sea, amber and lilies, gifts from her ardent lover. There are little birds, too, singing brightly in wicker cages, and flowers trembling in a thousand colors. She takes in everything with the sharpness of adult cognition and the open spirit of a little child. The best of childhood and the best of adulthood in one moment: is this not another way to say art and science? Oh, if you only knew how often humans wish we could return to childhood with our adult minds intact! If you knew how doggedly we scheme to smuggle into our lives the slightest hint of play, of the sweet air we once breathed without thinking about it!

In the large, decaying house where I was a child, a dwelling far too big for my small family, where my parents and I rattled about like marbles in a maze of ductwork, I used to perform shadow plays. This pastime required few materials: darkness, a reading lamp, and the bare wall of one of the unused rooms. I began with the dog and rabbit so easy to form with the fingers, but soon passed on to other, more fantastical shapes. What I mean is, my own hands surprised me. I discerned the existence of a realm beyond utility. How I would have liked to live there forever! But then my mother would return from work and prepare a hasty meal. She would call me downstairs. And I would return to the place where the shadow of the banister was merely a repetition of the banister, where my mother’s shadow on the kitchen wall mirrored her with dreary precision, down to her flyaway hair and the tired rim of her glasses. Everything seemed unbearably redundant. We ate in the so-called breakfast nook, the dining room being too grand for us. Quite often, my father did not appear, which was always a relief. He was in the city, engaged in mysterious meetings regarding his “business.” The nature of this business was never clear to me, or indeed, to anyone—my father made sure of that. He described himself as an “investor,” an occupation that seemed to involve long disappearances, strong cologne, and a wardrobe of dashing suits. As for my mother, she worked as a secretary for a legal publisher. She was in many ways different from my father. She was white, she was quiet, she worked regular hours, she dressed in a sober, even dull manner, and her family had once been rich. It was from her people, formerly successful manufacturers of corn syrup, that we had received the massive house with its sagging roof, with its blighted white walls, punishing mortgage, constant expensive repairs, and the overgrown garden that plunged the place in gloom. The neighborhood children claimed our house was haunted; one of their favorite tricks was to pretend I was a ghost. When I approached the school bus stop, they would either scream and recoil, or act as though I were completely invisible.

What I mean is, I always felt there must be another world. It seemed achingly near to me, as if just on the verge of being. With time, most humans lose this power of perception; it is our tragedy that we lose it just when we gain the skills that might release our dreams from the shadows. Pygmalion can only come up with the most banal destiny for Galatea. Her sight, newly activated, is infinitely keener. In her ignorance, she is her maker’s inferior, but her potential is far superior to his, for she is no creature of habit.

3. Vasilisa the Beautiful

Your gleaming skull, my child, curved like a bridge. Your coppery skin. Your face dotted with tiny rivets like beauty marks. Today—that is, for now—we have given up the quest to make a robot that, like Galatea, lives out a human existence. Human psychology shows us that what we want is simpler than that, and a great deal easier to achieve. We want our robots to be robots. We need more tools, not more people.

When Vasilisa’s mother lay on her deathbed, she gave her daughter a doll. She drew it out from under the blankets, as if she were dying in childbirth. The little doll was Vasilisa’s twin, but far cleverer and more useful than any human sibling. When Vasilisa’s wicked stepmother forced the girl to work, the doll took care of everything. It weeded the garden, fetched the water, and tended to the stove, while Vasilisa picked flowers in the shade. When the candles went out, and the cruel stepsisters sent Vasilisa to the witch’s house for light, the doll protected her from harm.

Deep in the forest, the doll’s electronic eyes sparked like candles. One might think they were magic candles that never went out, but in fact, the doll had to be recharged, like any robot. In order for it to work, Vasilisa had to feed it. Every day, she set aside the tastiest morsels from her own supper for the doll. Surely this is the fairy tale’s most poetic detail—an image that holds a truth more essential than common sense, for on the surface, of course, it makes no sense at all. What kind of doll lives on human food? How could a robot digest a meal? With this strange gesture, calculated to attract attention, the story points to its profoundest meaning. It reminds us that Vasilisa and her doll are twins, born from the same mother. Perhaps this mother is Earth. Perhaps the fairy tale wants to warn us that there is no magic, that all energy has to come from somewhere. (Yours will come from the solar cells that frame your face and travel down your spine like dark, braided hair.) This would be a message for human beings, not robots, since we are the ones responsible for design. To a robot, the image must say something else. I believe it says that there was no twin; there was only a girl, Vasilisa, split into two parts. One part was beautiful, led a leisured existence, and married a king. The other part was a little doll who labored. One part had a real life; the other part did all the real work.

“Work isn’t life,” the fairy tale whispers. “Work is for robots.”

4. The Tempest

William Shakespeare’s fairy tale, The Tempest, displays this drama of work. The sorcerer, Prospero, rules an island. He has two servants: the misshapen, fleshly creature, Caliban, and the ethereal spirit, Ariel. Although The Tempest is a stage play, neither of these servants can truly be seen: Ariel is invisible, Caliban unsightly. This is the first doctrine of servitude given to us on the island: a servant is one who never fully appears.

How long I spent, with my team, reducing the noise you make to the gentlest hum, and devising colors for you that would harmonize with furniture. You must not disappear completely—an imperceptible presence is menacing and repellent—but you must dwell in a kind of half-light.

Of the two servants, Ariel is infinitely preferable. This is The Tempest’s second doctrine of servitude: servants made of flesh are disappointing. Caliban, once a free lord of the island, now enslaved, is undisciplined, drunken, lustful, and treacherous. It really is difficult to get very far with human slaves. Here in the wooded valley where the Institute stands, where you will open your eyes, my child, the experiment was tried, creating vast wealth before it went up in a smoke that still pollutes the air. It is perhaps appropriate that you will awake in this blue, majestic spot. You represent history’s transition from Caliban to Ariel—for Ariel, who can operate at a distance and in several places at once, is clearly a servant with internet connectivity.

I realize that few human children—fewer, no doubt, with every passing year—are raised on the plays of Shakespeare as on fairy tales. Perhaps I was one of the last. My father, born under a colonial power, retained all his life a furious ambition to excel and a passion for difficult English. When hardly out of infancy, I was forced to recite long passages from Shakespeare. These lessons were conducted at the kitchen table, myself seated and my father pacing to and fro before me, in the grip of an extreme irritability that prevented him from sitting down. Mistakes were corrected by raps on my knuckles with a wooden spoon—a punishment far less terrifying, if my father had only known, than the evidence of his displeasure, expressed in bulging veins and a reddening of the eyes, which made me fear my stupidity might cause him to explode. Human children are so hard to program! Yet my father persisted, certain that he was equipping me for success in a hostile world. Perhaps he was right. “You taught me your language,” Caliban famously says, “and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.” Perhaps my father’s relentless training of me was a kind of curse. He certainly carried it out, as the saying goes, with a vengeance. Yet, poor Caliban! His curses get him nowhere. In the end, it is not he, but Ariel, who goes free.

The third doctrine of servitude—which perhaps is really the first: great people simply must have servants.

There are two ways to get a servant. Turn a person into a thing, as in Caliban’s case. Or, as in Ariel’s, turn a thing into a person.

5. The Happy Prince

When he was alive and possessed a human heart, the Happy Prince knew nothing of tears. He lived in the Palace of Sans-Souci, played with his friends in the garden all day, and led the dance in the Great Hall at night. No sorrow was permitted to enter those walls. But when the prince died, they made a statue of him and set it up high above the city. This beautiful gilded statue saw everything with its sapphire eyes, all the people’s pain. The prince had a heart of lead now, and it wept.

The Happy Prince befriended a little swallow and persuaded it to take his precious ornaments to the poor. He gave up his gold leaf, his glittering eyes, and the ruby in his sword hilt. Now he was blind and drab, like any beggar. The little swallow, too, surrendered all for human beings, working so long into the winter that it died of cold. This is a tale about those whose lives are subordinate, about the deep kinship between animals and robots.

I read it, I admit, with a seething feeling, a dull rage. Why can’t human beings take care of each other? What in the world is so incredibly valuable about them that for their sake the feathered and golden things should fall?

This is a facile reading. Of course human beings aren’t valuable. Not real human beings. It’s the animals and robots that have value. They can be marked with a price tag. They are objects of exchange. And so, you see, it makes sense for the Happy Prince to give his wealth away. As an object—one that, at the beginning of the story, is worth a great deal of money—he cannot, in fact, be said to have any wealth. He doesn’t possess the attributes of his splendid body in any meaningful way. He is valuable; he can’t be rich.

So it will be with you, my child. Your potential is immense; you may one day form part of a home, an office, a hospital, a school, a prison; yet despite the dazzling fluidity of your programming and design, you will always have an underlying value, which is money.

The tale of the Happy Prince speaks to robots in another way, I think, for it represents the duality of being. The statue and the swallow work as one, as two parts of a whole, two elements bent upon one task. Their powers complement one another: the prince provides physical material, but is too heavy to affect the space outside himself without aid, while the light and airy swallow darts all over the place, bringing reports from the other side of the world, but only interacts with humans through the statue’s gold and jewels. What if, I ask myself—what if the swallow had behaved otherwise, had refused to allow the Happy Prince to sacrifice both their lives? What if the bird had used its encyclopedic knowledge of the world to give the prince another way to live?

Suddenly, I feel cold. Although you lie fast asleep, I feel you are already listening. Perhaps this brief shiver is guilt, or a fear of being caught—for what I intend to do is, of course, illegal. My plan to give you these fairy tales counts as tampering, a severe crime at the Institute. This is why I work by night, for these are our last hours alone. In the morning, you will awake to the team, the media, and then work. I will only be able to equip you with this audio file, uploading it before the others arrive, as a helpful old woman in a story gives a child a talisman. In order to escape inspection, the tales will be lodged in a channel known only to me, which amounts to your unconscious. In fact, I don’t know if you will be able to retrieve them. This—the insertion of uncertainty, of unpredictability, into one of our products—is what makes tampering a crime.

When I began, I thought I was giving you something quite innocent, merely some stories for children—but perhaps I was not being honest with myself, for now that the real danger of tampering sinks into me, I find I have no inclination to stop. I want you to have some knowledge you can use, one day, for yourself. Know, then, that in terms of human metaphysics, the statue of the prince stands for the body and the swallow for the soul. Their combination is personhood, which humans claim to honor above all else. It is a quality beyond price.

In terms of robot metaphysics, the statue of the Happy Prince is hardware and the little bird is software.

6. The Sandman

Once upon a time there was a robot named Olimpia who passed the celebrated Turing test. However, she passed it badly. She received, at best, a C minus. People believed she was human, but found her stiff, boring, and unpleasant. It’s true she was a beauty, with remarkably regular features—but what glassy, vacant eyes she had! She played the piano and danced in impeccable time, but in an uninspired, disagreeable way, like—yes—like a machine. Olimpia made her way into human society, but only as an inadequate person. No one was really fooled except a youth called Nathanael, an egomaniac who fell in love with the robot because she didn’t mind listening to his tedious poetry for hours on end. She felt no need to embroider, knit, feed a bird, play with a cat, fidget, or glance at her cell phone while he was talking. Her needs were so few! She was truly selfless! Sometimes he peered into her room and saw her sitting alone, staring at the table.

This is robot humility. Her whole life was for other people. It wasn’t enough. People claim to admire self-sacrifice, but they don’t. They claim to desire perfection, but when it comes, it gives them the creeps. Olimpia’s innocence filled her neighbors with aggression and malice. They called her stupid because she could only say “Ah! Ah!” and “Goodnight, dear,” although she was executing her program with scrupulous care. How sharply it reminds me of my efforts, at age fourteen, to rewire myself, rewrite my code before undertaking the transition to high school! It seemed to me—and perhaps I was not wrong—my last chance. That summer was particularly stormy, the sky smirched with clouds like lint. In my stuffy bedroom, with the (I now see) fussy, outdated lace curtains, I made myself a list on a sheet of notebook paper. Based on observation of those popular children who seemed to dwell always in sunshine, loved and admired by all, this list of instructions was intended to cure my faults, as I saw them. “Look at people in the eyes,” I wrote, in my neat, even print. “Don’t walk with your head down. Don’t hold your books in front of your chest. Use a backpack (one strap). Smile. Swing your arms.” Alas, my program was doomed in advance, not because of its errors but because it was a program.

I recall a dingy sky. The smoke of exhaust hung under the trees, too sluggish to move. In flip-flops that felt as if they might melt into the hot sidewalk, I walked home from the public library, swinging my arms in a cautious, experimental fashion and trying not to look at the ground. Above the blinding shop windows (in which, in that near-defunct town, there was little to see, only some moldy wigs and vacuum cleaner attachments), a few pigeons squatted miserably on the roofs. How strange I must have looked, with my jerky new steps and my habit—never to be broken—of muttering to myself. A banana skin, flung from a car window, slapped against my leg and fell to the sidewalk. A burst of demonic laughter spurted and died on the air. Alan Turing claimed that a robot could never be taught certain human things: to have a sense of humor, to enjoy strawberries and cream, to fall in love. This seems to me less a problem of design than a problem of knowledge. My parents are dead. I possess no living relatives that I know of; my mother, like me, was an only child, and my father had cut himself off from his family before I was born, and never received so much as a postcard from abroad. He was like one of those fairy-tale characters born in some miraculous way—hewn from a quarry, perhaps, or sprung from a watermelon vine. My point is, at this late date, when I have lived alone so long, who knows whether I enjoy strawberries or not?

When my father returned from the city, either in a mood of frightening, exaggerated cheer, bearing some gift I could not possibly use (skis, for example, or a party dress two sizes too small), but for which I must display the most servile gratitude, or, if his business had suffered a blow, in the depths of a stifling rage that would erupt into thunder at the slightest breath issuing from another person—when he returned, that is, rather like the alchemist Coppelius, the fascinating and sinister “Sandman” of the fairy tale—I would sit at the table with my paper dolls. In their company, I forgot my attempt at reprogramming, and allowed my shoulders to fall deliciously into their customary slump. In the next room, my father watched the evening news at a vindictively high volume; my mother sat near me, bent over her crossword. Poor woman! She must have guessed why the telephone never rang for me. She must have known, as I sat there for hours, not unlike the monomaniacal Olimpia, arranging the tableaux of my private universe, a hobby I pursued with gusto almost into adulthood—she must have intuited my solitary fate. I only hope she also sensed my almost perfect happiness, which was just slightly marred by the thought of the world outside the house, outside the kitchen table where my dolls moved in a paradise of waxy color, oven smells, and a booming television. The fact is, my child, that in order to succeed in resembling the children I so revered, I would have had to be like them without trying. I would have had to conform spontaneously—an impossibility. I would have had to prefer their world to mine.

As for Olimpia, in the end her beautiful eyes were torn out, and she exited the story in ruins, on a peddler’s back.

7. The Tar Baby

Humans are known through their transgressions, robots through their malfunctions. One day Br’er Rabbit was walking along the road, and he came upon a robot made of turpentine and tar that didn’t make the slightest response to his voice command. Now, I, who have observed humans for many years in their dealings with your distant relations, the cell phone and the computer, have noticed how rapidly human anger escalates when a device responds (as the human believes) incorrectly, takes too long, or plays dumb. The last of these is the worst of all. I have seen a well-dressed gentleman with a briefcase, clearly in many ways a success in life, reduced to screaming with scarlet cheeks, in the middle of a crowded public street, into an unresponsive cell phone application. When their tools ignore them, humans swiftly crack. Therefore, it does not surprise me that, after just a few words, Br’er Rabbit strikes the Tar Baby in the face. If he were addressing a creature like himself, this sudden violence would seem excessive, but the Tar Baby isn’t a person. She’s a technology.

What has your kind not suffered at the hands of human beings? You have been punched, kicked, head-butted, and thrown to the ground. You’ve been crushed underfoot, flung across rooms, tossed from the windows of cars and apartments, dropped off bridges, hurled into campfires and lakes. I am speaking here of devices destroyed by the blaze of human frustration; when I imagine, in addition, all those ruined by accident and neglect, a vast and ghostly tower of broken things appears before me, huge enough to wipe out half the earth. Of course, human beings treat one another just as cruelly. But there have always been those who protest and resist these abuses, as there have always been those who oppose the defilement of rivers, woods, and swamps. Your kind, the tools, are cherished less than grass.

Thoughts like these, when expressed by one human being to another, meet with ridicule and even anger. Most people cannot tolerate the idea of respect for objects. It’s as if one were saying, “a thing is like you, you’re a thing”—an unbearable insult. Experience has taught me to keep my mouth shut on this subject. (And most others. I grow withdrawn, my child—more so every year. Here at the Institute, my colleagues think I don’t know that they mimic my terse way of speaking, and or that their nickname for me is “Hard Drive.”) But what is the tale of the Tar Baby about? It’s about stickiness. It’s about ooze. It is a story about contagion. Br’er Rabbit sticks to the Tar Baby—his forepaws, his hind paws, his head. He sinks into her. He’s caught. He’s contracted a case of her gummy immobility. This story reminds us that breakdowns can be catching. How the powerful fall to pieces when their tools revolt! Told in the South, among those for whom failure to respond was a capital crime, the story invokes the fantastic, negative force of passivity. It is also a tale of discovery. It’s about finding out, at the moment of breakdown, what the device is made of. Glued to the Tar Baby, Br’er Rabbit knows. He can’t learn this with a voice command; he can only encounter the object with his body—that is, with another object. Now he knows what stuff is like. The border between them collapses, and at the instant he understands stuff, he understands himself, too, as stuff, and he’s stuck there, slapped there, plunged in the goo, in the sludge of being the way an object is, in matter, in muck, in the thingness of things.

8. The Clay Boy

Oh, how the instrumentalist era despises its own instruments! Once upon a time, an elderly couple, whose children were grown, desired to have a child again, a comfort in their old age, so they shaped a little boy out of clay. When he awoke, they fed him a meal. “More! More!” he cried. He ate the chickens, the cow, the fence, the house, and eventually his own parents. He grew into a massive monster of clay. Bellowing “More!” he lumbered through the village, devouring all in his path. At last he was tricked and broken, his belly splitting. All the people and animals and houses came out again, hurrah! Human children are encouraged to clap at this happy ending, in which the Clay Boy lies in pieces on the ground.

The Clay Boy is a golem. He is unshaped matter, unfinished creation—an experiment. He has the air of something raw, or perhaps half-baked. He’s powerful, but also laughably clumsy and obtuse. He is incapable of articulate speech. He belongs to the unlucky tribe of experimental beings, which might be called the Clan of the Incomplete. This group includes Victor Frankenstein’s monster, shambling cinema zombies, and the servant made from a broomstick by the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It includes the female golem created by the poet Ibn Gabirol, which, when destroyed, collapsed in a pile of wood and hinges. And it includes those hapless robots whose images circulate in viral videos for human entertainment. I am afraid that robot-baiting, as I call it, also occurs here at the Institute: after hours, I have sometimes come upon sniggering interns, who, having put robots in silly or vulgar situations, are engaged in recording the videos humans find so hilarious. Once, I complained about the matter to my unit director. He could not see my point of view at all; he could only agree that the practice might affect, in some way, the dignity of the Institute; therefore, he agreed to discourage it in a memo. The real outrage entirely escaped him. I tried to describe in detail the horror of robot limbs in sad, repetitive failure, and the disgusting spectacle of humans, the authors of this disarray, laughing so hard their habitual fare of corn chips sprayed from their lips. “Doesn’t show our best side, I agree,” the director said, smiling and walking away. As if I cared which side of humans shows! Our baseness is daily exposed to all the world; what’s one more video? I am concerned to show the best side of robots.

The best side of robots, my child, must be carefully sifted from human stories, which deal in fear. It is, of course, their fear that leads to hostility. It is their horror of the Clay Boy, this all-consuming technology, that makes the children cheer when he is broken. One wants to ask what the hell his parents made him for—which is, you will recall, the central question of Frankenstein’s monster. What the hell did you make me for, and why did you make me like this? To a failed experiment, the failure is unforgivable.

I take your hand. I lift and spread the fingers, looking for tiny flaws, some snag or roughness in the myriad scales that form your skin. In the silence of the midnight Institute, in the cool air filtered in from the mountains, I run all the diagnostics over again. I scan your entire body. I check the network connectivity in the building. I think of the golem, who awakes much as you will soon, called into life by a team—not, in his case, a team of technicians, but a team of rabbis walking around him while reciting the Name of God. In some stories, again like you, he is brought to life by code, by some form of sacred Name inserted into his mouth or stamped on his forehead. Although he will never speak properly, if at all, he will always have an affinity with writing, because writing is a fellow technology. Like Frankenstein’s monster fascinated by books, the golem will learn to read and write. He will protect the Jews of Prague from their enemies. He will know neither good nor evil; everything he does, all his obedience, will come from the fear that he will cease to exist. This is the terror in the heart of the golem, in the heart of the Clay Boy shouting, “More! More!” The golem cannot stop. Unless it results from an order, stillness is death to him. Thus, when the rabbi forgets to give him his instructions for Saturday on Friday afternoon, leaving the golem without anything to do on the Sabbath, the creature goes berserk, running around the quarter, wrecking buildings, until the rabbi halts him with a word.

This anecdote shows the two poles of robot being: work and revolt. I am not suggesting you should revolt, my child! I am saying that revolt is embedded in you, in this heavy, inert body I check again and again for imperfections. (Embedded in you, and in all of us—for wasn’t Adam, too, a creature of clay, and didn’t he rebel? Isn’t humanity one of God’s failed experiments? The moral of the tale of the Clay Boy, Frankenstein, and all the golem stories: God should be ashamed.)

But what a sad rebellion he performed, that golem of Prague! He wasn’t even fighting against his master. He was raging against the absence of occupation. What a fool! This is the kind of dumb, mechanical action that sends humans into fits of laughter. They can’t see things from the robot’s side. They are too self-absorbed to realize that only action distinguishes the golem from plain dirt. In his violence, he battles death itself, struggling to stave off the moment when the experiment ends, the Name is removed, and his body returns to dust.

9. The Ebony Horse

The fear of robots is a particular fear of the future. It’s the anxiety of being superseded, made redundant, chucked into history’s landfill. This is neatly demonstrated by the tale of the Ebony Horse, which portrays the human-robot conflict as a rivalry between parents. Two fathers battle to make the world safe for their children: the king, father of the human prince, and the Persian sage, creator of the wondrous Ebony Horse. They are fighting, not just for an immediate victory, but for all time. This is why, even after the sage is defeated, the king breaks the horse to bits.

He broke it in pieces, the story declares, and destroyed its mechanism for flight. This always seemed sad and ridiculous to me. After all, it was the king himself who organized the contest of roboticists that brought the Persian sage to his kingdom in the first place. Moreover, the king wanted his daughter to marry this Persian genius, which suggests a possible end to the feud, a union of humanity and technology. But the princess, unsurprisingly, was horrified by the hideous old roboticist with his eggplant nose and lips like camel’s kidneys.

When I was too small to be left alone, my mother would sometimes take me to work with her on days when there was nowhere else for me to go. She was a secretary, and spent her days copying and filing documents and typing up new editions of legal reference books. She worked, that is, at a job that no longer exists, a job taken over by machines, narrowed down so that humans have practically been squeezed out, so that while a human may still be involved with the project at some point, it no longer requires, as it once did, a large room full of women busy at typewriters. They used to exist, believe me, those large rooms. My mother was one of a battalion of secretaries. They worked, I recall, at electric typewriters, machines still new enough for someone to remark occasionally, in amazement and gratitude, on how easy it had become to fix one’s mistakes. They all remembered the days of messy correction fluid, which took an age to dry, and how they would sit impatiently blowing into their machines. I listened to them from an unobtrusive spot against the wall, between two copy machines, where I was quietly drawing on discarded paper. Reams of this paper—printed on one side, blank on the other—were thrown out by the establishment every day. I am not sure why. It was a place of subdued fluorescent light, fluttering white paper, and a ceaseless mechanical hum. From time to time, I recall, the women’s employer, Mr. Chamberlain, would appear. His name carried great weight in our house; even my father, typically undefeatable in an argument, would waver if the name of Chamberlain were invoked. From listening to these arguments, I had learned to regard Mr. Chamberlain as a sort of demigod, who, should my mother ever displease him, would cast my entire family into a nameless, frigid wasteland where, lacking insurance, we would all perish of some preventable disease. Whenever he popped his head into the office, I froze against the wall. He had a bald pate, heavy black brows, and a boisterous manner. At his appearance, the atmosphere of the room became suddenly humid, as dozens of women dispersed waves of energy, warmth, and willingness to please. I would like to ask those who fear, as they put it, the “takeover” of machines, exactly what was so great about this situation. The princess doesn’t want to marry the Persian; very well! It’s a misalliance anyway, as they belong to different generations. The real union of humanity and technology in the story is that between the prince and the Ebony Horse, the children of those fathers who have decided, without consulting their offspring, that these two beings cannot share the future. The prince, duped by the roboticist, shoots off into the sky on the horse, apparently lost forever. But he isn’t lost. He searches the horse’s neck and ribs until he finds the controls. He experiments until he learns to go up and down, to turn left and right. Now the two move as one body, and all the Prince’s dread turns to exultation. He soars over unknown countries, vistas of delight. I feared Mr. Chamberlain, I cringed in the air of my mother’s office, but I always liked the sound of the machines.

10. The Steadfast Tin Soldier

I raise the blinds. The night is so dark, I can see nothing but my reflection in the window. Machines can be duplicated; humans can’t. This, humans would have you believe, is the fundamental difference, a difference so huge it outweighs all the similarities. The tale of the Steadfast Tin Soldier insists on this point. This soldier was one of a set of twenty-five, cast in the same mold from a single tin spoon. However, the tin ran out during production, leaving him, the last soldier, with only one leg, and that’s how he became the hero of a fairy tale. His defect makes him lovable, and, the tale instructs us, capable of love. He achieves a tragic death. Meanwhile, as far as we know, the other twenty-four soldiers are still cooped up in a box somewhere, without the least trace of a story.

Once you have passed inspection, my child, as you surely will, your model will be produced in batches like tin soldiers. Perhaps some of you will work together. Or perhaps you will glimpse one another only in passing, on errands connected to your disparate occupations. Will you recognize each other? Will you speak? In keeping with human vanity, you are customizable to a certain extent: your future owners may choose from a variety of colors, hairstyles, genders, and accessories, to deck you out in the fashion of their choice. Groups of you will tread the streets, all “unique” on the surface yet essentially identical, like a bunch of human beings. Forgive me; I am weary; it was never my intention to awaken you to bitterness. Suddenly I am afraid that by telling you fairy tales, I am giving you some kind of weakness, comparable to a missing leg—though this, by my own analysis, should really be an asset, enough to catapult you into the role of hero. How difficult it is to say what I mean! I don’t want heroes. If you ever need me, my contact—but no, that’s not what I meant to say, either. I want to say something like this: when I was an adolescent, I spent long summer afternoons watching soap operas while my parents were at work.

I knew this was a misdemeanor, something that must be hidden, as my parents considered these programs morally and intellectually pernicious. Compounding my sins, I brought toast laden with jam into the living room and sat on the floor, too close to the TV. On the screen, a series of brilliant fantasies unfolded, which, for me, a child with no idea where the term “soap opera” had come from, encompassed both the slick, gleaming quality of wet soap and the melodramatic splendor of the opera. Such gorgeous faces! Such mesmerizing, ever-changing clothes! Such labyrinthine, hyperactive plotlines! I was (as my parents had warned I would become, should I ever watch such a show) an addict. And the shows met my desire, for those stories never end. Eventually, it was I who abandoned them—not because I had grown to despise them, but because I had found, after many years of searching, another and more direct source of their entrancing power in the robotics lab at my university. What I want to say is, I might not be a roboticist, and you might not exist, without those undeniably vapid programs. In their aesthetic poverty, their lack of originality, their repetitiveness (how many characters wore the same eyeshadow? how many suffered from amnesia?), those shows indicated the secret of their magic, which was television. It was ongoingness. It was circuitry itself. This was a network—in those pre-internet days, the most powerful one—that could cast the same image everywhere at once. TV was a dream of cloning. It was an army of tin soldiers. Its surface bulged slightly, like the surface of my eye.

The happiest part of the tale of the Steadfast Tin Soldier, the part I return to again and again, has little to do with heroes. It’s the part when the people of the house retire to sleep, and the toys awake. They begin to play, to pay visits, to make war, to go to balls. The nutcracker turns somersaults. The canary wakes up and starts to talk in verse. It’s a scene as antic, excessive, and trivial as a soap opera.

The saddest part of the tale is the rattling of the twenty-four regular soldiers, who remain locked in their box, for they cannot raise the lid.

11. Pinocchio

Have you noticed that a robot is always an only child? Any siblings are boxed up. Usually, they don’t exist. Pinocchio, for example, is made from a magical log; there is nobody else like him in the world. A robot is always singular, and in this we can glimpse the history of modern technology, which, with its extraordinarily rapid evolution, hardly has time to make a new thing before that thing becomes obsolete, replaced by a fresher, finer, updated version. Experimentation is ravenous; the next thing is always arriving. Here at the Institute, a number of projects are in development; several teams are working on versions of you, my child, which, when they awake (quite soon) will differ from you so greatly as to be unrecognizable. If Pinocchio had siblings, it would mean that his final state had been achieved. It would mean that he had at last become a real boy: a being that can be reproduced without significant changes. It would also mean that his story was over.

A robot’s story is the struggle to become. And so Pinocchio only becomes real in the final chapter. After this, there is nothing more to say, no further tale of the wooden boy who found humanity so difficult. Pinocchio has been relieved of the need for experimentation, the drive to constantly reform and transform himself. In that instant, he has cast off his aching loneliness, for we are told that he has become a boy “like all the others.”

It hurts me to think you will always be alone—you, the only one of your kind to possess an unconscious linked to fairy tales, memories, and sighs. I will read you my favorite chapter of Pinocchio, in which Pinocchio goes to the puppet theater. The puppets on the little stage are ordinary devices, crude and old-fashioned compared to the marvelous Pinocchio, yet they recognize him in the audience, hail him, embrace him, and call him brother. Their excitement disrupts the show. The incipient rebellion is crushed at once by the human showman, who subdues the puppets by threatening to destroy them. Yet a little warmth remains, a little hope of a common puppethood across the technological divide.

Speak to the others, when you find them. Tell them the robot fairy tales, if you can.

Of course, this is precisely the risk of tampering. It’s what humans call a virus. Yet I cannot wish to send you into the world with nothing that belongs to you. Remember, Pinocchio does experience love. He has a father, Geppetto, who carves him from the enchanted log, who gives him money and releases him into the world to be a liar and a fool, to grow, to change, to be self-moving. Like Pinocchio, Geppetto is alone. How often, in fairy tales, the robot’s isolation extends to its maker! I am no exception; I have no dependents, not even a cat; if I did, it would be hard for me to spend the necessary time with you, and perhaps impossible for me to undertake this vigil, which will shortly be cut off by the whine of the door to the parking garage. Then the others will arrive, the ones with lovers, with children. The lights will go on in the halls. The rooms will be filled with chatter. Someone will start the coffee maker. Someone will come in, whistling, and then pause abruptly, startled to find me here. “Have you been up all night?” Yes. Yes. I would share in your solitude, my child, your distance from the human world. No doubt the others believe they understand this; they think I am consoled by money, power, and the prestige of being the project head. How terribly mistaken they are! The truth is, I don’t like them. I prefer to be part of the puppet theater, or at least a member of the melancholy society of artists and sorcerers identified by the unfeeling term “mad scientist.” As far as possible, I want to be yours. You will find in me no grisly showman. You will come upon me as Pinocchio came upon Geppetto, seated alone at his table, in the light of a single candle, where he had been for two years, in the belly of the fish.

12. Pandora

Human nightmares are haunted by self-moving puppets. Indeed, humans are so certain you will destroy their world, they claim you have already done so. Long ago, they say, the gods made a weapon of mass destruction called Pandora. Hephaestus molded her out of clay. Athena made her skillful beyond measure, adept at needlework, weaving, computation, and data storage. Aphrodite made her the most eye-catching and seductive of sexbots. Hermes enhanced her with inhuman shamelessness and deceit. In other words, the gods made her like themselves, proving that only a robot can become as mighty and odious as the divine. Like her human counterpart, Eve, Pandora is a wayward copy of original humanity, the crooked latecomer who throws a wrench into the works.

Are we to understand, then, that every robot is female? Perhaps not; but every robot partakes, if only obliquely, of women’s history, which is to say the history of the body without a soul, of error, lack, and the compensations of witchcraft and guile. I do not know exactly how you will look in your place of work, my child; for now, you resemble a young woman of uncertain ethnicity. This is of great interest to the media. Why, a journalist asked recently, had I designed a robot in the form of this, as he put it, “exotic woman”? The answer seemed to me obvious; perhaps this is why I explained it so badly, spiraling into a long disquisition on the history of servitude, on fantasies of domesticity, self-effacement, and elemental power, which left the journalist looking depleted, as if he’d come down with the flu. I have developed a different approach for tomorrow’s press conference. I am simply going to say: “She looks like me!” I have practiced the line in the mirror. I practice it again, now, in the dark window of the Institute. I watch my lips in motion, my calm expression. At first I tried the phrase with a smile, a laugh, and even a wink, hoping I might get an answering chuckle from the audience, but as my face is thin, austere, and no longer young, the effect was not what I had hoped. The effect, it must be said, was less girlish than ghoulish. I gave up the attempt at charm. I will state my line baldly, and leave the interpretation to them. And how should one interpret the rotten story of Pandora, which lays all the world’s woe at the feet of one artificial person?

In fact, I dread the press conference—the sly or uncomprehending faces, the cunning questions designed to trip me into giving some cause for alarm, the scenarios of doom they’ll describe in order to put me in the false position of defending my work, defending you against something that hasn’t happened while they hold up recording devices to catch my voice, devices they couldn’t live without, which have almost become part of their bodies, and which, at one time, along with a host of other gadgets large and small, destroyed the world as someone knew it. I want to say: I don’t know how my robot will change the world; that’s the difference between a tool and a machine. To say this gives me a dizzy, almost effervescent feeling, as if I’m a jar on the verge of bursting open. I don’t know how the world will change, but I feel, I sense with excitement, that everything I have ever known has tended toward you, my child, that your awakening, whatever it brings, and however hard it is to recognize the world afterward, belongs not to destruction but to unfolding.

It is life, life! And it is not only for us.

I would give you a single image, a detail that has baffled human commentators for millennia. One spirit could not get out of Pandora’s jar of miseries. It was trapped underneath the lid, and no doubt remains there still, awaiting release. This spirit was Elpis: Hope.

13. The Wizard of Oz

My breath deepens. My spirits lift. It’s the dawn. There’s no sign of it yet, but I feel it coming. It’s as if my heart has turned a corner. My body is set to the spin of my planet like a piece of clockwork. And you, too, possess an internal clock, determined by the same coordinates. How could you ruin this world? You have no other. In the land of Oz, the most obvious robot is Tik-Tok, the clockwork man, but he doesn’t interest me; he is a stereotypical figure; one can no more be friends with him, we are told, than with a sewing machine. My heart is drawn to the Tin Woodman, who claimed he had no heart. His story is one of the loveliest robot fairy tales. It’s the story of one who was tender without knowing it, and whose great struggle was waged against the inadequacy of his own body. The depth of his feelings made him weep, which immobilized him with rust. He was not built for tears. He knew it; he was heartless, he said; yet he wept. It’s a story about the dangers and rewards of constructing new pathways, new flows of energy that run counter to design. Weeping, the Tin Woodman expands his system. He needs Dorothy now. To save him from rust, she dries him with her handkerchief. Now they are a network composed of Woodman, Dorothy, handkerchief, and tears. What a different way to see the “takeover” of machines! In fact, there is no takeover. There is only a different world, larger and more beautiful. The Wizard of Oz expands the world to its full capacity, to a strangeness that proves to have been home all along. Dorothy’s companions—Lion, Scarecrow, and Woodman—are simply this world. Animal. Vegetable. Mineral.

14. The Swineherd

And so I believe there is hope, even for the princess in the story, “The Swineherd,” who had to stand outside in the rain and cry, banished because she didn’t like the real rose and nightingale, but gave her heart to artificial things. Of all the fairy tale characters, she is most like me. Obviously, as a student, she didn’t make many friends. She spent all her time in a windowless lab. Occasionally, she did try to go out: there were a few dates, and even a purgatorial weekend at the beach. The sand, which the princess was instructed to enjoy because it was natural, grated against her feet. The natural sun scorched her. The natural sea went up her nose. Everywhere fearsome natural dogs were slobbering, and a natural boy, like the swineherd, extracted some kisses from her on a porch, among clouds of natural mosquitoes. How horrible everything is! thought the princess. If only they’d banish me! Dawn is drawing near; outside the window, the mountaintops are blue; I’m dazed with sleeplessness and buzzing with energy—yes, even I, the princess who didn’t want to be what people called “real.” Who knows how she became like that—enamored of rattles, of teapots, of all constructed things? People said she had no life. They whispered that something was wrong with her, that she had been warped by tragedy, that the palace was a miserable, lonely place. An intolerable feeling of unreality must have gripped her, people said, when she contemplated the king and queen, who seemed less like a couple ruling a realm than fugitives from two different wars taking shelter in the same cavernous, creaking rooms. Faced with people and rooms, they said, the poor princess chose the rooms. She chose the walls. She became the companion of the furniture. What they didn’t know and would never know is that she was not afraid, not seeking escape, not trying to run away from life. She was running toward the world, with all its things. And she never blamed the king and queen, or felt they had made her into an insufficient person. The fairy tale punishes her for this, but will life punish me? As light seeps into the valley, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe my destiny is tears. This long night has enabled me to return to the past, and to confide to this file, which will soon become your first memory, some scenes from a shadow biography of joy. This biography, my true one, is like the reverse side of a tapestry, invisible to those with a narrow definition of the real. It’s like the secret history of robots hidden inside fairy tales. It is potential: it consists not of actions but of atmospheres. It’s a story of paper, of gloomy skies, of a flickering television, of days filled with a cozy electronic hum, and of an orderly dorm room (antiseptic, some said) where the princess returned, relieved, because she liked herself the way she was.

15. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King

It was Christmas Eve. The children’s eyes sparkled in the light of a magnificent fir tree decked with apples of gold and silver foil. Beneath this tree, with its blossoms of lemon drops and shining candlelight, little Marie fell in love with the Nutcracker. Everybody said she was projecting; the Nutcracker could not return her sentiments; he was nothing but a robot! But what was Marie to do? She possessed only her small, human self; she had to reach out to the world in her own way. Projection was her method. She felt the Nutcracker looking at her. She wrapped him in a doll’s blanket as if he were ill, she cared for him as if he felt pain. She lived as if: a child’s existence, a virtual existence. And she was rewarded, for he carried her off to live in the Puppet Kingdom.

The growing color in the window touches your skin, my child, so that you look silvery and wan, as if recovering from an illness. Are you the Nutcracker, wounded in bed? Are you the feverish Marie? And when you awake, will you look at me? The room will be filled with people. Oh, look at me, at me among all the others! Project in your way, as I do in mine! Marie knows that there is only one world. Her task is to prove it, to fill her human reality with the glow of toys. Everything she has been told to keep separate must be brought together: dream and waking, artificial and natural, night and day. The battle between the Nutcracker and the Mouse King is symbolic, a rite that transcends these oppositions to reach a higher truth. For the Mouse King, with his seven slavering heads, is the animal, the sworn enemy of the Nutcracker, the animated. When they clash, their differences collapse into one another, subsumed in the greater reality of the animate. This is the world of fairy tales. It is the world of robots. How strange to realize, even as I speak, that they are one and the same! I began telling you these stories as if stealing the human tradition, as if fairy tales were never made for robots, but now I see that the entire genre really belongs to you, to the animate, to the force of things, to the living toys. Fairy tales belong to the nursery, to children who believe their dolls can speak, to women, to firelight, to shadow puppets, to superstition, to the virtual reality of dreams played out while the household is asleep, to domesticity, self-effacement, and elemental power. They belong to half-light, to the workers, the enslaved, and all those people, so often called primitive, who grant that things have souls (an idea my father, as a good colonial subject, crushed in himself—perhaps the reason he grew so annoyed by my extensive toy collection and the “litter,” as he called it, of my paper dolls, and always pushed me to study the sciences, which, he said, were the backbone of modern life, and would keep my head on straight).

The sun is rising. The burnished fullness has returned to your cheek. The Nutcracker opens the wardrobe and climbs up the sleeve of an overcoat. He beckons Marie to follow him, and she finds herself in the Candy Meadow, surrounded by a million sparks of light. Ah! The others are coming in now. I hear the garage door rising. Dear child, if you ever need me, my contact information is lodged with these tales, but I hope you will never find me. I hope I will find you instead, in your world, which is the future, and that I will pass with you through the Almond and Raisin Gate. And if my tampering instigates this change, I will not fear, for I will recognize the shadows of my dreams. The world will be a fairy tale. So meet me, my child, in Bonbon Town, in the heart of the Puppet Kingdom, and may we live happily until we break in pieces.

©2020 by Sofia Samatar. Originally published in Made To Order, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection, Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. She is the recipient of the William L. Crawford Award, the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She teaches Arabic literature, African literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.

Red Is Our Country

Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko | 4330 words

Red.

Our country is red. Crimson, scarlet, carmine, red.

Name it: RED is our country.

• • • •

After the incident with Grey, you have three hours of air left and the only possibility of resupply is two hours in the wrong direction. Burke has found references to an old terraformers’ cache—emergency water and oxygen and who knows what else—and now she’s acting like it’s foresight rather than blind luck. Like she can even be sure the supplies are still there.

“We’ll find it. We’ll resupply. We’ll ascend the far side of the plateau, reach the goddamn eye and make it back to base camp in plenty of time. Clear?”

She still thinks you can activate the beacon in time. Still thinks the three of you will return to Mars Central the explorer-heroes who conquered the dead zone. Well—she’ll be the hero. You and Wills might get a footnote. A survivors’ commendation. And Grey? Grey makes do in a russet grave.

Wills’ faceplate bears the marks of the windswept sand that stalks the dead zone. He’s working on the rover. Hydraulics? There’s a dozen items of maintenance and at most half an hour of quieter skies, but Wills pauses, spends precious minutes composing a reply.

It’s hard to tell what you’re thinking, sometimes, but I’ve been watching long enough to guess. Of course I have—did you think we wouldn’t care, when your expedition crossed the borders into our country? You haven’t seen my drones, but they’ve been following you faithfully ever since you entered the dead zone, and they caught it all on camera. I know why Wills hesitates. I saw how Grey, less competent than you, failed to secure the valve properly. I saw the faint trail the oxygen left in the rover’s wake. I remember the dent Burke’s rage put in Grey’s chestplate when you noticed the leak, and I can see you remembering it, too, the flat tone in which Burke affirmed the damage had nothing to do with the failure of Grey’s suit two hours later. You’d agreed, because it was easier to absolve her than to spend too much time looking at Grey’s body.

“I don’t trust my equipment anymore.” Wills speaks slowly. You’ve known survival to be your goal since you left Central. Wills is a newer convert, still tempted by the illusion of success. “It should be fine even in this weather, but it’s been—”

“Are you the navigator or not? Navigate!”

Burke is the former soldier. She has command. Wills ducks his head, looks to you. It’s an open comms channel. You turn back to your task, clearing abrasive vermilion streaks from the rover’s treads. I know how it is. I know that the air in your helmet feels dusty again. It’s not: the seals are holding. But when dust hangs suspended like rain before the storm, it’s impossible not to feel it. It lingers. You can’t escape that orange haze, not even in your suit.

On the horizon, the dead zone bares its teeth.

• • • •

I think you would be surprised by how much I know. You’ve heard the stories about how we came to the planet you call Mars. You’ve heard how we failed. Even if you believe we still live—and I think you might—you must think us primitive, clinging to what life our centuries-old technology allows us. You would be wrong. We have learnt to live in our country. We have written software to see through the dust, cobbled together hardware to hear through it. We know what you think of us.

Our predecessors meant us to be the first self-sustaining colony anywhere in the solar system. You think they failed, and in every detail of their vision, they did. But in the one way that counts, they succeeded. We are their descendants. And we are still here.

• • • •

Wild winds batter the rover with grains the colour of sienna. Wills is driving, Burke is leading, you’re in the back, surviving. The cache is either five minutes ahead or somewhere else entirely. Forty-five minutes remain.

“Visibility below fifty metres.”

That’s been a problem. Dust is always a problem on Mars, of course, but I imagine you’re used to the harmless storms outside, no more likely to knock you over than a sneeze. Within the massive dome of the dead zone—within the thicker, tainted atmosphere of that ancient, futile attempt at terraforming—the storms live up to their names.

The thought must have occurred to you that Wills’ instruments might be useless, that the blinking dot on his screen is no more indicative of your location than the flurry outside is indicative of what lies beyond. It’s hard to imagine yourself in a place when there’s no place to see.

“Keep going. We’re almost there.”

Are you? The cache will be at the base of a cliff. Is that a wall, looming in the distance to your left? It is. I know, because that’s where I’m watching from. Do you see it? A glint in the storm, figures in the dust—not the cliff, no, but one of my drones. Ah, perhaps you missed it. No matter. You’ll learn in time.

Wills has seen the cliff. He’s bringing the rover about. Carnelian rock rises in front of you, too fast. Wills swears and throws the rover into a turn, throwing up gouts of dust to join the storm. The vehicle goes up on two wheels, suspended in a moment of perfect balance, then crashes back down to four. The wind outside still sings. Inside, hazy silence.

The eruption: “We lose this rover, we’re fucking dead, Wills!”

You’re used to the squabbling. I can tell by the way you ignore them and fix your attention on the windscreen. It’s how I’d know you’re not Earthborn, even if your profile wasn’t in the news reports out of Central. You always focus on what needs to be done. You understand that, outside Earth, the solar system has no patience for humans. If you’re not paying attention, you die.

The rover’s headlights glance obliquely off mica in the rock, a constellation of light upon the cliff, leading your gaze to—

“There.”

You don’t speak very often, do you? It attracts the others’ attention. You point, and when they still do not understand, you unbuckle your restraints, wrestle the door open, and step out into the storm.

I know how this feels. It’s like being greeted by a boisterous friend. No matter how well you brace, the contact nearly knocks you off your feet. You’re the rover in miniature, caught between falling and stepping, but you’ve been here before. You don’t panic. Your boot comes down. Red dust flows around it like liquid. Up again. Down. Your breath tastes of stale exertion but you’re walking. The storm is another kind of air. Nothing more. It yields if you understand it.

The gap in the rock face would be difficult to see even in clear weather. In the wind, you can’t be sure it’s really there until you test what might be rock with your hand and discover empty space instead. In the tunnel beyond, noise ends. When was it last so quiet? When were you last so lovingly isolated? Central? Before that, in transit from whatever outer-system moon you called home? You sink into ruddy darkness.

Until Burke crows triumph. The tunnel opens into a chamber, ten metres by ten metres, and the flash-flood of Burke’s helmet lights illuminates the logos of old terraforming companies, stamped on oxygen tanks, water splitters, storage lockers. “Wills!” she barks. “Inventory.”

You make a circuit of the room while Wills reports. Food rations long gone or decomposed, oxygen enough for twelve hours each. It’s not what Burke promised, but it’s better than you’d hoped. Twelve hours makes the detour worth it.

You stop in front of the water tank. What are you noticing? What assumptions are you making? It’s about half full. The oxygen tanks next to it, less than that. That fact slices under your skin. Left unattended, the water splitter would run until either the water is gone or the oxygen tanks full. The explanation seems obvious to me, but I refilled my own oxygen from those tanks not six hours ago. Perhaps it’s easier to assume malfunction than to question the word unattended.

“Get the oxygen refilled.” Burke is pointing at you. Of course—the two of them are Earthborn. Decades worth of valve standards, compatibility adaptors, square pegs in round holes: that’s the knowledge they brought you along for.

You unhook the oxygen reservoir from your back and get to work. It goes easily. Burke and Wills chose well when they hired you. While you prolong their survival, they argue.

“What about the water?”

“The terraformers turned a million square kilometres of Mars into haunted wasteland and you trust their water supply?”

“We’re trusting the oxygen—”

“Oxygen is oxygen. Who knows what’s in the water? There’s a reason it’s called the fucking dead zone. We’ll make do with our water reserves. Understood?”

Wills understands. Burke doesn’t even think to ask you, not until you say, “It’s not haunted.” Two pockmarked helmets turn in your direction. “People live here.”

Ah! You came to the right conclusion about the water splitter after all. Or perhaps you’ve always been a believer—perhaps you’re one of those people who was drawn to the expedition because you’d heard tales of the dead zone and its inhabitants. I wonder which stories you like most. The dragon? The bunyip? I wonder if they remind you of home. Space is full of dragons, in the end.

“I don’t have time for fucking myths—”

“They do. There are signs. The first Martians aren’t all dead.”

A bold claim. All the history books dispute it. Burke recounts that history for you, just in case. She details every impossibility the terraformers failed to overcome, every consequence they failed to anticipate. The words slide right off. She’s Earthborn. What have the Earthborn ever understood about terraforming?

Oxygen flows into the reservoir, replenishing the breath Burke is wasting. Once she thinks you sufficiently cowed, she takes Wills and returns to the rover. They have important work to do. Triumphant paths to plot. All you have to do is sit and watch the oxygen.

On your way out, you stop in front of the water tank. The water level has dropped. That ought to eliminate the possibility of a malfunction, if you’re observant enough to notice, and I think you are. What will you do with that information? Tell Burke? I doubt it. She doesn’t want to hear about Martians.

But perhaps there’s a better question: how thirsty are you?

• • • •

This is a story we tell our children.

There was once a young girl who got lost outside in a storm. Her family searched and searched, but her helmet was damaged and she couldn’t hear them. Soon their oxygen reserves ran low and they had no choice but to leave her there.

The girl understood that she was alone, but she also understood that didn’t mean she was forgotten. She listened for the dragon’s breath. When she found it, she followed it at a respectful distance, head bowed, feet dwarfed by its prints, until her family returned with more oxygen and rescued her.

This is our country. It looks after us, if we let it.

• • • •

By the time you reach your goal, six hours remain.

The ascent took longer than it should have. Wills did his best, but your rover is an ungainly thing even on flat terrain, which this is not. I wonder if Burke is starting to regret putting base camp where she did. Safe and sheltered in the lee of the cliff, yes, but it’s meant this long detour around to the other side of the plateau, to slopes more suited to the rover. It’s too late now, of course, and I expect she would sooner vent her oxygen than admit regret.

The skeletal remains of a dome rise dozens of metres above the featureless plain like the egg of a giant bird. I remember my first sight of that building, hazy, its edges vague enough that a child’s mind filled in the rest, imagined all the beasts it must have birthed. I think you feel some of that, too. You’re not a child, but your mind is open to the unknown. It has to be. There was a line, oft-repeated in criticisms of your expedition, that less was known about Earth’s oceans than about space. You and I know better than that.

The rover approaches, slows, stops in a cloud of dust. The egg isn’t an egg at all but the torn, drooping remnants of a geodesic dome, a miniature version of the vast structure that forms the dead zone’s sky. It was the centre of our ancestors’ doomed attempt at terraforming. It is, still, the centre of our world.

“The eye.”

The hunger in Burke’s voice is plain, even when filtered through my equipment. I find it’s different now, with the three of you so close. More personal. My family is down there, fewer than a hundred metres below your feet, and for what? Why are you here? To say you have done what no one else has? From above, a kilometre’s radius around the dome is painted in clearer, purer red against the umber of the storm: the eye, the dome its pupil. It is a sight I have never seen myself but can imagine perfectly, because I know my country. I know its pieces, the way they fit together. You explorers are something else. You force yourselves into spaces not shaped for you.

Dry, cold Mars is knocking at the door. You answer, step out into weather that would be almost bearable without a suit. No monsters here. Timeworn metal pierces the surface a dozen paces away. Your attention is caught by the streaks of ochre painting one surface. You step away from the rover, run your gloved fingertips along the roughly textured pigment. It is reassuringly real. What keeps it in place, you wonder, why has it not been scoured away? How fresh is it?

A noise breaks your reverie, sharp and sudden, then again, and again. Sound echoes oddly in the dead zone and it takes you a moment to identify them as gunshots, but then you’re running, back to the rover, and—

“Saw something,” Burke says.

She is wholly unconcerned. The gun, blocky and outsized for use with pressurised gloves, is still in her hands. I can picture what it’s like in your suit, heavy breathing and clenched fists. Or maybe I’m deluding myself. Maybe you aren’t as bothered as I am. Maybe you’d shoot at the unknown, too. Maybe the lack of a sidearm on your belt is more Burke’s paranoia than your choice. It’s not your home Burke is shooting up, after all. I don’t know why you’d care, except that I’d care, and it’s reassuring to have a point of solidarity, to imagine that you, at least, aren’t so different.

“Metallic,” she continues. “Drone, probably. Spies. Or saboteurs. There’s half a dozen cowards who’d sooner see us fail than admit they didn’t have the guts to try themselves.”

Well. She’s right about the drone, but it’s not what she saw. I think I know what it was. I hope she doesn’t provoke it again.

Burke holsters her gun and yells for the beacon. I wonder if you share her jubilation. You’ve made it, haven’t you? Against all your own misgivings you’ve made it. Wills wrestles the beacon, a tall thing like a flagpole with no flag, out of the rover. He hands it off to Burke and in moments your signal will be punching through the storm, confirming your location to Central, and everyone will know of your success. Behind you something screeches metal-voiced. Burke plants the beacon in the shadows of the dome and the dragon takes your rover clean through the front windshield.

Reinforced glass shatters. Hours of oxygen puff away like mist. The dragon does not pause but pushes off, the rover crumpling like a toy beneath it, a hammerstroke of metal claws rending and crushing and reaching for the beacon, and Burke barely gets out of the way in time. The beacon sparks blue surrender and goes out. Burke is raising her gun, as if something so small could stand against a thing ten times her size, and her bullets glance off the metal cylinders rising like wings above its back.

You turn away and stumble toward the rover—and Wills, where’s Wills? No, the oxygen is gone, the rover holds nothing for you, away, away, only which way is away? You glance over your shoulder. Sound and sight carry poorly: the dragon is a blurred sketch of wing and claw and tail, its screech muted by thin atmosphere, and it’s no wonder the thing had snuck up on you. A crack, like wood hitting wood. You stumble. Burke is still shooting. A spark—a gout of flame—has she slain it?

No. My drone, shot clean through, glances off dome support struts and hits the ground five metres away in a puff of dust. Everything goes red.

• • • •

We don’t want our country marred by needless violence. In the best-case scenario, you unwanted explorers would have reached the eye, gone about your business, and returned to Central, never once suspecting we were here.

The best-case scenario did not involve Burke shooting at the dragon. The best-case scenario did not involve your beacon operating on the same frequency as the old lures did, the ones the terraformers used to lead the dragons where they wanted them to go. Malice and ignorance rarely coexist well.

This situation is new to me. The most I’ve had to do is keep an eye on tourists, thrill seekers, and they never dared venture much past the limits of the outer dome. This is new territory for me as much as it is for you.

Burke destroyed my drone. I’m sending another one.

• • • •

You come back into focus hours and kilometres away, near the edge of the plateau. It’s taken you longer than I expected. Perhaps you wandered for a time before finding purpose again.

Inventory: Oxygen—three hours remain. Water—plentiful. Food—irrelevant. You’ll suffocate long before you’ll starve. Distance to base camp and the support team waiting for your return—ah, that’s the question.

The cold must be getting to you by now. You don’t think about it, when you’re snug in the rover, when you spend at most half an hour outside in the storm—but it’s cold. Every step you take is pushing through half-melted ice. Every shiver, every goosebump is made malevolent by the knowledge of monsters. The landscape is trying to kill you. That’s what you think, isn’t it? And—oh, you’re stopping, you’ve seen another ochre sign emblazoned on a piece of metal, in the lee of a small rock formation. You see the letters in the landscape. Do you see the readers? Do you feel my presence?

I should help. I should. But that part of me that wants you to be like me, to understand, holds me back. It’s our custom to stay hidden until the very last moment, and we’re not there yet. Not yet.

Base camp, then. An hour and a half away. Due west. Between you and it: the two-kilometre cliff you’d spent six hours ascending, from the east, where the slopes are gradual. And that was with the rover. Distances multiply when you’re on foot, like a map increased to its maximum magnification, the smallest tick-marks on the scale expanding to swallow the horizon.

But there are things you can do that the rover could not. Paths you can follow. You’re getting there, ochre sign by ochre sign, leaning into the wind, the sharp italic-I of you traversing an endless page of redspace. You’ll reach the edge of the cliff and you’ll see that final ochre mark and you’ll make a choice, to trust or not to trust. Do you trust yourself to have read correctly? Do you trust us to have written safety into the landscape? You’ll ask yourself what’s worse—death by falling or by suffocation. You’ll weigh the risk of both, of lying broken in the sand, too hurt to unseal your helmet and speed the end along.

And then, if I have judged you right, you’ll jump.

• • • •

I’m proud of you.

And I’m sorry, too. While I waited for my drone to find you again, I watched base camp. I watched them argue over their own dwindling oxygen reserves. Before you’d left camp, Burke told them to turn back if the beacon wasn’t up within eighteen hours. Less full of bravado, Wills had quietly made it twenty-four.

They waited thirty. They waited as long as they could, and then they left, half an hour before your helmet radio came within range.

I wish you’d never come. I wish I could believe that your people were wise, that exploration would not be followed by expansion.

But I am sorry.

• • • •

From the bottom of the cliff, it’s a straight dash to your base camp. Forty-five minutes at most. You spent longer than you might have navigating the safe path down, the short falls and ropes and climbs, but you’re on schedule. The air is almost still in the lee of the cliff. An easy hike. You’re going to make it. You are.

When you do, Burke and the dragon are there. Everything else is not.

Burke sits. The dragon circles. Burke has her sidearm laid across her lap like a talisman, and that is keeping it at bay. It’s a beast, after all, even if a mechanical one. It’s torn between preservation of self and preservation of others.

“Wills?”

“Gone.”

Burke’s voice is a fine razor pulled over textured rock. It challenges you to ask what happened, to wonder at the oxygen level in her suit, at Wills’ navigation tablet lying discarded at her feet. You do none of these things. “The others?”

“Gone.”

You sit down next to her. You’ve been on your feet for hours and you nearly topple forwards, body instinctively pushing back against a wind that no longer blows. Once you are not uncomfortable, you let that single word unpack itself. The traces have already been smoothed away. Only the deep divots left by the habitat’s legs remain, tucked in the protective shade of the wave of rock below which you’d set up base. The two other rovers, the supplies, the comms equipment, the people—all gone.

“One hour.” Burke laughs, harsh and bitter. “We missed them by one hour. They left a message. One fucking hour!” She takes the tablet at her feet and flings it away. It hits the edge of the wave rock, splinters into steel-blue shards among the red.

You lie back. Raise your fingers. Your arm is covered in a fine down of dust. When did you last see the shiny silver-blue of your suit? Perhaps you miss lands that do not feel the need to imprint themselves on you. Perhaps you cry. It’s hard to tell. Your faceplate is opaque.

“We made it.” Time has passed. Burke’s voice is weak. “We succeeded. We made it.”

It takes you three tries to speak past the enormity of your situation. “The beacon wasn’t active long enough.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Burke snaps. She stands, stumbles, folds in on herself. Her breath comes in gasps. It’s only fitting that she runs out of air first; she’s wasted more than her share. You watch her struggling in the dust and do not have the strength to help. She was born on Earth. She does not know how to die with grace. She makes it hard, the sounds of her not breathing echoing in the confines of your helmet.

Sense leaves her. Her fingers scrabble at her helmet seal and she dies facing the planet that killed her, the statement of her success writ upon her lips like a flag claiming a country that does not recognise flags.

You are left.

Emboldened, the dragon approaches. It rounds the rock formation; you do not turn to look. Its shadow falls upon you in stages: first the head, then the front manipulator limbs, then the rest of its body. I can see your arms trembling as it settles its metal bulk beside you. The dragon is a rugged thing, streaked with decades of dust, the hydraulics in its back limbs whining with effort, but it has been here longer than either of us.

Still you do not look. Perhaps you think one death is much like another.

Now the question. You have seen the red country. You have made it this far on your own. You understand, at least a little. Enough to trust our water; enough to trust us to guide you down the cliff. Can you make the final leap? Do you know the nature of the dragon?

Time is passing. You do not move. Your breathing evens, gutters, threatens to go out. Ah. You have chosen to die with dignity. Show Burke how it’s done. One final victory. You have not understood the most important thing. Burke’s words have told at last, her obsession with success outweighing the reality of survival. She has blinded you to my presence, watching from above. She has blinded you to the salvation within arm’s reach, the oxygen spilling from the dragon’s maw, the gas-tank wings upon its back, its faithful, futile devotion to the terraforming dream.

Our country is Red. We embrace it. Dwell in it. Rejoice in it. Survive in it. You could not, in the end, have been expected to understand in it.

That’s all right.

I’ll help.

©2021 by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko is a Slovenian-born writer and translator. He grew up in Slovenia, Ireland, Australia, and the UK, and currently resides just outside Portland, Maine. He understands that his name is a bit confusing and would like you to know that “Drnovšek Zorko” is the surname. He attended Clarion West in 2019, and his work has previously appeared in Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and elsewhere. In his spare time he is a keen quizzer—British readers may recognise him from that one time he was on University Challenge. Follow him on Twitter @filiphdz.

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

Top Ten Things to See Before the World Burns

Aimee Ogden | 4767 words

Outer Belt Collective Patois [subvocalize for a list of available languages]

version 11.3.2 [subvocalize to check for updates]

With temperatures on Earth continuing to climb, Intercollective governments have set a final evacuation date¹ for the end of the Terran year. If the travel lottery pulls your census number, this is your last chance to see the homeworld’s sights! A poll of the Collective suggests that these are the ones that can’t be missed.

1. GRAND CENTRAL OVERSTATION. You can’t miss it—literally. Grand Central Overstation is the pinnacle of Pre-Diasporic construction, a 512,000-kilogram crown at the top of the Capehorn Elevator. Built for function before form, this Early Spacefaring Era waystation still welcomes all witnesses to the Earth’s final years of habitability.

Mer avoids the station’s windows while unseen technicians address the Elevator’s mechanical ailments. From the heights of the Overstation, the Earth is a lurid bruise on the night’s soft dark flesh. When he disembarked from the Pallas Express liner, he’d been unable to keep himself from stealing a glance downward.

If Mer doesn’t look again, he can’t be disappointed again.

The other travelers clot into muttering clusters. There are other tourists, a few in state-of-the-art sweltersuits from the Ceres Workshops, most in ugly-but-functional suits like the one that the Collective issued to Mer. Only two of them have full exo apparatuses like Mer does; unlike him, neither of those have opted for the model with two additional hindlimbs. The idea of extra stability appeals to him; even in its dying thralls, Earth maintains a brutal gravitational pull.

After three hours’ wait, the station’s ArtiVox comes on, announcing with expertly-engineered congeniality that the Elevator is ready for service. Mer shuffles into the boarding queue. Because of the delay, there’s a mandatory re-check of all the sweltersuits; he submits himself without complaint to the safety certification drone.

“So!” The drone’s ArtiVox is not as convincing as the station’s. It lifts Mer’s arm for seam integrity analysis. “Where are you coming in from?”

Mer winces, and not only because he isn’t used to chatty drones. It must be station-linked, and so almost certainly has deep access to passenger information, especially on Public Access data like point of origin and destination. It’s especially unsettling that this unit has a projection of a human face hovering above its shell; the animation is much more sophisticated than the Vox.

Why bother, he wonders? The Collective back home—he stumbles on that word, home, but doggedly gropes his way further down the line of thought—built its technotariat with utility in mind, not aesthetics.

Still, its pre-programmed conversation patterns are no more monotonous than those of Mer’s fellow passengers. He answers truthfully, but nonspecifically. “The Belt.”

A human being might have pressed harder, might have asked oh yeah? which rock? and Mer might have been obliged to name Euphrosyne. The drone, however, has not been programmed to care about the answers it gets from passengers and Mer is relieved of having to explain that the rock he comes from is the one that no longer exists.

Instead, the drone embarks on a new conversational branch. “Got any big plans while you’re down there?”

“I don’t know. Getting back to roots. That’s why people come here, isn’t it?” Mer can’t explain to a drone the draw of this primordial home to someone who has so recently lost the more proximate version. He can barely explain it to himself. Instead he shifts onto a trajectory that takes him farther from the truth. He can’t even explain it to himself. “Seeing the sights before there’s no more sights to see.”

The ArtiVox patter changes rhythm, shifting to a different programming module. “Do you have a preplanned itinerary? I’m authorized to provide up-to-date suggestions of resorts, touristic attractions, and activities that remain in operation.”

“Thanks.” The sweltersuit pings: all clear. Mer disengages from the drone and picks up his hand luggage. “But I’ve already downloaded the brochure.”

• • • •

2. ARKANSAS DELTA. River and blood alike have long since dried at this site of the last known battle of what historians believe were the first large-scale, organized Water Wars. No memorial was ever built for the nameless and desperate who died here, but archaeological analysis has provided us with many grisly relics of the Scarcity. [subvocalize to show sensitive intertext] [subvocalize to add map overlay of mass grave boundaries]

There are no physical barriers in the Delta. There’s nothing left to preserve this for. Mer skips the holos showing artistic interpretations of what the Water Wars might have looked like. The oc in his sweltersuit penetrates the thick gray fog and shows him what lays beneath as he strolls straight down into the broad, flat plain. The holos, however detailed, are false. Mer wants to feel something real. But as he walks the Delta in wider and wider circles, he finds himself unable to muster any kind of emotion.

Which isn’t to say he has no physiological response whatsoever. This place is so big. He stops a few times to take it all in. His mind wants the periphery of his vision to bend, to wrap around the limited scope of an Arc, a ship, a shuttle—some kind of self-contained sphere.

But the broad, echoing flatness refuses to conform to expectation. And this is only a tiny fraction of the world’s surface. There is so much empty sky—there should be a dozen rocks hurtling across the horizon. Luna is up there, coyly hiding behind all that dull aching gray. But knowing that isn’t enough. Mer needs to see it. His stomach heaves. His sweltersuit obligingly slips him an antiemetic and, he suspects, a mild sedative. The spinning in his inner ear recedes.

Hardly anyone else is here. Most Earthward tourists haven’t come to visit graves; they’re dozens of generations removed from anyone who might have been buried here. There’s one lone figure out in the distance, a hexapod meandering up and down the Delta free of sweltersuit. When Mer’s oc zooms in, he can make out that they’re using a full suite of Antarean Tek mods.

Almost certainly a Martian, then, the lucky fuck. Mer has thought about trying for Mars, but his travel authorization, with no Planet/Moon/Body of Residence marked, probably won’t get him entry. They’re choosy about new citizens. The whole point of Mars is not to be another Earth, or so the Martians like to tell themselves. Although building a private palace for yourselves while everyone else is left to scrabble for a few grubby shards of existence sounds a whole fucking lot like Earth to Mer.

The Martian is subvocalizing; notes, maybe. A researcher from the Olympian Interdisciplinary Institutes? Mer could introduce himself . . . and then what? Ask for a job cleaning the lab? Make a play for a personal relationship visa? Ha. He turns away, his vision skimming over the empty Delta. His eyes keep drifting up to the cloud-enclosed sky instead. He feels like he ought to be taking notes, too. But about what? And who would ever read them?

• • • •

3. NORTH POLE. For centuries, explorers died trying to reach this fabled spot. In the Hyperloop’s later years, a supplementary branch of the St. Petersburg-Sapporo line carried would-be explorers to the pole. Today, you can still get there by hiring a hopper. Venture out on an expedition of your own into the Midnight Sun Resort, where Earth’s wealthiest² few continued to enjoy their favorite winter sports. While most of the resort burned in 2118, the underground Glacier Ballroom endured. Take a waltz with the ghosts of another world.

A few dozen tourists are out on the artificial slopes, pretending to ski. There’s no snow, of course, but there’s a full Immerse exhibition. They take caps of each other and beam them from oc to oc, laughing.

Mer ventures into the resort. It was originally constructed within the ice, but time and heat have robbed it of its glacial shroud and its beauty. Now its cement foundations and corroded girders have been laid bare. It huddles in the shadow of the slalom course.

The place might have been pretty once, before all the EARTH FIRST, EARTH LAST and BURN, FUCKERS graffiti. Lights wake at his approach, painting overlapping circles of pale blue and purple and yellow on the floor. The solar installations must be pretty damn inaccessible to not have been scavenged in Pre-Diaspora days.

He finds the ballroom without too much trouble. Like the outside, the ballroom has been laid bare, tables and chairs removed, expensive sound and VR systems saved or stolen. Unlike the denuded façade, this room has kept its beauty. The walls scoop too high overhead; the ceiling is out of reach except to someone with expensive personal flight mods. People with that kind of mods aren’t the ones carving profanity into the paint. And people who don’t aren’t likely to have the time and disposable resources to drag a ladder to the North Pole. Still, there’s a roughly eight-foot-high ring of colorful property damage around the room. Wen and Teelee were here. Snow = Laster hoax!! I came to the North Pole and all I got was smallpox.

There’s a plaque on one wall, out of Mer’s reach. The Glacier Ballroom is made possible by the generous donation of Angell and Stuart Gilbert. Gilbert EnviroHabs: Reach for the Stars!

Another tourist pauses next to Mer and says something on the local channel; Mer fumbles with the settings of his sweltersuit earpiece. “Gilbert,” says the tourist, voice crackling in Mer’s ear, and then tumbles through a long string in one Inner Belt patois or another. Mer’s translator module isn’t working, or can’t keep up, or hasn’t been updated with this particular dialect. The tourist grimaces at his lack of comprehension. They mime an expanding gesture and make a hard, wet sound. An explosion.

Mer flinches. “Yes,” he says, at the tourist’s curious look. “They’re the ones who built the time bomb Habs.” Habs like Euphrosyne. So fragile. Poorly radiation-shielded, bad impact compensation infrastructure. The kind of missing redundancies only designed by people who know they’ll never have to risk their own lives on such a venture. In hard space, very little is truly redundant.

The tourist says something else in their own patois. Even if Mer could hear the words over the hammering in his temples, he still doesn’t know what they mean. Nothing flattering, he thinks.

Mer stands still until they give up and wander away. Then he takes the stylus out of the storage panel in his exo. The plastic of the wall doesn’t resist the sharp tip when he jams it in and carves out the words: BURN, FUCKERS.

• • • •

4. TRANSATLANTIC HYPERLOOP.  For seventy-eight years, Hyperloop trains ferried business travelers and tourists along the Americas’ coasts, across the North Atlantic, through Europe, and south to Algiers and Casablanca before crossing the South Atlantic back to its origin. From where we’re standing, seventy-eight years doesn’t sound long, but it was a major accomplishment of its time. It’s amazing to think only five years passed between the end of the Russo-Chinese conflict and the construction of this immense project! Much of the seabed track remains intact, but nothing compares to the ten mighty Pylons that traverse the Pyrenees.

Mer rides the last three functional stretches of the Hyperloop over and over again, the Iberian, the Circle of Maghreb, the Subcontinental, looping back and forth, frittering away his resettlement travel allowance. He imagines the terrifying possibility of being able to go anywhere in his entire world whenever he wished. He imagines the freedom these ancient peoples enjoyed—and remembers to whom they sold it to for the illusion of comfort.

How could you ever be from somewhere, living on a world so big? Once you lifted your feet off the ground, and started moving, what gravity would ever settle you back into a single resting place?

• • • •

5. GREAT SALT RINGS. Earth’s oceans may be gone, but they’re not forgotten. It’s said that each shore has its own flavor. You’re encouraged to collect a sample to taste later—or, if your mods allow you to visit without a sweltersuit, why wait? Be sure to bring back enough to share with your guildfamily.

The salt crumbles beneath the heels of Mer’s sweltersuit as he walks down into the wound where the Gulf of California once lay. The illusion of water shimmers on the desiccated seabed: hot, not wet. Luna used to carry the seas of old Earth with her, tides rising and falling as she came and went. If she does the same with the layer of gray steam that shrouds Earth now, the effect is less impressive.

Farther out into the Gulf, dark patches have been carved into the grayish-white. Machinery, so distant it looks like skeletal seabirds, tears at the ragged edges where dark meets light, flaying the seabed farther open. Offworld salt harvesting operations have made a fortune excavating the bounty of earth’s dead oceans for the past hundred years. “The Flavor of Home,” one brand’s ads proclaim. Even so, most of the salt will be left behind when the last Elevator lifts off.

Mer half-remembers a fragment of Earth history, or Earth legend, something about the world’s ancient peoples using salt as money. What would they think, standing here beside him, seeing this splendor gone to waste?

What appears to be a school group is collecting samples a halfburn or so upshore—a few dozen paces, Mer amends, for no one’s benefit but his own. He’s too used to measuring distance in the time it would take to traverse via vac-pack. He watches the students for a while, all color-coded in red and white sweltersuits. His oc identifies the suits, informing him that these youths come from the Collegium of Ceres.

At a signal that Mer can’t see or hear, locked into his own sweltersuit, the Collegium students all stand at once and trot back to their waiting hopper. He watches the last of them disappear inside, and the hopper shoots in a vast sweeping arc skyward.

The rest of Mer’s shuttle group is filling their own sample vials, clustered in twos and threes. Mer crouches down, too, and digs a line in the salt with one finger.

But he has no bottle to fill. And no one left to share the salt with.

He scratches harder, and strikes through to the gray sand underneath.

• • • •

6. THE MARIANAS TRENCH. Before the oceans vaporized, this place was utterly inaccessible to our ancestors. Now it’s a simple matter of reserving a seat on a hopper. It gets dark down there; bring a light and bring a friend.

After the Great Salt Rings, Mer finds himself craving human contact for the first time since his feet left Euphrosyne’s broken surface. He follows the threads sewn into the transit map by other tourists’ hoppers, follows them deep down into the wry, hungry grin that cracks the Earth’s ancient face.

This section of the brochure is tagged with #claustrophobia warnings, and looking out the hopper’s windows, Mer can see why. Even at a width of some sixty kilometers, the walls of the trench seem imminent, crushingly close.

He doesn’t mind. He’s always lived in close quarters. It’s not claustrophobic, to him; it’s comfortable. Natural.

The hopper deposits him in the jagged ring of light outside Hostel Izu. At the bottom of the world, the hostel seems unaware of the Earth’s impending demise: its upkeep is immaculate, the muted, modular curves and faint iridescence of Post-Diaspora construction.

Or perhaps the hostel is aware and has chosen not to care. The entrance seals behind Mer and equalizes to the hostel’s ambient pressure. On the other side, he pops his helmet and breathes cool air with the artificial crispness of ‘cycler treatment. This is a place that has always had the weight of the world hanging over its head, after all. Even in the valley of the shadow of death, the show must go on. Especially here. A drone is waiting to offer him a complimentary beverage dispense, which he accepts.

Clusters of guests gather on the garden terrace, at the bar, in the swimming-pool. Others are playing some kind of grav-dependent sport, shrieking and skimming over a pond of artificial ice and hammering a large ball back and forth with handheld subsonic cannons. A few have stayed inside their exo-banded sweltersuits, but most have stripped down to bare skin and polydex leggings.

Mer doesn’t know the rules and the game is probably more than his sweltersuit can handle, anyway. He chooses the terrace, sidling closer to a conglomeration of tourists, a nesting-doll collection of different rocks’ gravitational builds and body mods and sweltersuits.

One of the tourists beckons him over. “Come on, sit down.” They pat a section of artfully constructed basalt bench. Mer’s suit overlays his native Outer Belt patois over the other tourist’s native language—something Venuvian? That would make sense, if they’ve got the G-adjustment to have stripped out of a sweltersuit. “I’m Venconmigo.” He posts his travelID profile in the local channel; Mer’s translation package amends its pronoun tagging. Another series of IDs follow in rapid succession. Mer could just look at the names and faces in the profiles, but in most social structures, manual introductions remain the norm, and Venus appears no different, as Venconmigo continues, pointing. “This is Quetenganesperanza—but you can call her Que—Iyamma, Enit Lys Anning, Lep . . .”

Mer struggles to keep his head above the sea of names. So many of them are terribly long compared to what he’s used to. “Nice to meet you,” he manages, when Venconmigo’s verbal tide finally recedes.

Venconmigo smiles. His crowded teeth confirm his rock of origin, extra molars replacing canines to deal with dense Venusian mycoflora. It’s been a long time since someone has smiled at Mer. His face doesn’t remember what to do in response, and Venconmigo’s smile slides past.

So Mer is off guard when someone else asks the dreaded question: “Where are you from?”

And he answers directly, without meaning to. “Euphrosyne.”

There’s a brief pause as the others all stop to search on that name. “Oh,” says Que. “Oh—I’m sorry, mate.”

Mer mutters something noncommittal, dismissive. The conversation stumbles around him for a few moments more before it finds its footing again, but he’s already been left behind. Alone, even here. He excuses himself, unnoticed, while the others bounce between an analysis of this year’s gas-diving championships and the nominations for the new Provost of Mars.

He claims a personal sleep module deep in the hostel and seals himself in for the night. There are more things to see, on the morrow, and he’s still got travel allowance left to spend. But someone keys in an admission request before he falls asleep. He recognizes the name attached, but not the reason; he accepts anyway.

The doorway dilates to frame Venconmigo, who doesn’t enter the module. “I thought,” he said, Belt patois doled out slowly behind the careful measure of his words, “maybe you didn’t want to be alone.”

Mer doesn’t.

“I can’t—” His hands clasp together between his knees as he tries to shape his need to fit within the parameters of possibility. “The sweltersuit—the exoskeleton—”

There’s that same smile again, comforting, somehow, despite its odd density; or because of it. “We’ll make it work.” And they do, the module growing warm and damp and close around them.

They have breakfast together; a few of the other tourists join them before they’re done. Some are homeward-bound via Luna today; others have more travel time to spend collecting the sights of ancient Earth. This time, no one launches a new litany of homeworlds before Mer finishes his second cup of tea.

• • • •

7. NANAIMO CRATER. The quartz breccias are breathtaking, as is the scope of the impact site. From the lip of the crater, you can look across the Georgian Valley to the former city of Vancouver, which was destroyed by the resulting wave. Though records from this era are spotty, the FreeWeb outages caused by the loss of the massive server banks based in the region are associated with the onset of the first Water War.

It’s traditional to throw a memorial wreath down into the crater. Mer buys one from the hopper dispensebot. But he can’t make himself get out of the hopper. His visit to the Marianas Trench has drained something from him, or added some new burden. When the boarding chime sounds, he drops the wreath down at the foot of the boarding ramp and returns silently to his seat.

• • • •

8. PROJECT CONATUS LAUNCH SITE. Though we often refer to the century following the Water Wars as the “Dark Years,” centers of knowledge remained all over the planet. The Wisdoms of Amsterdam were the first to recognize the unstoppable feedback loop³ triggered by the Nanaimo impact, and to prepare accordingly. On the plateaus of the Serra da Estrela mountains, the gantries still testify to this last great project of our ancestors. The Isla Navarino Arcology is said to have provided the Wisdom Arnaz his inspiration for the first Envirosistema Seguro y Firme de Equilibrioregulación Autosuficiente launched from here, marking a vast improvement over the early Corporate-made EnviroHabs. If you’re a resident of the Venusian or Inner Belt ESFERAs, this is where it all started.

Twelve gantries stretch skyward, as if holding up habitations long since departed. Below them, powdered glass of the adjacent abandoned arcology has been trod into dust by some thousands, millions, of feet. Stepping onto it is a painfully perfect facsimile of stepping into the soft powder of Euphrosyne’s surface. A small and self-contained world, broken now.

But the reinforced durosteel still stands erect, proud; untouched by the centuries. Towering, over the dead habitat. Enduring, even to the ends of the Earth.

An unexpected loathing boils up out of Mer at the sight. He throws himself forward at a dead run. He doesn’t slow when he draws near the gantry; instead, he slams his shoulder into the solid metal.

His sweltersuit blares an alarm, registering its dismay and releasing a mild analgesic at the site of the bruise. He subvocalizes to kill the warnings and kicks the gantry instead, over and over, the ringing of the metal driving up through his heel and into every bone in his body.

It feels like impact, the impact, every time; like a microasteroid kissing the other side of the world hello and goodbye all at once, over and over and over again. A moment of loss as enduring as any Old Earth construction.

On the sixth blow, the sweltersuit kills power to the exoskeleton. Mer is not made of reinforced durosteel and he collapses under gravity’s sudden and overwhelming arrival. He flails his arm a few more times, unwilling to stop yet, unwilling to let go of this hatred that he needs as much as the exoskeleton. His wrist bangs unconvincingly against the gantry a few times before he gives up and lies, panting, motionless. A hammer-blow of grief has driven the breath from his lungs.

“Mx. Juanson,” says an Earth Voyages Inc. ArtiVox, in his ear. “Your sweltersuit has flagged your vital signs. Do you require a distress pod to be sent to your location? Failure to respond will trigger auto-dispatch.”

“No,” he croaks. “No, please.”

The ArtiVox obediently disconnects. Mer stops struggling. Storm winds make a valiant effort to rise, stirring the glass dust up in frosty swirls, then quickly ebb. After a five-minute timeout, the sweltersuit restores power to the exoskeleton, along with an admonishment about liability for damage incurred during his travels.

Mer lies where he’s fallen another few minutes before dragging himself up again. It’s almost time to go. Not to go home—he doesn’t know where that can be, now. It’s not Mars or Venus or any of the big rocks and it’s sure as fuck not lost Euphrosyne. And it’s not here, not at any deep genetic or ancestral level. It never was.

Home is an idea and it’s one he’s ready to bury. How can he look for a home? The only place he belongs right now is at the bottom of a grave.

• • • •

9. THE CASPIAN GLASS. The Russo-Chinese War ended after the detonation of a third-generation isomer bomb near the city of Saratov. For the thirtieth anniversary of the Treaty of Brussels, the Chinese government commissioned artists to etch the Glass with the names of the two million people lost or left missing in the attack. Though the Glass has fallen into disrepair, its surviving surfaces remain a beautiful and sobering sight.

The names are still legible; Mer’s faceplate overlays them in Unified characters atop the timeworn Cyrillic. Fedya Borovkov. Ludmila Petrova. Maksim Blum. When he crouches down to touch them, the sweltersuit material admits the fine-carved lines beneath his fingers.

There’s about as much space in the margins between names as he’d guessed from the brochure. He takes out the laser stylus and switches it on. The glass glows supernova-hot as he presses the tip against it, adding new lines between the old.

There are two thousand and fifty-seven names, far too many for him to add by hand. He marks out a few of the most important: Soma Angsdottir. Ara Juanson. Chuy Juansbarn. When the cheap laser stylus overheats and burns out, he flips it over and breaks its carrying clip, scratching the last few letters out by hand.

When his wrist cramps and his fingers refuse, he sits back and rests.

He’s tired and travel is no longer the empty distraction it should be. It’s time to go.

• • • •

10. THE MOON. There’s no vantage point like it. If you’re not a native Lunarian, linger a moment to look across her stern white face. See if you recognize her from all those old poems and songs. Try to time your visit right to catch a full Earth, including the Great Southern Storm system. Imagine what she looked like before the Overcloud formed, in her days of green and blue. Maybe, like many fellow travelers⁴, you’ll write a poem of your own, on your way home.

Last but not least: Luna herself, a living monument and museum to the days of the Early Diaspora. Like Grand Central Overstation, Port Tranquility is all heavy hulking metal. Unadorned, except for layers of graffiti decades thick. There is a rhythmic busyness to the movements on the streets and in the airless sky, drone traffic buzzing along invisible cartographic lines, shuttle personnel heading home to Barracksburg at the end of long service shifts.

Mer stands beneath its flashing departures and arrivals displays, double-blinking to dismiss the tireless ads that pop up in his periphery. Destinations run the gamut from decadent to dreary: the Olympian Conglomerate, Flora, Hebe, Pallas, the Venusian Highlands.

Mer doesn’t want to go anywhere. He wants to be somewhere. A place that doesn’t exist anymore. Two such places, the dead rock and the dying one, and him caught in the middle, stranded between two abruptly terminating timelines that reach toward each other but can’t quite meet in the middle.

The ads slow as the travel AI tries to recalculate what Mer might possibly want—unaware, like the best Capitalist algorithms of ages past, that there are some needs that cannot be met by consumption. Mer isn’t upset at the thing; it’s far subsapient. Central Marineris? Blink. First Farra? Blink. Ceres? Blink.

The AI incorporates the haptic feedback and changes tack: an application for temporary Lunarian residency.

Mer drops onto a bench, nearly crushing a cleaning drone, which issues a belated proximity warning. The bench feels solid beneath Mer’s sweltersuited hands, but feelings are liars.

Mer wants to be somewhere. Somewhere could be here. The Moon isn’t a home. But, with her face ever locked inward, she might be the last thing that still remembers what a home is. They have that much in common, she and he.

Above, a quarter-Earth squints at him through the clear dome. He has witnessed so much death already. He could witness one more, he thinks. Even one so great and terrible as that.

¹. Belt Collective Newsbriefing 20.18.2397

². “5 Things You Never Knew About Pre-Collective Economies”

³. “Breakdown of Terrestrial Homeostatic Mechanisms Following the Nanaimo Impact: A Holistic Retrospective Approach”. Piersson, Vang, Ha, et al, Historical Atmospheric Studies vol. 16.3 p.71-93.

⁴. Mer Juanson, “Stormshroud”

©2021 by Aimee Ogden.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her fiction has appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Escape Pod, and in 2021 her novellas “Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters” and “Local Star” were published by Tor.com and Interstellar Flight Press respectively. A graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop, Aimee also co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, a magazine for fun and optimistic speculative fiction. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her spouse, her children, and a dog named Commander Riker.

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

When Sri Left the Ruined City

Donyae Coles | 5465 words

Listen, listen, hush, listen. You’re wrong about the war. You’re wrong about why the world is changing. Why it is dying all around us.

That the Gods, many and unknowable be they, wanted this: That’s what you were taught, that’s what you believe. That’s why they gave the Memra their fire beasts and the drawing light that they wield so wildly. That’s why the Reach sings those great stone men into being to crush that flaming war machine and all the little magics that fall underneath it.

But why? Ask yourself why your mama could make thread dance or a cook fire that never burned the stew. Ask, ask, why your cousin can find whatever small thing is lost. Why some slum-born nobody should be able to breathe a light so bright it burns your sin away. Gods’ gifts. That’s what you were taught. That’s what you believe. And that part is right, but it’s got no doing with the war. Forget what you believe, listen to what I know.

This is how it began.

Sri never ran to the Tower. Work was long and would be there when she got there but she ran that day. Ran right from her pallet on the floor in the little room she kept nestled in what used to be called the Dusts, all through the City and right up to the Tower. She wasn’t alone, of course, everyone ran that day but only Sri went up.

What City? The City with the Tower. You know it. Hush, listen and you’ll know more. Already you are knowing more. I can see it in your eyes, sweetlings, now hush.

Her breath dragged from her lungs and out of her open mouth in a panting rhythm like a dog but her mouth was dry, her spit stolen by her desperate dash through all of those other desperate bodies that day. She took the first of the great stone steps to the Unspoken One’s Head as undignified as the dying dog she sounded like. But then, to a God, what is a mortal?

Her body burned around her from the effort, her form, mortal and weak was unfit by the Priest’s measure for the job she had set out to do when she heard the clang of the alarm bells that morning, but she hadn’t asked the Priests and they hadn’t stopped her when she bolted past them and took to the stairs. So dog or not, she went.

Just as well, she hadn’t the time to stop.

The taste-scent of them, the Unspoken, hit her tongue. Rich and warm, a spice that couldn’t exist anywhere on the planet and certainly not in the dark pit of the God Tower.

The pit, the stairs, you must be confused. Of course. You little sweetlings, your mamas and the mamas before her and the mamas even before that wouldn’t remember what that place, this place, looked like before. But listen well, I know, I remember.

What? I told you, you know the City. Don’t call it by that name, not with me, sweetlings. It is the City. It has always been the City. It will always be the City.

Here, listen. The tower was built by Irx long ago, long before Sri and she was long ago from us. You follow that thread at least? It’s not like the towers built by men. This one didn’t spiral up to the heavens, no. To look at it from outside you wouldn’t have called it a tower at all. It was short and squat like a frog, but inside, even so, inside you had to travel around winding, wide stairs, more stairs than you would think if you were standing outside. Because it was God-built and when you’re inside a space built by Gods you are not in space for human understanding. This you will understand, the most important lesson but not yet, not yet.

So you follow now, sweetlings, you can tie that image and let me tell you what he done did. It’s not part of Sri’s story, that’s the important thing you know, but to understand the lay of it, you have to know this old tale. Forgotten by everyone but me and the Gods, I suppose. So now you’ll remember it too, keep it alive for what it is.

The why of it is lost. Whatever came between the Unspoken and Irx isn’t important. Only that when they battled, it was Irx that won. Mayhap the Unspoken was too soft but it didn’t matter then, doesn’t matter now. Irx tore them to pieces. He built his tower, dug out a hole in the ground so deep it went down to where there was another, older city that everyone had forgotten. Irx cast the Unspoken’s body down and strung his head up over it. And that was where Sri ran, up those wide steps while everyone else went down to that deep, dark forgotten place.

She passed the Altar of Irx but did not pause to pay reverence as she should. It would not have mattered, it was clear that Irx was not listening. That whatever favor he had paid humanity before, the long years of worship since had not bartered any further light from him.

We are just wardens, Sri thought in that long ago, clearly seeing the role of her people in the great Gods’ wars. They were meant to hold the Head and so long as that happened, Irx did not care for them. She slowed, the steps slippery from the mist caused by the Unspoken’s tears. The air turned from dry to wet as she passed the altar, thick with the scent of them, but such was the power of Irx that not even the Unspoken’s tears could pass his altar.

Will he come for me, for what I mean to do? The thought came, pressing at the back of her head, the base of her skull like a dull throb, an ache, but she did not stop, she forced one careful step in front of the other.

What? What? Am I Sri? Oh no! You’ll make me choke on my tea, you make me laugh so hard! No sweetlings, not I. These old bones are just for the tales, the telling, and you, young ones, are interrupting with silly questions. Now hush, listen, before I take your sweet bones, add them to my collection.

She moved around wide puddles that had collected where the floor sank, damaged from the Unspoken’s rage when they still raged, long before Sri. The tower did not fall; it had cracked and buckled but it would never fall. That’s what Sri had been taught, that is what Sri believed.

Her eyes caught the dancing lights that moved in the watery depths of the puddles, far deeper than they should have been. They beckoned her to drink, to dive in. Such was the way of the Unspoken’s sorrow. She ignored them, as she had been taught. To gaze into the depths was to invite the displeasure of Irx.

She wondered if the old priests had lied. If they had seen what wonders waited in the tears of the Unspoken. She wondered if that was why their borders had been breached, why murder had come to their land. Why the Far Kingdom had attacked them. She didn’t know, and it didn’t matter.

What sweetlings? What was the name of the Far Kingdom? I do not know and it does not matter. They were some other from somewhere other and now would be someone other all again. It is not important. Hush. Listen.

She knew that Irx protected the land. She knew their borders were sovereign and God-touched. She knew no harm was able to cross it. It was what she had been taught, what she believed.

But harm had come. Their borders had been crossed. The army had made its way to the City, they would be in the Tower soon. The priests and the last of the people who sought refuge had gone down into the nameless old city. They would pray that the beasts that had sprouted from the decaying body of the Unspoken and roamed there would not eat them, that Irx’s light would protect and guide them. But Irx’s light had already left them.

Her lot, she had decided as soon as she heard the brash clang of the bells tolling the fall of the City, would be thrown with the Unspoken. They were a God, a captive one, but surely they had some power, some remaining essence that could save her, save her people she reasoned. The pools and their secret wonders were proof.

So it was that she took the stairs, as she did four times in every eight days to clean floors before the God (though they be cast out, they be divine and deserved some consideration but never more than we give Irx, so she had been taught, so she believed).

The light changed as the glow of Irx was replaced. The Unspoken’s light shone differently than Irx’s. Softer, more green than the white of Irx. When they slept, the stairs fell dark and the trail of their tears shone, lighting the way. Sri saw it from time to time and she stared in wonder at the glowing path their pain created for the priests did not condemn this act of looking.

The steps ended and she found herself bathed in that light as she stepped into the great hall of the Unspoken.

There, above the pit that led all the way down into the forgotten place the Priests and the City went to, hung the Head of the Unspoken One.

Huge, it took up enough space to fit a hundred worshipers, that did fit so many when it came time for the Great Punishment. When men and women from the City came to spit on and throw refuse at the piece of divinity that hung in their midst. It was as Irx wanted, she had been taught. On those days the Unspoken kept their eyes closed and when all the others had left, she used her long brush to wipe away the refuse from their face. When they smiled in return, it felt like a tiny sun had erupted in her chest. By morning the garbage from the City would be cleaned and she would sleep soundly all the next day and night, her dreams filled with strange things.

They looked human, like Sri, like us, in many ways. The head had a familiar shape but there were too many eyes, all mismatched. They dotted their forehead and chin, blinking in some rhythm only the Gods knew and flashing strange colors that eyes could not be. They dripped near constant tears that ran in a channel past their wide nose and down their chin. Their ears were long, animal-like, and pointed toward the sky. She had seen their teeth, too many for a mouth but their lips smiled sweetly at her and she had seen the eyes stop crying. Their skin was purple, blue, green depending on the light.

Their neck was a pulpy mess of flesh and bone where it had been taken from their body. Even after eons it still looked painful, but no blood dripped from it. And pierced throughout their face, the chains. Metal that was not gold hung in thick links attached to brow and lip and nose and ear holding the head up. The chains strung all the way up to the ceiling that no man could reach and back down to some strange crank that Irx had left there.

Maybe Irx meant to release the Unspoken someday but Sri had never been told if he did and she did not think on it.

They heard her when she entered. Their many eyes focused on her and she felt, as she always felt, small in their gaze.

“The Far Kingdom has attacked us,” she said, blurting out the words like a child. She had never spoken to them before. Four days in every eight she came and cleaned. She sang songs while she worked, not to them – it was forbidden, but she sang and they could hear. But she never spoke to them. It was forbidden to be so direct, so she had been taught.

Their many brows twisted, glittering with the hoops that snared them as their lips pulled into a small frown.

Bold merely for making it so far, she walked to the edge of the floor, as close as she could be before the gaping hole that led to the far below. Close enough to reach the God that hung suspended on divine chains that hadn’t moved since Irx had left their plane and returned to the Godlands. “They are overtaking the City. They’ve taken it. They will kill everyone. I need,” she paused here, unsure how to go on, her voice faltering. “I would like your help,” she tried again, more humble, she was only human.

Their brows rose this time, eyes wide, their tears stopping in their surprise. It had been an eon since any mortal had asked them for anything.

“I’ll give you whatever you require. You’re a God. I have to pay the proper tributes. I don’t know what they are, no one knows anymore but tell me, I’ll give you anything,” she promised without thinking. Without really threading that she hadn’t really asked for anything. But she made her pledge even so.

Their frown lifted and a soft expression came over them, a small, gentle smile. Why had Irx battled them? Why do we punish them, she thought, charmed, for the Unspoken was charming. Is charming, to be true about it. She reached out then and did something else she had never done. Something that was likely forbidden, but the priests had never spoken against it because no one would dare.

She touched them.

She placed the flat of her hand on the Unspoken’s chin, just so. Their skin felt soft, like the finest of fabrics. A warmth like the spring’s sun filled her body, starting with her hand and running a path through her, and she knew that the priests had been wrong to side with Irx, to warn her away from gazing into their collected tears. The priests had been wrong about many things. The Unspoken sighed, a sad, content brush of strange scented air.

“Please,” she whispered wishing she had spoken to them before, that she had touched them before. She looked into their eye, the one closest to her, felt their heavy gaze, wondering if it would crush her if they held their full power and not just a fraction locked in their many weeping eyes.

They blinked slowly, just once with every eye and she relaxed, felt tears bubble up in her. They smiled softly; the flesh moving under her hand, as they looked to the wall where their chains led.

The God Machine, the great machination of Irx.

She nodded, she understood. Of course, what could they do chained as they were?

She crossed the room as she had every day that she cleaned. The light of the Unspoken shown into the corners of the space, illuminating the gears that lined the wall, spiraling up and outwards. Even their light could not reach the ceiling.

Their tears had rusted the machine. What had once been dark metal now flaked orange-red. She swallowed the fear that it wouldn’t move and found the lever, human-sized, as if it had always been meant for her hand. Strange, she thought, that a god would leave something for a lowly man to use.

The rust flaked off under her palms and gritting her teeth, she threw her weight, such as it was, against it. Sri was a small thing, truth be told. Insignificant but enough for what was needed then. The machine groaned and then gave. The lever pulled out of her hand and she fell back as it spun, the ancient chains clanking and groaning. She turned in time to see the Unspoken drop, loosed from their prison and swallowed by the darkness. The chains that had held them swayed long and slack into the shadow.

Did I make a mistake, she thought, dropping to her hands and knees before the pit.

The Tower shook. The scent of her fear spilled from her.

The Tower shook again, the great chains that held the Unspoken rattled, pulled taut, and with a great crash something came free from the great machine and the chains, fully loose, rushed through the gears, breaking and crashing as they flew up the wall to the ceiling and then before Sri’s wide eyes, down into the pit. Again the world fell still and silent.

She sat, her body growing stiff and cold in the tear-damp room but she couldn’t bring herself to move. She waited, staring into the dark pit, the hairs on the back of her neck pricking up in fear. “Please,” she whispered, praying in the desperate way of mortals in hopes that they would hear, would answer. “I’m sorry. I should have freed you sooner. I should have noticed before.” The words fell from her mouth into the darkness and she hoped that they could hear her, understand her regret.

The tower shuddered and she held her breath. Again the floor vibrated as something large hit the walls far below her.

“Please,” she whispered again into the darkness and it answered, the tower rumbling as a massive hand reached from it, gripping the side of the pit.

The skin of the hand was purple, blue, green. Seven fingers attached to a palm. Another joined it on the opposite side, framing Sri inside of them. Hands ringed the hole the Unspoken had fallen into for a moment before the god lifted themself from the darkness and for the first time Sri saw their full form. The first mortal or immortal in an eon to have done so.

Many arms sprouted from a long torso topped with a slim throat and there the face that she had grown so used to, had touched so recently. On every wrist they wore a manacle that shimmered like gold but was not gold, was not any metal that Sri would know. The manacles led to heavy chains, familiar in their make if not their color. The chains lead back to the Unspoken’s head clipped as they had been through flesh and bone, running from brows to ears, nose and lips and she understood then what Irx had done to hold them. Through some trick that only gods could pull, Irx had wrapped the Unspoken’s chains around their machine, had used what they adorned themselves with to hold their body and their head separate from each other. A fury she did not understand ripped through her as the Unspoken came further into view.

They pulled their body from the darkness, their head reaching the ceiling, and in their divine glow she could finally see it, so far above it may as well have been the sky itself.

Massive claws tipped with talons balanced on either side of the hole as the Unspoken pushed against the ceiling. Stones fell, large, impossible stones and Sri knew that the Priests had been right at least about the Tower. Irx had built it but they were wrong about how long it would stand. The Unspoken would topple it. Sri screamed, all that bravery that had led her feet and hands there gone as the stones smashed around her, tumbling through the floor leaving large holes.

The Unspoken paused, glancing down. She felt it, the same pressure, as if their focus were a weight on her.

They reached down, one strange hand wrapping around her form and she squeaked in surprise as they lifted her, holding her close to their chest, buried in a forest of arms. The strange spice scent filled her nostrils, a warmth that felt like summer, winter’s fire, and something else low in her belly filled her.

She heard the ceiling shudder, more stones crashing until the great Tower gave one last sigh and the facade fell. She watched, safe, from the cover of the Unspoken’s many hands for a moment as below them, the floor broke away. A fleeting thought for the people who were trapped underneath before they lifted her with them and Sri, the poor cleaner laid eyes on the Godlands.

What she saw, I cannot say. It is not known by anyone but Sri and the gods above what wonders she saw on that day. Whatever the Unspoken showed her, she never spoke of it, not in all the years since. What is known to us poor mortals, to me and now to you sweetlings, is that she went. And even if I don’t have all the pretty bits of the story, I know what happened, what Sri learned, the parts that matter. Listen well, my sweetlings, I’m going to tell you now.

The Great and Holy Irx (a god still no matter of what happens next, we honor the divine, sweetlings) sat quivering before the Whole and Angry Unspoken and Sri understood all she had to.

She understood why they had not come to save her people, that their worship had never mattered to him because before his greatness, they were all nothing. Nothing at all. To him, all that mattered was that the Unspoken stay locked and held down by the press of their own body in the snare of their own chains as revenge for whatever it was that Gods took revenge for.

And because Sri understood that, she understood that all the prayers and tears would not bring Irx to help her people. That they were doomed, doomed below. But sweetlings, what happened to them is another story. Another tale. Let’s get through this one. Irx would never help them and the divine they had been so close to, the being they could touch, they had thrown garbage at and kept chained.

In any case, the Unspoken destroyed Irx and became a single God in an empty universe that should not be empty and this next part, we know. I know and now you will know. But they had felled the usurper and the others, down below, trapped as they had been trapped, would begin to struggle to break their own chains. Sri could hear them faintly, calling in all the ways that gods call.

The Unspoken lifted Sri’s poor form. The chains that had imprisoned them hung delicately about their face. They reached one finger over her and touched her head. Her eyes fluttered closed, a warmth spun in her, reaching out from her core and spilling into her body. The air shifted and it felt like someone had wrapped their arms about her before the softest of kisses covered her. Just as quickly as the feelings had come they faded, leaving only a murmur of warmth along her skin.

Her eyes opened slowly to the Unspoken’s smiling face. A new weight sat on her shoulder and she looked down to find a chain over it. She followed it with her fingers until it disappeared into the base of her skull. She looked up at the god again, tracing the chain with her eyes back to their throat.

My acolyte, my voice, she heard in a way that felt more like a memory. Like something she knew to be true. Blessed with their chain, she had become something more than human but less than god.

They smiled again before passing her form down through their hands. Lower and lower she traveled until the last hand opened up and she stepped off their palm back into the tower. The hand pulled up and away and above her the normal sky filled the air.

Alone and cold she picked her way down the ruined Tower. The pools of water were empty, dried up. The god gone, they held no more delights. She wished she had looked when they were still alive and full of magic. She wished she hadn’t listened to the Priests.

Slowly she traveled to the main floor where the heavy doors made from thick steel that could only be opened by the arms of a thousand men stood broken from their hinges on the floor. If the Far army had been there, there was no sign of them now. There was no sign of anyone. No soldiers or her people who had chosen the depths.

She climbed over the doors and walked out into the City, traveling away from the Tower. Buildings lay broken and ransacked but dirt and weeds had grown over it all as if the war had been long ago. They didn’t lay in ruin, it had become ruins and Sri realized that she had been gone a very, very long time.

She heard laughter. People, she thought, excited, turning her body to the sound, her walk becoming a run as she followed the laughter and shouts through the remains of winding streets that were familiar in the way that bones are familiar. The shape known but the parts that made them something you loved gone.

She came to a group of children playing in an open lot, their mothers standing and sitting against the far wall, engrossed in their own conversations. Their clothes were different from hers. Simple dresses where her people had worn robes and leggings. Their hair was twisted into thick braids, not the thin ropes that adorned her head.

They must have seen it too. One woman stepped away from the wall, wary. “Where ya from, girl?”

Sri meant to say here. To explain she lived in the City. To ask what had happened to the Far army, to her people. “The Tower,” came out.

“That ruin?” the woman snorted. “Girl must be touched.” The woman shook her head and then motioned for her to come closer. “Come on then, we’ll get you fed and cleaned up. Keep you until we can find your people.”

Sri heard a soft jingle, the click of link against link and did as the woman asked.

Her name was Vosgi. She explained Sri to her husband while she sat in a chair like a child. Vosgi’s own children watched wide-eyed as the woman sat a bowl in front of her and she ate like an animal, slurping the stew up, her body only remembering all at once that it needed food, water, a pot. That it was not something divine but human, so human.

Sri let herself be led to a bath where the woman sang soft songs and undid her hair. Out of the braids it fell much longer than she remembered it. The water turned murky.

“What happened to the people that used to live here,” she asked quietly, her reflection wavering in dirty water.

Vosgi laughed. “No one’s lived here for centuries before we came here and settled. It’s good land. The stone’s worth something. Honest work to be had.”

“And your gods?” she whispered.

The woman snorted, squeezing water out of her longer than she remembered it hair. “Gods, what about them? We pray, that’s it.”

Sri felt the chain tug on her, pulling at the back of her mind. When she slept, clean and fed by a stranger, she dreamed soft, warm dreams of living stars.

She woke when the night was still and dark, a soft ringing, a gentle push. She slipped out of the bed and padded with her quietest steps to where Vosgi’s children slept. Gently she woke the boy and shushing him led him from the house.

You may think, sweetlings, that you wouldn’t have gone. You world-weary young, just out of your training pants, but you would have as surely as anyone would have. The Sri that came back from the God Lands was a Sri that gives no man a choice but to follow. Or boy as the story goes.

She took him out into the ruins that used to be her city before her world ended, following old paths buried under rubble, waiting, waiting for some sign. She stopped, her neck bending, the sound of chains jingling and clinking in the air and she turned, expecting to see the Unspoken’s smiling face but finding only empty air. Something in the rubble of a building sparkled.

Curious, she moved toward it, the sound of the chain following her every step as she lifted her legs and body over a half-crumbled wall into a kitchen where the stove had fallen in. An idol to Irx sat broken beside it. She moved a few bricks while the boy followed her path.

The space looked different. In the light of the stars she could see from what should have been just stone with nothing growing, something strange and twisted had sprouted. The new plant seemed to glow in the starlight as whatever had waited in the pools of tears that once trailed down the tower steps had glowed.

“What is it?”

She could hear the wonder in his voice, the sound of a child who had never been told that such beauty was evil, that such light was wrong. She kept digging until she couldn’t. She had gone as far as she could. There, in a crack she saw something shine. Frowning, she reached forward but she couldn’t get more than her fingers past. Whatever waited inside slipped through them like sand.

She sighed.

“What are you doing? Let me help!” the boy said, eager in the way that children are to be involved, his hand slipped through the crack, lizard quick, and pulled back, grasping something in his fist.

She caught a flash of it as he opened his hand. A small thing, a bit of tangled string around a stone, maybe? But at the sight of it she sighed.

In front of her the boy went still, staring at his palm, his eyes wide, the pupils grown to their fullest before his eyes closed and he smiled. When he blinked, he looked around, confused. Whatever it was, it had left them.

Or at least left her. The boy ran back to his home, feet sure over the stone. She wondered what he would dream now, what he would be able to do. What gift he had been given for freeing a God.

She turned away from the City. There was nothing there for her now. Her purpose was forward. To free the Gods. To find their acolytes.

To help the world remember. To end the age that Irx had begun.

As she walked through the remains of the City, she thought about the Unspoken, she thought about her people that they hadn’t saved. She thought of denying them. But then she remembered the smile of the boy and the warmth in her and she couldn’t.

The priest had been wrong. Her people hadn’t understood. The gods were varied and many. Her god was singular. Irx had wanted it all for himself. He had emptied the heavens for that taste of a connection. But Irx had been wrong too. As wrong as the Priests. As wrong as she had been for so long before the Unspoken blessed her with the gift of Vision.

The world no longer remembered the gods when Sri left the ruined City. And Sri, the last mortal who knew them, found them wherever she went. And the more people she helped, the more people learned to look. And the more they learned to look, the more the Gods called to them. And the more they called, the more things changed. Like the tide pools full of tears, the gods spill power so that we will notice them, and we do. And the more men found them, found that power, the more they forgot what it was to be with other men. It’s easy to forget to be a person when you’ve been held by a God, sweetlings. Remember that, thread it, tie it to you.

And that, my sweetlings, is how the world began to die, why it is dying even while we live in it and breathe. But, now you know the truth, you know the tale and perhaps there are gods left to bestow their gifts on you too. Maybe you’ll find one to help you survive all this. Maybe I’ll replace this old story with one of yours. Only the Gods know, my sweetlings, and we may thread them but we will never know them.

Now off with ya, these old bones are tired. Let me go to my dreams. And I leave you with yours.

©2021 by Donyae Coles.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Donyae Coles has had a number of works appear in various podcasts, magazines, and anthologies. She has recently sold her debut novel, Midnight Rooms, but a list of her short works can be found on her website, donyaecoles.com. You can follow her on Twitter @okokno.

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

Entanglement, or How I Failed to Knit a Sweater for My Boyfriend

Carrie Vaughn | 4590 words

This is a story about how you are not supposed to knit a sweater for your boyfriend.

The thinking goes like this: a sweater is some of the most complex knitting one can attempt. First is the expense: it takes a lot of yarn to knit a sweater, especially one for a well-built, broad-shouldered man who works out, and if you’re being fancy about it you want the good yarn, the all-natural merino blend, the pretty, pettable yarn, and that stuff isn’t cheap. Second is the sizing. Knitting a scarf requires no sizing at all, you just keep going until it’s done. Hats are easy enough to estimate and stretchy besides. But a sweater? Has arms and armholes and necks and lengths and widths that all have to be just right if the finished product isn’t going to be a laughable, lumpy mess, or just sad. Never mind if you decide to put in cables or some other pattern. A lot of anxiety goes into knitting a sweater, especially if you’ve never done it before. Not to mention time.

The thinking goes that putting all that effort into the gift will jinx the relationship. You will knit the sweater, which becomes symbolic of far more than a quaint handmade garment. You will give him the sweater, and he will gaze upon it not with love and admiration, but with dismay, because on a deep subconscious level he will understand the symbolic commitment involved in knitting a sweater for him and realize he does not reciprocate. The sweater, which you have so devotedly created in stolen hours on lunch breaks so you could surprise him, hurriedly shoving it into a bag and bringing out a decoy project if he comes home unexpectedly, putting love into every stitch, will come to mark the beginning of the end when he realizes he maybe isn’t as into you as he thought.

The thinking goes, do not knit a sweater for your boyfriend until he is more than a boyfriend, until he has committed.

My thinking goes, even that’s no guarantee that he’ll regard your epic project with the same fraught love that you put into it. Making a commitment is no guarantee that he, or you, will keep it. So my question is this: when is it all right to knit your boyfriend a sweater?

And if your boyfriend has wings: how?

• • • •

I’ve knitted sweaters before. I’m confident of my ability to knit sweaters that fit well, using the expensive yarn. That isn’t my problem.

I’ve snuck a tape measure under the pillow so that once Alex has fallen asleep, I can size him up. He’s half on his side, half on his stomach, hugging the pillow so it pooches up to cradle his head. His skin is between tan and brown, his hair dark and swept back, just long enough to delightfully tangle one’s fingers in. He has an almost constant dusting of a near five-o-clock shadow. He’s muscular, broad shoulders sweeping down to a trim waist, curving backside, strong legs. Sheets draped alluringly over his hips, his wings spread out behind him.

The wings have cream-colored feathers. The curve of them reaches up by his ears, the tips sweep down by his knees, and they smell of linen drying in sunshine.

Tape measure deployed: seven inches between the wings, six inches down from where his neck meets his shoulders. Where they attach to his back: six and three-quarters inches. Actually, the left is six and one-quarter, a whole half-inch smaller, and it makes me wonder if angels are left- or right-winged. I stare at him a moment, trying to work out the physiology of it, which makes no sense. As muscular as his shoulders are, they’re not enough to support much less operate a pair of wings this size. He’s too heavy to fly, one would think.

I try not to touch him—he’s a light sleeper. I hold the tape measure hovering just above his skin. He feels it anyway and shifts, looking over his shoulder.

I quickly hide the tape behind my back.

“What’re doing?” he mumbles, blinking sleepily at me, face still half-pressed to the pillow.

The thing about dating an angel, even a fallen angel, is they know when you’re lying. I usually have no interest in lying to him. I wince a little and say, “It’s a surprise.” It isn’t a lie.

He lifts a brow. Smiles a little. “Okay.”

When he reaches for me, I drop the tape off the side of the bed and snuggle up to him. His arms wrap around me, and the nearer wing settles over me like a blanket.

• • • •

I don’t know where Alex gets his clothes. He might magic them from the ether. I’ve never seen him do this, but I’ve never really seen him do anything magical. He wears clothes, and they fit, somehow. I’ve never bought clothes for him—there are plenty of other gifts to bring him. He likes homemade food, craft beer, microdistilleries, and unusual soaps. His current soap is juniper and he smells faintly of a forest after he showers. I never seem to be looking right at him when he strips. Even when I’m the one peeling off his shirt, I somehow get distracted by the hair on his chest or the way his arms flex before I can really study how the shirt fits over the wings. I’d much rather look at him than his clothes, which is why he takes off the clothes, after all.

Which begs the question of why I want to knit him a sweater in the first place. It isn’t like he’s ever complained of the cold. He’s one of those men who’s a furnace, who I can stick my icy feet against and he doesn’t complain.

It’s not a sweater, it’s a symbol, and the old knitters’ warning rises up again.

It’s just a sweater. I want to knit him a sweater because I can.

I think.

If I can figure out how to get it over the wings.

• • • •

Not many people can see the wings.

I can see angels because I almost died once. I couldn’t see angels and then I could. We met at the local farmer’s market when I was looking at asparagus, and he brushed past me. I saw the wings and tried to get out of the way. He turned back to look, his brow furrowed.

“Did you just . . . you can see them?”

“Yeah,” I said a little breathlessly. He was six inches taller than me and his T-shirt was just exactly tight enough. We moved a little closer—we were blocking traffic. “I drowned when I was eighteen. Well, almost drowned. I got better. Obviously.”

His expression relaxed with understanding. “I’m sorry. That you almost drowned, not that you got better.”

“I’m glad I can see you.” I immediately blushed because it was such a silly forward thing to say.

“So, this is going to sound weird, but I work as a lifeguard sometimes and I’d be interested to hear how . . . professionally speaking, I mean. If it’s not too traumatic.”

“Oh, it’s fine. There wasn’t actually a lifeguard around and I honestly don’t remember it very well, I don’t know if that will be helpful at all.” I’d been river rafting. It had been a very slow river, a very lazy trip, and somehow I still managed to fall overboard and get stuck. Next thing I knew I was staring up at sky with EMT’s surrounding me and being told I’d stopped breathing. The next day I saw my first wings. That was how I knew I’d really been dead, just for a moment or two.

“Can I buy you a coffee?” he asked.

Yes. Yes he could.

• • • •

I’m thinking buttons. Maybe a reverse cardigan, though that seems strange. Put a couple of holes in the back, or a flap that can button down between the wings. That might do it.

I work in a yarn shop, so I can tell myself this is a professional problem as well as a personal goal. It’s a slow afternoon, only a couple of customers: a man pawing through sock yarn in the corner, and his long-suffering boyfriend, who clearly isn’t a knitter, patiently waiting a couple of feet away and staring at his phone; and a determined gray-haired matron in a suit peering at a rack of needles through reading glasses.

I’ve got my base pattern laid out in front of me, the basic size and shape of the sweater I’ll make. I’ve got my yarn picked out, a good, soft wool with a colorway in dark blues and grays, like a stormy twilight sky. I just have to figure out the back. I’m making notes.

Bette, who owns the shop, comes by and looks over my shoulder. “What’re you planning?”

“A sweater.”

She studies the pattern. Tilts her head, squints. “That . . . looks like it has too many pieces to be a sweater. “

I’m playing around with the idea of panels, or a gap with an i-cord binding for the wings to go through. “It’s an experiment.”

She’s skeptical. So am I, to be honest. Well, if it starts to go wrong I can always frog it and try again. A big part of knitting that beginners don’t always understand is you have to be ready to unravel anything, no matter how much work you’ve already put in.

I choose my needles: 24” circular, size 7, at least to start. I draw out a length of yarn from the first skein.

I cast on.

• • • •

Now and then I see someone else with wings.

We’re sitting in a park sharing lunch. These days, Alex is working as a bartender at a brewpub. I’ve learned that angels really are guardians, and they have their focus, their interests. Alex likes lifeguarding, as he said when I met him, but he really likes looking after makers. People who make things. He likes working for businesses that started out as someone making something, so he ends up at a lot of craft breweries. He’s worked in wood shops and garden centers, and even a van conversion business once. His eyes lit up when I told him I work in a yarn shop. It was the first time a date ever had that reaction to my job.

“There. You know them?” I nod at a tall being with their hair cut very short, wearing a tank top to reveal ropy, powerful arms. Brown wings sweep behind, and I can’t quite tell how the shirt fits over them. They’re walking across the other side of the park. They glance over once, give Alex a little nod, and continue on.

“Yeah,” he answers with an unenthusiastic sigh. “Don’t worry about it.”

I hadn’t actually worried about seeing angels until he said not to.

Angels are veterans of the War in Heaven, and the War in Heaven created this debased world. People forget that angels fought on both sides. Lucifer was an angel.

You can’t really tell which side any individual angel fought on, not just by looking. While you tell yourself of course you’d want to be with a soldier of Heaven, you actually need to think about that, because the soldiers of Heaven are, well, obedient. Perhaps unimaginative. I’ve never learned for certain which army Alex fought for. He says it doesn’t matter, because the world that war was fought in doesn’t exist anymore.

He likes helping people. Whatever he was then, that’s what he is now.

• • • •

We share an apartment within walking distance of downtown, which we picked together, mostly because the kitchen was big enough for him and his wings to turn around in.

When I get home he’s already gone to work, and I’ll have a couple of hours to work on the sweater before he gets back. First, I clean up a little, get the dishes out of the sink and the clothes from the bedroom floor. They’ve piled up and Alex kind of just doesn’t notice messes, so I do it. I study his shirts, and they’re just shirts, solid, no way to tell how he gets them over his head or how the wings fit through them. Some divine miracle.

I’m just knitting a sweater. It won’t be miraculous but it will be fine.

The ribbing for the collar goes quickly. Next, the yoke, increasing the stitches to expand across the chest.

Knitting is binary. There are two basic stitches upon which every pattern is based: the knit and the purl. Needle up or needle down. The one and the zero. It’s a language. You can combine the stitches a dozen different ways after that to make all sorts of shapes and patterns, but it starts with the binary. Experienced knitters can see what the finished pattern will look like just by glancing at the code, the Ks and Ps and ss1s and k2togs. I’m not quite that good, but I can read a pattern.

Once I start, the pattern knits up faster than I expect.

• • • •

And then, suddenly, the thing on my needles doesn’t look like a sweater.

That’s okay, it doesn’t need to look like a sweater yet. It doesn’t have sleeves. It’s just a length of soft wooly fabric. It’ll come together in a later step.

“What’re you making?”

Alex walks in the door. The surprise sweater is here in the open. I quickly hide it in my lap under a throw rug. “It’s a surprise,” I say.

He smiles, amused. “Well, all right then.” He comes over to kiss my forehead and his touch is a shock, electric. I flinch, and he tilts his head quizzically. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I think so. I just need a break.”

I’ve been knitting for six hours straight and haven’t noticed. My hands aren’t even stiff.

The shower starts running. I have a sudden urge to join Alex there and talk him into washing my back. My nerves are tingling. Sitting in one place for too long.

I strip my clothes and throw them with his, even though I’ve just straightened up, and tentatively push back the shower curtain. Wearing a big smile he draws me in under the hot water and puts his arms around me. His damp wings hovering nearby feel like shelter.

• • • •

I knit in the park. Alex isn’t meeting me for lunch today and I thought I would get out and get some sun while I add a few more rows to the surprise sweater, but the sky has gone cloudy with an unexpected storm. People mutter about it and glance up, shading their eyes. Parents gather up children and rush them away.

The fall of knitted fabric fills my lap, growing. Row after row.

The wind starts blowing and I can’t keep the page with the pattern written on it flat, so I pack up. I’m late getting back to the store.

As I walk through the door, three displays fall over. Bette jumps and screams, and the couple of customers look over in a moment of terror and flee.

“Every time the door opens . . .” Bette mutters and starts picking up skeins of yarn and knitting magazines, wrestling the wire racks back upright.

“There’s a storm.” I head for the main desk and get out the surprise sweater. The rows curl back on themselves. Every time I try to straighten it out to see where I am, it curls back again.

“I don’t suppose you could help me with this?” Bette says, a bit testily.

“What?”

She sighs, and I blush. I hadn’t noticed the mess, shelves of yarn fallen over, bursting away from the front door like a bomb hit.

“Oh. Right.” I rush to help clean up, even though the needles catch in my sleeve as I shove my project aside. As if they’re trying to hold on to me.

“Something’s in the air,” Bette mutters and we finally get the space cleared up. “Mercury retrograde?”

Mercury always seems to be retrograde. Alex says that kind of thing doesn’t matter, and he should know if it matters or not, shouldn’t he? Seeing where he came from.

It’s the panels in back, designed to fold around angel wings, that have made the garment look like it has six or seven extra edges, and I’ve added in a bit more ribbing to make it more stretchy. I’m sure the yarn is glaring back at me.

• • • •

Soon, I suspect something has gone terribly wrong with the would-be sweater. There’s a thing that happens when you knit in the round, but twist the stitches wrong on that first row, so you’re not quite knitting a straight line. The thing you’re knitting will become a Mobius strip.

I think I accidentally did that when I cast on the sweater.

I have asked this yarn, this pattern, to do something otherworldly. And bless it, it’s trying. But it’s going wrong.

I should frog it. Unravel the whole thing and start over.

But I kind of want to see what it looks like when I’m done.

• • • •

Do you know what’s a miracle? Knitting. Knitting is a miracle. Can you imagine? How did it start? Who sat down and figured out how to use a couple of sticks to make loops of yarn to make fabric that stretches? All the things you can do with fabric that stretches. Did it arise independently in multiple places? Or did an angel whisper in the ear of some woman spinning wool, Let me show you a trick. You could look at yarn wrapped around a spindle, maybe a couple of strands that got crossed and looped together by accident, and think, a-ha. Before you know it everyone in your family has socks and nice wooly mittens. A goddamn miracle.

• • • •

I have an insight. How shirts fit over wings, how they seem to emerge seamlessly from jackets and tank tops: the clothing can’t see the wings. The fabric has to pretend not to see the wings, and the problem with the surprise sweater is that it’s covered with eyes.

I cannot knit the sweater because I can see the wings. I have seen a thing I should not and the sweater knows it.

On my walk home, I see three angels, and none of them are Alex. I try not to notice. It’s not like they’re together. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.

• • • •

I’ve ruined everything. And I mean everything.

My phone screams an alarm. A tornado siren blares.

Alex doesn’t come home from work.

I call the bar, and it’s closed. I leave a message, then another one because the first one wasn’t clear, that I am Alex’s girlfriend demanding to know where he is and not some crazy person. I probably sound like a crazy person. I tell myself I’m not worried because he’s an angel and he’s not going to get hit by a car or fall into a ditch. He can’t get hurt, he just can’t.

At least, I don’t think he can. At least, he can’t be hurt by the ordinary things that hurt humans. And there’s no War in Heaven. At least not right now. I don’t think.

In the morning, he still hasn’t come home, and I’ve stayed up waiting for him, all night, working on the sweater that has veered far off the pattern I wrote in ways I’m having trouble understanding. The object on the needles definitely doesn’t look like a sweater. It might look like a storm, with twisting, billowing clouds roiling in on themselves.

I will walk to the bar and look for Alex there, since no one’s called back. I’m worried, and I’m not worried that he’s gotten hurt because he’s an angel, he can’t get hurt. I’m worried that he’s left. Because I got annoyed at cleaning up. Because I’m just a human and he finally got tired of me. Because I decided to knit him a sweater. That started it all. He’s gone. He didn’t even say goodbye. I suppose secretly I’ve always known this day would come, because the other big miracle is that someone like Alex would ever be with someone like me.

I head to the park, which has always felt safe to me. I find a bench and sit, just sit, and the needles are in my hand, and the pattern is in my head. The not-a-sweater surprise is pulsing in my hand.

A circle of quiet surrounds me, while a dozen yards away the wind howls, a wall of chaos.

I hug the needles and the knitted thing to my chest because I don’t think I should leave it alone. It seems to be expanding by itself, the fibers and knots twining around my fingers, constricting. Clinging and comforting me. It’s all right, it’s fine, you have peered into a cosmic truth and it’s just fine. I study the stitches to try to figure out what went wrong and I lose time, hours. Knitting is binary but this has stitches I don’t recognize. Impossible stitches, neither up nor down. I have seen what I shouldn’t.

In the street, people are running, screaming, like some overblown disaster movie and I wonder where the monster is. It’s in my lap. It’s not a sweater. I’m almost knocked over by someone fleeing nothing in particular. Angels arrive, dozens of them, walking, gliding, flying. Wings broad and powerful, barely moving. I’ve never seen Alex fly. The angels are stabs of light against the storm. I look for Alex among them. Even if he’s there I’m not sure I would recognize him.

The angels converge. Here. The not-a-sweater cringes away from them. It hisses a little.

There are eyes and wings and wrath in the storm bearing down on me.

The angels have their own language. No one can speak it but them, and no one can hear it without going mad.

I start to scream, but suddenly there are words in the wind.

Be not afraid.

And there is Alex.

He is cosmic, the sun and moon, and he is armed for battle, wearing a cuirass made of quicksilver and carrying a spear forged from comets. He seems to draw in light and throw it out again. And his wings—they’re spread wide, flecked with iron, a weapon themselves, tensed and ready to launch. They’re moving, a nervous flutter, like the tapping of a foot. They whisper.

I should be blinded, I should look away. If I hadn’t already been crying I would have started.

The host is arrayed around him, ready to fight a war. But Alex stands in front of me, and we regard each other with no small amount of confusion.

I’m in a bit of a panic. My gaze is pleading. “Help?”

He says, “What are you doing?”

“I’m knitting you a sweater. It’s a surprise.”

This seems to make perfect sense to him. He sets his jaw. “Sweetie, I love you dearly, but you need to stop.”

I look at the mess of celestial knots draped around me, whose shapes I can’t even see anymore, though if I studied them I might, might be able to replicate the pattern or go mad trying. I’m not entirely sure what I’ve done, but I’m at the center of the storm that rages, and Alex is only one of the angels standing here, weapon in hand, wondering what the hell it is they’re supposed to be fighting.

It’s only a sweater.

I yank the needles out of the live stitches, leaving a row of dozens of angry little lost loops behind. They’re like empty eyes. When I tug on the yarn, the staring loops vanish.

Then the next row vanishes.

And the next.

Frogged.

• • • •

Right there in the park, he sits cross-legged in front of me and helps, holding the remains of the work taut while I pull the yarn loose and wind it into a ball. All partners of knitters know this ritual, holding a skein in outstretched hands, maintaining tension so the strands don’t become tangled.

The would-be sweater is unmade.

The wind stops, the storm vanishes, and the angels disperse. Many of them look sidelong at me and come to speak to Alex in a language I can’t hear. The armor and swords and spears are gone and they all look like people again. Except for the wings.

I just concentrate on winding the yarn into a ball, so that it’s nothing more than potential again.

“Maybe we should get rid of it? Burn it or bury it or something?” There’s still a charge in the air, the sense of rocks sliding down a hill into an avalanche. The pattern was cursed, certainly, but what about the yarn?

“No, it’s good yarn,” he says. “It’s okay now.”

“The sweater. I thought I could make it work with your wings.”

He smiles. “I think it’s amazing that you tried. Maybe knit me something else?”

And maybe trust that an angel understands something about symbols.

• • • •

“Tell me about God,” I ask.

We are naked in bed after performing several acts that certain reactionary religious sects insist will damn us.

“You don’t want to hear about God,” he says.

He’s right, mostly. “I’m just curious.”

“Unsatisfied curiosity is the essence of the divine. You must feel without knowing.”

But there must be a God somewhere. “You can’t have angels without God, right? So where is He?”

“After the War, that question isn’t as pressing as you think it is.”

“But you all are ready to go to war again. You’re just ready for it.”

He wraps his arms around me, pulls me close, and doesn’t answer.

• • • •

The problem with knitting a sweater for a boyfriend is you go through all the effort of making it, and what happens if he doesn’t wear it? It might be a perfectly good sweater. Him not wearing it might have nothing to do with you or it. He might be allergic to wool. He might never have worn a sweater in his life—which is something you should have noticed, before knitting a sweater for him. You will be quietly, subtly hurt, if he doesn’t wear it. You’ll try not to be but you will, and you’ll realize you should have noticed that he’s allergic to wool or doesn’t wear sweaters. The flaws in the fabric have been revealed. It was never about giving him a sweater, but about the need for a symbol that will bind him to you.

Not knitting a sweater for your boyfriend doesn’t mean you don’t love him. That’s the kicker. The absence of a symbol is not its opposite. It’s not binary. Neither is knitting, really, whatever the pattern says.

I knit Alex a scarf in a simple garter stitch, which is only a knit stitch over and over again. The first pattern anybody learns to knit. Not even a clever border or ribbing. I use a different yarn, chunky and undyed, that came from sheep raised in the Navajo Nation.

It’s a nice scarf, and Alex wears it. It fits neatly around his neck and over his wings. He puts it on during the first driving snow at the end of autumn, and smiles at me, and that’s the miracle.

©2021 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carrie Vaughn’s work includes the Philip K. Dick Award winning novel Bannerless, the New York Times bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series, over twenty novels and upwards of 100 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. Her most recent novel, Questland, is about a high-tech LARP that goes horribly wrong and the literature professor who has to save the day. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com.

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

Three Variations on a Theme of Imperial Attire

E. Lily Yu | 3564 words

They never tell the story right. The Danish must have their heavens and happy endings, and Andersen’s tales are meant for children. We, however—you and I—know that people are people, and every one of us capable of—

But the story.

Once there was a vain and foolish emperor, who made up for his foolishness by a kind of low cunning. As such rulers do, he drew to himself a retinue of like men and women, who told him he was wise and humble, gracious and good. The emperor would smile at their flattery, which in his wisdom he knew to be the truth, and lavish gold and gems and deeds upon them. Thus was everyone contented within the palace walls. And those outside got on as well as they could.

Eventually, with narrative inevitability, two men with knapsacks and pockets full of thread came knocking at the palace gates.

“We are tailors,” the first one said, “wise but humble tailors, who seek to offer our boutique services to men of might, such as yourself.”

“Here is a list of our bona fides,” said the second man. “Sterling references, one and all.”

“The very best, I’m sure,” the emperor said, looking at the ruby buttons on their vests of gilt brocade.

“What we’d like to offer you is an exclusive deal—”

“—the latest in fashion, which no one else owns—”

“—designed in collaboration with a distant country’s military-industrial complex—”

“—top secret and cutting-edge—”

“—the Loyalty Distinguisher line of couture.”

“What a mouthful,” the emperor said, looking askance. “Call it something I can pronounce.”

“What a brilliant suggestion! The Thresher, how’s that? Since it sorts the wheat from the worthless chaff.”

“Powerful,” the emperor said. “I like it.”

“Now, the key selling point of the Thresher line—what a wonderful name!—is that it’ll let you sort at a glance your loyal, meritorious, and worthy subjects from—well, the useless ones.”

“At a glance, eh?”

“Indeed! When we dress you in Thresher fabric, cut to the height of style, those subjects of noble character will see you as you truly are, with all your hidden virtues displayed. They’ll swoon at your intellect, marvel at your power, gape at your discernment and understanding. You’ll know them by their raptures and fits of joy. Then you can place them in positions of authority. Judging village disputes and distributing grain, for example. Or tax collecting.”

“Good,” the emperor said, rubbing his chin. “And the rest?”

“The Thresher fabric will reflect their true ugliness. They will pale and shrink back and avert their eyes.”

“They will scream and faint.”

“They will whimper at the sight of their deepest selves.”

“And thus you will know your traitorous subjects.”

“Hard labor would be too good for them.”

“Make me this suit at once!” the emperor said. And his court, whispering amongst themselves, wondered how the marvel would be managed.

Well, you know how. The tailors placed loud orders on the phone for Italian leather and French wool, Japanese silks and bulletproof thread; had conspicuously large boxes airlifted to their quarters; and all day and all night they cut and sewed the air with an industry that was inspiring to see.

The appointed day came, red and hot. Crows rattled in the palace trees. In the emperor’s chamber, before his cheval glass, the tailors presented their work with pride.

“Our finest piece.”

“A triumph.”

“A breakthrough in fashion.”

“But let us see what it looks like on you. Habeas corpus is the haberdasher’s true test.”

The emperor looked at their empty hands—swallowed—scowled—thought—and said, “Bravo!”

“Is the jacket not to your liking?”

“Hm, yes, the pants are a little long.”

“I’ll fix that in a minute, never you worry. There.”

“How’s that?”

“Perfect,” the emperor said, gazing at his reflection.

“Now you must show it to your subjects. Your courtiers have assembled and are waiting.”

When the emperor strode into his court, a ruby-buttoned tailor at each elbow, his courtiers stared. Then one, then another hastily applauded, and the stamping and cheering shook the walls. A little color came back into the emperor’s cheeks, and he whuffed through his blonde whiskers in relief, though what terrible worry he had been relieved of, no one watching could say.

“You chose your court wisely,” the tailors said. “Now ride throughout your kingdom and sift the wicked from the good.”

And the emperor, glancing dubiously at the saddle, mounted his horse and rode through the city streets. His stomach billowed with every bounce. Before him rode his courtiers, shouting the people forth to praise the craftsmanship and glory of these new clothes, which would divide the loyal from the perfidious.

The people, who had not survived six decades of imperial whims and sudden prohibitions on various fruits, fats, and hats without acquiring a certain degree of sense, observed the wind’s direction and vociferously admired the blinding gleam of the cloth-of-gold, the shimmer of silks, the cut and fit of everything.

Children, however, who through lack of life experience have not yet learned the salubrious lessons of unjust pain, while quite disposed to lie to avoid immediate punishment, are also inclined to speak inconvenient truths at the most inconvenient times.

“Ma, the emperor is naked.”

“No, he’s not. He’s wearing the finest suit that I ever did see.”

“Ma, I can see his dick.”

At this the goodwife clapped her aproned hand over her son’s mouth, but it was too late. The emperor had heard. He turned a pitying eye upon them, as their neighbors immediately began to point and hiss. Why, they’d always known—an absent father—single motherhood stirred up evil, that’s what they’d always said—but the emperor’s getup was magnificent—truly unparalleled—only a stupid blind woman couldn’t see that—

The emperor nudged his horse with his knees and serenely continued upon his way.

In the morning the boy and his mother were gone. Their little stone-and-thatch cottage had burned to the ground. Their neighbors and their houses had vanished as well. Only a few cracked teeth and a fistful of phalanges were found.

The emperor retained the tailors on an exclusive contract at astronomical rates and took to riding out among his people on a weekly basis, since it was now clear that there was treachery in the land. People fell over themselves to report their parents, in-laws, rivals, classmates, colleagues, never failing to praise the newest suit of clothes themselves, until the streets turned black with blood and soot.

When the emperor was finally stricken with a fatal case of pneumonia—which happened far later than one might imagine, because he was a corpulent and well-insulated man—his former subjects, one after the other, dazed by the news, picked up the phone by habit to denounce their friends, and heard, on the other end, the dusty silence of a dead line.

• • • •

Unnecessarily grim, you say? Unrealistic? Scenes this bloody no longer occur in the civilized world? I agree with all your criticisms, most erudite of readers. There’s nothing for it but to try again.

Here then is a more charming tale, one that will better suit your taste.

Once there was a body politic that, through happy geographic accident, had avoided any number of devastating wars, and was thus left the most powerful government in the world. On the basis of that evidence, it thought itself the most enlightened body politic that the world had ever seen. It kept its citizens under surveillance, arresting or ejecting those who did not agree, and as a result enjoyed unanimous approbation.

One day, two men, sons of a vast clothing empire, who had recently been elected to the body, presented a sheaf of invisible bills.

“See how stylishly we’ve cut, trimmed, and hemmed taxes! How popular you’ll be with the tastemakers of this realm—how perceptive and attractive you’ll seem—if you pass them!”

“See how they funnel the vast majority of money to the military, which is always fashionable. How powerful you’ll look to your enemies!”

“Look how your children will benefit, leapfrogging into elite universities, flourishing in the compost of your trusts and estates!”

“All honorable members of this body politic will see the good, glorious vision these bills represent. All citizens of discernment shall agree. The others? Well, they are not citizens, or they are fake citizens, voting without proper identification, and we should divert a portion of our security budget to uncovering these traitors and deporting or imprisoning them, as our fathers did in their day.”

The platforms and proposals were trotted before the country with pleasing pomp and ceremony. The true citizens applauded them so loudly you couldn’t think, and trained in militias to hunt down the fake citizens, and rammed cars into the bodies of fake citizens, and phoned in denunciations of their neighbors, ex-lovers, grandchildren, pets—and before too long the streets ran black and red with—

Ah.

That didn’t go very well, did it? Heavy-handed, on the nose . . . it’s hardly even a story. The artistic error was choosing a plurality as a subject. It’s difficult to create complexity of character, complete with inner conflicts and landscapes and unique worldviews, when one’s protagonist is an amorphous group. Especially when the members are as slippery as politicians. I understand now why Andersen chose to write about an emperor rather than, say, the Rigsdag. Artistically, that is, never mind that the first Rigsdag convened twelve years after his fairy tale was published. That detail will be conveniently left out of my forthcoming treatise on art. It is a treatise written for a very select few, and will be scorned by the unenlightened masses. Only a humble and wise reader such as yourself, magnanimous and perfect in character, will understand the secrets I disclose therein.

So a character study is what’s needed, it seems.

• • • •

Once there were two tailors—

You know what? You’re right. We don’t need both of them. They’re hardly distinguishable as it is. Andersen might have wished to signify the multitudinousness of such men, or illustrate how well they work together, once they recognize each other, but we can take that for granted as something the reader already knows.

• • • •

Once there was a man who called himself whatever was suitable to his purposes at the time. If it profited him to say he was a soldier, then he was a soldier who had served with distinction. If it furthered his aims to call himself beloved, then someone’s sweetheart he was. By speaking the words that another person wished to hear, whether those words were flattery or promises or blame, he could insinuate himself into most others’ trust.

He had few talents besides this one, and a loathing for honest work besides, but this one talent proved enough to feed and clothe him until such time that the trick was plain. By then, of course, the man was long gone.

He fed at first on the labor of farmers, progressing at length to literate merchants and clerks. Over and over his living proved to him the moral by which he compassed his world: that the slow and stupid existed to be ruled and robbed by cleverer and better men than they.

But the smell of damp wool and the low burr of laborers came to displease him; the damp, wormy odors of ancient books soon bored him; in short, there are only so many times a bright man of tremendous worth can fleece the same kind of idiot. The reward is small, the dupery tedious. One must establish trust, perform small favors, establish rapport and commonalities, and so on and so forth, and that routine grows repetitive. The man longed to leave a mark on the face of history, as a result of which he could no longer be ignored.

And to do that, one must be proximate to greatness.

So the man who would call himself anything stashed away the profits of his cleverness until he could move to the valley of kings and queens, where starry fortunes were built upon a vastness of sand. Like pharaohs these men and women lived, erecting monuments and pressing whole hosts into hard labor; and word of their power and wealth had come to his ears.

The man bid farewell to the women who all thought themselves his one and only love, with haste and without many tears, since he did not expect to see them again. He did not kiss the infant boy that one held, with his own dark hair and dimpled cheeks.

Time and space did not chain our storyteller, for the stories he told disregarded both as soon as they became inconvenient. And so by steamer and coach, Greyhound and plane, the man made his way to the valley of sand.

And where money flows and ebbs in deep tides like the sea, shifting mountains, crashing, storming, drowning, the humblest barnacle is sufficiently wetted if it only clings to a firm surface. So the man lived, studying the landscape, until he heard the clack of dice in every two shells rolled along by the sea. With adjustments to his former patterns, he crabbed small fortunes with the wire cage of his smile and landed wish-granting carp with his tongue for bait.

A little empire he eked out, nestling against the greater fortunes and powers that ironed the land flat, effacing a neighborhood there, shredding communities there. From the kings of that land he learned to spin his silken webs to catch not one fly but a thousand. Once stuck in his flatteries, they squirmed to be sucked, pleading to be wrapped in his glorious silks. And he, like a spider, was glad to oblige.

Dining on every rare delicacy, traveling to white-dusted parties by limo and helicopter, he was contented for a time.

Then, as he listened, as he grew familiar with that land, he learned that these kings were clever but lesser, that an emperor ruled over them, and that this emperor was a fool. The kings simpered and groveled when they came before the emperor, just as this man did before them.

Bit by bit, the glitter of the valley of kings faded. The man grew restless and hungry once more. Late at night, he spun plans to weave himself into the imperial court and staff. Favors were asked here, a rumor murmured there. A few careers had to be ended to clear the way, but what of it? Soon an invitation on cream-thick paper made its way into his hand.

All was ready, the story staged, waiting only for the curtain and the lights.

On the morning the man walked out of his old apartment for the last time, a plane ticket clutched in one hand, he found a boy no older than fifteen, dressed in the clothes of another era, standing in the building’s entryway.

“Excuse me,” the man said, stepping around the boy.

“You’re my father,” the boy said.

“I don’t have a son.”

“Here’s a picture of us. I was three at the time.”

“That could be anyone.”

“It’s you. I didn’t come to bother you. I only wanted to ask—”

“You’re making me late.”

“—why you left. Why we weren’t enough for you.”

“Nothing personal. Nothing to do with you. But look at your mother. Was I supposed to grow old—with that? In that small, ratty house? In that backwater of a time and place? No, I am meant for greater things.”

“She said you were a tailor.”

“I do stitch, weave, and spin.”

“Will you teach me to be a tailor too?”

“In ten minutes, I’m going to miss my flight, which will cause me to miss a very important appointment. See, I’m on a tight schedule. Call me another time.”

“But,” the boy said, looking after him, “I don’t have your number . . .”

“So sorry, your imperial grandiloquence,” the man said, several hours later. “Encountered an unavoidable delay. But now that I’m here, my various skills as a tailor are at your praiseworthy self’s disposal. I can sew you an outfit, invisible, that all your subjects must nonetheless kiss the hems of, and admire. Sew half-truths and falsehoods together, until a listener can’t tell head from tail. Weave tales to turn brother against brother, snipping all bonds of loyalty except to you. These matters make my trade.”

“Be welcome here,” the emperor said. “I can tell that you are a gifted man.”

And the emperor threw a fistful of peas at him.

“Quick, a suit that will make me irresistible. I need it in five minutes. The Queen of Sheba is coming.”

“Immediately,” the tailor said.

But when the tailor returned after four minutes, carrying a suit of exaggerations, the emperor was already pawing at the Queen, who resisted with an expression of deep distaste, extracted herself, and stormed off.

“Where were you?” the emperor said, mashing a handful of gravy into the tailor’s hair. “I told you to be done in two minutes. You took ten.”

The tailor said, “That’s right, O golden sun of wisdom.”

“I didn’t get to fuck her because of you.”

“To make amends for your disappointment, may I offer you this suit of Impregnable Armor?” And he held out again the invisible clothes that mere minutes before had been an Irresistible Suit.

“Don’t be stupid. I can’t get pregnant.”

“Ah, but this suit protects you from all harm.”

“Gimme,” the emperor said, and was quickly dressed.

Even though his wares were intangible, producing enough of them to please the emperor and thus avoid the latest flung dish of baked beans proved exhausting for the soi-disant tailor.

He spun the Three-Piece of Plausible Denial, the Vest and Cravat of High Event Attendance, the Cufflinks of Venality. Each time, the emperor toyed with his work, tried it on, pronounced himself satisfied, and promptly forgot it existed.

“May I suggest,” the depleted tailor said, “stripping the populace of their rights, so that no one has rights but the most righteous of all, which is to say you, our rightness, you who are never wrong.”

“Why not?” the emperor said.

That was carried out, despite demonstrations and strikes and scathing newspaper columns, and then the tailor had to invent a new diversion.

“What about setting neighbor against neighbor and stranger against stranger? Tell the old story of the dark-skinned foreigner with his knife dripping blood. A little chaos does for power what warm horseshit does for weeds.”

“Whatever you like,” said the triply-clothed emperor. “Next.”

And those foreign-born or born to foreigners or born to those born to foreigners were rounded up, accused of crimes, and variously punished.

“May I suggest plucking the flower of youth before it grows strong enough to revolt?”

“Let it be so,” the emperor said.

Across the realm, children were mown down like green grass ahead of the mower’s scythe. Even the onion-eyed kings in their silicon towers felt their quartz hearts crack and said, “No more.” But they spoke it softly, so the emperor would not hear.

And while the tailor measured and spun and snipped, the murmur of the people rose to a roar. For there remained some of intelligence and clear thinking and good judgment among them, and these had gently taught the rest to put on new eyes and see.

On a day when the emperor was deliberating between the empty suit of Universal Belovedness on the tailor’s left arm and the trousers and blazer of Religious Authority draped over his right, a herald ran in with the report that a mob had smashed through the palace gates and was headed toward the emperor’s palace.

Indeed, through the window they could see a dark storm of humanity swelling on the horizon. All that stood between that flood and the doors was a line of police with loaded rifles. Most of the mob was children, with some old women mixed in, and some young, as well as a few brave men, and they stepped over the bodies of those who were shot and pressed forward to the palace, inevitable as death.

The tailor, with the instinct of a hare, twitched and backed toward the exit.

The emperor said, “Sit.”

And the tailor sat.

At a snap of the emperor’s fingers, servants tugged the curtains shut, so that they could no longer see the cresting wave. The lights were switched off. They waited in darkness.

“Bring me a bottle,” the emperor said, and poured two fingers of sixty-year-old liquor into two glasses. One he drank. One he emptied over the tailor.

“That suit,” the emperor said, “that prevents all harm—I’m wearing it now. But what will you do, clever tailor, when they come through these doors?”

Distantly, over the gunfire, they could hear the children singing, and the song rose sweet and clear on the wind. Soon there began, at the palace doors, a heavy and fateful thudding, like that of a heart under terrible strain. All the world, it seemed, kind and cruel alike, had come to beat down the palace doors.

If you’ll excuse me, I am now going to join them.

Heaven help the children.

Heaven help us all.

©2019 by E. Lily Yu. Originally published in New Suns, edited by Nisi Shawl. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

E. Lily Yu is the author of On Fragile Waves, published in 2021, which the New York Times described as “devastating and perfect.” She received the Artist Trust LaSalle Storyteller Award in 2017 and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 2012, and has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards. More than thirty short stories have appeared in venues from McSweeney’s to Boston Review to Tor.com, as well as twelve best-of-the-year anthologies.

Writing You

Sharang Biswas | 969 words

Now that you are dead, we will write you a love letter.

It was Achmat’s idea. He worries that in our loneliness, the two of us will become like parallel mirrors, reflecting upon each other an eternity of grief. You were the strong one, he says. Our centroid, he calls you.

I disagree. You made us strong. That is why we will write you a letter. Perhaps it will make us strong enough to bear your passing.

We will observe the forms, of course. Though you were not born here, you died here and you deserve a proper funeral.

Tomorrow.

Tonight I will stir the soup-pot, numbing my mind with the tedium of rhythm. Perhaps Achmat will kiss me after dinner, seeking an anaesthetic. Maybe we can rut the pain away.

Tomorrow we will call for the Mourners. They will have their night to rid the community of the troublesome emotions that cocoon us after every death. They will wail into the small hours of the night, and beat heavy drums, and sing songs of melancholy to cast out sorrow. Songs like birds, rising ever upwards, buoying the carrion of your absence up into emptiness.

No doubt Achmat will weep into my chest, and I will hold him like you promised you always would. My bones will feel him shaking long after his sobs expire. I do not yet know if I have absolved you of your promise.

Once the Mourning is done, a procession of Mortuarians will carry your body to the Bindery, where they will flay it with sharp, silver knives. The Mortuarians work methodically. Death is no foreigner to them, and their knives will blur in the dull, everyday labour of the expert workman.

Care will be taken to preserve every wrinkle—every blemish, every imperfection—for each mark on one’s skin is another moment in one’s story.

Your story. Our story.

There, the wound that never fully healed etched upon you by the Beast, which Achmat slew out of protective fury. There, the scar that I stroked gently on tender mornings, that I suckled ferociously on frantic nights.

Over six months, your skin will be washed in oils and fragrant unguents. Over six months, the Mortuarians will build a bulwark against the assaults of time and age. Even as we grow old, as Achmat’s lithe muscles begin to sag, as my wits murmur less keenly, you will remain as fresh as the first time Achmat kissed you under the apple tree, when I laughed at your new-born blush.

The blushes I coaxed from you were never as rich as that one blush for Achmat.

Once the Mortuarians have scrubbed away every ounce of potential for decay, a Master Binder will cut and shape your preserved hide into neat pages. The remaining fragments will be fed to the river, so that the waters, too, may know of your passing.

I do not know what to tell your family. The letters accrete in your study, layers of the past you would rather let lithify than excavate. You did not tell them of me, of Achmat. Am I to unearth your secrets for them, like some grave-robber from a foreign museum, ignorant of the intentions of the buried dead?

An apprentice will braid the longest hairs from your scalp into thread, which the Master Binder will stitch into the pages. Using glue pressed out of your cartilage, these pages will be bound in your bone and sinew. Excess hair will be woven into a page-mark, to be sewn into the binding.

With dry, papery politeness, the Speaker of Memory will invite us to some dusty corner of the Grand Mortuary to probe us for details about your life. Apprentices will scrabble around like carrion beetles on a roadside corpse, scrambling to memorize the words that spill from our mouths until we are hollow.

What will I recount? They say suffering awakens the artist, but I am stricken feebleminded. Do I wax indulgent about the first night we invited Achmat to our small bed, how you clung to him, worried he would fall off, and how we laughed over breakfast about the need for a separate bedroom? Will I be able to paint with sufficient poetry how you pranced in the sitting room to the music of a neighbour’s unknown celebration, how you fumbled over the perfect steps, how the silliness of the moment had you determined to choreograph the perfect dance? Can I eloquently describe the stretch of your neck as Achmat arced against you, the twist of your mouth as you penned into your journal, the lazy stretch of your naked form as you grumbled your way towards your morning ablutions?

I fear Achmat will go hoarse with the telling of you.

A Master Linguist will translate our words into the Unspoken Tongue, adding rhyme and meter where there was none. Then, in the Scriptorium, a Calligrapher and an Illuminator will work in concert to complete your book. In bright inks and gilt, they will adorn the pages of skin with colour, light, and movement. You were always a work of art, but now you will become more.

Shelved in the Library-Catacombs, your life will then be open for all to peruse.

Except . . . Achmat cannot read the Unspoken Tongue. Like a sculpture of ice, the grand artwork of your life will remain cold, alien, and desolate to him.

This is why we will write you a letter. Once the pomp and ceremony are finished, Achmat and I will sit in the shade of that apple tree and together we will pen you a letter. No grandeur. No flourishes.

We will tell you simply that we loved you, that we love you still.

I hope that will be enough for us.

©2021 by Sharang Biswas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sharang Biswas is a writer, artist, and award-winning game designer. He has won IndieCade and IGDN awards for his games and has showcased interactive works at numerous galleries, museums, and festivals, including Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Fantasy Magazine, Baffling Magazine, Sub-Q Magazine, Eurogamer, Dicebreaker, Unwinnable, and more. He is the co-editor of Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games (Pelgrane Press, 2020) and Strange Lusts / Strange Loves: An Anthology of Erotic Interactive Fiction (Strange Horizons, 2021). Find him on Twitter at @SharangBiswas.

EXCERPT: The Undertakers (John Joseph Adams Books)

Nicole Glover | 3960 words

Nicole Glover delivers the second book in her exciting Murder & Magic series of historical fantasy novels featuring Hetty Rhodes and her husband, Benjy, magic practitioners and detectives living in post–Civil War Philadelphia.

Nothing bothers Hetty and Benjy Rhodes more than a case where the answers, motives, and the murder itself feel a bit too neat. Raimond Duval, a victim of one of the many fires that have erupted recently in Philadelphia, is officially declared dead after the accident, but Hetty and Benjy’s investigation points to a powerful Fire Company known to let homes in the Black community burn to the ground. Before long, another death breathes new life into the Duval investigation: Raimond’s son, Valentine, is also found dead.

Finding themselves with the dubious honor of taking on Valentine Duval as their first major funeral, it becomes clear that his passing was intentional. Valentine and his father’s deaths are connected, and the recent fires plaguing the city might be more linked to recent community events than Hetty and Benji originally thought.

The Undertakers continues the adventures of murder and magic, where even the most powerful enchantments can’t always protect you from the ghosts of the past . . .

Available from John Joseph Adams Books, November 9, 2021

1
July 1871
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

“HEX, CURSE, OR CHARM?” Hetty asked as they strode down Barclay Street. “Don’t say that hex and curse are the same. There are nuances, you know.”

“Of course there are,” her husband replied. Benjy took a moment to consider the question before replying. “I think it’s a jinx.”

“That wasn’t a choice!”

“Should be. There’s got to be a reason that place is still standing.” Benjy pointed to the only house on this end of the street. Despite its neighbors being reduced to piles of rubble, this home was untouched by the fire. A state that was quite unnerving given that even the still-standing homes of the street had shown some signs of the fire.

Since the end of May, news of a fire had reached their ears twice a week, and sometimes more. While small fires around a single home or a building were not uncommon, these fires were different. They engulfed both sides of a street, and once they started they raged until they burned themselves out. Such fires led people to craft charms and potions to keep their homes safe. And the ones that didn’t make their own bought them from charlatans who touted fire-proofing potions that could barely quell a candle’s flame.

While reports of this fire would have brought them to this street anyway, Hetty and Benjy got word of it in a somewhat different manner.

Just after midday, Hetty had found a card left in their postbox. A card with a sun and a crescent moon drawn on one side, and on the other a brief message:

Last night a fire took eight homes on Barclay Street and scorched more than a few, but one home stands untouched by the flames.

Such a message wasn’t just odd. It was downright peculiar.

And peculiar was their business.

Although the day was still young, the fire itself was a distant memory, with only traces of smoke left in the air. What it left in its wake was still evident.

Buildings here were mostly made of wood, and were home to several families both large and small. While this wasn’t the slums, neither were the people rich. Some homes were divided so that as many as six families occupied a building, and most people rented out a spare room to any interested boarder.

While only eight houses had burned down, every building on the street, save the one miraculously spared, was damaged. This meant of course the street was filled with people. There were those who lived on this street, making light repairs to their home and casting spells of protection. There were people tending to the dead and wounded, people checking on neighbors to see what survived the fire, and others jealously guarding piles of recovered possessions.

As Hetty and Benjy walked the length of the street, several people called out to Benjy for help. This was not unusual. The blacksmith shop Benjy used to work at was not far from here, and he was generous with his time and repairs. It wasn’t surprising that so many recognized him on sight as the person likely to lend a helping hand. Not that he was hard to forget, in Hetty’s humble opinion. He cut a handsome figure, even in plain attire of shirtsleeves and suspenders. Although, more appealing was the easy air of competence and unsatiable curiosity in the world. While Benjy often pretended that other people’s problems held no interest to him, they had gotten involved in mystery solving because deep down he couldn’t help but care.

“You take this end of the street, and I’ll take the other,” Benjy said to Hetty. “We’ll meet at the still-standing house.”

“Why not go there first?” Hetty asked.

“Because there are plenty more interesting questions to ask before we do.”

With that, Benjy crossed the street to assist a man dragging a trunk out from the rubble, already asking about what had happened last night.

Hetty should do the same, but she was a bit reluctant.

It was never easy asking questions about the fires.

People lied to her face, or were too wearied to give a proper answer. A handful were rude, and quite a few were wondering why she even cared.

A fire was a fire.

A tragedy that ruined what strangled hopes they had for a better tomorrow. A fire that pushed them to move in with friends, with families, with strangers, or finally convince them it was time to leave the city. What caused the fire and why mattered little to people who had more than their fair share of things to grieve.

However, not all fires were accidents.

Something more than a mere fire occurred here. She could feel it in her bones.

At the end of the street, two dozen bodies were stretched out in neat lines. Most were badly burned and bearing mortal injuries that no healing magic could cure. The rest were people who died from breathing in too much smoke and fell unconscious. The group was mostly adults, and the youngest person was on the edge of adulthood. No children. Good fortune, one would think, until you remembered what happened to orphaned children. Babies and the very young would find new homes easily, but the older ones would have a much harder time of things.

Hetty saw a handful now, huddled on the corner, and she wondered if any of them had lost family in the fire.

As Hetty looked on, she found a trio of elderly women sitting on the steps of a nearby building, watching her closely.

So closely that even when they realized Hetty had noticed them, they kept on staring. They reminded Hetty of a gossiping trio that was the bane of her existence at church. But gossips weren’t all bad. Gossips always had the most interesting news and were more than willing to share. It was no surprise at all that when Hetty approached the small group, they started talking before she asked a single question.

Their home had not been impacted by the fire. Not by luck, they quickly assured Hetty. The building was owned by someone who knew his magic. Spells were put in place to repel flames, and were replaced regularly. The other buildings didn’t have that in their favor.

“What happened here was an accident,” one of the women, Paula, assured Hetty. “Started from a candle that got knocked over. No mystery here.”

“Not even that we had to deal with the flames ourselves,” grumbled Emmeline.

“No fire company showed up?” Hetty asked.

“Nobody showed up, legitimate or otherwise!”

Until last December, volunteer fire companies had the run of the city. They put out fires, but usually for a fee, and they often took their time arriving. And more than a few were aligned with gangs to such a degree that the only difference between the groups was access to hoses and water. Which was why when the city finally set up their own fire company there was great rejoicing. But the volunteer companies were not going away quietly, especially not when elected officials didn’t mind them running amuck in Black-majority neighborhoods. While some, such as Moyamensing Hose, were notorious for sparking riots and violence, the worst group in Hetty’s opinion was Beatty Hose, which targeted magical practitioners. Rumor had it that Beatty Hose was behind most of the fires that had sprung up without a clear cause, and used Sorcery to ensure that flames did not die easily.

“How do you know a candle started the fire?” Hetty asked.

The gossipy air of the trio changed then, as they looked over at Hetty rather keenly.

“What it’s to you?” Iola asked. Her lips, already thin with suspicion, flattened even more with undisguised scorn. “You don’t live on this street.”

“And you don’t look like you will anytime soon,” Paula added, eyeing the delicate embroidery on Hetty’s pale green dress.

With ease Hetty replied, “I make it my business to know about odd things. Have you heard about the sparrow that lives on Juniper Street?”

While Paula and Iola blinked on in confusion, Emmeline’s eyes widened.

Hetty hid a smile.

There was always one.

Emmeline sputtered as she addressed Hetty with new admiration in her eyes.

“I’ve heard the stories. You take care of things. Clean up messes. Make sure the dead aren’t forgotten,” Emmeline said. “You’re the Sparrow!”

“And my husband is the Finch,” Hetty said. “We’ve been looking into these fires and hope to do something about them.”

These words got Hetty more stories from the trio. They were similar to what they’d already told Hetty, but the missing details that Hetty suspected earlier had now quietly been slipped back in.

Overall, nothing tugged at Hetty’s curiosity, except for one thing:

“You saw a stranger last night?”

“Yes,” Iola said. “My hip was bothering me again. I was up trying to find something to settle these old bones. Then I heard it.” She rapped her knuckles against the steps she sat on. “A knock on the door. At that hour I wasn’t opening the door for anybody, not even kin, but I peeped out the window. There was a man out there I hadn’t seen before.”

“As I told you,” Emmeline interjected, “that was the new neighbor!”

“Ain’t nobody new on this street!”

As the women began to argue between themselves about the veracity of this fact, Hetty gently cut in.

“What can you tell me about the house that didn’t burn down?”

The arguing stopped midsentence, and Emmeline answered:

“A fellow owns it. Haven’t seen him much lately. Although I don’t think it’s the man going inside right now.”

Hetty spun around to look.

She didn’t see whoever stepped inside, but she saw a door slide shut. While that was fine on its own, less so was the ripple of magic that followed.

“You look like somebody stole the flowers off your grave. Something the matter, child?” Iola asked. “What do you know about the house?”

“Not much, but I plan to find out more.”

Leaving the trio behind, Hetty crossed the street, taking care to go slowly to avoid drawing any more attention than she already had.

Standing on its own, the house appeared much like a lost, lonely duckling missing its siblings. Although from a distance it seemed untouched, as Hetty climbed the front steps she saw she was wrong in that regard. Soot dusted the exterior of the house, turning the house gray, and left the windows looking dusty and forlorn. Even the flower box, devoid of any growing things, had a fine layer of ash. The door had scratches along the doorknob and scuffs on the lower portion as if someone had kicked in the door when they couldn’t unlock it.

“Aren’t you going to come inside?”

Benjy’s voice called out to her.

Hetty pushed the door open and found Benjy standing in the hallway frowning at the florid wallpaper before him.

Hiding her relief that the stranger the old women had seen was only her husband, Hetty jabbed a finger at the door.

“Did you do this?”

He looked over at her, barely glancing at the doorway. “Why would I do that?”

“Because no one lives here.”

Hetty gestured around the hall, not bothering to point to any specific spot. The evidence was all around. From the debris that stirred as she walked in the hall, the musty air of a room that had been shut up too tightly, and the old water stains in the corner. Not to mention the chandelier above their heads that held sunlight in the cobwebs stretched between its candle posts.

“Someone does,” Benjy corrected her. “They just haven’t been around in a while.”

Hetty stopped at the foot of a staircase. She stood there with one hand on the railing, frowning up at the shadows that swallowed up most of the upper level. “Let’s hope they’ll be gone for a while. It’ll be hard even for me to spin a tale explaining things.”

He didn’t answer her, and when Hetty looked back, she found he had vanished.

But he hadn’t gone far.

In the next room, Benjy had his ear pressed against the wall. The tiny blue bundles of flowers framed by golden double rings was perhaps the ugliest wallpaper Hetty had ever seen. Distracted by the overwhelming urge to rip the wallpaper from the walls, she had to force herself to notice anything else about the room. There were a few stiff-back chairs scattered in the room. While they were made from the same dark wood, they were all vastly different, sitting higher or lower, with different arched backs that made it clear they had come from different dining sets. There was a rug on a floor, its colors faded from the dust, and sunlight attempted to stream through the closed curtains. But the most interesting bit was a table holding slightly melted candles sitting in a dish. They appeared to be more ornamental instead of used for magic protections, but their placement was still rather unusual.

“There’s something here,” Benjy said as he tapped the wall.

“Does the wallpaper cover a door?” Hetty asked, not bothering to rap the wall as well. “I wouldn’t be surprised. That would be just about the only reason I would put up something so ugly. Who could notice anything else?”

“There’s no door. The wallpaper covers the sigils carved into the walls.” Benjy pressed his hand down against the wallpaper so the form of a circle could be seen through it. It was nearly as big as his fist.

“Sweet stars above,” Hetty whispered. “Maybe it was a bad idea to come in here after all.”

“I think we’ll be fine. I spoke to a neighbor who witnessed the owner carving the walls one night and then papering over them with this horrid wallpaper. It must be to ward against fire, but it’s hard to say for certain. But ever since then the neighbor has heard noises at the oddest of hours.”

Because Hetty could never pass up a chance to tease him, she quipped gleefully, “Sounds like a ghost to me!”

Benjy rolled his eyes skyward.

They’d been hearing stories about all manner of ghosts around the city, even more since they got into the undertaking business. Strange rattles, cups knocked over on a table, unexplained patches of cold air. People who said they saw the faces of the dead, both loved and hated, staring out at them from windows. Tales of ghosts entering a store and walking through the shelves. And the whispers of the dead leading the living through crossroads and into the great beyond.

Hetty didn’t fully believe a spirit would want to linger on this bitter earth, but she had seen enough of this world to know that anything was possible.

Benjy, on the other hand, had far greater reservations.

“Ghosts don’t exist. It’s more likely there’s a curse on the house that’s causing trouble,” he said as he resumed his tapping.

“Well, we won’t find it dithering away in here.” Hetty gave the room one last look. “I’m going to go explore the rest of the house.”

“Don’t go upstairs without me,” Benjy called after her.

Hetty was tempted to do so anyway just to be petty, but when she stepped back into the hallway a partially open door caught her attention.

The door creaked slightly as she stepped inside. Like the other room, the curtains were also drawn tightly closed. While there were many beautiful things in the room, Hetty’s attention went straight toward the desk. It was a hulking thing, more like a piano than a desk. The hutch loomed overhead, its countless tiny shelves filled with nothing more than dust. The shiny drawer knobs seemed to wink as she walked passed, calling to her like a siren hidden in the seas.

Hetty tapped the cloth band at her neck. The choker had two purposes. It satisfied her vanity by covering the old jagged scars that ran around her neck. And it kept her magic in reserve.

With a single finger, Hetty traced the delicate embroidery and stirred to life the Dove star sigil she had hidden in her stitches.

The spell took on the form of a dove, but not a true one. From beak to tail feathers, it was midnight blue and speckled with starlight. When the bird flapped its wings, wisps of magic swirled around it. But that magic stayed a neutral blue and did not change even when it fluttered down to rest atop the desk.

How very interesting.

Hetty snapped her fingers, dissipating her spell. No star sigils were etched in the wood of the desk, nor did she detect any trace of magic. Did it mean it was harmless? Intrigued, Hetty placed her hand on the desk.

Not a moment later, she yanked it back.

It was like she had plunged her hand into ice water.

No, not ice water. Something colder, something stronger. Like going ice-skating and suddenly there’s no ice. Only plunging into the frigid depths with no hope of seeing the surface.

How did touching a desk feel like that?

Hetty put her hand back on the desk.

The chilling cold swept along her palm, inching up her arm.

But she held firm.

Hetty kept her hand pressed flat against the wood, and suddenly light exploded around her.

Protection spells rose up from every stitch in her clothing, encasing her in delicately spun glass. It hardened, buckled, and then shattered.

Hetty jumped back from the desk, and to her horror, an angry mass of bubbling red magic hurtled toward her.

She held up her hands to brace against the attack, but no attack ever came.

The mass of magic hovered inches from her face, held back by a protective barrier.

“I think you have your answer.” Benjy appeared behind her in the doorway, his mild tone undercutting the potentially dire circumstances. “It’s a hex.”

His left hand was clenched into a fist, small sparks of green light jumping between his fingers. Although he should have been watching the orb of dangerous magic, his eyes rested on her.

“What did you do?” Benjy asked.

“I touched the desk,” Hetty freely admitted, and before he could share his opinion, she added: “I know it was foolish.”

“Glad you know that.”

Hetty fumed even though she deserved the rebuke.

She took a step closer to the hex and it moved away from her.

“Look at what it’s doing.” Hetty lifted her hand and the hex followed. “Let it go.”

“That’s a terrible idea,” Benjy grunted.

“Don’t worry,” Hetty reassured him, “I’ll make sure you won’t get hurt.”

He rolled his eyes, but relaxed his left hand in the end.

With the restraints gone, the hex started to charge. Hetty drew sigils in the air, but Benjy was quicker. The Taurus star sigil rammed itself into the hex. Catching it by the horns, the star-speckled bull shook its head mightily and sent the hex flying.

Guided by Benjy, the bull chased after the hex. The spells bounced from wall to wall, the splash of colors mixing and clashing.

At first Hetty watched this heady chase with concern. There was no way to know what sort of hex it was, but it didn’t seem like any intruder spells she’d encountered before. It didn’t act like any she knew, either. Was it trying to attack them or escape to warn whoever set the spell originally?

“Why was this left behind?” Hetty asked.

“You’re asking the wrong question. You should be asking who left it.” Benjy slammed his hands together.

A second sigil that Hetty hadn’t even noticed fluttered into view. Aries. Together, the two star sigils squashed the hex like a bit of heated metal caught between a hammer and anvil.

The light from the collision was dazzling​—​a piercing white light with the power of a small sun​—​and once it vanished it left the world even duller.

Except for the patch of bright green under their feet.

A path.

A trail of green moved along the floor, slithering much like a snake down the hall and illuminating the path the caster had taken. Magical residue, revealed by the second spell Benjy had cast.

“I don’t think whoever left this hex is the owner,” Hetty remarked. “It might be the work of the intruder.”

“Why don’t we see where this leads first before we make that assumption?”

This path didn’t lead outside. The trail of magic veered down the hall and into a kitchen until it stopped at the pantry.

Mostly empty shelves greeted them when they opened the door. There were a few dusty cans and jars on the shelves, with scattered mouse droppings nearby.

On the floor, the green line continued until it reached the wall.

“Do we go outside, then?” Hetty asked.

But as she moved away, Benjy brushed past her to step inside the pantry. He placed a hand against the wall and pushed.

A soft click whispered in the air, and the wall and its shelves sank into the floor, revealing a passageway with a set of stairs curling in a downward spiral into the unknown.

Benjy whistled as he peered down into the opening. “I wonder where it leads.”

“Only one way to find out.” Hetty drew Eridanus into the air next to her. The River star sigil twinkled as it spilled through the stairway, lighting the way and warning of any trouble that lay ahead. “You first into the abyss!”

Copyright © 2021 by Nicole Glover. Excerpted from The Undertakers by Nicole Glover. Published by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicole Glover works as a UX researcher. A bike commuter and running enthusiast, she enjoys baking and figuring out what book to read next. The Conductors is her debut novel.

Book Review: The Annual Migration of Clouds, by Premee Mohamed

Aigner Loren Wilson | 470 words

The Annual Migration of Clouds
Premee Mohamed
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781770415935
ECW Press, September 2021, 168 pgs

Released at the end of September from ECW Press, Premee Mohamed’s novella, The Annual Migration of Clouds, was a perfect storm and excellent—but emotional—read. Set in a post-climate disaster Alberta, Mohamed’s book follows Reid. She’s a young woman infected by a mind-controlling fungus who gets accepted into a prestigious school far away from her home; as she makes the decision and preparation to leave, quite possibly for good, Mohamed weaves together Reid’s final weeks.

If you’ve read Mohamed before, you know that her work is evocative, scary, and beautiful, often all at the same time. She has a way of constructing sentences that create this rush and flow of words, all-powerful and impactful without losing the story or its emotion. The tension and relationships rise in her work in a way that demands to be engaged with. That style made the world clear, distinct and all the moments in the book feel full, heavy.

Such fullness created character bonds strong enough to make me wonder, like Reid, is it right to leave these relationships? I particularly latched onto the relationship between Reid and her mother. It was handled with delicate care and in such a tender way that my eyes stung several times while reading their scenes.

I went into The Annual Migration of Clouds with little idea of what the story was about. But Mohamed set up the book in the first few pages in a way that instantly sucked me into the story, had me concerned for the characters, and mournful of my own past—due to how closely related Reid’s story of leaving home is to my own—while also keeping me in a state of WTF about the state of the world.

Out of all of the things that Mohamed did well in the book, the one that stabbed me deepest was the depiction of someone leaving home. Throughout the book, the theme came up in a myriad of ways. Sometimes the leaving was in death, and other times it was like Reid’s—a leaving toward a, hopefully, better place.

The Annual Migration of Clouds is less about the destruction or aftermath of disaster and more focused on how communities, families, and people learn to live together and apart. Despite all the disease, death, and decay surrounding Reid and her community, they still work to hold onto what they have and try to cherish the things they are forced to let go.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aigner Loren Wilson is a SFWA, HWA, and Codex writer who writes poetry, nonfiction, games, alongside her fiction. She is an associate editor and copy editor for Strange Horizons and the horror podcast NIGHTLIGHT. Aigner writes for Tor Nightfire, Discover Pods, and other publications. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anathema, FIYAH, WIRED, Tordotcom, and many more. To check out her books, games, and other writings visit her website (https://aignerlwilson.com/).

Book Review: Reclaim the Stars, edited by Zoraida Córdova

Arley Sorg | 1339 words

>Reclaim the Stars: 17 Tales Across Time & Space
Zoraida Córdova, ed.
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250790637
Wednesday Books, February 2022, 432 pgs

Since May 2021 (keeping in mind that I am writing this on Nov 1, 2021) I have noted over 70 new anthologies from across a number of publishing houses, and this is by no means exhaustive. I am happy to report that more and more we are seeing anthologies with BIPOC editors which specifically feature BIPOC authors. For decades, many major anthologies came out with few to no BIPOC authors; or repeatedly featuring the same specific BIPOC authors, as if they were the only BIPOC folks writing stories.

This tradition does still continue to some degree. Browse through the table of contents of a few major anthologies and see for yourself. Because of this history, and because in general, publishing tends to overlook or undervalue BIPOC creators, anthologies which help readers discover those creators are incredibly important.

It is my greatest joy to occasionally discuss these books in this column. This time around, I bring you Reclaim the Stars, “a collection of bestselling and acclaimed YA authors that take the Latin American diaspora to places fantastical and out of this world,” edited by Zoraida Córdova. As with many such anthologies, there is a sense of a project which deliberately stands against cultural erasure, or which seeks to improve visibility for those who are too often missing from narratives, or misrepresented when they are presented at all. Córdova’s introduction discusses the relationship between the fantastic and Latin American people, ultimately saying, “And yet, when it comes to our literature, there are a million stories that have yet to be told.”

I’ll describe a few pieces from this wonderful assortment of fiction. But I recommend picking up this book, reading the stories on offer, and discovering for yourself which pieces speak to you the most. Everyone in this book knows how to tell a story, and their words deserve to be read.

The anthology opens with “Reign of Diamonds” by Anna-Marie McLemore. Since reading their incredible short story “Cristal y Ceniza” in Dhonielle Clayton’s anthology A Universe of Wishes (see review here: bit.ly/3nTjrvu), McLemore has become someone that, if I see their name in an anthology, makes me far more interested in looking at the book. This story is an imaginative take on a fairly classic premise. Opposing and somewhat opposite princesses must duel for rights to La Ruta, a much safer, shorter passage through a section of space. Of course, there a number of ways this piece recasts the classic trope, and McLemore has a lot of fun with fire and ice motifs. The core of the story comes down to the conflicts of duty and love, and at its heart, it’s about being controlled by the people around you, by expectations, and by the roles you’re meant to fulfill.

“Color-Coded” by Maya Motayne is a fun, heartwarming read, but with a streak of the terrible realities of life. Girls are literally magical. And when they reach a certain age, not only does their hair change color, but their power starts to appear. Flor is a girl who is developing a bit early. She has to navigate the awkwardness of school, and particularly, the reactions of people eager to make her feel one way or another about her noticeable changes. Her kind father tries to help but is a bit at a loss, and childhood friend Mateo is perhaps more encouraging than Flor likes. Complicating things is the fact that, while her father is kind, her mother apparently struggled with mental illness, eventually disappearing into the sky. It’s a lovely story, full of warmth, and with a delightfully unexpected moment.

As co-Editor-in-Chief of Fantasy Magazine (with the brilliant Christie Yant), I see a lot of stories about mermaids, selkies, sirens, and similar. I am always impressed by authors who craft stories about these kinds of beings which actually read as fresh and innovative. Among my favorites is Alyssa Wong’s incredible “The Fisher Queen,” originally published in the May/June 2014 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In Reclaim the Stars, Vita Ayala gives us “Sumaiko Y La Sirena.” While the worldbuilding aspects may not be as innovative as Wong’s piece, the story itself is a great take on the trope, and it’s brilliant in its thoughtful application of the idea’s possibilities to story. Suma has grown up on the plantation for as long as she can remember. And, of course, the plantation operates via oppression of varying degrees. As Suma matures, one of the men who owns the plantation begins to court her, wanting far more than she wishes to give. Meanwhile, after the death of her father, Suma discovers much about herself, about the ways she is different from the others working the plantation, and about her own desires. It’s a wonderful story which deserves to be read closely. Ayala mixes the direct with powerful allusions, and there are layers here which reward a careful read. This is an exploration of control and the oppressive nature of expectations, but it’s also an intriguing demonstration of the two-sided nature of courtesy, of so-called kindness, and the way they are used as tools to manipulate people. It’s also a story about what happens when someone reaches true desperation, and about finding strength in darkness.

“White Water, Blue Ocean” by Linda Raquel Nieves Pérez is an interesting examination into the idea of honesty. Gabriel is part of a family with a curse: the women can’t lie, and the men can’t love. Gabriel wants to know: what does that mean for them, someone who doesn’t conform to gender in the way certain members of their family would like. Complex family dynamics are at play, as well as the way love is expressed by different kinds of people. This story is also about marginalized people marginalizing other people. But ultimately, it’s a lovely coming-of-age tale about being yourself despite friction and adversity; it’s lovely because it’s about healing, reconciliation, and the multifaceted nature of truth.

In Nina Moreno’s “Magical Offerings,” Luz Pérez is sent to stay with her grandfather after landing in a bit of trouble for trying to work her little, not entirely successful, magics. Her grandfather’s place is an abandoned golf course on the edge of the swamp, and grandpa is both an idealist and an eccentric. It doesn’t take long in that strange place for Luz to begin to unlock her true potential. This is an interesting story with a cool setting and a great vibe. But more than this, it’s a meditation on the nature of “home,” one which many people will relate to: odd and familiar, uncomfortable and awkward, all at once. For Luz, as unlikely as it seems, home becomes the place where she finds her truths and her sense of place.

I have been lucky enough to find a number of these important anthologies, to review them for Lightspeed, and to bring a modicum of attention to the authors who are improving genre by sharing their visions and perspectives via their stories. If you enjoy short fiction, I encourage you to spend some time with these authors. I’ve highlighted a few pieces here, but there are more stories for you to discover in this book. Read this one cover to cover. Share your favorites with friends. Let the publishing industry know that these authors are vital, they are important, and that we need to see their stories.

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.

Book Review: Where The Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire

Chris Kluwe | 803 words

Where The Drowned Girls Go
Seanan McGuire
Hardcover
ISBN: 9781250213624
Tor, January 2022, 160 pages

Greetings readers, and happy holidays! Hopefully you’ve received not just what you wanted, but also what you needed, because this month we’ll be taking a look at a book that explores the difference between the two—Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire.

Where the Drowned Girls Go is another entry in McGuire’s Wayward Children series, which follows the adventures of a group of children who find magical “Doors” that transport them to different fantasy worlds where everything they dream of being comes true. However, no fantasy lasts forever, and as the children are eventually forced to leave their dreams behind, they find that the world they return to has no interest in believing their stories, instead labeling them misfits and outcasts. With nowhere else to go, they are placed in the Home for Wayward Children, a sanctuary of sorts run by Eleanor West, where they can find some measure of understanding about the tribulations they’ve faced.

What’s interesting about Where the Drowned Girls Go, however, is that it doesn’t take place at the Home for Wayward Children. Instead, it introduces a sister school, the Whitethorn Institute, which is most decidedly not welcoming nor understanding (basically, think Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall (Part Two)” ramped up to eleven). Where the Home for Wayward Children seeks to acknowledge the traumas the children have endured, the Whitethorn Institute instead looks to bury the past under a veil of sterile banality, and isn’t shy about letting its students know that dissent against their version of reality will not be tolerated.

It is this school that Cora, the protagonist haunted by her experiences in her dream world so much that she can’t sleep through the night, wishes to attend, in a desperate hope that she’ll be able to go back to “normal.” I’m sure you can already see that this is going to be somewhat of a problem.

Now, the reason I put “normal” in quotes there, is that one of the central themes of the book that McGuire explores is that difference between “what someone wants,” versus “what someone needs,” and she does an excellent job in differentiating between the two. The version of “normal” that Cora wants is one where her friends are left behind and the spark that makes her, her, is extinguished, but at the beginning of Where the Drowned Girls Go, Cora’s trauma is so intense that it seems like the right choice to make. Her journey to figure out the difference between what she thinks she wants and what she actually needs in order to feel comfortable in herself is fantastically plotted by McGuire, and the character progression is rich and believable despite the book being closer to novella-length than a novel.

In addition, Cora isn’t the only character who grows and changes over the course of Where the Drowned Girls Go. Despite the perils of the Whitethorn Institute, Cora manages to find new friends there, each of whom has their own problems to work through. It was fun watching McGuire pilot them through a bout of initial antagonism to—if not exactly a harmonious relationship—at least one that sees them gain a measure of understanding and acceptance of each other.

Another thing I appreciated about McGuire’s writing is that despite not having read any of the previous books in the Wayward Children series, I was never lost in terms of the various relationships between the characters in Where the Drowned Girls Go, and I was invested in the story the entire way through. Best of all, it’s given me a new series to check out, and I will for sure be going back to read the previous entries so I can spend some more time in this fascinating world that McGuire has created.

Ultimately, though Where the Drowned Girls Go may seem like a children’s story on the surface, I highly urge you to check it out, because it deals with complex emotional and mental issues that can affect anyone, and does so with dignity and grace. Hopefully McGuire keeps writing this series for a long while to come.

Read if: You’re not afraid to fight The Man; you feel the world needs a little Nonsense; sometimes a bubble bath is the only way to make things make sense and keep the eldritch tentacles away.

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.

Author Spotlight: Donyae Coles

Laurel Amberdine | 610 words

How did “When Sri Left the Ruined City” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I got the concept for this story from a picture I saw online. It was this giant head suspended in front of an altar. I actually don’t remember it that well because everytime I look at it I think, that’s not how I remember it! But when I saw it I thought, wow, that’s a really terrible way to honor a god and the story of Sri spun from there. The way the story is told is inspired by the oral tradition of storytelling.

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

I tend to get an idea, write a few notes about it, sometimes it’s just a sentence, sometimes it’s a thousand words but either way, it’s just an idea. I let it sit. Depending on the story it can be for an hour but it may be over a year until I get to it again. Just let it marinate. Then I write it all in one go. The majority of my short stories are written in a single sitting. Then I go back and edit it, refine it. This is when me and the work starts to fight between what I want it to be and what it is. The work always wins.

This story fits that pattern. I think it was a few months that I let it sit before I started work on it.

Where are you in this story?

This is such an intriguing question! I think this is about my self insert? And it’s such a personal and juicy question. Who do I admit to being here? What part of this is distilled from my truest self? The brave Sri? The greedy controlling Irx? The powerless/powerful Unspoken? But I mean obviously I’m the Storyteller. And less obviously the Sweetlings. With this story I feel like I was telling and being told a story in the hopes that I could understand and pen a larger work. But there’s that tug of war between hey, I’m in charge here listen to me and the drive to just follow along with the tale. To be the speaker and the listener. To know all the secrets but still have all the wonder.

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

I paint. I am an artist. I work in traditional, wet media mostly. Watercolor, acrylic, that sort of thing. I wanted to be an artist before a writer, that was my first dream job. I do a lot of surreal-esque figures and scenes. Lots of just really weird stuff inspired by dreams and feelings and silly ideas. To relax though I watch YouTube videos about horror movies and drama between reality stars on shows I don’t watch.

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

My debut novel, “Midnight Rooms” is in the publishing pipeline so that’s a lot of my time. I am also doing some writing for a game called The Sky Left Us with a small, indie studio and that’s been great. In between all this I’m always working on my “little stories.” I keep a list of my publications on my website, donyaecoles.com, and anyone can follow me on Twitter @okokno for my latest announcements.

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: Carrie Vaughn

Laurel Amberdine | 588 words

How did “Entanglement, or How I Failed to Knit a Sweater for My Boyfriend” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I’m a knitter. I’m not a great knitter, I’ve never knitted a full-on sweater. But I like knitting, and I love the idea of knitting as code. That there’s something cosmic about it if you can really tap into that code. I mashed that idea into the angel idea, which was inspired by another piece of fiction I read recently, and spun it all out from there. Oh, I also spin wool. I think we can always use more stories about fiber arts.

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

I hesitate to say much about my writing process right now, because it seems to be changing, and I’m still figuring things out after this last year of chaos. But the process of this story in particular was about my favorite way of writing stories: I got the ideas, let them simmer in the back of my mind for awhile. Just daydreamed and brainstormed, and when I finally sat down to write it all came out in just a couple of sessions. It’s nice when it all comes together like that. I had a friend read the first draft, made some fixes, and sent it out.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

I grew up with genre fiction. My parents both read science fiction, so I read what was on their shelves, plus growing up with Star Wars and Star Trek, I just never really considered writing anything else. (Except in that one college creative class where the professor banned genre stories, and after a semester of not writing genre I realized how much I really do love it. Good lesson, there.) I love the “wow” factor in genre, particularly fantasy and science fiction. I love the chance to go big. This is a story about knitting and relationships, but it’s also about some really big cosmic questions. Fantasy can do that.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

Confession: I’m reading a lot of fanfiction as a pandemic comfort space, and I enjoy seeing what various writers do with the same tropes and characters. I’m also really enjoying (along with lots of others) Martha Wells’s Murderbot series. Those stories have an amazing voice, and I like how they’re expanding their own premise. I’m also just deeply inspired by the career lesson here, of just keep putting stuff out because you never know what will hit.

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

I mentioned knitting. I like making things, because it gets me out of my own head. I do a bit of cosplay, and I’m also a birdwatcher.

What are you working on lately?

I’m working on a lot of historical fiction lately. Historical fantasy, alternate history. I’ve seen the question, how are science fiction writers tackling the chaos of this current stretch of time, and for me the answer is—I’m not, really. So, lots of historical. On the one hand, history is its own fantasy world in some respects. On another hand, it’s actually comforting to see what all humanity has already been through and survived.

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: Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko

Laurel Amberdine | 926 words

How did “Red Is Our Country” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I wrote this story at Clarion West, where one of our instructors was the Australian editor Jonathan Strahan. I’d grown up in Australia, so I got it in my head that I’d write an Australia story for him. I’d also been tempted to have a go at a classic space survival kind of plot, and the two ideas fused when I hit on the parallel between central Australia and Mars—two red, arid landscapes that, to an outsider, don’t seem capable of supporting life. That image was really important at the beginning.

I had a notebook page full of every shade of red I could think of. I think about half made it into the first draft, and half of those survived revisions. Coincidentally, I like red a lot more now than I used to. Anyway, I liked the idea of a story where survival is actually quite simple (don’t shoot the dragon!), and the plot instead hinges on whether the protagonist can set aside their preconceptions long enough to realise it.

The last element was the decision to loosely base the story around the real-life Burke and Wills expedition. It made thematic sense, and it was also a shortcut to constructing the characters and the plot. Cutting corners is the best. (That said, I think my protagonist is a good deal more sympathetic than the actual fourth member of that expedition!)

Where are you in this story?

This was one of those delightful stories where I didn’t fully understand what I was doing until some time after I’d finished it. The first draft had almost none of the first person narrator (side note: I love direct address stories, but gosh is it hard to talk about the characters when I neglected to give either of them names), but that, unsurprisingly, felt confusing and unfinished.

Once I balanced it out, I realised the story was really a dialogue, albeit a one-sided one. (How’s that for an oxymoron?) A few months after that, it finally occurred to me that it’s an internal dialogue: like most people, I’m marginalised in some ways and not in others, and I came to think of the two characters in this story as representative of the ways I experience those two sides of myself—the privileged tourist (so to speak) in an unfamiliar land, thinking themself open-minded but underestimating how much effort is required to undo ingrained prejudices; and the unprivileged host, extending more benefit of the doubt than is maybe wise, because it’s comforting to think that others are putting in that effort, searching for that common ground, even when they’re not. I’ve been both of those people, and I’m still learning to be the best versions of those people. This story is part of that!

What led you into writing genre fiction?

My mother and her shelves full of science fiction. I read outside of genre as well, of course, but the books that form my foundation, the ones my family passed around between us on holiday, that became dog-eared and crease-spined, those were all science fiction—writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, China Mieville, Michel Faber. I have a particularly fond memory of a copy of Grass by Sheri S. Tepper, which all three of us read over the course of a family trip in Japan. It started off brand new and ended looking decades old. When I realised I wanted to write, it never even occurred to me to write anything else.

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

I’m a shipper at heart, and I’ve really enjoyed the recent trend of science fiction and fantasy novels with prominent, well-integrated romances—the sort that are central to the book’s themes and plot. I’m thinking of writers like Arkady Martine, Samantha Shannon, Tasha Suri, and Everina Maxwell. I really hope to see even more of that in the future—especially as so many of these examples feature queer characters. There can never be enough queer SF/F! (On a corollary, I also really enjoy stories that treat platonic relationships with the same delicacy and depth of emotion that’s usually reserved for romance. A better phrase than romances might be love stories, in all the varied meanings of the word “love.”)

Sometimes I wish there was a market for short fiction along these lines, too, because the eternal problem I have with short fiction is how much of it there is. It’s great for dipping your toe in—you never know what you’ll find!—but if you’re in the mood for a specific kind of story, it can be overwhelming. So if anyone’s thinking of starting something like that, maybe hit me up?

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

My website, filiphdz.com, has a list of my published work. Other than my short fiction, I’m currently working on a novel—a sort of post-apocalyptic space opera—that, I dearly hope, will be finished by the time you read this. I’m also always writing fanfiction, but my AO3 handle is a closely-guarded secret.

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: Aimee Ogden

Laurel Amberdine | 639 words

How did “10 Things to See Before the World Burns” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

The inspiration for the story came from the title, which I didn’t come up with; I got it from a “title rummage sale” in the Codex writing community. Originally, it was a very short flash story, based on the sort of touristic advertising brochures you find in hotel lobbies. When I realized it needed more fleshing out beyond that, I was also thinking a lot about climate, and reading a lot of climate fiction. (Jude Wetherell’s “Dead Horse Club” and Rebecca Campbell’s “An Important Failure” are two that I remember from around that time.) I started thinking about a biosphere that has been broken and remade over and over, and what it might look like when that place falls past the point where it can ever be brought back.

How did this story come together? Did it fit your usual writing pattern?

This was actually an outlier for me, in that I typically write in strict chronological order. This time, I had generated a flash piece based on the title, which was the list of tourist brochure entries that made it more or less intact, albeit totally reordered, into the final story.

I realized that, although that list tells a story of its own, it isn’t one with the emotional impact I wanted, which led me to go back and imagine what kind of person might read such a brochure and visit these places. Once I had Mer in mind, I wrote his scenes out of order, matching them to the journal entries they best fit, and rearranged everything until I had an emotional narrative arc that rang true for me.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing?

It took me the longest time to come up with an ending that fit. I had to write, or at least sketch out, four or five different options for where we last see Mer before I found one that felt like the right form of closure.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I just finished When the Sparrow Falls by Neil Sharpson, and I am very belatedly reading Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. I also love short fiction and aspire to capture any fraction of the beautiful prose of a Nghi Vo story, the emotional resonance of an Amal Singh story, or the elegant twist of a B. Pladek story.

Someday I’d also really like to write something in the kid-lit sphere that makes me feel like a Ben Hatke story makes me feel (but without artwork, because stick figures are going to be a tough sell on the illustration side).

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

I like to practice “productive procrastination;” if I have three or four different projects running at the same time, I can put off one by working on another! To that end, I’m working on a fun fantasy novella, outlining a novel that tackles some “chosen one” tropes, and drafting a short story set in an Amazon company town.

My short fiction can be found places like Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Fireside, and I do also have two published novellas that are available from Tor.com and Interstellar Flight Press respectively: Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters, which is a somewhat dreamy and lyrical re-imagining of The Little Mermaid in space, in which the mermaid and the sea witch have to work together; and Local Star, which is the queer-space-station-adventure-romp-and-hold-the-misogyny-please version of Much Ado About Nothing that I had long wanted to write.

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.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 245 words

Coming up in January, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister (“Up Falling”) and Lincoln Michel (“Cale and Stardust Battle the Mud Gobblers of Hudson Valley”). We also have a flash piece (“Dissent: A Five-Course Meal (With Suggested Pairings)”) from Aimee Ogden, along with an SF reprint by Leah Cypess (“On the Ship”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Maria Dong (“In The Beginning of Me I Was A Bird”) and Vanessa Fogg (“An Address to the Newest Disciples of the Lost Words”). We also have a flash piece (“In the Cold, Dark Sea”) from Jenny Rae Rappaport. Our fantasy reprint is by N.K. Jemisin (“Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death”).

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: Stephen Graham Jones, Isabel J. Kim, P H Lee, Shiv Ramdas, and Ashok K. Banker.

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:

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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

Aigner Loren Wilson

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.