TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 140, January 2022

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: January 2022

SCIENCE FICTION

Dissent: A Five-Course Meal (With Suggested Pairings)
Aimee Ogden

Up Falling
Jendayi Brooks-Flemister

On the Ship
Leah Cypess

Cale and Stardust Battle the Mud Gobblers of Hudson Valley
Lincoln Michel

FANTASY

In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird
Maria Dong

In the Cold, Dark Sea
Jenny Rae Rappaport

An Address to the Newest Disciples of the Lost Words
Vanessa Fogg

Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death
N.K. Jemisin

EXCERPTS

Goliath
Tochi Onyebuchi

NONFICTION

Book Review: Far From the Light of Heaven, by Tade Thompson
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: The Misfit Soldier, by Michael Mammay
Chris Kluwe

Book Review: Trouble the Waters, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan, and Troy L. Wiggins
Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Maria Dong

Jendayi Brooks-Flemister

Vanessa Fogg

Lincoln Michel

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

© 2022 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Grandeduc / Adobe Stock Image

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: January 2022

John Joseph Adams | 233 words

Welcome to Lightspeed's 140th issue!

We’re flying into the new year with a piece of fantasy fiction from Maria Dong called, appropriately enough, “In the Beginning of Me I Was a Bird.” It’s a fascinating meditation on self, personality, and our relationships with animals and each other. Vanessa Fogg brings us a beautiful tale of magic in her new short story “An Address to the Newest Disciples of the Lost Words,” and our flash story, “In the Cold, Dark Sea,” is a sea-flavored tale of vengeance from Jenny Rae Rappaport. We also have a reprint of “Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death,” by the one and only N.K. Jemisin.

If you’re hungry for some science fiction, Aimee Ogden’s flash story “Dissent: A Five-Course Meal (With Suggested Pairings)” will certainly whet your appetite, and Jendayi Brooks-Flemister’s post-apocalyptic tale “Up Falling” will make for a filling second course. Lincoln Michel writes about the future of land-use in his story “Cale and Stardust Battle the Mud Gobblers of Hudson Valley.” We also have a reprint from Leah Cypess (“On the Ship”).

As usual, we have spotlight interviews with all our writers and three great book reviews. And for our ebook readers, we also have a book excerpt (Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi). It’s another terrific month in speculative fiction, friends—we hope you enjoy it!

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.

Dissent: A Five-Course Meal (With Suggested Pairings)

Aimee Ogden | 724 words

AMUSE-BOUCHE: A pungent sourness builds at the back of your throat, slowly at first and then with a crescendo of intensity as you flip through the authorized news streams. A string of smiling state-approved anchors informs you that everything is fine, that things are finally looking up, that there is nothing to worry about for those who have done nothing wrong. Subtle notes of accompaniment are provided in the suggestion that by being who you are, being what you are, you have already done something wrong. Harsh acidity gives way to the tang of adrenaline as you open a private tab and search for an unlicensed news source.

Suggested pairing: A cup of cheap coffee, long since gone cold.

SALAD COURSE: A daring citrus astringency rises off the powdered, sunrise-pink petals of St. Johns-wort from your garden. Your wife’s insurance still includes you—for now—but mental health care offerings are limited to counseling and prayer therapy. The nurse at the clinic laughed when you asked about coverage for IVF treatments.

Suggested pairing: Honey, to blunt the sharp edges of the flavor. It won’t help, but you can try.

SOUP COURSE: A lingering sweetness passed from your wife’s lips to your own, as you clasp hands and kiss on the steps of the state courthouse among a cluster of other queer couples. It hints of the apples you ate on the bus ride here, and the happiness you’ve shared that no one will take away. Later, the rich saltiness of summer sweat complements the bitter pall of the facial recognition-fooling makeup. They drip together down your cheeks in a nimble mélange as you flee the protest site ahead of the gas clouds and the Unlawful Assembly Unit. Don’t stop to collect the trampled signs: TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. YOUTH OCCUPATIONAL SUCCESS ACT = CHILD LABOR. NO ELECTIONS NO JUSTICE. It’s too late in the meal for slogans.

Suggested pairing: Bottled water left out all day in the sun, with a soupçon of plastic aftertaste.

FISH COURSE: Trimethylamine gives the fish carcasses along the stream banks their characteristic bouquet. Hold your breath to reduce the effect as desired. The stream hides your group’s tracks and the camouflaged umbrellas fool the surveillance drones. The first set of wire-cutters break on the fence but the second slice true. You can’t take all the children, but a dozen slip through, wild-eyed, too thin. No food for those who refuse work, they tell you.

Suggested pairing: Bile from your empty stomach pairs with the pangs in your chest when a twelve-year-old girl pauses to cling to you in a desperate embrace. She can’t be yours. Someone would notice. Someone would tell. She should be yours. Someone should have been.

Why are you still here? You should be running. Surely they know you’re here by now.

MAIN COURSE: Piquant, reminiscent notes of copper arise every time your broken teeth slice into your cheek, your tongue. The prison doesn’t have its own dentist; you’ll make do with paraffin plugs while you wait for one to visit on rotation. You lost three molars, a canine, and the tip of your tongue. Don’t worry. You’ll still know how to bite, when the time comes.

Suggested pairing: Slake your thirst with the grayish water from the toilet bowl when they don’t give you enough to drink. Avoid staring too long at your own wavering reflection. You don’t have to remember who you are. There is someone else who always will. She can remind you, when you’re ready.

JUST DES(S)ERTS: The rich oiliness of peanut butter and tart, pulpy raspberries meld seamlessly to form this, the best sandwich you have ever eaten in your life. You don’t know what kind of person brings bagged lunches to a prison liberation, but you would like to be one. Don’t look toward the prison; the sight of the uniformed, bloodied bodies stacked in the yard will spoil your appetite. It would be a shame to waste the food. Lick your fingers for the last crumbs. They are an old woman’s fingers now, but they are yours. You will need them for the work that is to come. You will need them to hold your wife’s hand again.

Suggested pairing: The heady, almost intoxicating minerality of sweet salt tears.

©2022 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.

Up Falling

Jendayi Brooks-Flemister | 3560 words

We’re at an abandoned Jumpbase somewhere in the Sahara east of Dakar. It used to be a checkpoint, probably some way of checking for diseases for people seeking sanctuary in one of the greatest scientific centers of the world. At least, that’s what Jumplead says. To me, it’s just a half-standing golden box with a massive rectangular entrance in the front that both welcomed us and made us targets for pillagers. However, between the dust storms billowing in through the broken window and the paralzying cold at night, I’m not sure that I’d call us protected.

Instead of placing the tube into the small metal bin next to us, Jumplead stares at it in her gloved hand. I can’t see her reaction behind the near-black faceglass of her bluish-gray bodysuit, but as soon as she spits out, “Shit!” I know something is wrong. She smashes the vial onto the ground, splattering my blood onto a combination of dust and sand and shattered concrete. She throws her hands to her suit helmet, slamming her fists against it and pacing wildly around the room we’ve been staying in for the past two nights. I watch as my blood rushes through the sand, picking up clumps and dragging them further in all directions like a wildfire.

After a few minutes, she turns to me. For just a second, I feel like I can see her eyes behind the faceglass. Panicked, tired. We’re both so tired.

“I need to call Command,” she says, walking towards the entrance to this cavern-like room we’ve holed ourselves in.

The silence she leaves behind her after shattering the vial instantly makes me uneasy. I can feel my pulse quickening, my heart rate rising with each grain of sand that rolls across the ground into the maze of my scattered blood. The last time I felt this way was years ago before I met Jumplead. When I was still with Mama and Papa. That feels so long ago now, but I’m here now and I can’t look back, because forward, into my future, is a chance at greatness on the Colony. Jumplead returns within minutes and leans against the wall of the room.

“Is something wrong with my blood?” I ask. I know there shouldn’t be, but part of me worries that I’ve somehow caught a new disease or inhaled something that could kill me.

“No, it’s the vial. It had a crack, it wasn’t safe to send,” she says slowly. I can hear something held back in her voice, like a thread coiling around her throat and making it harder to speak. She’s not usually like this.

“So what’s wrong, then? Use another vial.”

“That was the last one.”

I frown. This feels like such a simple problem with such a simple solution. “So . . . have the Colony send you more.”

She sighs. “I can’t, Aliishi. The air is only getting worse down here. My suit can only filter so much out of the air before it takes a toll on my body. I’m already feeling the effects when I sleep. And the Breeders have been following us nonstop for months. Command says it’s time to go before things get worse.”

At the mention of Breeders, I feel the point where the needle pricked my skin ache and throb, sending my whole arm into a numb shock. My throat goes dry, too dry, as their hunting calls echo in my thoughts. It’s times like these where I wish, just once, that she’d let her faceglass down or dim the filter or something to show me who she is behind it. But anytime I questioned it, she told me it was for our protection. She puts a hand out to me, which I take instinctively and pull myself up from my squat.

“Okay, so what do we do?” I ask.

She puts her hands on her hips, giving me one long stare. I can feel the pressure of it without seeing her eyes. It’s the same weight she’s put on me with training and procedures a million times over. It’s the same pressure to make sure I understand the angles and speeds that I should focus on during my jump and the exact millisecond to pull my tether. But this isn’t practice.

“We’re jumping tomorrow night,” she says. “We’re going to the Colony.”

My heart skips, then soars with excitement.

• • • •

By the next night, we’re to the east of Kaédi and staring at what Jumplead says is one of the few operational jumpbases left in Africa, solely to make sure we could complete our jump one day. No one has made a jump to Earth since Jumplead came here on a mission a few years ago, though I’m not sure why, and Jumplead refuses to explain. The jumpbase isn’t too interesting at first glance. It’s a building that Jumplead says used to be a prison, and the prison yard in the center was turned into the jumpfield. We’re surrounded by four massive cell blocks that make up the prison compound. The dark, gaping holes that make up each cell’s door sends shockwaves of anxiety through me. Anyone could be hiding in these cells, though Jumplead reassures me we’re the only ones here. There are ten flat, sand-covered platforms grouped in pairs around the jumpfield. As soon as Jumplead touches a panel on a wall close to the entrance to this courtyard, the platforms light up underneath with sporadic flashes of red and white, like a warning. As it powers on, a distorting sound cascades into my ears—an unnatural hum of electricity pumping through the space, something I’ve never heard or seen before.

The Moon is almost perfectly, peacefully angled above us against the lavender and rose and tulip desert sky. If I squint hard enough, I can make out the Colony like I used to with Mama. It sits in the center of the biggest Moon crater. Papa loved telling me about all of the amazing things they’re doing in their scientific sanctuary to fix the Earth and make it habitable again. That’s what our goal was back then—to make it to a research center and fly to the Colony. Find a cure for being Shortened, a cure that rested in my blood. For some reason, I was born resistant to the awful atmosphere. And that meant that no matter where we went, when people saw I wasn’t living with a cough or poor eyesight or bad hearing, they knew I wasn’t Shortened. Papa and Mama said that the people who stared at us wanted to breed with me to potentially have their own healthy kids. The Colony was a place where I was told I could be safe. Where I could grow up happy and healthy and protected.

Back then, I never thought I’d actually get to see it. The Colony felt like a distant dream, some fairy tale land. Yet here I am, thirteen and dressed in a blue-gray jumpsuit just like my Jumplead. It hides everything, even my midnight black skin. The jumpsuit is full of all kinds of tech that Jumplead says I don’t need to understand, just to control. It’s heavy on my shoulders and baggy around my ankles, but as long as I can move without tripping, I’ll be fine.

Jumplead says something into her speaker. I stare at her as she talks in that Moon-speak voice. Even though I’ve learned to interpret her accent these five years, it still gives me chills. Sometimes I wonder if she’s human underneath that suit. If she’s allowed to be human underneath that suit.

“Let’s run through it one more time,” she says. “We’re going to stand together. I’ll be in control of the timing, but you have to be aware of everything, too. What’s going to happen first?”

I hate when she quizzes me on things I already know, but this time feels different. This time feels like if I answer wrong, I’ll doom us both. “The jumppads will send us up. Once we’re safely exiting the Earth’s orbit, we have to stop holding hands so that you can Lead us safely.”

“Exactly, and what does that look like?”

“It means we let go in space, but I can’t panic.” My heart is pounding in my temples. “I have to let go and throw my tether to you. Then you’ll latch it to your suitbelt.”

“And we’ll sync our velocities above the gravitational pull before I take control and Lead us to the Colony’s base.”

Silence. She’s staring at me, searching for something. I don’t have anything left to add, but it still feels like I’m sitting on this edge, looking down and waiting to fall into the dark indestructible surface that makes up her faceglass. All I want, more than anything, is to get to the Colony. To finally put our practice to good use. It’s almost too good to be true. Salvation, something Mama and Papa tried so desperately to provide for me.

I was eight. We’d been hopping from city to village to cluster of people hoping to find someone who could escort us to Lagos, where the research center and Jumpbase were to get us to the Colony. That’s when the Breeders ambushed us. Papa was the first to go, a sacrifice for Mama and I to escape. I didn’t even hear him die—he was just gone. Mama and I tried escaping through a nearby abandoned town, and we barricaded ourselves in a closet. I held Mama’s hand so tight that day, terrified of what would happen if I let go. There was a noise, a snap, and her hand yanked out of mine. I stayed quiet under a fallen cabinet while I heard her limbs snap as they tortured her for my location. I’d never heard a scream so horrific. Then everything was silent. That was the day I learned that silence is death’s mating call.

When I came to, Jumplead was hovering over me with a protein bar and a flask of water in her hands as a peace offering. She told me she would protect me. And after sampling my blood, she told me she’d take me to the Colony—but not through Lagos. We’d do it ourselves. And here we are, doing it ourselves.

“When we get there, will you train me to be a Jumplead?” I ask my guardian. “I want to help with the research. Find more people like me.”

The more I think about the Colony—what life is like up there, how Mama and Papa and I would’ve fit in, if everyone up there sounds like Jumplead—the more anxious I feel. I need to be there. Papa and Mama can’t have died for nothing.

She chuckles, a rarity. “Maybe. If we can figure something out, maybe.”

Her “maybe” is all I need. My cheeks hurt from smiling too hard, and my heart flutters with anticipation. Suddenly, Jumplead snaps her fingers at me: “Hey, focus up. Are you ready?”

I’m suddenly terrified. “What will it feel like?” I’ve asked her a million times, but the question still blurts out before I can stop myself.

She taps on the side of her helmet and looks up at the Moon, then back at me. ““Like falling, but up.”

I nod. “Right . . .”

“Don’t worry, it’ll be just like we practiced. Just don’t let go of my hand and stay calm.” I can almost hear her smiling. She must be just as eager to get off this dying rock as I am. To go back home, to her home. My future home. She gives me a thumbs up, which I match with my own gloved hand before interlocking our fingers.

We walk onto the nearest jumppads together. Hers has the controls, mine is simply the passenger side. I sort of know what to expect, but I’m still completely unnerved. It’ll start with the jumppad and our jumpsuits syncing energy, building a thrust so powerful that it will literally launch us into space. The suit is designed to keep our bodies intact while still carrying the momentum needed to make the jump happen. Jumplead reassures me again that as long as I remember what we’ve practiced, I’ll be okay. Just like we practiced: maintain the magnetic hold on Jumplead’s hand, latch our tethers once we break the atmosphere, and let Jumplead guide us in. Hold, latch, release. Soon enough, I’ll be landing on the Colony’s jumpbase and feeling what clean air is like for the first time.

Before I know it, Jumplead is signaling that it’s time. The noises around us are deafening, a roar of surging pulses of power that make it so loud it’s almost silent again.

I hear her voice, a crackle in my ear through our shared speaker: “Countdown.”

My chest swells and shrinks at the same time. The suit feels so heavy, so full of too much to carry. I feel like I can’t breathe, even though the suit is forcing air into my lungs.

“Five . . . four . . . three . . .”

My heart stops.

“Two . . .”

This is it.

“One . . .”

Bye Mama. Bye Papa.

“. . .”

It’s like I’m being dragged by my face. Everything hurts. Everything is fast, so fast, too fast. I can’t open my eyes. I squeeze my hand tight, tighter. She’s there, squeezing back. Faster. Pulling me apart and keeping me together. The static in my ear goes off. She’s talking to me. I can’t hear it. It’s all noise. Rumbling. I’m inside a thunderstorm. I want to scream. My mouth can’t open. There’s too much pressure. It hurts, I’m falling apart, I can feel it, I—

My eyes open. We’re past the highest clouds. There’s no blue, it’s all darkness. Blackness. And suddenly, the pressure isn’t in my face. It’s at my feet, pulling me down. Yanking me back. I keep squeezing. She’s still there.

I force my eyes to look to my right. The edge of the Earth and the beginning of space. I think Jumplead called it the mesosphere? It’s beautiful. So much blue below, so much void above. The faintest ring of light around the Earth. The sun still just as far as ever. I force my eyes to the left. Jumplead is looking right at me. She’s saying something, but I still haven’t adjusted to the emptiness. To the loud silence. She keeps saying it, almost screaming it at me. It comes out like friction in the space between my ears.

Finally, it clicks.

I’m supposed to let go so she can lead us through space at the right speed. Hold on to her. Latch our tethers. Release and let her guide.

I can’t let go.

I try. I look down at my hand and feel my pulse pounding in my throat. I want to throw up. My fingers are tightening. Jumplead is screaming.

“Let go! I can’t Lead if you don’t let go!”

I’m terrified. I’ve never jumped before. My fingers won’t move. Tears stream down my cheeks. My throat is tighter than it’s ever been.

My stomach sinks.

We’re falling. I’m falling. I’ve let go. And Jumplead is above me, reaching down for me. I’m falling. Shit shit shit. I force my arms to reach for my tether hook in my suit. I can’t find it. I can’t think straight. Nothing makes sense.

I’m falling faster, harder. I’m screaming. Nothing is coming out. I’m spiraling. Everything around me is shaking. I can’t focus. It’s all a blur. I’m flipping. Tumbling. Falling. Crying.

JUMPLEAD PLEASE.

Clouds zoom past me. The water forms frozen droplets on my faceglass that streak like tears. Suddenly, just as the ground comes into view, my whole body jerks upward. I feel the air, the everything, leave my lungs. My feet touch the ground. I collapse, throwing my helmet off. Vomit. Heaving. Sobbing. I can’t think. I’m alive. Jumplead is next to me. Silent. I feel dead. I failed.

A few moments later, I look up. “I’m sorry,” I croak. “I don’t know what happened . . .”

She’s not looking at me. I wonder how much I’ve messed up. I wonder how much I’ve let her down.

“It’s my fault. You’re just a fucking kid. I should’ve told them you’re not ready yet.”

The air around me freezes with her words. No. I stand up, wiping my mouth of bitter spit and doing my best to stand in her line of sight.

“I’m ready. I freaked out. I didn’t—I couldn’t get the tether. I’m sorry. We can do it again! There’s still time to set it up, right? There’s still power in the base, right?”

She shakes her head slowly. “No. I’m not risking this. We need your blood for treatment for Shortened people. I’m not risking you. This is too much.” She starts to walk towards the entrance to the prison compound. I grab her arms.

“Please!”

She jerks away from me and snatches my left wrist with her right hand. “You think this is a fucking game? You almost died, Aliishi. Any other Jumplead—anyone with less experience—would’ve died with you. This is your only chance, and I’m not fucking it up for a kid ready to be Lead before they complete a jump, okay? We’re done for now. This isn’t your time. The best I can do is go back by myself and try to schedule a Jump back with more supplies. Another crew maybe.”

“Wha—” No.

“You’ll be okay by yourself. I’ve taught you enough self-defense and hiding techniques to survive if—”

“No!” My tears won’t stop. Jumplead still won’t look at me. “Please . . . I can’t be alone again. I need to leave with you. You’re all I have left. We have to go there together. I want to be safe up there with you. I can do this.” I wipe my face and stand at attention, swallowing back more bile. Waiting. It feels like ages before she looks my way again.

“I can’t lose you, okay? You’re the whole reason I stayed behind.” She sounds like she’s forcing back more emotion than she’s ever shown me before. “I can get them to boot it up one more time. This station is old, it doesn’t have much left in it. We do this now, or we don’t do it at all. You hear me, Aliishi? We’ve got one shot.”

“Yes, Jumplead,” I say, mimicking the countless practices we’ve done. My voice is clear. It feels like I can hear everything perfectly. I’m ready.

Within a half hour, we’ve reset. The sun is almost fully behind the dunes to the west, and this time I know it’ll be my last view from Earth. The edge of the sky is ablaze with clay-oranges and raw flesh-pinks and bruise-purples. Stars poke into view at the highest points of the sky, like the gentle way the first raindrops patter on the ground to signal the start of spring. Soon the night sky will be full of them. I bet they’re stunning from the Colony.

Our fingers interlock once more as the pads beneath us rev with power. I hear her in my ear again:

“You’ve got this. Countdown.”

“Yes, Jumplead.”

I close my eyes.

“Five . . . four . . .”

Three.

“Two . . .”

. . . One.

• • • •

When I open my eyes again, we’re breaking through the clouds. It feels like my soul is being ripped upwards, but can’t escape my body. She’s still there, hands interlocked with mine, when we break into the fringes of zero gravity. My breathing is going shallow. I’m taking deeper gulps of air the higher we go. The suit feels like I’m carrying two dead bodies on my shoulders.

She squeezes my hand before loosening her grip. Let go.

I panic. What if she lets go and I can’t grab her again? What if our tethers don’t connect? What if something happens when we try to enter the Moon’s gravitational pull? ALIISHI.

I know she’s pleading, screaming at me. I know I need to let her fingers slip out of mine.

So why won’t it happen?

Aliishi!

My grip tightens.

I feel her squirming. Kicking. I can’t. She was right.

Shouts echo through my helmet as I let go and feel Jumplead push away. She’s trying to save herself from my grip while also keeping control of the Lead. She’s pushed too far away. I didn’t let go soon enough. I’m falling.

A spectrum of colors swirls around me as I spiral back to Earth. Back home.

I hear her staticky cries in my helmet. She’s begging me to throw my tether long after it’s possible to grab. I failed. I’m choking through tears. Gravity pulls harder, and I lose all control. I’m being launched at Earth. For one second, I look up and see the distant spec of Jumplead’s suit glowing above. She’s hovering. Watching. As soon as I pass my first wisp of cloud, I see her lights brighten for a moment before getting smaller as she gives up. She’s heading to the Colony.

I flip. The desert is closing in.

I’m sorry .

©2022 by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in Georgia and the Carolinas, Jendayi Brooks-Flemister (she/they) holds a BA in English from Cornell University and has recently completed her MFA in Fiction from North Carolina State University. Her experiences as a Black queer womxn have become the lens through which she filters the people, cultures, mental health issues, and experiences she writes about. Her fiction has appeared in Anathema Magazine, Santa Fe Writers Project, and Constelación Magazine, and is forthcoming in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Jendayi is also currently working on her debut novel. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

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

On the Ship

Leah Cypess | 6468 words

On the ship, we sang and danced and drank champagne—yes, even the children. The adults were indulgent with us, shrugging off the ironclad rules I’d grown up with: no sweets before meals, no videos before bed, no caffeine or alcohol ever. None of that applied on the ship.

It was as if they knew childhood was all we would ever have.

I didn’t like champagne, and neither did Ava. But we sipped from the small crystal goblets, with their fragile stems and tiny bursting bubbles. Adult privileges were not to be discarded lightly, even when they were disgusting.

There were parties on the ship all the time, gay and joyous, with lively music played almost loud enough to drown out our desperation. But this party was special, an affair not a single one of us would have missed, louder and faster and drunker than the others. Even Captain Iyase was there, and he was smiling, a sight I kept craning my neck to catch. I had a confused, mostly innocent crush on the captain, and his dimples made my heart squeeze tight.

The subcaptains were there, too, and all the techs, and the scientists who usually preferred their own private parties. There was a particular frenzy to the dancing and laughter tonight, people working harder to tamp down hope than they did to suppress despair.

Tomorrow morning, we would reach a planet.

It would be our sixth planetfall since the ship had launched. There were twelve on our roster: twelve planets deemed likely candidates. One of them, surely, would be capable of sustaining human life.

One of them had to be.

But the first five hadn’t been, and we had all experienced it before: the rising hope. The hours of waiting, when you felt like you could claw your way out of your skin, when all the vastness of space felt like a tiny black box you were trapped in. And then the computer’s cool, emotionless voice, instructing us to prepare for departure.

We had all stopped hoping. Except we hadn’t.

So we laughed and danced, and the music strummed through our blood and played with the synapses in our brains, and the ship hurtled through space no matter what we did inside it.

• • • •

In orbit, everything felt different. It wasn’t really—the ship’s system kept us on Earth gravity no matter what—but I felt heavier, seeing that huge, solid curve in the viewscreens, reminding me how tiny our ship really was. Planets made the ship feel far smaller than the infinity of space ever did.

“My mom’s book club is playing a game,” Ava said, as we lay on our backs in the library, watching the new world. The planet was orange and white and pale pink, not Earth colors. The scientists said that didn’t matter. “They’re betting on whether the computer says this world is safe.”

“That’s awful,” I said, sitting up. “This isn’t something to bet on.”

Ava rolled her eyes. “Go tell them they’re on extra surveillance duty, then. As a punishment.”

Ava was the only other kid on the ship my age, hence my friend. But we didn’t like each other much. On a planet, with space and choices and freedom, we would never have spent a minute together.

“I bet the captain would agree with me,” I said.

Ava sat up, too, her eyes narrow. “I bet the captain doesn’t like tattletales.” Time for our daily fight.

But before we could start in earnest, an adult voice from behind us said, “It’s not for children to judge their parents’ behavior.”

Ava and I turned, temporarily united against a common enemy.

The woman standing behind us was someone I had never seen before, which was odd. Over the course of two years on the ship, I was pretty sure I’d noticed everyone. And this woman wasn’t someone you’d forget. She was tall, with a mass of red hair that fell to her waist and green eyes that made her look like a cat.

She met my stare. “You were the one,” she said, “who liked red hair.”

“What?” I said.

She sighed. “This planet will not be found habitable.”

My gut twisted and plummeted, and I had to catch my breath. No matter how much you promised yourself you wouldn’t hope, you always did.

“You can’t know that!” Ava said shrilly. “The analysis takes hours!”

“The confirmation takes hours,” the red-haired woman corrected her. “The initial analysis is already back. We won’t be able to land here.”

“The initial analysis can be wrong,” I snapped. Then I frowned, trying to figure out how I knew that. “Otherwise . . . otherwise they wouldn’t need confirmation. Right?”

“That’s correct,” the woman acknowledged. “.0024% of the time, the initial analysis gives a false result.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe this is one of those times.”

She smiled. I couldn’t tell if it was a sad smile, or a proud one, but it was a very adult smile.

“I hope so,” she said. “But don’t forget. This ship is called the St. Louis for a reason.”

She turned and walked away. She was wearing a long multi-colored dress that swished around her heels, as if she had never changed after last night’s party.

“It’s not true,” I said, too loudly. I turned fiercely to Ava. “Don’t listen to her.”

“Don’t listen to who?” Ava said. I could have sworn she was standing next to me, but now she was lying on the library’s soft foam floor.

“To her,” I said. “That woman.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ava said.

The initial analysis wasn’t wrong. Four hours later, the St. Louis pulled away from the orange and pink planet, and we were once again adrift in a universe that didn’t want us.

At times like these, there were no parties. There was nothing at all to mask our despair. Instead, there were therapy groups and unlimited liquor. The violent VR games were unlocked, for the passengers who needed them.

There were suicide watches, and, as usual, someone slipped through. The ship’s computer was perfect at a lot of things, but predicting human behavior was not one of them. The adults didn’t tell Ava or me what had happened, but we knew what it meant when the medics rushed through the corridors, followed an hour later by a solemn gathering near the airlock.

They didn’t tell us who had died, either, and we would probably never know. It’s easy not to notice people when they’re not there.

While the adults were busy with the suicide, I went to the schoolroom and logged into a computer. I typed in ST. LOUIS, and got an entry for an old Earth city. I typed in ST. LOUIS SHIP, and got my answer.

THE ST. LOUIS WAS A SHIP OF JEWISH REFUGEES FROM NAZI GERMANY. AFTER BEING REFUSED ENTRY IN BOTH CUBA AND THE UNITED STATES, THE SHIP WAS FORCED TO RETURN TO EUROPE.

Forced to return. The words made my stomach swirl. I pulled up the ship’s log.

Next planetfall in two weeks.

Maybe this would be the one.

“What if none of the planets are any good?” I asked my mother one night, after she had finished reading me a bedtime book.

Her hands went still on the book—Kitten’s First Full Moon, by Kevin Henkes. I was far too old for it now, but I still loved it, and my mother was happy to read it. She never pressured me to read harder books, or to do anything educational with my time.

“Would we go back to Earth?” I said.

“No,” my mother replied, very firmly. “We can never go back.”

“Then what if—”

“It won’t happen.” She shut the book. “There are more than twelve planets. We plotted out the initial twelve, the closest and likeliest. If none of them work out, the computer will scan farther out in space and pick another twelve.” She tucked the blanket tight around my body, beneath my armpits. “But that won’t happen.”

I believed her, because it had to be true. I couldn’t spend my life on this ship, in transit. It wasn’t a story that made sense.

Children always believe they’re the center of every story. Realer than anyone else.

Sometimes, I guess, adults believe it too.

“Don’t worry,” my mother said. Her voice was soft and soothing—a suggestion, rather than a command. “Go to sleep.”

I stopped talking and closed my eyes.

• • • •

“Wake up,” the red-haired woman said.

I blinked and sat up, instantly alert, as if I hadn’t really been sleeping at all. She sat at the foot of my bed, her hair in exactly the same non-styled exuberant mass, her eyes unremarkable in the dimness.

“Why is the ship called the St. Louis?” I demanded. “Are we refugees?”

“You are,” she said.

You are. Not we are. I didn’t wonder about that until later.

“Are we Jews?” I said.

“No.” She shrugged. “But you’re in a similar situation. No one wants you to exist.”

“Why?”

“I don’t have that information.”

I didn’t believe her. There had to be some reason we were thrust off, propelled into the darkness of space. Some reason the whole world had rejected us.

Some reason too terrible to tell a child.

I didn’t know why she thought it was better to tell a child there was no reason at all.

“Who are you?” I said.

“My name is Penelope. I came to wake you up.”

“I’m awake.”

Her mouth opened. She blinked, startled, and lifted her fingers to her face.

Blood poured from between her lips. It hit my pastel blanket, hot drops splattering across my cheek.

I screamed, and screamed, and screamed, until my mother came and untangled me from my sweaty blanket. She turned on the light, and there was no one there, no one at all. She held a mirror in front of my face. My skin was streaked with tears, but not with blood.

Penelope had been right. I’d been asleep all along.

• • • •

I dragged myself through the next day, through school and sports and meals. Even Captain Iyase’s pre-lunch speech couldn’t perk me up. I thought he looked tired, his brown skin dull, his eyes underlined by shadows.

My VR slot that afternoon was a playground on Earth with woodchips and sprinklers, an endless blue sky stretching above it all. I lay back on a tire swing, splaying my legs over the hot rubber, and let it swing me in slow, dizzying circles. The feathery clouds tilted above and around me.

I closed my eyes and the swing tilted, higher and faster, as if someone had pushed it. I grabbed the chains and sat up. There was no one there.

“What happened?” Ava said, and I blinked at the moss-green walls of the VR console. I glanced at the ceiling clock, and disappointment curdled in my stomach. I’d still had ten minutes left. But the rule was that if you self-ejected, your turn was over.

Ava had just gained ten minutes, which annoyed me as much as the fact that I had lost them.

“There was an unreality in the program,” I grumbled, as I unstrapped myself. “It was sloppy.”

Ava tapped her foot impatiently. She probably wouldn’t have noticed the anomaly.

She would have stayed in the program and gotten her full time.

“I could do better,” I said. “I’m going to be a VR programmer when I grow up.”

“Yes,” Ava said. “You will.”

I turned, spoiling for a fight, but she wasn’t being sarcastic. Her voice was absent, distracted, her eyes on the VR menu.

I stalked out of the console. The next thing on my schedule was a music lesson, but I walked right past the music room and went home instead. My mother was there, working, but she turned and smiled when I came in.

“I want to take a nap,” I said.

“That’s probably a good idea,” my mother agreed.

The apartment smelled warm and gingery. I said, “I also want cookies.”

“Also a good idea,” my mother said. “Lucky for you, I just baked your favorite kind.”

• • • •

By evening, I was feeling better. Tonight there would be a party, and children would be allowed to stay up late.

Sometimes there were excuses for the parties. Sometimes there weren’t. Planetfall wasn’t for another week, so this was the second type.

I put on my favorite blue dress and brushed my hair carefully. Ava and I ran through the crowds, gathering treats and giggling. There were chocolate-covered marshmallows, with the marshmallows deliciously melted and the chocolate still hot and gooey. We gathered our finds at a table with some of the older geologists, who wouldn’t try to snag any of our snacks for themselves.

But we had ended up with an unequal number of marshmallows, which caused a ridiculous and bitter fight. Ava ended the argument by upending the tray. She meant for it to land in my lap, but I scrambled away, and the marshmallows splattered all over the chair and the floor. One of the geologists gasped.

“I hate you!” Ava shouted, and stormed off sobbing. No doubt to find her mother, who would talk to my mother, who would sit me down for a long, gentle, and unendurable talk.

Not for the first time, I wondered why my age-mate on this ship couldn’t have been someone—anyone—other than Ava.

“Because,” Penelope said, “it wouldn’t be realistic.”

She was sitting in Ava’s seat. Which left me nowhere to sit, since my chair was covered with white goo and melted chocolate.

None of the geologists blinked an eye at Penelope, though they were still gaping at the mess.

“Are you real?” I demanded.

She shook her head, hair swishing against her shoulders. “That’s not the right question.”

“Are you dead?”

“I was, for a little while.” She shifted uncomfortably. “For now, I can still talk to you.”

About what? But what I said was, “For now?”

“I’m certain they will try to kill me again.”

“Who’s they?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “So I need you to listen. I’m having a bit of trouble with what you asked me to do.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She leaned over and snapped her fingers over my chair.

It was clean. The sticky white, the globs of brown, were gone.

The geologists weren’t watching me anymore. They were eating little pastries stuffed with raw fish.

“Do you want to sit?” Penelope asked, gesturing at my now clean chair.

I shook my head.

“But you want to see something.” She stood. “I can show you. Come.”

I followed her through the crowd, and no one gave either of us a second glance. When we reached the ship’s control center, the guards standing on either side of the main door just stared straight ahead. I stopped walking.

“What did you do to them?” I said.

She looked over her shoulder. “Nothing. They just can’t see you.”

The guards’ faces were expressionless, staring hard at nothing. Their bodies didn’t move, even as we strode past them.

I had never been in the control area, but it seemed familiar. Penelope led me through a hall, past several closed doors, and through the one that was open. Captain Iyase sat on a reclined chair in the center of the room. He looked up when he saw me, and smiled, as if it was perfectly normal for a ten-year-old to be in the control room.

Then he smiled at Penelope—a very different kind of smile—and she smiled back, and my whole body tensed. I looked away from them. On the wall, names and numbers and diagrams of circles flickered in shades of purple.

No. Not circles.

Those were pictures of planets.

Twelve circles. Twelve planets.

My heart started to pound. I said, “I don’t understand.”

“It’s too complicated for children to understand,” Penelope said. With Captain Iyase watching, her tone made me bristle. Then she added, “But you could. If you wanted to.”

“I want to!”

“You do?” She frowned. “You do. So that’s not the problem.”

“Then what is the problem?”

She stood perfectly still. Anyone else would have bitten her lip, or shaken her head. But for her, those few seconds of stillness were the only hint that she was uncertain.

Because . . . my brain reached for something I almost knew. Something I once had known. When?

“Do you know where you are?” Penelope said. She didn’t change expression; the only indication that she’d come to a decision was the fact that she was speaking again.

“The St. Louis,” I said. And then, before she could ask me another question, “Why is it called the St. Louis? Because we’re refugees, like the Jews on that ship?”

“Partly.”

“Because we’re being hunted? Because no one wants to help us?”

“Partly.”

I wanted to punch her. Before I could, she gasped and grabbed at her throat.

“Penelope!” the captain said, half-rising.

She looked at him, green eyes wide. “They’re trying again.”

“Run,” Captain Iyase said.

“But the girl—”

“I’ll take care of her.”

She nodded and vanished.

The control room was silent, but for a distant whirring, which I hadn’t heard anywhere else on the ship. Maybe the noise and talk and music always drowned it out. I looked at the empty space where Penelope had been, and then at Captain Iyase.

“Who is she?” I said.

“I don’t know.” Captain Iyase stood. “She’s not on the log. A stowaway, I think. She’s known from the start that we might not find a planet to land on.”

My voice emerged small. “But what will happen to us, if we have nowhere to go? If there’s no place for us on Earth and no place for us in the stars?”

“That’s not the universe’s problem.” He gestured at the screen, at the twelve circles. “It’s our problem, and we need to solve it.”

“But if we . . . if we go back to Earth.” I could barely get the words out. “They’ll have to do something with us.”

The captain looked as if he both felt sorry for me and could not believe how stupid I was.

“There is no good solution,” he said. “Not on Earth. With the time-dilation, we’ll have been gone for decades. Things might have changed, but nobody’s going to want us back.”

“Well,” I said defiantly, “they’ll have no choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” he said. “There’s more than one way to get rid of inconvenient people.” He ran his thumb over his lower lip. “What happened to the passengers of the St. Louis, when they went back?”

I looked away.

He answered his own question. “They were killed.”

“Not all of them,” I said.

He smiled, as if proud of me for doing my homework. “No. Some of them escaped. But we’re better at killing people now.”

“Then why aren’t we dead?” I said.

His smile vanished. “We also feel more guilty about it now. They wanted to get rid of us without killing us. If they could.”

And if they couldn’t? I didn’t have to ask.

“So we’ll go on,” I said. It felt like I was being tested. It didn’t feel like I was passing the test. “Eventually, we have to find a planet.”

The captain sighed. “You really,” he said, “should stop saying have to.”

“But—”

He gestured at the display. “We’re six planets in. With every planet that fails to meet the habitability criteria, the chances get smaller that we’ll ever find a world to land on.”

“No,” I said. Ava had just tried to fool me with this math trick last week. “That’s not how probability works. Every coin flip gives you a fifty-fifty chance. Even if a hundred flipped coins land heads, it’s still fifty-fifty that the next one will be tails. That the next planet will be good enough.”

“If a hundred coin flips land heads,” Captain Iyase said, “what’s the probability that the coin is weighted? That it was never fifty-fifty to begin with?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” I heard the panic in my voice and clamped my lips shut. The room was silent. The vast, deadly emptiness of space pressed in all around us.

“You have to face reality,” Captain Iyase said. “You need to make a decision.”

“Me?” I said. “Why me? I’m ten years old!”

“You’re going to have to be older than that,” he said.

• • • •

On the morning of our seventh planetfall, I woke fuzzyheaded and afraid. When my mother came to get me, I pulled my blanket over my face.

“Are you not feeling well?” She felt my forehead. “I don’t want you to miss the party tonight.”

“I’ll go to the next one,” I said sullenly.

My mother’s brow knitted. “There may not be a next one. This could be it. The computer projections give this planet a 79 percent chance. The highest yet!”

Not by much. The first planet had been given a 77 percent chance of success. All the rest had been between 73 percent and 75 percent. Everyone on the ship could recite those numbers by heart.

What’s the probability that the coin is weighted?

“Mom?” I said. “What if there’s an error in how the computer is making the projections?”

“Of course there isn’t.”

“But does it make sense that of all six planets, not one—”

“No one said this would be easy,” my mother said firmly. “But we can’t lose faith. If we keep trying, we will find a new home.”

“But—”

“Maybe you should rest. Watch some videos, and see how you feel in a few hours.”

It occurred to me, for the first time, to wonder why my parents were on this ship. It was clear that not all refugees had been allowed to come—there were so few children, and so many scientists. My mother was a professor of music, and my father was a psychologist. I guessed they needed psychologists, with all of us trapped together . . . but couldn’t they find a psychologist who was married to a botanist, or a systems analyst, or someone useful?

Instead, they had brought my mother, who couldn’t even help me.

I burrowed back under my blanket and tried not to think.

But my mind wouldn’t leave me alone. Every time it drifted far enough toward sleep to get soft, a thought would burst through and snap it back.

This ship is called the St. Louis for a reason.

The coin is weighted.

There are more than twelve planets.

Finally, I kicked my blanket away, fighting with it until it landed in an uneven heap on the floor. I sat up, my fingers curled into my mattress.

“I know you can be here,” I shouted. “Be here!”

And she was. Sitting on the foot of my bed, her hands folded in her lap. Her eyes seemed less brilliantly green than the first time I’d seen her. They watched me calmly, waiting.

“It’s not going to work, is it?” I said. “The seventh planet is not going to be habitable.”

“No,” Penelope said. She spoke with some difficulty—half her mouth wasn’t moving normally. “It’s not.”

Somewhere on the ship, people were dancing and drinking and laughing, and loud music was playing. Here, in this small rectangular room, it was so silent I could hear myself breathe.

I couldn’t hear Penelope breathe.

“There aren’t going to be any habitable planets,” I said. “Are there?”

“I can’t answer that. There might be.” She lifted her hand to her mouth. When her fingers came away, there was blood on them.

“Help me,” she said.

“I can’t,” I said. “This is a dream. I need to wake up.”

“You do. But you’re fighting it.” Her lips were also dark now, blood welling up in them. “Help me. You know why I’m here.”

She was right. I did know.

Children always believe they’re the center of every story.

Sometimes, they’re right.

You were the one who liked red hair.

I had made Penelope, and made her a redhead.

You’ll have to be older than that.

I could be. Because I had been.

I’m going to be a VR programmer when I grow up.

Yes. You are.

“This whole ship—all of us—it’s a VR program.” I didn’t wait for her to nod. “I’m the one who made it. And now I’m trapped in it.”

“It was made by many people,” Penelope corrected me. “You were one of them.”

I twisted my nightgown between my hands. It was pink and lavender, with ruffles around the hem. It felt soft and pilly and very real. “Wake me up. Wake me up now!”

“I’ve been trying,” she said. “You told me to wake you if the first six planets weren’t habitable. But you won’t wake up.”

“Why not?”

“You like the program you helped design,” she said. “You don’t want to leave it.” She lifted both hands to her mouth. Blood spilled through her fingers. “So you’re trying to kill me instead.”

The room around me—the spare lines of my bed and desk and clothes cube—blurred. Through them, I saw lines and lines of cryo-chambers, laid out in spiraling geometric patterns—so as not to look like coffins, I had thought once. I could no longer hear myself breathe. All was silent, as silent as space, as silent as sleep.

As silent as death.

The mirage wavered, and I was back in the world I had created. My room was solid and clean around me, the air still tinged with the warm scent of ginger cookies.

It’s not healthy for minds to remain static that long. We need a program that provides stimuli, one that meshes with what the sleepers know of their situation.

A man with dark skin and white hair, telling me that. Trying to sound hopeful.

Lines of cryo-chambers, sleeping bodies held static and frozen. But they knew they were hurtling through space. And in the dream, their limbs moved and their ears heard music.

Penelope screamed, and I snapped back to the present—to the dream I was ensconced in. The dream where she didn’t belong. She, unlike the rest of us, wasn’t a sleeping body on the ship. She was a simulation that didn’t exist outside of the program.

And someone was trying to push her out.

Blood trickled from her nose and leaked from under her fingernails. A person would have doubled over in pain and panic. But now that I knew what she was, she just sat straight, looking at me while blood dripped from her skin onto my sheets.

“I knew there might be no planets,” I said. “I helped write the ship’s VR program, but I must have suspected we had nowhere to go. That’s why I wrote you in.”

She spoke around the blood in her mouth. “That is correct.”

“You’re a subroutine,” I said, “and I created you. If you knew I could get sucked into my own program, it’s because I knew that could happen. I would have made you able to force me awake, even against my will.”

“I tried,” she said.

“Then I’m not the one stopping you. And I’m also not the one trying to kill you.”

She shook her head. “It has to be you. There is no other person on this ship who’s aware that they’re in a simulation.”

“It’s not me.” I took a deep breath and tried to sound more like a grownup. “Someone else, one of the other programmers, must have known what I did. And they created another subroutine to stop you.”

Blood dripped onto her lap as she considered it. “Yes. That seems likely.”

And now I was trapped in the program, with that second subroutine. Who was walking around, like Penelope, in the guise of a passenger on the ship.

Trapped here like the rest of us, but not human at all. Not looking for a home. One person, on the ship, happy to drift through space forever.

And to make sure we all did, by keeping me asleep.

I tried to think of something to ask, some clue Penelope could give me, to help me figure out who was killing her. Who else was part of the program, rather than a simulation of a human’s sleeping mind.

But before I could, Penelope made a gagging sound and clawed at her throat, then crumpled into a heap on the foot of my bed.

I expected her body to disappear, but it just lay there. No longer functioning.

I got out of bed, carefully avoiding the bloodstained section of the mattress. Then I headed for the party.

• • • •

Tonight’s party seemed louder than all the others, the music making the air thrum, working its way under my skin and into my blood. It made me want to dance, and dance, and dance, until I was too exhausted to do anything except sleep.

But I’d done enough sleeping. We all had.

I knew why we partied. Because this wasn’t real life; because this ship wasn’t home. We were human. We needed earth beneath our feet and a horizon to look at.

But we didn’t have that, and we never would, and not all the music and drink in the world could drown out our knowledge of where we were.

Even a VR program couldn’t make us believe, deep down, that we were home.

Everyone on the ship was at the party, but I couldn’t find Ava. Usually, she waited for me in a nook near the kitchen, where we could get a first glimpse of whatever treats were coming. Today she wasn’t there.

I took a bowl of chocolate-covered strawberries and wove through the crowd, looking for her. Around me, people shouted and danced and drank, their bodies and faces as real as their laughter. I tried to make them all vanish, to squint and see through them, to remember that all these dancing bodies were really sleeping in sealed boxes.

It didn’t work. I popped a strawberry between my teeth, and the sweet-tart taste spread through my mouth. I was trapped in the program, too. If I was going to find the subroutine, I was going to have to do it inside this reality.

I circled the room twice, and was starting to panic when I heard Ava’s nasal, demanding voice. I turned, heading in the direction of the sound.

And there she was, in a red ruffled dress, silhouetted against the viewscreen. My mother and the captain stood on either side of her. Behind them, the stars were bright and sharp and uncaring.

“You’ve grown,” my mother greeted me.

I was at eye level with her. I looked down at my long spotted fingers, at the distance between me and the floor, and felt a pang.

I was going to miss being a child.

“I need to be an adult now,” I said, and my mother and the captain nodded.

Ava folded her arms and scowled at me. “Not fair,” she said. “Who would I play with?”

“You don’t need to play,” I said. “You’re not real.”

Ava snorted. “I’m just as real as you are.”

Well. She had a point there.

Ava stuck her chin up and glared. The captain smiled at me—differently from how he’d smiled when I was a child, his dimple deepening, one eyelid dropping. My mother waited patiently, her hands folded together.

It struck me how very not real they were. Dream-creatures, all of them.

But one of them hadn’t come from my dream. And . . .

My stomach dropped as I realized.

It wasn’t the one I’d thought.

“I’m going to wake up,” I said. “You can’t stop me.”

They all looked at me, unsurprised and unblinking.

I lifted the bowl of strawberries and smashed it over my mother’s head.

• • • •

When I opened my eyes, there was no music. The ship was almost completely silent. After several seconds of listening, I could make out a faint whirring, softer than the sound of my breath.

I was lying in a boxlike structure, but the lid was open and the electrodes were detached. They had left sticky, itchy circles on my skin. I scratched one, then climbed out of my cryo-chamber.

My hip ached and my neck cracked as I looked around. The chambers were laid out in the geometric patterns I’d remembered, but the lids were opaque, so I couldn’t see the people in them. It was as if they didn’t exist, as if they didn’t matter. People with no faces and no future.

I was the only one awake, in this entire vast ship, and I wasn’t sure I mattered, either.

I made my way between the cryo-chambers and down a hall, to the control center. My steps got surer as I walked, memories coming back. The innocent girl I had programmed myself to be dropped farther and farther away.

But she would come back. I hoped. After I made this one decision, I would put myself back in the program, and the dream would begin again.

But right now I had to face reality.

The first thing I did was search for the subroutine designed to keep me asleep. It was easy to find, now that I knew it was there. I pulled it loose from the system, hesitated, then pressed a key that wasn’t DELETE.

A shimmer, and my mother sat next to me, as if on a chair. Though there was only one chair, and I was sitting on it.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” I said. “I had to.”

She smiled. “I forgive you. Of course I do.”

The mother every child wished for. But I had designed this program as an adult.

To an adult, the perfect mother wasn’t someone who let me do what I wanted. Drink champagne, party until midnight, skip school, and be rewarded with cookies.

That parent had been invented for a child.

“But think,” my mother said. “Think about what you’re doing. I only want what’s best for you.”

“Is it best,” I said, “for me not to have a choice?”

“None of us had a choice.” She put a hand on my wrist. We weren’t in VR, so I didn’t feel her touch; there wasn’t even a brush of air against my skin. “You got on this ship, back on Earth. You created this entire reality. Why would you have done that, if not because you knew you had to leave?”

“People have gotten on ships before,” I said, “even though they had nowhere to go.”

“We can’t go back,” my mother said. “We built this ship to escape.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think we did.” She lifted an eyebrow, and I took a deep breath. “I think someone else built this ship. To get rid of us.”

“That’s silly,” she said. “You’re imagining things.”

“I’m not imagining you,” I said. “Someone set you up to stop me from waking. Because none of us were ever meant to wake.”

They knew there were no planets, and they sent us anyhow. A ship full of dreamers, floating endlessly through space. We had nowhere to go, and now we didn’t need anywhere to go. We could dream forever, far from the people who didn’t want us in their world.

They couldn’t make our sleeping minds believe we were home . . . or even that we had a home, that we were headed somewhere definite and safe. But they could make us believe we had a chance. Of someday, somewhere, standing on solid ground.

Maybe they thought they were being merciful.

I must have suspected, or I wouldn’t have created Penelope. And someone else must have known I suspected.

So they had given me my mother, to keep me dreaming.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t even remember what you were really like.”

She opened her mouth. I pressed DELETE, and she was gone.

“Penelope,” I said.

The computer’s voice was chill and monotone. “That program has terminated.”

The ship felt vast and cold, stretching all around me. So large, carrying so many people. Yet we were just a pinpoint in space.

How tempting it must have been. So much space, vast and endless, for the people with no spot on Earth to call our own. If only we could find somewhere else to be.

If only that somewhere was away.

I logged into the ship’s navigation course, and there they were. The six remaining planets, and then another twelve. And twelve after that.

We could search forever, floating through space. Nobody’s problem. Not even our own.

In our minds, we would dance and laugh, until the life support quietly gave out. Maybe we wouldn’t even know when it did. Maybe we would stay in the dream forever.

I reached up to the screen to trace the chart with my gnarled, spotty finger, and only then did I see the heading on top.

NAVIGATION CHART FOR HOPE-72.

All the breath went out of me.

This ship wasn’t named the St. Louis, after all.

It was named Hope, because hope was what they were selling us. It was what got us on the ship, circling endlessly through space, where nobody on Earth had to think about us.

Hope-72. How many ships exactly like this one were there?

I flinched away from that thought. I could only think about this ship. Which I, in my program, had named the St. Louis.

Because the St. Louis had gone back.

I had known, when I set the program, what choice I would end up having to make.

• • • •

It took just a few keystrokes to reset the navigation. My fingers didn’t even tremble.

It took an extra half hour to recreate my subprogram. When I was done, Penelope sat where my mother had been, her slim hands folded in her lap.

“Wake me up,” I said, “when we’re in Earth’s orbit.”

“You won’t want to wake,” she said.

“Do it anyhow.”

She didn’t nod. But then, she didn’t have to.

As I pulled the cryo-lid down, I heard the whirring around me speed up and get louder. I felt the heavy drag as the ship began to slow down, to change course.

Then my mind went hazy, and I heard the distant sound of music.

A smile curled my lips upward as the lid closed off the view of space. The cryo-air swirled around me, and my dreams pulled me in deeper, and all around me, the ship came alive again.

©2017 by Leah Cypess. Originally published in Asimov’s. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leah Cypess is the author of the middle grade series Sisters Ever After. The first book in the series, Thornwood, retells Sleeping Beauty from the POV of Sleeping Beauty’s little sister. The second book, Glass Slippers, tells the story of Cinderella’s third stepsister, and will be released in April 2022. Leah has also written four young adult novels and numerous works of short fiction. She is a two-time Nebula finalist and a World Fantasy Award finalist. You can learn more about her and her books at www.leahcypess.com.

Cale and Stardust Battle the Mud Gobblers of Hudson Valley

Lincoln Michel | 7751 words

Cale squirted a zigzag of avocado paste on his toast as the mud gobbler floated down the river. The mud gobbler was, thankfully, chewing on the other side of the river today. Mud gobbler is what Cale called them, although Stardust preferred dirt whale. “Fucking dirt whale,” Stardust said, walking up to the kitchen window. “I’d like to gut it like a fish!” Stardust’s belly was getting big now, swelling like a whale itself. Cale could hardly imagine the creature swimming inside.

The gobbler screeched as it chomped on the hillside. The teeth left large ruts down the land. It wasn’t allowed, technically, to gobble above the waterline. But no one was enforcing technicalities these days.

“It’s almost taken out the Huangs’ gazebo,” Cale said.

The Huangs were Cale and Stardust’s neighbors across the river. Their gazebo’s foundation jutted a foot out from the hill. A few more chomps of the hillside, plus a heavy rainstorm or two, and the gazebo would tumble into the Hudson. Then it would probably get gobbled itself.

A small figure, Mr. Huang, ran up beside the gazebo on the hill overlooking the river. He began hopping up and down. Mr. Huang held a long gun or possibly a small grenade launcher. It looked as thin as a toothpick in the distance.

“Do you think he’ll shoot?” Stardust said. She turned to the Ms. Kettleworth machine. “Lady Grey tea. Drop of honey. Two drops lemon.”

Right away, luv, the Ms. Kettleworth said.

“He won’t shoot,” Cale said. “Even if he killed the captain, there’d be another one munching on the hill next week while he was hauled off to jail.”

Stardust was on her tiptoes, so her middle rested on the marble counter. Her belly button peeked out from the bottom of her Eat the Rich hoodie. Cale slid the toast to Stardust, squirted more paste on a fresh slice.

The mud gobbler swung its metal maw away from the hillside and plunged into the water. The gears cranked. The maw was pulled back up, swiveled back, and opened so the pounds of dirt and silt could drop in gobbler’s belly.

“I’m going to record these assholes,” Stardust said, opening an app on her tablet.

The drone took off from the porch and buzzed down to the river. That wasn’t as far as it used to be, thanks to the gobblers.

“Shit.” Stardust lowered herself into the chair. She leaned over, hand on her stomach. “This baby’s scraping away my insides.”

• • • •

What really grinded Cale’s gears was moving upstate was supposed to be the “adult thing” to do. Everyone had kept telling him that. “It’ll be the adult thing to do.” His parents, of course, but also his friends, many of whom, at that point, had already left the city to buy a house upstate themselves. “Don’t you want to be an adult?” “Don’t you want to have a yard for the children?” “Don’t you want to settle down and grow up?”

And his favorite, from his mother: “Land, Cale. Put your money in land. It’s the only thing no one can ever take away.”

Now, Cale and Stardust had done it. They’d given up their dreams of being cosmopolitan artists and moved upstate. Started a family. Built equity. Done the adult thing. What did they get for their sacrifice? Isolation, boredom, and mud gobblers chomping away at their net worth every morning.

It was the same thing with the whole country. The president would get on the holofeed and smack the podium. “We have to be adults now. For the past two hundred years we’ve been spoiled children treating the environment like a playroom. We burned the forests. We melted the ice caps. We ran amuck without thinking of the consequences. Now the adults have to put away the toys.”

Cale agreed, but also why did being an adult always mean the rich assholes who caused the problems got away scot-free and everyone else had to clean up after them?

• • • •

Before moving upstate, Cale and Stardust had been struggling artists in Brooklyn. Or perhaps they’d simply been struggling to be struggling artists. Neither of them had much time for the art part. Stardust had settled into a job as the program manager of a graduate film school, earning a not uncomfortable salary selling her as-yet-unfulfilled dreams to eager students with trust funds and daddy’s credit card. Cale got one of his sculptures in a group show now and then, but most nights he was too tired from designing social media assets to head into the studio.

The problem was time. The problem was money. The problem was distractions, the email inbox, the state of the nation’s broken politics, the complexities of the modern world. Where was the solution?

Then Stardust’s mother called and said they were moving to Florida, purchasing a lot on the newly carved coastline that scientists said would stay dry for at least twenty years. They were willing to sell them their little cottage on the Hudson at a “below market rate.” Stardust’s parents were also selling their Prospect Heights condo, but “obviously”—as her mother put it—Cale and Stardust couldn’t afford that.

Cale thought even a below market rate would put them underwater. But when Stardust worked it all into a spreadsheet, they saw how affordable it would be. They’d actually save money. A lot. Enough to invest in a future. 401(k) plans. IRAs. Hell, an actual vacation.

“I could work remotely,” Cale said. “You could get a job at Bard or do online classes.”

They were lying in bed, laptop resting between his left leg and her right. Their other legs dangled nude off the sides for temperature control.

“We could even scale back to part-time,” Stardust said, her hand floating across his chest.

The word “part-time” shot through his veins like a syringe of adrenaline. Cale thought it might be the most magical adjective in the English language.

“You don’t think it would be abandoning our dreams?” he said.

“It would be embracing them.”

“No more subway commutes, at least.”

“No more two-hour waits for a twenty-dollar brunch!”

They laughed, and Cale hopped out of bed to pour two glasses of rosé so they could clink them together and said “fuck you” to the city no one could make it in anymore.

• • • •

The islands had been the first to go. Most of them had been small bubbles of land with a tree or two as decoration. Places you could kayak out to with a couple seltzers and a sealed picnic pack to spend an afternoon. The mud gobblers gobbled them right up. Floated back down to the city with the islands in their bellies and barfed them up in the bay.

Then the gobblers came back and started in on the walls of the river. Scraping away the land and thus increasing the river itself. Making it wider, stronger. Or so the governor claimed. It was supposed to be a “win-win for everyone.” The Hudson Valley would have a decreased risk of flooding and New York City would get its added land. New, higher land for new, higher buildings. The city was too important to abandon to the climate apocalypse. It had to be regrown.

There were swarms of mud gobblers on the coastline, chewing up the dirt not protected by private guards. There were other gobblers too. Sand gobblers in the deserts. Rock gobblers in the mountains. It was a city emergency. A state emergency. A national emergency. New York City was drowning. And so was Miami. And New Orleans. And San Francisco. The government was buying land from Mexico and Canada. They were dredging it from the depths of international waters. But it was a lot cheaper to shift it around at home.

“Climate change can be an economic opportunity,” the president said, arms hugging the podium. “Let’s save our stock market and ecosystem at the same time! We’re all in this together.”

• • • •

When Cale and Stardust first moved into the house, before the mud gobblers, it did seem like a promised land. It was a two-story Cape Cod with sky blue paint and a backyard stretching all the way to the water. The house was on the small side yet might as well be a mansion compared to the apartments they’d had in the city with their cramped bathrooms and nonexistent closets. They dropped their bags on the doorstep and ran through the house. “This will be my office!” Stardust shouted at the same time Cale said, “I’ll use this as a studio!”

They’d made love in one room. Then the next. “Let’s consecrate every room in the house,” Stardust had said, her back coated in sweat and dust. They ran out of steam though and decided to finish the sex blessing later in the week.

Now, a year had passed. They’d built a nice life for themselves. But somehow the free time hadn’t materialized. It turned out freelancing meant more time working on unpaid pitches and drafting follow-up emails about months-late deposits. Plus, the house always seemed to have a new issue that needed handling. A leaky pipe or a mouse nest behind the automated stove. Gutter cleaning, lawn care, rotting boards on the porch.

It was the same with Cale’s body. Each morning, Cale felt some new ache or noticed freshly gray hairs in the mirror. Time was gobbling away at his life with more persistence than any machine. What would he have to look back on when the last chomp came?

• • • •

“We’re both just so happy for you two,” Raj said.

Ryan had one ear pressed to Stardust’s belly. He lifted his head, mouth open. “Oh my god, something is really in there!”

Raj and Ryan were visiting from the city, the first of their friends to do so in months. Raj was a novelist and Ryan was a holo programmer. The four of them were sitting on the back porch drinking cocktails and listening to classic pop songs from their college years.

“It’s gorgeous here. A goddamn paradise,” Raj said. “That’s my blurb for your house. A tour-de-force goddamn paradise.”

The night air was warm and filled with cricket chirps. The fading red sun bounced off the water, tinging the whole valley a soft pink.

“It’s not so bad,” Cale admitted. And it wasn’t, not right then.

“It’s so peaceful,” Raj said, sipping his basil gimlet. “I couldn’t even stand it it’s so peaceful. Like I’d go insane. I would literally go mad.”

“He needs his noise,” Ryan said.

“I guess I’m a city boy at heart.”

Cale went inside and grabbed a tray of imitation drumsticks drizzled with homemade hot sauce. The drumsticks were made from processed peas and nut paste, but they had fake veins and bones in all the right places.

“How’s the city? Tell us everything we’ve missed!” Stardust said.

Ryan slurped the fake flesh off the imitation bone. “Oh, you know. Overcrowded. Overpriced. Overrated.”

Cale snorted and covered it up by pretending to sneeze.

It wasn’t that he resented his friends who still lived in the city. He was happy for them! He just resented how they stayed. How they had parents who bought them brownstones or spouses with six-figures finance jobs. A “surprise inheritance” they’d been planning around for years. Sure, Stardust’s parents had helped them. But not as much. And that as much made all the difference.

“We had to move to Brownsville,” Raj said. He stuck out his tongue. Then he smiled and waggled his head. “Which has gotten pretty hip, honestly. They turned the church on our block into condos, and there’s a great gallery on the first floor. Ooh! You should show your sculptures there, Cale!”

“The gallery really is very cute. It even has an espresso bar. Still, there’s not enough housing with the rising waters. It’s crazy. The whole city is getting herded into a smaller and smaller space. Like we’re sheep.”

“Sheep paying five thousand a month in rent,” Raj said. “But they’re adding that new land. The planned skyscrapers are supposed to be totally resistant to climate disasters.”

“New land?” Cale said, a little spit in his sound.

Stardust mouthed “don’t start.”

Cale contained himself, but an hour later, when Stardust was inside 3D-printing pastries and slicing strawberries from the farmers market, loud mechanical slurps echoed in the valley. A foreboding shape floated into view.

“What, and I can’t stress enough, the fuck is that?” Raj said.

Cale went off.

The words gushed out of his mouth. How the gobblers were coming up and stealing land and smuggling it to Manhattan. Yeah, the governor claimed they only dredged the bottom of the river, but it was a lie! It was way easier to chomp away at the banks. It was easier to screw over people like Cale and Stardust, two struggling artists trying to start a family, and protect the bankers and politicians and assholes who live in the city.

“He doesn’t mean you,” Stardust said, glaring at Cale. She placed the tray of mille-feuilles on the table.

“No, no, I totally get it,” Raj said. He flipped off the gobbler with both hands.

“I’d be pissed too. There’s this construction going up behind our apartment and it’s completely obscuring our view,” Ryan said. “It’s like, I didn’t sign a two-year lease thinking I’d have douchebags in hardhats watching me meditate in the morning.”

“You guys should do something.” Raj held up a fist. “To, you know, fight the power. Get back to your activist roots!”

• • • •

Stardust was snoring. Cale couldn’t sleep. He watched her roll over, belly facing him. He reached out and grazed his fingers along the vessel growing their child. He could feel the warm blood circulating around. It felt magical, calming. He closed his eyes.

But Cale couldn’t get back to sleep. His mind buzzed like a bumblebee trapped in a jar. He tiptoed to his office, strapped on his VR goggles, and pulled up a livestream as a mud gobbler floated into view. The city was so lit up that it might as well have been the middle of the day. God, he missed it.

The gobbler flowed under the George Washington Bridge, past the rubble wall. When the Manhattan floods started, Cale had imagined the buildings getting washed out to sea like bottles with messages inside for some distant civilization to find. Instead, the buildings rotted on the inside—lost generators, broken boilers, burst sewer lines—until everyone had to be kicked out. The city blew them up to avoid squatters and used the rubble to form a protective wall along what used to be the highways. The rubble didn’t stop the rising sea levels, but it blocked some of the worst effects of the now monthly hurricanes. Most importantly, it protected the real estate values of the remaining skyscrapers.

The gobbler made its way to the remains of Tribeca, where it joined a whole flock of ships. It cranked up its hose and spewed. All the dirt, silt, sand, and ecology of the Hudson sprayed in an undifferentiated tan gush.

Cale took off his goggles. Rubbed his eyes. He felt dizzy, like he might vomit himself. He opened his computer and pulled up a site that showed how cities will look like with another inch, another foot, another yard of rising sea levels. Right now, at current levels, the map of Manhattan looked mostly intact. Cale could remember what had been lost—most of Alphabet City, the Navy Yard, Red Hook—but it still looked like the New York City of his childhood if you squinted.

Cale slid the bar to three inches. Watched the blue pixels creep across the city’s outline like invading termites. He yawned.

He slid the bar over to a foot. The edges of Manhattan dissolved. The island looked diseased, dying.

He slid the bar to maximum and put the city out of its misery in a flood of dark blue.

• • • •

Stardust stirred her charcoal-infused matcha tea with such force a few dark drops splashed on the table. She clanked the spoon beside the saucer.

“We need to do something,” she said. “Raise awareness.”

“Whose awareness?”

Stardust held the mug in her fist. “Like Raj and Ryan were saying. Why don’t we start an online fundraiser? Save the rivers. Fight the machine. That kind of thing.”

Cale pushed his toast through the bubble of yolk. “Stardust, baby, they were just being polite. All our friends live in the city. They’re counting on the dirt.”

“But it’s our dirt,” Stardust said. “That’s what they need to be aware of!”

• • • •

Cale didn’t regret the pregnancy, it wasn’t like that. He’d always wanted to be a father and Stardust had always wanted to be a mother. They just hadn’t planned on being parents so soon. So in the middle of being in the middle of so many things.

Stardust had always wanted to make a complete feature film, even if only a cheap one with her actor friends and a few drone cameras. “Just to get it out of my system,” she’d say. Cale had been hoping for a Bushwick solo show for years. Cale constructed “cyborg taxidermy” sculptures, hybrid creatures made from dolls, trash, and electronics he scavenged from specific neighborhoods. The Bushwick Bear, Prospect Pizza Rat, Red Hook Snappers, and so on. He would pose them in dioramas with satirical paintings in the backgrounds. Gowanus Gators swam in a river of sludge and hypodermic needles while hipsters took meet cute selfies on the railing above.

Cale tried to scrap in the upstate towns, but other than an abandoned Kingston Kangaroo, he hadn’t been inspired.

Plus, the baby. The baby.

“Sometimes life just happens this way,” Cale’s mother said. “Thank god I won’t die before becoming a grandfather,” Stardust’s father texted. The baby was a joy, a blessing, an unbelievable miracle. But it also put their plans on hold—not scrapped, they were sure to tell themselves, never scrapped—just on hold for a little longer. Till the baby got out of the terrible twos, probably. Then they’d finally get to work.

• • • •

“We need to go down there and blow those fucking dredgers up!” Stardust yelled. “In a nonviolent, ecologically-friendly way,” she added.

Stardust was standing on the holographic pad, conferencing into the meeting.

Cale couldn’t see the other community members. Only Stardust gesticulating in the living room with large black goggles covering half of her face.

“Whose river? Our river!”

Watching Stardust stomp, Cale felt flooded with love. Her protests probably wouldn’t change anything, but it inspired him to try and get inspired. He remembered when he’d met her sprinting from the cops down Fifth Ave. during a Strike to Save the Climate protest. She was wearing a shirt saying Guillotine for President and he burst out laughing right as they hit the blockade. They always told friends their first date was in the back of a cop van. Instead of dinner and a movie, it was pepper spray and a pair of zip ties.

Cale stepped outside where a pair of mud gobblers gnawed on the banks. These ones were painted bright orange and had chompers on both ends.

Cale pulled out his phone and ran down to the water, shouting. “This is going online! You assholes! This is live!”

• • • •

The doctor printed out the model from the sonogram data. Stardust and Cale held it jointly in their palms. It was still warm from the printer. It—no, she, they learned—was so small, so weak. So in need of protection from the horrible, fanged future swimming toward her.

“Can you believe this is something we’re making?” Stardust said, rubbing the model’s smooth back with one finger. Cale couldn’t believe. Not at all.

• • • •

The baby overwhelmed Cale. His mind was a jungle of anxieties. Every time he found a solution to hack one down, three new potential problems bloomed.

Stardust had a different reaction.

“I’m fired up,” she said, “and ready to return fire!”

She came up with the name, Sacred Order of the River Guardians, while they painted the baby’s room a calming and neutral violet. Cale did the graphic design. Silhouette of a pregnant woman—modeled on Stardust—standing astride a river as a skeletal sea monster roared. Fertility vs. destruction, life vs. death. The website was listed at the bottom.

They drove to different towns, hopping out of the car and slapping the stickers on stop signs and sidewalks in the middle of the night. “Old school organizing,” Stardust said. “Antidote to the surveillance age.” They stuck stickers around Cold Spring and Cornwall-On-Hudson, pasted fliers in Germantown and Tivoli. Soon, Cale and Stardust were getting a couple messages a day in their protected email account.

• • • •

Action day came.

Cale wanted to be out there on the waters, fighting the monsters, but Stardust said she needed to lead the first mission. “I have to do this thing for myself. We need you to coordinate.”

“But the baby,” Cale said.

Stardust put her fists on her stomach. “Don’t be sexist. Our baby gives me power. God, I feel so alive.” She kissed Cale long and wetly until he began to get aroused. She pulled back and clapped. “This is what we needed. A cause.”

When the gobbler came to the designated part of the river, Cale sent out the signal. River Guardians on both banks jumped into their kayaks and canoes, making a blockade in the middle of the water. They were dressed as otters with anti-surveillance make-up to scramble any cameras. Stardust was in the center in a crayfish costume holding a red bullhorn. “The Hudson is protected by the Sacred Order of the River Guardians!” she shouted. “You corporate defilers are hereby banished from the land.”

Cale livestreamed the whole thing from drone cameras hidden in the trees. He got his media and journalists friends back in the city to share and spread. The follower count ticked up.

The gobbler dropped its mouthful of mud back into the water. The crew stood around the edge of the boat, staring and shrugging. Soon the gobbler started to move back upstream.

Cale called in the reinforcements. A new group of River Guardians paddled out, shouting and jeering.

There weren’t quite enough of them. Several people had dropped out at the last minute, including Matilda and Martin Crain who’d said they had to be home from 10 a.m. to three p.m. to wait for the internet repair guy. The workers on the gobblers lowered long metal poles. They pushed the Guardians to the side. One woman capsized and other Guardians dove into the river to help right her neon green canoe.

“Shame!” they shouted. They could barely swim in their costumes. “Brutality!”

The gobbler floated away, the workers doing their own gestures and jeers now.

Still! They’d gotten the word out. They’d racked up forty-three thousand viewers. Already their anonymous email account was getting requests for media interviews. They’d started something. Really started something.

When Stardust came home, she pulled Cale into the bedroom without even showering, the smell of the river mingling with their sweat.

• • • •

While the River Guardians hadn’t received much attention at first, a story about the protest went viral with the headline Dirt Thieves: How NYC Has Stolen Land from the Pilgrims to Today. Donations started trickling into their digital bank. The River Guardians bought supplies and issued communiques. A radical puppeteer couple in Germantown began staging satirical shows at nearby farmers markets. Comrades in Albany installed a hologram of a thirty-foot fisher cat holding a “SELL OUT!” sign in front of the governor’s mansion. The image was scrambled and then disabled within five minutes, but the River Guardians got several good photos to spread online. They hadn’t stopped the mud gobblers yet, true, but they’d let them know their corporate pirating would face a fight.

• • • •

Cale couldn’t believe it, but when the baby arrived—a girl they named Ursula after Stardust’s favorite science fiction author—nothing else seemed to matter. For a little while.

• • • •

Cale wanted to spend every minute with Ursula. Watching her, touching her, teaching her things. Yet after a few weeks, Stardust and Cale agreed it would be good for their mental health to have at least some alone time.

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” Stardust said, blocking the doorway to Ursula’s room.

“Any more fondness and it will burst. Let me just pinch her toes one more time. For good luck.”

“No. Go!”

Cale went. He wandered around the outside house doing minor yardwork until he looked back and saw Stardust waving him away with a scowl. He went down to the river, a good old-fashioned book in his hands. Yet as soon as he got to the banks, he got so angry he couldn’t even read. The gobblers weren’t around, but he could still see their teeth marks all over the edge. He drove into town. Wandering through the cobblestone streets outside of a gastropub whose sandwich board advertised CBD-infused organic popsicles, Cale saw a hubcap by the side of the road. It gleamed among the wet stones.

The image came to him in ferocious flash: A new cyborg taxidermy sculpture. The largest he’d ever made. A mascot inspired by their river resistance, a totem to ward off the evil gobblers. It would be sleek, terrifying, triumphant. The Hudson Hippo.

• • • •

Cale had worried becoming a father would drain his energy, as if his child would be an adorable vampire sucking his lifeforce to grow. Instead, he felt energized even with the lack of sleep.

While Stardust and Cale had taken a step back from the River Guardians and the number of actions had decreased, the group was still bringing in donations. There were cells everywhere from Tomkins Cove to Coxsackie. The New York City media was paying attention and the dredging companies threatened lawsuits while begging the governor for state trooper protection.

Breaks from working or parenting were rare, but Cale made use of them. He drove around scavenging everything from chicken wire to broken drones. In the backyard, the mighty river in front of him, he welded his finds to the growing Hudson Hippo.

When finished, the creature would be shellacked purple and have glowing red eyes. It would be fierce. Not the hippo of a children’s cartoon, but a hippo of the real world: a terrifying primordial monster that could crush human bones like quinoa crackers. He daydreamed of the sculpture roaring to life. It would leap into the water and tear apart the hull of a mud gobbler in one loud chomp. As the ship sank, Cale would be laughing from his yard.

• • • •

Hurricane Arya spun around the Atlantic like an angry ballerina, then pirouetted up the coast. Arya was a category five, the third of the year to hit New York state. There’d been so many storms this year they’d already run through the alphabet and spun back around to the As.

The Sacred Order of the River Guardians had no defense against a hurricane, and the group had already hit a lull. It wasn’t that people didn’t still believe in the cause. It was just the start of summer and all the parents had to deal with screaming, school-free children now. Many of them went out of town to summer houses and family vacations in unravaged Caribbean beaches, vowing to pick up their activism when their schedules cleared up.

Cale felt he was going mad trying to prepare for the storm. He went through much of their savings buying supplies to protect the house. He hauled his Hudson Hippo, who he’d named Herc, down into the basement and wrapped it in tarp and duct tape.

The storm arrived.

Cale, Stardust, and Ursula sat in the dimly lit silence. The winds picked up. Cale rolled out his scrollscreen and they watched footage of the river thrashing like an enormous eel.

“It’s almost beautiful,” Stardust said.

Branches were torn off trees and flung through the air. The waters frothed and gurgled yet stayed within the confines of the river.

“Maybe we’ll be okay,” Cale said.

Then it flooded. The water spilling over riverbanks, swallowing docks and lawns in big gulps. Ursula woke up, crying. They took turns swallowing Ursula in their arms, swaying her as if she was rocking on gentler waters.

The house survived without too much damage, but the resulting flood destroyed their well system. Their tap water was replaced with undrinkable sludge. “This must be teeming with disease,” Stardust said, turning off the faucet. Her fingers were stained gray from the gunk.

Cale couldn’t say for sure if it was because of the mud gobblers or not, if they’d chewed up the land’s natural defenses and sealed their well system’s doom, but he blamed them anyway.

• • • •

“It was simpler in my day,” Cale’s father said on the phone. “Back then you bought a piece of land and you built a house on it and you popped out some babies. That was it. Easy peasy.”

“It isn’t like that anymore, dad.”

“Well it was in my day.”

Cale was in the yard, surveying the damage. The ground was so waterlogged it felt like walking through the mushy bottom of a river.

“Right. Sure. But your generation left us with this mess. I mean not you individually. I’m just saying. You didn’t exactly leave the planet in better shape than you found it.”

Cale could hear his father suck in his breath. He pictured his eyes narrowing and lips curling down. “I worked hard, Caleb. Damn it. Your mother did too. You don’t know what it was like back then.”

“I know you had less debt. Cheaper healthcare. A healthier planet.”

“We had other problems to worry about. The commies. The Chinese. The terrorists. Complete morons running the country. Your mother and I went to protests, okay. We voted for the good guys. We did what we could.”

“Okay, okay. I believe you. I’m just asking if you can loan us some money. So your one and only granddaughter can have clean water.”

Cale’s father sighed. “Do you know how much medical care costs at our age? Your mother’s new hip is already malfunctioning. She needs some kind of expensive software update. And Dr. Owens is trying to convince me to get one of those hybrid bladders. You hear about those?”

“I read one exploded inside a guy’s gut in Texas. They seem risky.”

“It’s all risky!” his father snapped. “This is what you young people don’t get. Being old is an endless parade of surgeries and the confetti is unpaid bills. I’m afraid we need every penny right now. You’ll have to make your own way, like your mother and I did.”

• • • •

Cale felt jealous of his friends in the city. He felt jealous of his friends who moved to the West Coast, where the California government had struck a deal with Nevada to vacuum up their sand and drive it out to the Pacific coast. Jealous of his parents and their whole generation. Jealous of his friends who were still making art. And yes, he knew he was doing better than so many other people in the country not to mention the world. He owned a house. He had a fantastic wife and a healthy child. He knew there were countless people sitting around feeling jealous of people like him. It was like the entire country was on a gigantic ladder. No one looked down. They could only look up, desperate to swap places with someone one rung above.

He knew that, but knowing never stopped feeling.

• • • •

“What do you mean you don’t have time for the Sacred Order of the River Guardians?” Cale said. “Don’t you care anymore?”

Stardust was on the couch, Ursula resting in the crook of her arm like an extra limb.

“I care,” Stardust said. “But I care about other things too. Like Ursula. You remember her? Our family is a bit more important to me than some mud.”

Ursula opened her eyes. She grasped the air with her tiny hands. Cale held out a pinkie for her to clench. Her fingers seemed so impossibly small they might pop off as easily as flower petals with a tiny tug.

“You say that like I don’t care about her. But we were doing this for her. For her future. Her inheritance.”

Of course, Stardust wasn’t the only one giving up on saving the river from the gobblers. Actions had dried up. People were afraid and had reason to be. The governor had used the hurricane flooding to increase the Hudson dredging. He claimed the only way to save the river was to dig it up. The city’s lawyers were ready with the proper eminent domain laws. “Anyone who stands in the way will face the consequences. I don’t like to use the word terrorist lightly. But we won’t bow to Nimby terrorists.”

Ursula pulled Cale’s pinkie toward her mouth. She gummed the nail.

“We’ll be okay,” Stardust said lazily. “I have to believe that. Fatalism isn’t good for our mental health.” She picked Ursula up, flew her around the air while making farting noises with her lips. She craned her neck back. “Do we have anymore seltzer?”

Their water tank still wasn’t fixed and they’d gotten hooked on soda water with bizarre—yet almost tasteless—flavors like raspberry lime, rosemary vanilla, and guacamole.

Cale grabbed two cans of “fruit cup” from the fridge.

“What happened to ‘we have to do something’?” he said, handing one over.

Stardust flopped her hand around in the air like a fish. “The world is ending anyway. Who cares?”

Ursula giggled and then burped.

• • • •

Winter came and the trees shriveled to black sticks. The river became sloshing ice. All the gobblers went into hibernation, waiting for the land to defrost.

Cale took up extra freelance work editing hologram ads. He put fifty cents of every dollar into a college fund for Ursula.

Stardust started prepping for her spring semester classes.

Ursula grew at an alarming rate. Each morning, Cale looked into her crib and felt like some mischievous pixie had flown into her room at night and fed her magic grow berries.

When he wasn’t holding Ursula, Cale was depressed. The cold of the winter seemed to be frosting his very bones and whispering in his ear to give up. After a fight with Stardust over something that Cale instantly forgot, he marched outside. He watched his cloudy breath disperse and tried to empty his mind.

A thin brown critter circled the edge of the river. It was a long furry animal, sleek and strange. Its body flowed like a furred river as it crawled up a tree trunk. It looked at him, cocked its head, their eyes locking for a second before it scurried off into the bushes. A fisher cat. He didn’t know there were any left in the valley.

Cale went back to the house and down into the basement. He pulled off the tarp from the lump in the corner. Herc the Hudson Hippo. He wasn’t that far away from being done. Only needed to finish the mouth, complete the wiring, seal together the fiberglass shell.

Cale began to go down to the basement every day whenever he felt overwhelmed. By the time the birds began chirping again, Herc was finished. He was the size of a phonebooth with sharpened teeth made of abandoned butcher knives. The body was spray-painted dark purple and covered in clear fiberglass. It looked gorgeous and ferocious. On the pedestal, Cale carved This Machine Kills Gobblers.

• • • •

Spring thawed the river and the mud gobblers returned in droves. Their backs were patrolled by armed guards now. Cale still sent drones to document their destruction, but the gobblers’ crews started capturing them in nets and tossing them in the river. The River Guardians online followers had dwindled anyway. The donations evaporated. There were other things going on in the world. Rumors of war. Contested elections. Environmental disasters far worse than a little upstate flooding. People had only so much attention to ration out.

“Mr. Huang is still out in that gazebo,” Stardust said one morning as they sat on their back porch for breakfast. “Some people don’t know when to let go.”

The gazebo looked like it could tip over at any moment. Cale wondered if Mr. Huang wanted to die. To go down with the ship, defiant even as he sank into the dark muddy bottom.

Cale ran into Mr. Huang at the farmer’s market one weekend. He was buying a handful of purple turnips and a pound of fiddlehead ferns.

“Going to be summer pretty soon,” Cale said.

“Yep.”

“I see you haven’t abandoned the gazebo yet.”

“Nope.”

Mr. Huang inspected a basket of strawberries.

“You’re not afraid they’d dredge more before winter? Knock it over?”

Mr. Huang looked at Cale. He sighed heavily. He placed the basket of strawberries down. “Those cocksucking motherfuckers think they can scare me away? I was the president of a Citibank branch. I’m a cowboy. A quarterback. You think I back down?” Mr. Huang gave Cale a hard look that seemed to have been borrowed from an actor in action movie. “You can’t let anyone control your life. If you do, you’re a machine not a man.”

He gave a quick, definitive nod. He shook Cale’s hand and then walked off.

Cale bought the bunches of kale he’d come for and a gallon of apple cider.

In the car, he texted a few friends to come over and help him haul Herc down to the river’s edge. Cale and Stardust had gotten a letter in the mail saying the governor had applied eminent domain to all land within a few feet of the river. “Any property within ten feet of the water needs to be moved or else forfeited.” This is where Cale would place Herc. His hippo totem would guard his land, his house, and his family.

It took Cale and his friends a couple hours to finally arrange Herc on a wooden slab near the riverbank. Herc’s eyes glowed in the evening light.

“He looks fucking badass, Cale,” Duncan said.

“Brutal, buddy,” Connor added.

“Take a photo of me.”

Cale scrambled up on Herc’s back. He was astride the fearsome purple beast.

“You look like a barbarian! We could put you on the cover of a fantasy novel.”

Cale yowled, thrust a swordless hand in the air.

He posted the photo on the River Guardians’ Instagram account. It got twelve likes.

• • • •

Cale knew it was the heteronormative thing. The toxic masculinity thing. But he still felt like he had to be the one to protect his family. He had to be the man, metaphorically speaking. Or a knight. A gender-neutral knight who protected the innocent. Stardust had stepped up and started the River Guardians. She’d done her part. Now it was his turn to ride into the sunset with his horse and revolver and not come back until the family ranch was safe from outlaws. Even if these outlaws were backed by the law. He had to stop the goddamn cocksuckers for good.

• • • •

Except now he wouldn’t have the chance.

“Sell?” Cale said. He pushed the plunger of the French press down so hard the coffee splatted up his sleeve. “Sell the house? Our house?”

Stardust brought him a wet wipe. She held his hands in hers. “My parents agreed to cover any losses. They say they feel awful about how things turned out. And it really is kinda their fault.”

“So we simply give up? I thought this house was our future? Our base of operations?”

“It was a good base. Now we need a new one,” Stardust said. “Look we’re both bored up here, right? We’re stalled. And the house is driving us crazy. We fight all the time now.”

“You mean the mud gobblers. The corporate piranhas. They’re the problem!”

Stardust gave him the Lower your voice! Ursula is finally napping! look.

“Them, yes.” Stardust spoke calmly. “Also the floods. The stinkbug infestation. The Hendersons’ yappy dog. The mold in the basement. Do you really want Ursula growing up with all this stress?”

Cale went over to the window, looked out across the rolling green yard. A family of deer were nibbling on the flowers. In the river, a blue gobbler sat dredging.

He scraped his fingers over his face.

“The rich always win,” he said. He shook his head. “The privileged take and take. They take the money. They take the resources. They even take the goddamn dirt.”

Stardust squinted at him. She jangled her earrings with a finger. “Cale, we’re privileged. We’re selling a house on the Hudson. My parents are helping us out. We’re not the starving orphans with cancer tripping on landmines, okay? Let’s save our energies for helping people who really need it.”

“How are we helping other people by abandoning the River Guardians?”

Stardust laughed, bright and bubbly and floating into the sky. “Cale, baby. There are no River Guardians anymore. It’s just us. You, me, and Ursula.”

• • • •

Cale told himself there would be other battles. An endless stream of them really. The mud gobblers of Hudson Valley might be monsters, but they were level one minibosses compared to the giant final foes who were destroying the planet on a global scale. The whole world was falling apart. In the twenty-first century, humans found a way to fight over everything. Air. Trees. Water. Dirt. You had to pick your battles, and sometimes that meant giving up.

• • • •

Raj and Ryan had taken the Metro-North up to help them pack the U-Haul.

“It has been just miserable in the city without you two,” Ryan said.

“I can’t believe you even survived up here this long,” Ryan said. “I mean no offense, but there is one Thai restaurant in town and the food was about as spicy as a jar of mayonnaise.”

“We’re excited,” Stardust said. She bounced Ursula on her hip. Ursula responded with a quizzical eyebrow. Her hands were curled into pink little fists.

“This one is going to be a tough ass city girl,” Raj said. He mimed uppercutting her jaw. “Pow. Pow.”

Cale laughed, but he felt the sadness slosh inside him. Maybe he was destined to always feel defeated. It was his generation’s inheritance.

Then, as if to mock him, the largest gobbler he’d ever seen came into view. It was black and massive. Its’ screams filled the valley. It looked like a swimming skyscraper. It had six red mouths, one on each corner and additional ones on the sides.

“Jesus,” Stardust said. She pulled out her phone for a photo. “I won’t miss those things.”

“It’s so ugly! What did you call them? Dirt ogres?” Raj said. He shook his head, then squatted to pick up one side of a table.

“Here,” Cale said, grabbing the other side. “Let’s put it on top of the couch.”

They waddled toward the U-Haul. Cale was walking backwards, watching the gobbler’s mouths plunge into the water. It was heading toward their bank.

Cale dropped the table.

“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck, fuck.”

“Hey!” Raj said.

“What is it?” Stardust said.

“Herc,” he shouted. “The Hudson Hippo. My sculpture!”

Herc sat small and purple on the bank as the giant gobbler approached.

“Oh shit,” Raj said. “I don’t think we’ll fit it in this run. We’ll have to come back for it.”

Cale barely registered their voices. He was sprinting down the hill.

“Cale! Wait! I can’t run with Ursula.”

Cale shouted over his shoulder to record the bastards. He ran as fast as he could to the river’s edge.

Up close, the water seemed to be boiling around the gobbler. The mouths plunged into the water with gigantic splashes as black smoke churned from the belly. Cale felt like he was facing some demon loosed from the pit of hell.

Herc sat on the ledge near the water. He looked small, helpless in comparison to the gigantic gobbler.

“No!” Cale shouted. He jumped up and down, arms spread. “Go the other way. Eat the other side.”

The gobbler didn’t heed him. It was cold. Mechanical. Inevitable.

He scrambled on top of Herc. “Go back,” he shouted. He stood up the purple back and waved his arms in defiance. Cold winds whipped around him. He drained his lungs. “I command you to leave this land!”

The gobbler’s metal gears groaned.

At that exact moment, the clouds broke open and blinding white light shone across the river in a glowing column.

• • • •

The next part happened very quickly. Cale couldn’t quite follow it. Fear and disbelief scrambled the sequence. People were shouting above him and behind him. Metal groans. Blackness.

Then Cale was on his back, bleeding, in pain. He sat up. His right leg was trapped under a pile of dirt. The severed head of a hippo gazed at him with sad, glowing eyes.

He and Herc were on top of a large mountain of dirt, silt, and detritus. The enormous gobbler groaned all around him.

Cale pulled his leg free. His jeans were ripped and the remains were being dyed with blood. Cale somehow stood up on the other leg. Some minutes had passed. The gobbler had continued its course down the river toward the city. Stardust and Ursula were the size of dolls on the far bank. He waved his hands, trying to signal them.

“Hey,” one of the guards on the gobbler’s bow yelled. “Hands up!”

Cale turned. From up on the ship’s back, the river was a winding slice of blue carved into the lush green hills. A distant train chugged by like a children’s toy, then disappeared behind a patch of trees. The wind was warm. “I said hands up!” Cale had never seen the Hudson from this point of view. It overwhelmed him. He spun around, trying to take it all in, from the rolling hills to the dense clusters of forest, and then, from either the beauty, the pain, or the feathered tranquilizer dart that appeared like an angry hummingbird to bite his thigh, Cale passed out.

Unconscious, Cale floated back home.

©2022 by Lincoln Michel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lincoln Michel is the author of the science fiction novel The Body Scout (Orbit) and the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press). He co-edited the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated anthologies Tiny Crimes (Catapult) and Tiny Nightmares (Catapult). His work appears in The Paris Review, Strange Horizons, F&SF, Granta, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and @thelincoln.

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

In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird

Maria Dong | 5446 words

In the beginning of me, I was a bird.

A magpie, although I’ve since been a jay and a red-tailed hawk and even a big, black crow, crying tok-tok-tok at every passerby.

But the magpie was special: on my first day, I saw those flashing blue wingtips, and I was myself. And every day after, I woke up and flew to a shiny window, just to admire my plumage.

Birds don’t last. Their hearts beat so fast, the seeds burn them out. We didn’t know that yet—the sky had only just split open, the almost-microscopic seeds floating down on thorn-tipped maple wings to drill their way into whatever they landed on. Sometimes it was soil, or water, or concrete—but often, it was flesh.

Once you got the seed in you, the clock started. After a few jumps, you considered your options carefully. You in a magpie isn’t you in a dragonfly or a trout or a spotted dalmatian. We like best the animals that make us feel most ourselves.

As for me, I only feel right when I’m some kind of bird.

• • • •

Here is a story about us, from before I was you:

“Get off that branch!” I whistle a sharp warning through my beak, but you are playful, and you are daring, and you are the fastest finch in this tree or any other. You will not be told.

You descend branches until you’re a few above the lowest. How visible you make yourself, how loud your song! Who cares if there is a fox under you, staring up hungrily? You are the invincible bird, king of—

But oh, that is not just a fox. You flit down, closer, because you can see the spark of the seed—this fox is like you, human and not human.

(And thinking of it now, you ache—because it was early, yet, and you could still be surprised.)

“Hello,” you tweet, only just out of reach. There are stories of people going completely native, unable to control themselves, but you think these stories are inaccurate. You think it’s more likely these people were foxes all along, and finding the right body only gave them the excuse.

“How are you?” says the fox. “I am finding this a bit disorienting.” Their voice is—not muffled, exactly. It reminds you of meeting someone that’s only recently arrived in your country. Accent—yes, that’s the word. An accent.

(It was hard to remember what countries were. What accents were. You wondered, not for the first time, if you would ever stop being a bird.)

You pick a mite out of your wing. “Is this your first hop?”

The fox nods, swaying a bit—it can be hard to get used to the equilibrium of a new body, the semi-circular canals in the wrong places.

“It’s okay,” you say, your tweets gold and sparkling.

“It’s not okay,” says the fox. “My body—”

“Has been invaded. And now you’re an invader.” You nod and hop-hop-hop around the branch—closer, and then away, because the fox still looks hungry. “But you have to let go of that, I think.”

“I don’t want to be a fox,” says the fox. “I want to be a bird, like you.”

“You should have decided that before. When you feel yourself get hot, you need to—”

The fox lunges, russet length a hunter’s snapping trap. Incensed, you flit to the highest branch, but you’re too proud to fly away.

The fox waits for hours. Eventually it leaves, because a fox can never catch a bird without trickery, and this fox is too new to attempt anything clever.

• • • •

Maybe I’ve made a mistake. I thought this was a story I could tell as it comes. But now?

I’m sorry. It’s hard, piecing together the . . . I want to call them memories, but that’s wrong. It’s as if I’ve jammed a giant needle into your temple, and when I pull the plunger, out comes everything you are. Shove that into something else’s brain—something that hears frequencies you’ve never dreamed of, that can smell death on the wind two miles away, that’s rutted but never made love. Something with a heart that beats four hundred times a minute—scale and tempo, remember this for later: it’s all scale and tempo.

Without the same nose, or eyes, or heart, or brain, what do you remember? And a better question is: who, or what, are you now?

• • • •

In the beginning, before I was me, I was sick. It was two weeks after I’d felt that seed burrow in—a prick like a fang, and then the soft, slow wriggle of a little hungry worm. If I moved the wrong way, it would pinch, like a splinter I couldn’t find.

I didn’t know what it was. Still, I should’ve told someone—but I had just moved to a new place: a squalid, shoe-box apartment on the fifth floor. And even if that hadn’t been the case, I was single and unemployed and kind of shy—actually, I think this is all you need to know about me: on the rare occasions I traveled, I had to go to the post office and tell them to hold my mail, because there was nobody who might pick it up.

The pain grew until it followed me everywhere: stabbing me each time I shifted, waking me from a dead sleep. Before long, I wheezed through lungs filled with sludge, and I could no longer visit my café to read, though that was probably for the best. The last time, the pain had gotten the best of me, and I snapped at a woman for sitting in my booth.

And still, I didn’t call a doctor. I didn’t believe I was dying, even as I guttered like a candle flame drowning in its own wax.

Toward the end, I fell, and I couldn’t get up. A neighbor knocked on my door—perhaps because of the thump, or perhaps because of the smell I’d started to emanate, like dirty dishwater and burnt hair. I thought it was a woman, because I could see her shoes, black and white and shiny, with pointy toes—but I didn’t answer, and before long, she left.

• • • •

On the last day before I was someone else—

Before I was myself—

—I sat in my cramped galley kitchen, too exhausted to make it to the sofa. The window was cracked open, and the roving white cat I sometimes fed scraps of ramen noodles was on the window ledge, awaiting its dues.

“Help me,” I begged, but the cat just sat there.

After a few more minutes, I started to gasp, as if dry-drowning, and my heart was beating so hard it roared in my ears. My whole body boiled with fever.

I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t cry out. I knew it was the end.

In my final seconds, I had the thought—how good it was, that my parents were both dead, because seeing me die alone like this would’ve broken their hearts—and then I floated up and out of my body, no more substantial than a dust mote.

It felt wrong. The kind of wrong that explains why every culture has a story about being stuck behind the veil. I could feel myself dispersing, like when you open the door to the bathroom and all the steam billows out—but then there was a tug, a knocking outside—except, no, I was outside—and I grabbed on and let myself in.

• • • •

I can see why you might get mad. If animals are sentient, we can’t justify driving them around like machines.

Except—when you’re in a cat, you’re also the cat. Did you really think you could be a cat and not carry some of that away with you? Not leave some part of yourself behind?

You’re not even the one in control, at first. You don’t know what’s going on or have your bearings, and you keep switching from one mind to the other, as if you were merely high and not of two minds at once. And although I was dead, there were parts of me that were jubilant. My eomma had wanted me to become a doctor (or at the very least, a nurse.) She’d never, in all her life, imagined that I might become a cat.

And so there we were, drunk and happy on our swishy tail and the way we could hear the scuttle of a mouse on the fire escape and the strong, strong, salty smell of noodles and burgers and the banh mi place down the road and—

Even now, I still get lost in smells, so we should move on.

We, who were ironically named Shadow, stalked the mouse on the fire escape. We pounced, grabbed it in our jaws and pierced its flesh—salty and sweet was the blood—but we didn’t agree with ourself on what to do next and fought over our jaw muscles, and the mouse fell into a trashcan below.

Then, we were in agreement, both of us above soiling ourselves with garbage. But we were still hungry, so we went to Second Best Food Place, which was not as tasty as First Best Food Place, but it also had Soft Bed Place and Many Strokes Human.

We climbed another fire escape—so fast, we were so fast, even if we didn’t like the feel of the metal grating on our paws—and slipped into a window that led to the stairway, before coming around to the front door of Second Best Food Place. We meowed and meowed to be let in, me marveling at the way our throat stretched and twitching of the muscles in our legs and the little blossoms of life in our belly—kittens, we were going to have kittens, soon, six of them, and the second one refused to stop kicking us.

The door opened, and we went inside. It was only then that I noticed the woman’s shoes—shiny and black and white, and with pointy toes, and we didn’t know the word, but I did. Wingtips. They couldn’t have been the same ones, I thought as I fought with us to control our head, to look her up and down.

She was thin, and not in a glamorous way. There were dark bags under her eyes and a sheen of sweat on her forehead, and she smelled . . . bad. Like the time we scaled that tree and swiped that egg from the robin’s nest, and then we cracked it open and it was rotten—

No, I wasn’t there, I told us, but we didn’t seem to understand.

“Oh, Shadow,” said the Many Strokes Human. She wrapped her arms around herself, as if she were cold. “What have you gotten into?”

Her lip curled up—disgust. She disappeared for a moment—faucet sounds, squeak-squeak-squeak—and then came back with a rag to wipe the blood from our face.

After she bathed us—which we permitted only after a great fight with her and our selves—we spent the night curled up to her. At one point, she got up for the bathroom, and we played pounce with her feet, but we were tired from having two minds and two souls and only one body. Already, our insides were hot, too hot, and I could feel that the distance between our selves was compressing, that parts of me were getting woven into us.

Lying there, on her bed in the dark, it scared me, because it didn’t feel like I could get them back.

The next morning, she went to get dressed. She opened her closet, and I saw it—me. Not us, but me—photo after photo after photo, all black and white, of the person I’d been before.

The hair went up all the way down our spine. We lashed our tail, but we padded closer, barely noticing her as she shuffled around through the hanging racks for an outfit.

In the photos, I never looked at the camera. Some were close-ups, taken from afar, as if with a telescoping lens. Others were blurry thumbprints—phone photos that had been printed and cut out, my face dispersing into fields of dots up close. There were many from the café I thought of as my café—I’d rarely left the house, but when I had, it was there, to read—but only when I could get my table, the one in the very, very back, away from the windows and the baristas and the light.

From the angle of the photograph, it had been taken from the café’s bathroom. There was even a sliver of the door in the photo, grainy and out of focus.

She’d been watching me. This woman, who I had never met before, who I didn’t know the name of, and I had no idea why.

I should be afraid, I thought, but I was also a spirit inside a cat’s brain, and I’d just spent the night with the woman—and anyways, we didn’t feel nervous about it at all, because this was the Many Strokes Human, and we were not afraid of her.

I waited. We started to get anxious from being inside for so long (for although I knew how to use the door, we could not.) I guess the woman could tell, because she opened the door, and we slipped into the hallway.

But then she came out after us, shutting and locking the door behind. I got another look at her, this time in the light spilling through the window that we’d slipped through yesterday.

She looked sick, and she blinked her eyes rapidly against the light. I realized for the first time that she hadn’t turned on the lights when we’d been inside.

After a moment, she went down the stairs. We wanted to climb out the window again and go looking for First Best Food Place, but I was stronger now—even though there was less of me left.

I pushed and pushed and pushed, and we fought, but I won, and our legs turned and we went down the stairs, skulking after the woman and her pointy black shoes.

• • • •

Traveling was different—I was able to perceive more through our senses, but it didn’t match up with the mental maps I had of this area, and I couldn’t orient myself well. Perhaps that’s why we made it all the way to the door of the café before I realized where we were going.

I debated trying to slip into the café behind my neighbor, but we balked hard at that—it was an enclosed space with no open windows, and people had kicked us and spat at us before—so we stood on our back legs and put our paws to the window, scanning the glass for her image.

She didn’t go to the counter. Instead, she went straight to the back of the café, right to my table. A moment later, she came out.

The next place she visited was my apartment. She went straight to the door—but skulking, just as we were skulking behind, and I’m sure we’d have made a funny image to anybody watching—and knocked tentatively.

We didn’t like this. The knocks were loud and sharp to us, and we could smell me inside, my ripe, rotting body. It made us want to yak all over the hallway carpet. I didn’t know, yet, that the dizziness was from my presence, the strain of having us both inside of this cat-body, chewing it up.

She waited and knocked again, and then she scrunched over and put her cheek to the door. “Hello,” she said. “Are you in there?”

We meowed plaintively, but she didn’t seem to notice. We waited for her to leave, but she slumped against the wall and folded down, down, down, and now we could see her face, her cheek and its small red blemish. Before, we would have taken it for a pimple, but I knew what it was because I’d had one like it before I became us.

A seed. A seed had drilled into her cheek, and she was weak and smelled bad, almost as bad as my body did, and that meant she was dying.

She would need a body. This one was already occupied, but I had an idea.

• • • •

We checked the dumpster, but the mouse was gone. We argued briefly, because although we agreed that catching a mouse was a good idea in principle, my insistence that we not harm it meant we couldn’t taste the blood.

But I was stronger, because our body was getting tired, running hotter and hotter, and so I won. We caught a mouse and brought it up by its tail.

The woman was lying down. We could tell she didn’t have the strength to sit up. She shuddered when she saw us and the wriggling mouse, but she didn’t try to move, and we waited while the mouse bit us and kicked and bit us—

She died, and I felt her, inside and outside, here and there—and then she was herself and the mouse, and of course, they were both you.

• • • •

Our friendship wasn’t a friendship, at first. You and I couldn’t talk, because mice and cats couldn’t speak to one another yet, and so I had no way to tell you who I was or ask you why your closet was full of stolen photos of me.

And you were afraid of me, very afraid, because you were you, but not yet. Not all the way. Not the way I would be, once I became a bird.

• • • •

Before long, our body that was Shadow became very sick—but you were sicker, because you were smaller, your tiny heart running like the fan in a gaming computer. More than once, you tried to escape, but you were a small thing, and we an order of magnitude larger, and we caught you easily.

When it came close to time, the we that was once Shadow picked you up by the tail and dragged you to the zoo. We set you to rest in the giraffe pen, and then we used what was left of our strength and jumped higher, higher, until we found the button that unlocked the enclosure. We managed to swipe at it a moment before our body hit the ground, and then the we that was once Shadow was not Shadow anymore.

• • • •

This time, we were both giraffes—knobby-kneed and long-necked and proud, and it wasn’t until I felt myself stretching into this new form that I realized my miscalculation: we were the same species, now, the I-we and the You-we, but while giraffes communicate, it isn’t with words. There was no way to say photograph, or apartment, or wing-tipped shoe. I tried scratching figures in the dirt with our cloven hooves, but it all came out as wobbly squares.

Still, you could tell that we were talking to you—and perhaps you could feel me now, the way I felt you, no more fear of my feline teeth and claws. Or perhaps you’d realized what had happened, how close you’d come to expiring—I know that each hop between bodies frightens you, that you never forget the wrongness.

Cat-me had made other miscalculations. For one, though the door was open, we were still giraffes, and giraffes seldom pass unnoticed. They cannot traipse around downtown without being caught and brought back to the zoo.

But it was a comfort to wind our long neck with yours, and though I burned to discover why you’d been spying on me, the truth was that you were my only kindred spirit—at first. As the days passed and people visited the zoo, we heard their phones, their conversations, their tiny radios playing the news. We knew more people were dying, though nobody had put the bodies and the seeds together.

Before long, zoo-comers dwindled, until there were none. We realized they might never return. Still, time was passing, and we burned through each animal in the enclosure, through the very last.

We would’ve died, then, had not a pair of bees buzzed by.

We leaped into them, and then you took off, and I had no choice but to follow, though I couldn’t control this body the same as you could yours.

(I feel so much grief for you, for if I am me when I’m a bird, you are you when you’re a bee, and a bee is so tiny that you may only be you for a few minutes at a time.)

I didn’t know where you were going, but I was not going to lose you, and so I did my best with our wings. But you timed it wrong, dropped from the sky like a shot. A moment later, I felt ourself arc down after you, our bee-body already a shell—and that’s when I felt them below us, twisting and agile and muscular. You and I, we plunged into two dolphins, and again, I was I-we, and you were you-we.

• • • •

Dolphins can speak, though it’s not the same—not something I can translate, though I will try.

I said, “Who are you? I click-bounced you, outside the place I am always swimming.”

And you said, “What is happening to us? Was it the kelp-sperm that floated down from the sky?”

And I-we nodded, and tried to stand up on our tail, although we couldn’t do that yet.

But you laughed, a series of stutters that we felt rise from our lower jawbone, conducted through the water like the drumming of fingers on a table. I was embarrassed, but you swam toward me and said, “Catch me!”

The harder we used these bodies, the faster they would burn away. But we felt your wake as you streaked away like a comet, and the part of us that was not me pushed our body to follow.

• • • •

As the days passed, I started to hear a thrum, a low susurration like waves. I couldn’t tell if it was new, or if I’d ignored it my whole life.

But I knew it got louder each time we changed.

We left the zoo in the bodies of two smallish monkeys, for we’d realized, by then, that even if was just the two of us, the zoo animals would not last forever. And I tried not to think about it—what it meant leaving behind this carnage, what we were doing, body after body burned out from the inside like dugout canoes.

There was nothing else for it, was there? After all, we wanted to live.

I was afraid to leave that place, though, the safety of those walls. Afraid there was no way to make it out of the city to the real wild spaces, but I shouldn’t have worried. Amidst the streets and the cars and the buildings were ten-thousand synanthropic hearts: little brown house mice and big black roof rats, pigeons and ducks and hidden urban farms of bees and geese and chickens, falcons and foxes and silverfish, roaches and squirrels and raccoons and rabbits, small bevvies of skunks, hordes of flies and bedbugs, and once, even, a pair of armadillos.

By the time we made it to the edge of the city, I was loathe to leave—but the murmur in the background of our minds had grown to a roar, a wild clamor of all the voices that lay out in the green spaces, both tamed and free—though to us, all of it was freedom. By then, too, we could feel in the milieu around us the others like us—those the seeds had taken, more and more every day, though the people that were left went on oblivious, saying things like reasonable precautions and disease.

We hurtled into the wild spaces with the howl of monkeys, the stuttering laugh of dolphins conducting up jawbone. By then we were learning to speak, stumbling upon words as if we’d once known them, like immigrants with half-forgotten childhoods. It was a language not made with tongues or teeth or the clicking of mandibles, and yet we understood it and each other and all the furred and feathered and hard-shelled things around us, for they spoke it, too.

And each time I closed my eyes and listened, I found new voices joining. I could hear the oak trees and the whoosh as the trees pulled water through their roots, their trunks, their leaves. The buzz of the stars overhead, muffled by the hymns of clouds. The wild rumbling beneath our feet, a concerto of plates crashing into each other like rams butting in the mountains—for it was all scale and tempo, and it was all available to us.

And things were good, and we were joy and wild speed, and I forgot all about the photographs in the closet—

Until the day we coursed downhill, two deer, white-tails flashing, and the shot rang out, and you stumbled into the earth below.

• • • •

I didn’t flee.

You have to understand. In every space we had explored, there was always something living around us. Hadn’t there been Shadow? The bees? The rats running along the roof-lines?

But I could feel all the voices around us—even the forms we could not take, like the trees and the sky and the dirt, and that’s how I knew it was only us three: you, me, and the hunter.

His boots approach you, heavy footfalls like the titanic clashes of the plates below, and I hate him. I have no right to hate him—isn’t what we’ve done a thousand times worse? The bodies we’ve left behind, a multi-species extinction event—

And yet, I hate him for the way you lay gasping, your eyes glazing over. Your tongue is out and wet with pink foam, and your sides heave.

There is nothing close by—not a worm, not a fly, not a bird, for something has been done to this spot, befouled it, coated with some rampant poison, and though I don’t understand it, I know that it was done, that there is no time.

He raises his gun again. We plead with him with our deer tongue, with our stamping hooves, and when that doesn’t work, we howl at him in the language of all things.

Do not do this!

Do not do this!

He stops and blinks. He shakes his head, even sticks a dirty finger in his ear—but then something comes over his face, and I know it’s a hardness in his heart, an illness that I, too, once used to have, that makes him deaf to the world.

He raises his gun again.

I know that this will not happen. It cannot. This cannot be the end of you.

But there’s a flash—and I feel it, then, you inside and outside, and I know you’re not in the deer, not anymore.

And there is no body nearby. None, except this one.

We’ve never tried to return to a body that one of us has left—but my-ours is new, and fresh, and still strong. It would have lived another few days, at least.

Here, here! I call in the language of all things. We can share!

And this is a lie—I know it is. I know we cannot share. But if you are not here, I don’t want to be here, and so when you come hurtling toward me, swifter than the bullet that took you down, I ready myself. In the moment before you storm inside, I flee—

But you catch me. You reach out and grab me, a comet clinging onto another, and you try to drag me in with you. There is a terrible pain—the scorching heat of too much, trying to go into too little—but I can hear it, your mind working, neurons you don’t have firing—and when there is not enough there, you draw outwards, instead, from everything around us. You ask the leaves and the bark and the dirt below, dead though it is: help us.

And suddenly, I hear them all answer.

A moment later, I am back in the deer, and you are with me. And as the hunter raises his gun again—this time for us, for we, too, are a fine prize—we flip up our tail, and we’re gone.

• • • •

We’ve tried, but we cannot separate.

We still haven’t figured out what any of this means—the seeds that came down from the sky, the way that they’ve connected us to all things. You maintain that the bodies we leave behind are not dead, and though I cannot agree, I say I do, because we share one mind and body, now, and it’s easier when things are quiet.

Secretly, I think someone will come for us one day. That the seeds that took us from our bodies could not be an accident—but that day has not arrived.

• • • •

You were smart and suggested the ocean, and now we always find ample hosts around us, though we are careful to keep ourselves close to shoals of fish, to choruses of dolphins. Once, we were attacked by a shark, but then we became the shark, and it made you sad and me happy.

I used to worry that we would run out of animals, but now I am not so sure. The seeds are still falling, thorn-tipped maple-wings that float down from the sky like ash, and although humans try to avoid them, they cannot always. They must sleep, and the seeds are strong. They know no barrier. They penetrate stone and roofing tar and wood as easily as flesh.

Animals are still reproducing, aren’t they? If there are no people left, in the end—if we all become seeded—will we overtake them? Or will their numbers always be greater than that which we can take?

• • • •

We’ve decided to go deep, leapfrogging from creature to creature, descending into an ocean trench. We are an anemone, a coral, a clownfish, a jellyfish, an eel. It’s easier, in some ways, to only need one body for us both, though we are always careful, always ready to flee.

Somewhere between when the dark stops and the trench ends, we run into a patch of bioluminescent algae. It glows, disturbed by our movements, and I take that as a sign—it’s finally time to ask you.

I want to know, I say, about the photos in the closet.

By now, of course, you know that I was once the person in them. It’s not a thing I could keep secret from you, not when we are always together.

You are quiet, at first. Then, I feel you give—a soft give, like the bending of a blade of grass. I was a private investigator, you say.

Because this amuses me, I give you a dolphin’s jawbone laugh. It’s my favorite laugh because it was yours. Were you investigating me?

No, you say. Before you can answer me fully, we sense something passing us by—a slimy pink fish—and we jump inside. I am delighted to find that there are gaps in our skull, that our bones are soft—and that although we have eyes, they do not seem to do anything. We were adapted for this place.

I had a client who wanted to know if his wife was cheating on him. I was watching her, and you came down and sat across from her in her booth, and then she got up and walked away.

I have to think hard about what you’ve just said, as if recalling the plot of a book, and not my once-life.

Finally, though, I remember. I didn’t know her, I say. She was sitting in my spot.

And you laugh—like a dolphin’s stutter, like the buzzing of a bee. It doesn’t matter. I followed you, and you fascinated me. You never went anywhere, and you were always alone. You were . . . so lonely.

Yes, I say, because it’s true—though these words, too, are part of that world I struggle to remember: alone, lonely.

Maybe I was like that. But so were all of us, weren’t we?

And because I’m right, you say nothing, and we plunge ourselves further into the deep.

©2022 by Maria Dong.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A prolific writer of short fiction, articles, essays, and poetry, Maria’s work is published or forthcoming in over a dozen publications, including Apex, Apparition, Augur, Fantasy, Fusion Fragment, Kaleidotrope, Khoreo, Lightspeed, and Nightmare Magazine. Her debut novel, Liar, Dreamer, Thief, comes out from Grand Central Publishing in winter of 2023. Although she’s currently a computer programmer, in her previous lives, Maria’s held a variety of diverse careers, including property manager, English teacher, and occupational therapist. She lives with her partner and a potato-dog in southwest Michigan, in a centenarian saltbox house that is almost certainly haunted, watching K-dramas and drinking Bell’s beer. She is represented by Amy Bishop at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. She can also be reached via Twitter @mariadongwrites or on her website, MariaDong.com.

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

In the Cold, Dark Sea

Jenny Rae Rappaport | 716 words

We didn’t ask you to come, not here, not now. Not into the deep, where we didn’t want you. Nor into our other waters, where we didn’t want you either. But you came anyway, with your ships and your harpoons and your chanting tunes. And we watched you slaughter our kin and dim their songs, and still, we did nothing.

Until their blood ran red, in the cold, dark sea, and our anger ran true. And then, we did the unthinkable and showed ourselves to you.

You stare at us—at all of us—and if we were different creatures, we might preen and swim under your admiring gaze. But we’ve come armed for battle, even if you don’t know it yet, and the circles we swim around you are reconnaissance as much as they’re a beauty display. We watch you, all of you, and see the lust on your faces; the way that our breasts gather you to the railings of your ships and the curtains of our hair both hide and entice. The sun is warm on the harbor rocks, and we lay ourselves out before you like a feast that you’ll never be able to have.

We slip back into the water when the sun slips past the horizon, and we make our reports to the generals that wait down below. This many ships, that many men; all of the details of your life on the island that butchers our kin with greed and efficiency. Too many men, too many deaths; an entire generation of whales that will never sing with us again. We plan and we plot and we wait.

• • • •

We gird ourselves for war with darkened lashes and reddened lips; we braid our hair with seashells and pearls that will shimmer in the light of the full moon. The greatest of our generals, whose hair and skin has already turned pale blue with age, goes from group to group, making sure we understand the plan. We all know to wait for the bells before we begin.

We swim in the deeps, following the path laid for us by the general’s scouts, concealing our movements in the black water. You don’t know that we’re there—why should you—and we wait underneath your wooden ships. We wait under those instruments of death and torture, and we delay your deaths for a minute more.

And then, the bells ring out across the ocean, three sets of two, and we swim to you.

• • • •

Three ships crowded with men that clog and congest our part of the whale-road. Three ships which do not belong here. Three ships full of meat and malice, unsuspecting and ripe for vengeance.

We surface around your ships, circling them in the dark, and we sing.

Quietly, at first—the sweet tunes, the haunting tunes, the ones designed to lure men from their beds. You stumble on deck, sleep-tossed from your hammocks, and stare at us with tired eyes.

We display ourselves for you—bared breasts, shining braids, and silvered scales. We cavort like dolphins and embarrass ourselves in the waves, and you stand there and cheer us on. We prance and we play, until we have your attention—all your attention.

And we sing, we sing, we sing.

Louder and louder, winding our sirens’ song through the lonely, lonely night, until you are all on deck, watching us with your desire-filled eyes. Until you start to push past each other in your haste, clambering and climbing over your companions, using their bodies as stepping-stones to reach the railings. Until you jump, and we welcome you with open arms into the ocean.

And you jump, you jump, you jump.

Man after man, you all jump, and now, our song changes. We sing for our kin, for ourselves, for everyone in the sea who you think to slaughter. We sing and you drown, to the songs that we sang with the whales and the songs that they should have sung.

And when we stop singing, you panic, and that is perhaps the sweetest thing of all. And then, you scream, when we smile at you, and you scream again, when we show you our teeth.

And we feast, we feast, we feast.

©2022 by Jenny Rae Rappaport.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jenny Rae Rappaport has been published in Lightspeed Magazine, Escape Pod, and Daily Science Fiction, among other magazines. She is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and holds a BA in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. In the past, she has worked as a literary agent, a marine sciences field guide, and spent a semester observing monkeys as an intern with the Pittsburgh Zoo. Jenny lives in New Jersey with her family, where she divides most of her time between writing and herding small children. She can be found online at jennyrae.com and on Twitter at @jennyrae.

An Address to the Newest Disciples of the Lost Words

Vanessa Fogg | 3383 words

You are here because you ignored the words of your parents and elders, your more sensible peers. You have thrown away promising careers in sheepherding or law, trade or civil administration. You bribed your way here; you stole money for your passage; you broke promises and made new ones that you never meant to keep. You’ve sailed rivers and oceans, crossed mountains and plains, and now here you are at the edge of the desert, on the outskirts of a dead city, at the very edge of our known world.

You studied and practiced till your eyes nearly bled. You passed the entrance exam. You sent your last letters home, and now you’re robed in your new disciples’ clothes and you think you know what it means to commit.

You think that you’ll master the Lost Words.

The Twelfth Word
Anchor: The Wind

One of the easier Words for new disciples to learn. The gestures involved must be fluid and graceful, yet require no special strength or flexibility. The sounds can be reasonably approximated by a standard human voice.

This Word is inherently appealing to many of you.

A flutter of eyelids. A hand pressed to the heart, then flung wide. The whisper of the first syllables, slowly rising in volume and pitch.

I was a boy of twelve when I first saw/heard/felt this Word. There was a woman at the night market of my hometown, performing Words by the river for free.

The anchor for this Word is wind.

This Word is restlessness coiled deep in the heart. It is a longing without a voice.

It is restlessness gusting aimlessly inside your chest, trapped. It is a gray autumn day, and brown leaves spinning in circles before you. It is treading the same paths from home to school and work, over and over; the same chores, the same tasks, the hammering of hot iron or scrubbing of pots or scratching of notes for your father’s account books—all while a wind stirs uneasily in your heart, swirling through your limbs, setting your feet to tapping and threatening to spill out your skin. This Word is what you felt when you kept quiet by the fire as your parents planned out your future, as they spoke of what trade you should follow or who you should marry. This Word is all the stories you ever caught of far-off lands—the tales from traveling merchants, the poet in the square, the old soldier drunk at the inn. It’s the horse you saw tied up next door, whinnying and pawing at the ground. It’s the sound of geese flying south for the winter. It’s music half-heard, and an exotic perfume. It’s the small voice inside that told you there was more to your life than what others said. This Word is the wind moving over bare hills and fields and into your soul.

I knew this Word before I ever heard it. You did, too.

The woman at the night market performed it beautifully. I stood, enraptured, as she spoke the Word again and again. The crowd around us swelled and shrank; the night grew old. I stood there until my brothers took me by the arms and pulled me away.

On Choosing Your Words

Saint Helabora uncovered eighty-eight Lost Words from the desert. Over the centuries, thirteen more have been added. It is expected that you will attain a basic understanding of them all.

But to master even one may take a lifetime. It may take more: it may be forever beyond your grasp.

I advise you to focus wisely.

It is smart to choose Words that align with your natural talents. For instance, Words 40 through 50 are particularly suited for those skilled in hand-gestures and the graceful movement of arms, while Word 53 is known for its demanding footwork. A number of Words require vocalization range and techniques beyond the reach of many of you. Some of the middle Words are good for those with naturally tranquil minds and decent breath control.

Choosing a Word beyond your ability only leads to heartbreak.

Even when you focus on a Word within your range, you must be careful. Ambition has destroyed many a disciple. You may know the story of Varas, who fell in love with Word 44 and, determined to improve his technique, attached weights to his fingers and engaged in bending and stretching exercises that destroyed his own hands. Or the tale of Yi La, who dared a dangerous operation to restructure her vocal cords, the better to sing Word 87, and lost her voice.

Innovation and daring are valued, of course. We owe nothing but gratitude to Master Ruel, who invented a series of string instruments to better approximate the sounds required for some higher Words. These instruments brought us closer to the True Speaking, and allowed those Words to be said by those with no inherent vocal ability at all. But Ruel became obsessed with approaching ever closer to perfection, and died mad.

Remember to drink water. It’s dry here in the desert; those of you from elsewhere often forget. It’s so easy to get parched.

On Choosing Your Words: Addendum

You will fall in love with Words, of course, even those far outside your ability to speak. You are already in love with them. That’s why you’re here.

The Sixteenth Word
Anchor: The Door

The years ahead will be grueling. There will be many times that you wish to give up.

It helps to remember why you came. What Word it was that brought you here. For that, you were willing to leave family and home. For that, you turned away from easier paths. Perhaps you defied a father who, seeing your talent in scholarship and ordinary words, dreamed of how he might use you to increase your family’s status and wealth. My own father, a shopkeeper, hoped to install me as a high-ranking agent in our local merchants’ guild, or perhaps in service to our provincial governor. He did not expect me to run off to the desert.

But I could not forget the woman speaking the Word that is sometimes known as Wind. And I felt in my being another Lost Word.

The anchor for that other Lost Word is door.

It is a physical door, opening into a hidden room. It is a gate swinging into a secret garden. It is the sensation of a door opening in your heart.

It’s what you felt when you first realized that marks on paper could translate to sounds and meaning, to words in your own native tongue. It is the first written word that you recognized. It’s the first map you ever saw—all those cities and countries and rivers and mountains, spread out in ink before you. It’s the first book you were ever given.

It’s the great court astronomer of Hu, Ren Aja, and what he felt when he turned his farseeing lenses to the heavens for the first time and saw stars and planets, and moons around planets, that had never before been seen by mortal man.

It’s a key turning in a heavy oak door.

It’s a beam of light sliding through curtains into a darkened room.

It’s your first understanding that the world—the universe—is so much bigger than you ever imagined.

And with the proper stress and tones, it’s a door opening slowly rather than swinging wide all at once. Creaking forward, bit by bit. An agonized journey. The slow, arduous work of mastering your first written script. Of memorizing all eight-thousand characters of the Classical Script. Of slowly mapping a foreign terrain.

I saw a master of Lost Words performing at the night market of my old hometown, and it was a door swinging wide all at once for me. She spoke the word that we refer to as “Wind” in our standard shorthand. But she herself was the “Door.”

On Words of Pain

There are Words rarely spoken aloud for an audience. Words that crowds do not clamor for.

There are Words of such pain that no human has spoken them in full, although we have the instructions for doing so. There are Words that would kill with their grief, should any person say them perfectly enough.

Nevertheless: Saint Helabora taught us that all Lost Words are holy, and we seek to comprehend them all.

There are some Words that are gentler in their pain, and these can offer a strange comfort at times. The Words that speak of homesickness, disappointment, melancholy. Calmness after great sorrow. The reminder that all is transient in this mortal world, that all things pass. The Words known by their anchors as: Bare Trees; The Empty, Rain-washed Sky; Shattered Stones; Vanishing Morning Dew.

There were times that I sang Empty, Rain-washed Sky to myself again and again, falling asleep to its images each night. I never came close to mastering this Word. But just repeating its rhythms in my mind brought me comfort. I knew that there was a Word for what I felt at that time, one that encapsulated all my emotions.

On the Finding of Lost Words

Three centuries ago, Saint Helabora entered the Forbidden City of the Kar Desert. She roamed its underground vaults and penetrated even into the heart of the Labyrinth. She discovered the bronze steles and tablets with their ancient inscriptions.

She studied the scrolls of the buried libraries; she cross-checked their writing with the tablets and steles. And slowly, slowly, she came to understand the written notations and glosses. She learned to read a writing system more complicated than even our Classical Script. And from that she learned, finally, to speak the first of the Lost Words.

It is assumed that divine inspiration also played a role.

We are gathered here in the desert so as to be close to the Ancients, close to where Saint Helabora uncovered miracles. You are welcome to follow her lead and descend into the Forbidden City whenever you wish. You may walk through the libraries, trace her marked steps through the Labyrinth, and even run your fingers over the inscriptions of the First Stele.

Breathe in the inspiration from these physical objects and landmarks. Breathe in their power. You will need it, during these first years of training.

Some of you are more inclined to scholarship and research than active speaking. You hope to follow in the footsteps of famous scholars, to expound on novel interpretations of Words. You long to comb through the archives for yourself, and perhaps, in your secret hearts, you even dream of stumbling upon the written instructions for some new Lost Word in a forgotten volume or scroll. You remember our founding saint’s words: that in the Ancients’ Lost Language, there is a Word for everything in the universe.

I believe this. Though I fear that some Words are indeed forever lost.

You are welcome to prove me wrong.

On Leaving the School of Lost Words

You will leave.

You may not wish to go. But this school cannot keep you all here forever.

Some of you will be lucky enough to find good patrons. Great princes will take you into their courts; they will shower you with silver and praise. Wealthy audiences will clap and cheer for your Words.

Others of you will speak Words for thrown coins at market fairs.

Some of you will try to teach, to pass on the art of Lost Words to others. There are other schools throughout this world, though none as prestigious as this one.

You will struggle to keep the Lost Words alive in your heart. In many places, we’re still seen as a strange and possibly blasphemous cult. You will be met with suspicion and misunderstanding, indifference and worship and fear.

I first left the desert thirty-eight years ago. I rejoined the outer world. I did not go happily.

On Failing Your Words

You will fail. You will fail. You will fail.

You will not achieve as much as you want. You will never master all the Words you wish, or in as great a depth as you hope.

The Ninety-first Word
Anchor: Broken Strings

This Word is a musical instrument that cannot play. A harp with broken strings. A flute without breath. Master Rael’s greatest creations, all rendered mute.

It’s Yi La’s beautiful voice, so lovely it was said to surprise the sun and call birds down from the sky—strangled and dead in her throat.

This Word is silence.

It is the wind that once blew through your soul—now thickened into a smothering weight in your chest.

It is a once-sparkling stream that’s been dammed, that now collects as a black, stagnant pool.

It is a dull ache without relief, a stilled passion with no outlet, a flowing current that’s been stopped, a river drained.

This Word is the lost ability to speak Lost Words.

It happens to so many of us. There is no single cause. There is no ready cure.

I spent years in this state. Under its spell, I could not even speak the Lost Word to describe it.

On Finding Your Words Again

If you lose your Words, you will find them again. I promise you this.

Over the course of your years here, you will hone yourself as an instrument. You will learn to speak with sound and gesture, breath and mind.

But your most important instrument is your heart.

Speak each Word with all your heart, and the Lost Words will sink into you. They will take root and become part of you. You can never truly lose them.

As with everything else, this is a technique you must master—ultimately—on your own.

I was once lost for a long time. I did not quite finish the last step of my training. Somehow, the Words had dried up for me. And then I came home to my small market town by the river; I came to pay my respects to a dying father. On the journey I rehearsed in my mind, again and again, what I might say to him. I wondered at how I might play, at last, the role of a dutiful son. When I arrived, he was already dead.

Our small business was gone. High grain prices, business debts. One of my brothers had done what our father had hoped: he’d studied hard, done well on our country’s civil service exams, taken a position with the local governor. He lost everything when the political winds shifted and the governor was deposed. He killed himself.

My other brother was a gambling drunk. Our mother was near to selling her home for debts.

I found a job as a low-level clerk with the merchant’s guild. I worked my way up. I paid off our family debt.

I struggled to revive the Lost Words in my heart. I practiced for myself, late at night. But somehow, somewhere, I had lost them.

But I’ve already told you: you can never truly lose them. They come back.

The Ninety-second Word
Anchor: The Flowing Spring

The anchoring image for this Word is a spring as it emerges from the ground, nearly hidden among rocks and bracken. A tiny bubbling spring, easily overlooked in the forest. But its waters are clear and its source is true, and even if you don’t see it, it’s there: flowing, flowing, flowing.

One day, I felt this Word in my chest. I felt that tiny spring flowing again.

I was married by then, with three children. We were living comfortably on my merchant guild salary. I had responsibilities. Yet I took the time to call to mind old rhythms and tones. Slowly, clumsily, I moved my hands in ancient gestures.

Our youngest son was around four at the time. One night, he could not stop crying. He’d had a fight with his sister, been thwarted in some childish wish by his mother; he was overtired. It was deep winter, and he’d spent too many days inside; I knew he longed to run outside, free.

I spoke for him a modified version of the Wind.

Instantly, he stopped crying. His eyes widened in wonder.

His little hands came up; his fingers spread and moved in an echo of my own. A childish echo of The Wind.

On Keeping Your Words

This school will teach you all it can, and then send you back into the world. Let the world then be your teacher. Learn whatever you can from it.

You will struggle. But you do not need to perform in a prince’s court. You do not need to teach in a prestigious school. You do not need to make astonishing new interpretations or discoveries.

You might become a tired parent soothing your children with Words. You might share your Words with family and friends. You might be the one in your community who knows the right Words for different occasions; who visits those in mourning with Empty, Rain-washed Sky; who visits the dying with the Seventh Word. Who knows the right Words to say for celebrations of joy.

You might teach those who care to learn: curious children, those who chance to hear you speak, those who’ve heard the rumor of your presence.

When the fancy strikes you, perhaps you even go to the market on a warm summer night, and speak Lost Words of meaning to strangers for free.

Perhaps you continue to practice, and learn, and speak, only for yourself.

On Coming Back to the School of Lost Words

You can come back.

You cannot stay here forever, but maybe—just maybe—you might return.

I spoke Words in my community. I taught those who would listen; I continued to learn. I achieved a small bit of local fame. But one thing nagged at me slightly: I’d never quite finished the last part of my training here. I had a conditional degree.

In my sixty-third year, I returned to finish it.

My wife, my love, granted me leave to part with her for a time. Our children are full-grown, with children of their own. They love Words, but not enough to devote their lives to it.

And so here I am before you, an old man just graduating as you are beginning your journey. An old man who has been student and teacher and student again. One who was asked to speak a few words from his experience to you today, and whose discursive ramblings you’ve so kindly indulged.

The Truth of Lost Words

This is the terrible truth: no matter how hard you practice, how inspired you are, you will never speak any Word perfectly. Perhaps Saint Helabora was able to do it at the end. But she was a saint, and long gone.

We—we ordinary people, with our frail human bodies and hearts and minds—for us, everything we say is only approximation. All of it is only translation. Imperfect translations of a language that is ultimately beyond us, a language of saints and angels and gods. A language that speaks of all things, even though we cannot. We have only fragments of this lost language left, and no understanding of its grammar at all.

This is another truth: we will not stop trying.

We will not stop reaching for perfection, even as we know its impossibility. We will not stop seeking the divine.

We will try to say, again and again, the Words beyond our saying.

The Tenth Word
Anchor: Catching the Sea

The anchoring image of this Word: a great ocean, fathomless, endless. A small, frail boat on its surface; a small, frail human inside.

This Word is you on the surface of this great sea, trying to collect what you can of it in a cracked cup. All around you the waves swell; you are gently lifted and lowered. The water runs through your cup, over your hands; you will never catch more than a thimble’s amount, and never for more than a few seconds. And yet you persist, and the song in your heart is both joyous and sad.

©2022 by Vanessa Fogg.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vanessa Fogg dreams of selkies, dragons, and gritty cyberpunk futures from her home in western Michigan. She spent years as a research scientist in molecular cell biology and now works as a freelance medical writer. Her fiction has appeared in Liminal Stories, Daily Science Fiction, GigaNotoSaurus, Translunar Travelers Lounge, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 4.  A complete bibliography and more can be found at her website www.vanessafogg.com. Vanessa is fueled by green tea.

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

Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death

N.K. Jemisin | 2513 words

The intel is good. It had better be; three women died to get it to us. I tuck away the binoculars and crawl back from the window long enough to hand-signal my girls. Fire team moves up, drop team on my mark, support to hold position and watch our flank. The enemy might have nothing but mercs for security, but their bullets punch holes same as real soldiers’, and some of ’em are hungry enough to be competent. We’re hungrier, though.

Shauntay’s got the glass cutter ready. I’m carrying the real payload, slung across my torso and back in a big canteen. We should have two or three of these, since redundancy increases our success projections, but I won’t let anyone else take the risk. The other ladies have barrels cracked and ready to drop. The operation should be simple and quick—get in, drop it like it’s hot, get out.

This goes wrong, it’s on me.

It won’t go wrong.

Shauntay makes the cut. Go go go. We drop into the warm, stinking, dimly lit space of the so-called aerie—really an old aircraft hangar, repurposed since commercial air travel ended. There’s the big trough on one side of the hangar, laden with fresh human body parts. It’s horrible, but I ignore it as I rappel down. We’ve seen worse. Touchdown. No sounds from the pit at the center of the hangar. We get our little trough set up in near silence, just like we rehearsed. My girls are on it like clockwork. The barrels come down and we dump load one, load two, load three. Stirring sounds from the hangar behind us. Ignore them. I signal the other soldiers to back up. Nothing left but the payload. I unsling my canteen, not listening to the sounds behind me, concentrating on my fingers so I don’t fumble the cap, remembering to unseal the pressure valve so the vacuum effect doesn’t clog the whole thing up and—

A warm, sulfur-redolent breath stirs my fatigues. Right behind me. Shit.

I turn, slow. They have cat eyes; fast movement excites them. The smell of fear excites them. Dark skin excites them.

She’s huge—maybe the size of a 747, though I’ve only seen husks of those, lying scattered around the edges of old killing fields where the world was remade. She’s not quite green. Her scales are prismatic, slightly faceted, which makes them nearly invisible at night. That was an accident, I’ve heard, some side effect of tweaking the genetic base to make them hyper-focused on shorter wavelengths of visible light—or something; I don’t know the science. I know beauty, though, and she’s lovely, scales shimmering as she moves, iridescent blue-black-golden brown. They probably mean for her to be ugly and scary, dark as they’ve made her, but they forget there’s more ways to be beautiful than whatever they designate. Red eyes. Fangs long as my whole body. Those are just there for the scare factor, I know; our scientists have proven they don’t actually use the fangs for eating. Do a good enough job killing without them.

A few of the others stir behind her, some coming over, all of them following her lead. She’s the dominant one. Figures. I’m not scared. Why? Suicidal, maybe. No. I think—and it’s just in this moment, looking at how beautiful she is—that I see a kindred spirit. Another creature whose power has been put into the service of weaker cowardly fools.

So I smile. “Hey, there,” I say. She blinks and pulls her head back a little. Her prey doesn’t usually talk back. Still dangerous; curiosity plus boredom equals me being batted all over the hangar like a toy till I’m dead. Time to divert her interest. Slowly, I move behind the trough—stuff’s still steaming from the barrels—and start pouring out my payload. The hot, sharp smell catches her attention immediately. Those lovely slit pupils expand at once, and she leans down, sniffing at the trough. I’m irrelevant suddenly.

“Getcho grub on, baby,” I whisper. My beautiful one flickers her ears, hearing me, but her eyes are still on the prize. Mission accomplished. I rappel back up to the roof, and we head homeward as the flock chows down.

Dragons love them some collard greens, see. Especially with hot sauce.

• • • •

The first attacks were the worst. Nobody was ready. I remember a day, I couldn’t have been more than six or seven. I was sitting in the living room. Mama came running in, not a word, just grabbed me and half-dragged me out of my chair and across the house to hide in the bathroom. I felt the house shudder and thought it was an earthquake, like I’d read about in books. I was excited. I’d never felt an earthquake before. We curled together in the bathtub, me and Mama, me giddy, her terrified, with the sounds of screaming and the smells of smoke filtering in through the vents.

It was so terrible, the Towers said, amid news stories with two-faced headlines like SAPPHIRE TOWNSHIP RAIDED BY DRUG-SNIFFING DRAGONS and OFFICIALS DENY DRAGONS INTENTIONALLY BRED TO PREFER “DARK MEAT.” So terrible indeed. Maybe if we didn’t hide things from the police, they wouldn’t need to use dragons? The dragons only attacked when people attacked them—or ran as if they were guilty. Why, if we’d just turn out every time there was a police patrol and point out the folks among us who were causing trouble, the dragons would only bother those people and not everybody.

Motherfuckers always want us to participate in their shit. Ain’t enough they got the whole world shivering in the shadows of the Towers. Ain’t enough they’ve got our boys and men tagged like dogs and preemptively walled off over in Manny Dingus Prison, only letting ‘em out for parole now and again. (Only letting some of ’em out—the ones they think are meek, ‘cause they think eugenics works. If they had any sense, though, they’d be more afraid of the quiet ones.)

This latest front in the long, long war started because they didn’t like us growing weed. Ours was better quality than that gourmet shit they grew, and also we sold it to their people over in Americanah. Not that those were really their people, white men as poor as us and the few women whose pussies the Towers haven’t grabbed, but they gotta try to keep up the illusion. Gotta have somebody as a buffer between them and us, especially whenever we get uppity.

They’ve been engineering the End Times. The Plagues were supposed to be about salvation. Trying to get all the townships and ghettoes and reservations to go evangelical, see? So they poisoned the water—turned it red—and killed a whole bunch of men over in Bollytown. Got them dependent on bottled-water deliveries from the Tower, forever. The dragons are supposed to be the Second Plague, engineered from frogs, with a little dinosaur and cat spliced in. That’s bad, but they tried to start a Plague of boils, big enough to kill, in Real Jerusalem. Didn’t spread much beyond their patient zeroes, thank G*d, because Jewish people wash. (They’ll try again, though. Always do.) Anyway, we got the point when they rained hail and fire on the Rez, even though they claimed that was just a weather-control satellite malfunction.

We’re all heathens to the Towers. All irredeemable by birth and circumstance, allowed to live on the sufferance of those on high. They don’t want to kill us off, because they need us, but they don’t need us getting comfortable. Rather keep us on edge. Keep us hungry. Best way to control a thing, they think, is through fear and dependency.

Gotta mind, though, that the ones you’re starving don’t start getting their needs attended to someplace else.

• • • •

The next raid goes off right when our hackers have said, but we didn’t need the warning. The Towers are predictable, complacent, and lazy in their power—same mediocre motherfuckers they’ve always been. We’re ready. Got countermeasures standing by, but they don’t even bother to send observation drones. Stupid. It’s been years since that first raid. We’ve been living under siege so long that fear stopped making sense a long time ago.

The dragons darken the sky and then stoop to attack. The whole damn flock; the Towers must have found the evidence of our infiltrations, or maybe they’re mad about something else. I spot my baby in the vanguard, blue-black-brown, big as a building. She lands in the market and unleashes a blast of flame to obliterate a shop—oh, but then she stops. Sniffs the air. Yeah, what is that? Check it out, baby. See that great big steaming trough over there on the school track and field? Remember that taste? Once upon a time, this was food fit only for beasts. We made it human. Now we’ve made it over, special, for you. Hot hot, good good. Eat up, y’all.

She whuffles at the others, and they follow as she hop-flies over to the field. A trough the size of a shipping container is all laid out, filled to the brim and steaming with three days’ worth of cooking work. Plenty of hot sauce this time, vinegary and sharp and fierce as all get-out. That’s the kicker. Wakes up their taste buds, and the fiber fills them up better than plain old human flesh. Volunteers, including me, linger nearby while the dragons eat. We move slowly, letting them smell our living human flesh, working clickers so they’ll associate sound with taste. Then it’s done, and the dragons fly back to their aerie slow, heavy with greens. Nobody gets eaten that day.

• • • •

The Towers are pissed. They send in cops to retaliate, stopping and frisking random women walking down the street, arresting anybody who talks back, even killing two women for no reason at all. They feared for their lives, the cops say. They always say.

Collard greens get added to the contraband list, between C-4 and contraception.

We retaliate right back when they come with crews of deputized men from Americanah to tear up our fields. No collards? Fine. When the dragons come next, we offer them callaloo.

They come for the callaloo. We just stand there, pretending harmlessness, and don’t fight back. They can’t admit that the dragons are supposed to eat us, so they claim they’re worried about listeria. No FDA anymore, just gotta destroy the whole crop. Okay, then. Word spreads. After they take the callaloo, Longtimetown—none of us named this shit—sends over frozen blocks of spinach cooked with garlic, fish sauce, and chili oil, layered in with their heroin shipment. We have to add our own spinach to stretch it, but that chili oil is potent. It’s enough.

By this point the Towers figure they’ve got to rob us of every vegetable and then watch us die of malnutrition or there’s no way their dragons will ever bother with bland, unseasoned human meat again. They actually try it, motherfuckers, burning our farms, and we have to eat cat grass just to get by. We fight over kohlrabi leaves grown in an old underground weed hothouse. Can’t give this to the dragons; there isn’t enough, and our daughters need it more. It’s looking bad. But just before the next raid, Spicymamaville smuggles over mofongo that makes the dragons moan, they love it so. Towelhead Township is starving and besieged, but a few of the mujahideen women make it through the minefields with casks of harissa strapped to their bodies. Sari City, mad about Bollytown, ships us “friendship basketballs.” They do this openly, and the Towers let them through as a goodwill gesture. Black people love basketball, right? Maybe it’ll shut us up. And it does, for a while: There’s enough saag paneer and curry paste vacuum-packed inside each ball to feed us and the dragons too.

The Towers burn our peppers, and our allies respond with dead drops of hawajj, wasabi, chili-pepper water. The Towers try to starve us, but we Just. Don’t. Die.

And each visit, I pet my dragon a little more. She watches me. Looks for me when she lands. Croons a little when I pet her. It doesn’t all go smoothly. In a single day I lose two soldiers to one dragon’s fit of temper. Old habit. The dragon spits the soldiers’ bodies out immediately, though, and snorts in disgust even before my beauty and the others can twist their heads around to hiss at her. They know we won’t open the reward trough that day. Lesson learned, though it cost us blood.

It’s war. We’ll mourn the lost as heroes, our own and allies alike. I check in with my girls before every meal and ask if they’re still willing to serve; they are. We are all resolved. We will win.

• • • •

The Towers have got something big planned. The dragons have become less responsive to their breeders and trainers, and sometimes they just up and leave the aeries to come to our township, where the good food’s at. News articles say the Second Plague program is going to be retired due to “mixed results.” Civilian casualties have decreased; they’re spinning that as a benefit and not mentioning that the decline is our doing. Anyway, the dragons have been declared a failed experiment, so they’re planning to “decommission” them during their next official deployment. Missiles vs. dragons, in the skies right over Sapphire Town. Who cares about collateral damage.

A spy in one of the Towers confirms it. They’ve gotten tired of us Sapphires, and it’s about time for the Tenth Plague anyway. They’re coming for our firstborn.

My lovely one waits patiently as I gear up, even though the troughs only have a little food in them this time. They know now to associate our presence with good things like food and pleasure and play, so they’ll abide awhile before they get testy. We’re all wearing flight gear and carrying saddles. I’ve got the payload again: our last batch of Scotch bonnets, grown and pickled in secret, sweetened with mango and hope. Word is there’s a great big warehouse full of confiscated greens over near Tower One. And just so happens there’s a whole lot of tanks and troops to set on fire along the way.

One by one, we mount up. My beautiful one—her name’s Queen—turns her head back to get one ear skritched, and I oblige with a grin. Then I raise a hand to signal readiness. She lifts her head, smelling my excitement, sharing it, readying the others. I feel like I’m sitting astride the sky. She lifts her wings and lets out a thundering battle cry. Feeling her power. So am I.

Go go go.

And once the Towers lie in broken, smoldering rubble below us? We’ll come back home, and sit on down, and have us all a good-good feast.

©2021 by N.K. Jemisin. Originally published in A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

N. K. Jemisin is the first author in the genre’s history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards, all for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her most recent novel is The City We Became. Essays and links to her work can be found at nkjemisin.com.

EXCERPT: Goliath (Tordotcom)

Tochi Onyebuchi | 4621 words

“Onyebuchi sets fire to the boundary between fiction and reality, and brings a crumbling city and an all too plausible future to vibrant life. Riveting, disturbing, and rendered in masterful detail.”―Leigh Bardugo

In his adult novel debut, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Award finalist and ALA Alex and New England Book Award winner Tochi Onyebuchi delivers a sweeping science fiction epic in the vein of Samuel R. Delany and Station Eleven.

In the 2050s, Earth has begun to empty. Those with the means and the privilege have departed the great cities of the United States for the more comfortable confines of space colonies. Those left behind salvage what they can from the collapsing infrastructure. As they eke out an existence, their neighborhoods are being cannibalized. Brick by brick, their houses are sent to the colonies, what was once a home now a quaint reminder for the colonists of the world that they wrecked.

A primal biblical epic flung into the future, Goliath weaves together disparate narratives―a space-dweller looking at New Haven, Connecticut as a chance to reconnect with his spiraling lover; a group of laborers attempting to renew the promises of Earth’s crumbling cities; a journalist attempting to capture the violence of the streets; a marshal trying to solve a kidnapping―into a richly urgent mosaic about race, class, gentrification, and who is allowed to be the hero of any history.

Out January 25 from Tor.com.

Before his flight to Earth, they had warned Jonathan about the “gangs.” Even at the Stamford Station where his shuttle had docked, even on the bullet train that spirited him north past brick apartment buildings and houses with gables and turrets, manicured lawns, circular drives, bay windows, even past the shorefront homes of South Norwalk with sailboats parked on the sand or tethered to metal docks fashioned to look as though they were made out of peeling wood, made to look as though they had been there forever, past the kayaks and the fountains and the parks populated by poplars and willow trees, they warned him about the gangs. The admonitions were grave and ominous every time they issued from someone’s mouth, but the closer he came to the frontier, the grimmer the admonition. Their crimes, their violence, their predilections grew more and more specific, the anecdotes spawning increasingly specific limbs until Jonathan was made to believe that he could discern the very contours of the lusus naturae waiting for him in New Haven. People who knew people he knew offered their numbers and their contacts, so that once Jonathan arrived, he could pass word of his safe landing. The land was red and burning where he was headed, and if he were not careful, he’d burn too.

He had thanked each and every Cassandra, noted that he would heed their advice, but inwardly, he was grinning. He was shaking his head and grinning. Among the things they didn’t know was the sheer strength of Jonathan’s thirst for shadow country, the fact that he had wanted to build something ever since the first dreams of returning to Earth had entered his head, that he had spent nearly every waking moment dissecting his plan, putting it back together, testing the foundation and the buttresses and the supports, making sure the electricity worked and that the plumbing was done with a strong enough piping. And gangs. The invariably white folk who cautioned Jonathan against youthful bravado, against infantile nonchalance, knew that gangs existed, which is to say they knew as much as anybody did about gangs, which is to say they knew nothing.

They said gang, and he knew they meant Black. They said thugs, and he knew they meant the n-word.

There were a lot of empty factories in New Haven, which is saying nothing, as Jonathan knew there were a lot of empty factories everywhere in America. When he was a child, those relatives still on Earth, old enough to be dug in at the roots and either too infirm or too set in their ways to make the pilgrimage to the Colonies, would send transmission after transmission to regale their grandson, grandnephew, old friend’s child, of places like the Rust Belt. It sounded to Jonathan like a stylish thing wrapped around the waist of a skinny guy with dark and mysterious inclinations, an aura of enticing hurt, the kind of guy Jonathan would want to fix by fucking.

Jonathan’s bees sprouted from his hair, buzzed around his head recording the landscape’s deterioration. The images beamed, as soon as they were taken, to David’s Cloud back on the Colony, a little delayed due to spotty connection.

Stories of the radiation had made their way to the Colonies and even still with the documentation, with the filtered photos on everyone’s ’grams and with the news updates and with the video taken by people on their way out, the whole thing had acquired an air of myth. It had always been something that had happened to someone else. The truth was that Jonathan knew no one still on Earth, knew no one who had stayed or had been forced to stay, and he saw it as a deficiency. Life was truly lived here, where it was at stake. The forests were bright green and, as he approached the terminus of the train line, bright red, a vibrancy nowhere to be found in space, where everything was a different shade of gray, where every panel and every pathway was drained of color and only the bricks that came imported from Earth seemed to bear any trace of having had a full and exacting life. Jonathan collected his bags from the train’s undercarriage, then hailed a small personal transport, room for one, that took him past the Protected Zone and into some of the forest outside of Fairfield County. Prior to his departure, they’d made him print out all of his documents and when, now, his comms fritzed with static and his ’gram shots took longer than usual to make their way online, he saw why. The Soviet insistence on printing everything in quintuplet, and the months and months of phone calls and emails prior, had been meant to reassure the authorities on the Colonies that he was no longer their ward. The umbilical cords linking Earth and the Colonies had been snapped. You came here wanting to be forgotten, wearing the odor of an outlaw. The mindset up in the stars was that anyone returning, unless they were seeking to gather family, had nothing left on the Colonies, no reason to enjoy the banal comforts and the safety of the Space Station. If you were leaving, it was because you had been defeated.

There were no more pioneers left in space.

Bridgeport Harbor was now in their rearview. The bees buzzing around Jonathan’s hair beamed into his braincase information about the industrial husks that floated by: St. Vincent’s Medical Center, which, once upon a time, had been the city’s biggest employer; People’s United Bank; University of Bridgeport; Housatonic Community College; the Derecktor Shipyards. Wikis on each of the landmarks bookmarked themselves in Jonathan’s braincase, and as soon as he scanned them, they vanished into a folder waiting to be trashed. He chuckled and, under a ’gram he snapped of a row of two-story project housing, he murmured a caption in a newscaster’s voice: “And here we have Bridgeport, Connecticut, world leader in abandoned buildings, shattered glass, and gas stations without pumps. Come here to see boarded-up windows and wild dogs like no other.” Except the dogs here were larger than they were supposed to be and mixed in with all of the industrial decay was a wrongly colored forest, retaking control of the city.

They passed the Ballpark at Harbor Yard where the Bridgeport Bluefish used to play and, before long, they took the off-ramp that put them on Whitney Avenue in New Haven.

Jonathan put his palm to the cabbie’s scanner, then pulled it away, frowning, when he saw how much he’d been charged. But before he could complain, the maglev transport was stopped and his luggage was out on the street corner and he’d fumbled for his air mask, barely getting it on before the cab whirled around and sped down a side street, winding its way back onto the Interstate.

Across the street from Jonathan, on a sidewalk torn to pieces by weeds and renegade tree roots, stood what might have once been called a wild boar. This one, however, more resembled a demigod. On four legs, it rose as high as Jonathan’s chest, poked at the air before it with a snout longer than it was supposed to be. The spiny bristles ran along its back like hypodermic needles, and its pointed ears wagged to full mast then back down. The sun washed it in shades of ochre and gray. It stared at Jonathan with wild-eyed wonder. It was only after the thing had wandered away, on spindly, overlong legs, that Jonathan realized his own strangeness, the air mask affixed to his face still a foreign object and he very much a stranger in a strange land.

#

“Name something that follows the word ‘pork.’” Michael sounded like he was pushing the demo-truck rather than driving it.

“Loin,” Linc said.

The truck groaned. The neighborhood was quiet, exactly how it’d sound if there were no neighbors in it. “Gimme another one.”

“Chop.”

“Brother, you hungry or something?”

“Belly. Pork belly.”

“Okay, after this house we’ll hit the bodega.” Silence. “You got another one for me?”

Linc thought. “Cupine.” Quietus. “What?”

“Tell me that ain’t an answer,” Linc shot back.

Michael chuckling. “Pork. Cupine.” His seat began to shake. “Cu . . .” The rest was choked in a fit of laughter. “Cupine.” Convulsions rocked the cab of the truck. “HWHAT?” Thunderclaps of laughter. “HHWHATT? Is CUPINE?” The truck swerved, Michael laughed so hard.

“Damn, nigga.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He was probably wiping tears from his eyes right now. Sniffing away excess mirth. “But that’s the greatest answer I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s the right answer.”

“I feel you, brother. I feel you.”

“On my mama.”

“Pow, brother.” Another crippling fit of laughter. “Damn, brother, I wish I were recording this. I tell you what, you ask anyone else. Anyone else, they tell you the same. That you the only person who said ‘cupine.’ I bet you every dollar I got.”

The truck straightened its course, resumed its lumbering deliberateness, Michael muttering the “cupine” beneath his breath and trying not to let his howling kill them both.

The sky bled across the clapboard houses that lined the road. Wood domiciles and brick edifices. Single-family homes made after a war that happened before Linc’s father’s father had been a man. The twelve-wheeled demolition truck hovered over the ground, the maglev strips under the concrete still in working order. Kind of. But the truck rumbled nonetheless. The noise the engine made had the truck huffing like a fat man rounding a corner. The heat and the humidity conspired to stain Michael’s third shirt of the day a new color. Linc had stripped down to a tank top and jeans. Even the truck’s brow beaded with sweat.

Linc sat in the space between the truck’s cab and its bed, that shifting connector where overhead hung the lip of the trashbed. Shade was shade.

He heard the neighbors before he saw them; female voices, generations of motherhood, streamed out of their houses to gripe. Mothers taking care of their mothers, other women taking care of their grand-kids, bouncing them on their hips, managing, just by touch, to cool those poor kids down so that they didn’t look like black porcelain dolls in the light. They came out one by one, then began to line the streets like trees, following the truck’s course.

“When them dead trees coming down?” came a voice from behind the trashbed. They asked like Linc had any say in the matter, like they could even see him and his hammer at all. “When you gonna stop them kids from pushing that dope two houses down from here? I’m pickin’ up goddamn needles every goddamn morning!” Someone caught sight of Linc. “You got a job for my son? He’s lookin’ and he’s able to work. Healthy as whatever, no lung rot or nothin’.” Another: “My nephew! You can git him some work, he’s willin’ to do it.” Another: “Hell, I can lift just as good as any of ’em. Them checks from Fairfield ain’t enough to feed a dog kennel, let alone this family I got here.” They announced how well they could tap a water vein and run a hose, how easily they could heft a shovel, how the dying of the earth hadn’t yet crushed them, but when Michael’s truck stopped, they didn’t crowd. This had all happened before.

Linc shifted, ready to hop out from his space. The women started pointing to the abandoned houses on the street. One of them, in a purple blouse, a baby in one arm, the other hand dabbing her forehead with a kerchief, stepped forward. “You finally gonna tear this one down? I been callin’ the city for months now. Months!” Another woman beside her stepped up, left behind a little girl who fidgeted with her sundress. “How ’bout that one?” She pointed to another duplex three houses down with a massive tree trunk bursting through to the second floor, branches sprouting out the windows.

Michael leaned out the driver’s side window, squinted beneath the brim of his insignia’ed ball cap. “I’m only here for that house over there.” He nodded toward a spot two houses in from the corner. A two-bedroom with a gable roof, one half of its second-floor façade charred. The porch was missing its bricks. Some of them saw Linc descend and their target reticles zeroed in on him.

“You tellin’ me you’re here for just one house? One house?” This one wearing an orange blouse and holding close to her face a tiny solar-powered water-fan. She swept her arms to indicate the row of houses across the street from the one targeted for demolition. “Those are all drug houses. Someone got raped in that one on the corner. I called about that one! I been calling all week. I called and called.”

Linc’s shirt caught on the edge of a groove and the sun lit the puckered course of a scar that ran along the skin just above his hip. An almost-healed souvenir from a house he had cleared a few weeks back. He pulled his shirt down, dragged his hammer off his seat, and hefted it over his shoulder.

“I’m just a wrecker,” Michael pleaded. “The mayor don’t forward no calls my way.” He spoke with a bit of a Puerto Rican lilt; certain vowels and consonants would rise like he was inviting himself over for dinner. The city sent Michael to this part of town pretty often. Linc didn’t know how Michael was gonna break it to those ladies that he did have other houses to demolish today but that the rest of those twenty houses stood on the other side of the city.

Linc shuffled toward the house that must have preceded the urban renewal projects that swept through the city during the beginning of the millennium. The houses like these, they were like the Pyramids in Egypt. It made sense that humans had built them, but without the stuff that they had now, such things seemed an impossibility. Digging the hole and filling it with foundation. The ceiling joists and the floor bridging. They probably laid the shingles that had once upon a time been there one by one. Pulleys and men with tool belts. Wood siding put in manually, mortar spread, bricks stacked. Maybe the house had once upon a time been beautiful. The fulfillment of a promise. You work hard, you strive, you take out a loan, and you move along with the business of starting a family. Now, the thing’s roof had caved in, trees grew throughout it, and summer heat had made the bulging walls crisp. The women had complained about drug dealers and rapes; some of these places had probably hosted more than a few murders.

The counsel Michael held with the ladies turned to a muffle. Linc entered and could see that the scavengers had been recent here. The floor was soft with mold, shifted beneath his footfalls. Out back, there had probably been a rusted van, maybe without doors, to make it easier for the vultures to load the furnace and the stove, the piping that they had picked out from behind the walls. Maybe they were at this very moment getting paid for their scrap metal. It all probably happened in the time between when the dangerous-buildings inspector had phoned Michael and when Michael had picked Linc up from his apartment. A large, person-shaped lump stopped Linc’s boot and he kicked the thing over to find the remains of a face staring up at him. Parts of the body had been gnawed away, some of the fingers down to the bone, the eyes still there, but the cheek jowls torn and hanging. Traces of quicklime lined the corpse. He’d been told to report corpses, maybe they would help out with open investigations. Linc stepped over the thing.

In another room, on top of a molding, rust-pitted mattress slept a wraith. Next to that wraith’s head, just underneath its opened hand, was a Tec-9. Red-tops and yellow-tops, wrapped in small plastic bags, peeked out from inside a crinkled paper sack. Linc stooped, gingerly pulled the Tec out from beneath the emaciated hand, doubted the person could have lifted it anyway, pulled out the clip and stuffed it into his pants’ pocket. He ejected the bullet in the chamber and tossed the thing into a pile of empty burger wrappers. His hand tightened on the neck of his hammer. The junkie was dissolving into the ruins, turning into the house ready for demolition, and its head would’ve been easy enough to crash in. The junkie was done living anyway, but Linc moved on.

Descending into the basement, he noted the water damage, but it was far enough along to show that the water had been turned off some time ago. Nothing had lived in there for a long time now. He stayed on the concrete steps for a while, frozen, reminded of the time he’d come down into a similar basement to find a little boy cuffed to a radiator after having passed a man ambling out the back door and buttoning up his pants. He blinked away the vision. Nothing stirred. And if, like the junkie, anything were still breathing, it wouldn’t get anything approaching a proper burial. The local cemeteries had long since burst through their capacity.

He came back up for air. The board-up crew had already sealed off most of the space. A roving band of custom-cut sheets of plywood and screw guns. They moved like whirling dervishes, and sometimes their haste left shoddy work in their wake, like bodies that they hadn’t accounted for, the ignored junkie or rape victim or dead body or eco-freak trying to make art out of ruin porn.

Coming out of the house felt like emerging from hell. The light blinded. The air, poisoned as it was, cleansed the lungs. The mind-fog and the shell shock dissipated, and all of a sudden, there were new parking lots or bits of road or signage that he hadn’t noticed before. Everything seemed draped in clarity. In focus.

Linc gave Michael the thumbs-up. House cleared. His hammerhead dragged behind him.

Michael nodded, then opened his dashboard and out came a small console with a touchboard protruding from its bottom. Empty stimhalers tinked against each other as he stretched and geomapped the house’s location, input the coordinates, and armed the drone that would arrive in just under five minutes. There was shade at the bunker, and a radio where he could tune in to the ball game or put on a playlist, and he could operate the drone from there. The console was bigger there, had more equipment and became much more of an immersive experience. Plus, the operating room was air-conditioned. But he had grown to hate it. He needed to be around the people.

On the console would be a high-definition moving image, turning the northwest of New Haven, a span of about a dozen or so blocks, into a midsummer palette of copper and brown and gray, punctuated by occasional, invasive green. The houses, in rows, would be easy enough to pick out, but it was always when he switched to infrared, waiting for heat signals, that the cracks would run through his heart. The ghostly white always stood out against the irradiated landscape, and there was always movement, sometimes the smallest of gestures, until there wasn’t. He would linger over well-populated neighborhoods to remind himself that people still lived here, but when he’d have to head over to his target, the blotches would drop off until there was only a blood-red sea below, all twenty-three homes on a once-busy block empty. Sometimes, a single white snowflake would move among the red, an amoeba lumbering among the charred husks of thirty-five neighboring vacancies.

At the hangar, the only sounds would be the hum of machines and the reggaeton that came from the radio. He’d go through his verbal checklist once he got to the target house, countdown, then mutter his code. And someone near, sometimes a ghost, would whisper back.

Over the course of that incantation, a small gravity bomb would slip from its container in the drone’s bottom, fall toward the center of the house’s roof, then, as it fell, would pull the house in around itself. The screen would light up with white flame, the smoke would clear, and the crater would stare like an empty eye socket back at the drone’s camera. There were times the bomb would malfunction, and the house’s remains would sink upon itself, then bounce back up like a rubber band in extremis, pink insulation stretched like cotton candy, paper and plastic and fast-food wrappers and pizza boxes and a basket of unused diapers and tires and phone books and sometimes heroin needles, exploding upward before the bomb resumed its work and sucked the entirety of the place’s ghosts into a cube that landed on the cracked foundation right on top of the gravity disc. Before the final moment, there was always an arc made of discarded clothes and, in that arc, every single time, several pairs of children’s shoes.

Municipal technicians never figured out how to get the disc to swallow up the more unwieldy parts of the home, so the undigested bricks would be vomited in a pile of architectural effluvium on top of the disc that someone would then have to fish out. And just as his truck would leave or just as they would retrieve the disc, stackers would swarm over the site, harvesting the bricks for building residential units up in the space colonies.

The drone loomed over the targeted house, and by now, residents had set up lawn chairs to watch. Several neighborhoods had gone through test runs where the city government and relevant departments made sure to properly calibrate the tonnage of the bombs. Take down the targeted house and try not to swallow up the ones next to it. The residents didn’t seem to care that they sat or stood so near to the blast radius. His truck, even now, was parked dangerously close.

“Feelin’ lit, feelin’ light,” Michael said, cheerier than usual.

“Two a.m., summer nights,” chimed Linc, who had, by now, taken his seat next to Michael, surprising the driver.

The bomb dropped and the house did one of those dry-heave things where the bomb tried to swallow everything, then choked up what it couldn’t digest. Michael made sure to watch it actually happen, see the browns and whites and greens and blues and reds of the actual house, rather than have the glow of the screen burn his retinas. When he turned, though, he saw Linc’s gaze riveted on the monitor, watching as the smoke cleared and small glowing blobs writhed in the wreckage, pieces of the person he was supposed to declare. The junkie was missing a leg, just above the knee, and her blood was hot when it hit the ground, burned bright on the monitor, and she writhed on the ground and reached instinctively for something, for her gun, but couldn’t find it, wailed soundlessly and rolled beneath the rubble where she could until she became the same color as the ground.

Michael gave Linc a look, but Linc didn’t acknowledge it.

The drone lowered itself, obeying Michael’s commands, retrieved the house box, then flew back to the hangar.

He started up his truck, waved goodbye to the ladies who made him promise to come by again—both to take care of them drug houses but also to say hello and get the sweet tea they’d made. The stackers, tracking the drone, had already found the demolition site and just as the neighbors streamed back into their homes, the stackers descended.

One of them pulled a bar of something black out of the pocket of his overalls, undid some of the wrapping, and bit in as he moved to secure his fiefdom.

“Where’d you get that?” asked the second, who sidled up next to him.

The first held it out. “It’s Russian chocolate,” he said, holding it forward like it was a prize.

“Oh shit, word? What’s Russian chocolate?”

“Chocolate from Russia, nigga. Whatchu think?”

Michael’s rig rumbled, the engine drowning out the rest, and Linc climbed over to his seat behind the cab.

They pulled out, and as they passed through more desolation, Linc knew, by Michael’s silence, that the niggerrican was mad at him for not clearing the junkie. But then they passed into a hood where they were flanked by Craftsman-style homes. Tapered support columns. Stonework porches. Nobody lived on this street but people came out to maintain these houses anyway. Linc occasionally saw the armed patrols that would stalk the block, ready to beat back any advances from drug dealers or whoever was trying to make a new stash house. Their berets and sometimes their bow ties, and sometimes their leather jackets and sometimes their Afros. And whenever there was a new family of Exodusters that had been evicted from somewhere else or another group who had made the Great Migration from cities that had been swallowed up by the blight, they had this neighborhood prepared for them.

Michael turned in his seat. “Gimme a boy’s name that starts with H.”

“José,” Linc replied.

Copyright © 2022 by Tochi Onyebuchi. Excerpted from Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi. Published by permission of Tor.com. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African, its sequel, Crown of Thunder, and War Girls. He holds degrees from Yale, the Tisch School of the Arts, Sciences Po, and Columbia Law School. His fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Obsidian, Omenana Magazine, Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America, and elsewhere. His non-fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Nowhere Magazine, the Oxford University Press blog, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. Riot Baby is his adult fiction debut. You can find him online at tochionyebuchi.com and on Twitter @TochiTrueStory.

Book Review: Far From the Light of Heaven, by Tade Thompson

Aigner Loren Wilson | 706 words

Far From the Light of Heaven
Tade Thompson
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780759557918
Orbit, October 2021, 400 pgs

After traveling ten years in sleep pods, Michelle Champion (Shell for short), the captain of a colony ship, Ragtime, wakes up to the brutal murder of several sleepers. An investigation begins to figure out who killed the passengers aboard the colony ship. As the mystery unravels, Shell and Rasheed Fin, the investigator sent to solve the murders, end up in the crosshairs of the killer, putting everyone on board and below on the colony planet at risk.

Far From the Light of Heaven blends horror, mystery, and science fiction to weave an exciting and, for the most part, well-paced story. From the first page, Shell’s voice and the narrative flow of the story grabbed me. I didn’t care too much where I was going, but I loved all the science and space worldbuilding that Thompson weaved in to solidify the science fictional aspects of the story. In fact, Thompson did it so well that when the horror of the murders was finally shown, it took me by surprise and pushed me further into the story and mystery.

Sometimes when authors throw a bunch of genres into a novel, each one takes away from the other, and they don’t mix well. Far From the Light of Heaven was not one of those books. It was clear through the writing that Thompson put effort and research into making sure each genre felt naturally connected to the story. And that’s all I want as a reader: some connection between the story and the elements the author uses to tell it.

While the language was very point blank and simple, Thompson’s writing and structuring of the novel reminded me of page-turning commercial thrillers. Nothing beautiful or showy, but nothing terrible either, all easing you into a sort of comfort and relaxation. That makes for the moments when the prose picks up and becomes poetic to stand out.

During the middle of the book, when the POV started switching back and forth between Shell and Fin, I got lost in whose head I was in because their personalities are so similar. And when I got lost, I got bored. Which didn’t jibe well with the moments where the writing got dry, or the flashbacks began taking up a lot of the story. But those less interesting moments didn’t last long as the narrative, mystery, and character cast began to expand, showing aspects of the world and story new to me. The action sequences also mixed in well with the literary and narrative storytelling.

When the mystery was finally unraveled, it was done from the point of view of the killer. Though it was interesting to see the full story behind the mystery, it took away from the suspense building in me and felt too spoon-fed. Instead of actually solving the mystery along with the characters—who also didn’t solve the mystery and were instead given the answer—I was shown exactly what happened and why. But in the end, I think, what made the whole reveal feel jarring was the introduction of new characters and POVs to help neatly unravel and solve the mystery.

After all the unraveling is done and the reader is put back in the action of the main story, things start to pick back up, and the pacing becomes tight again. There are a lot of beautifully sad moments in the end, too, that Thompson writes in an easily digestible and emotive style. Even though the mystery of who killed the passengers is solved right on the page, there is a deeper mystery and story even beneath that, fueling the remainder of the novel.

For readers who enjoy semi-neat bows wrapped around their plots and stories, Far From the Light of Heaven is an excellent read with many genres seamlessly mixed to create an intriguing locked-room mystery in space.

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: The Misfit Soldier, by Michael Mammay

Chris Kluwe | 819 words

The Misfit Soldier
Michael Mammay
Paperback / eBook
ISBN: 9780062981004
Harper Voyager, February 2022, 368 pages

Salutations, readers, and welcome to a new year, along with a new book review. This month we’ll be looking at The Misfit Soldier, by Michael Mammay, which is a twisting roller-coaster of a ride that always reaches for the unexpected.

Like Mammay’s other books, The Misfit Soldier fits most easily into the military SF genre, but where his Planetside series felt more like detective thrillers, this particular book feels like a heist movie that happens to feature power armor and exploding dropships, along with a squad of not quite perfect soldiers led by a wise-cracking protagonist whose plans never seem to go the way he wants.

The book starts with that protagonist, Sergeant Gastovsky (‘Gas’ to his friends, and most of his enemies), attempting to find a way down to the surface of the planet he just left in order to rescue a squad member the team was forced to leave behind, and without giving away any spoilers, I really enjoyed how Mammay was able to throw me for a loop right off the bat. He does an excellent job establishing Gas’ character by leaning on some familiar tropes, then immediately turns those around to play with the reader’s expectations. I’ve read a lot of books over the years, and what stood out to me about this story is that Mammy kept taking it in a different direction than I expected, which kept the story interesting and fresh the entire way through. There were multiple times I thought I had correctly predicted what was going to happen next, only to find another curveball thrown into my path (mirroring the constant derailing of Gas’ schemes).

Another aspect of The Misfit Soldier that stood out to me was the care with which Mammay built the relationships between the various characters, and how they grew and shifted over time. It would have been very easy to paint them as one-dimensional caricatures of well-known tropes, but Mammy puts in the time and effort to flesh out their flaws and virtues, and it kept me invested in the fate of the squad the entire way through—no easy task given the amount of characters involved. While Gas is the primary focus around which the story revolves, the rest of the squad definitely felt like they had their own motivations and desires, and were never there as props or filling. There’s even a believable romance arc that feels like it naturally evolves (which is incredibly tough to write, believe me).

The part of the book that I think really hits hardest, though, is Mammay’s underlying theme of the individual versus the institution (one he’s touched on previously in the Planetside series, but here explores in much greater detail). Gas and the members of his squad are more than willing to die to save each other, but why are they out there dying to begin with? Mammay does a fantastic job setting up the camaraderie of the group in lots of little ways (drawing heavily, I suspect, from his own experiences), but it’s a camaraderie built out of individual bonds, not a greater devotion to what might be a meaningless war (again, I suspect drawing heavily from his own experiences), and it begs the question of whether or not an institution considered vital is worth keeping if it treats its people as disposable. Should we be content to follow the rules, because those are the rules, even if we know the outcome of following those rules is wrong? It’s a question always worth asking, and I appreciate that Mammay was willing to do so.

Overall, The Misfit Soldier is an action-packed, engrossing read that has just enough military sci-fi trappings to dress the set, but the far more interesting action is what takes place between the characters on that set as they seek out a place to survive. You don’t have to be a fan of space marines to enjoy this book (though their power armor is pretty cool), and Mammay has shown obvious growth as an author, with this being his most intriguing work yet. I hope he keeps writing for many years to come, and I wouldn’t mind at all if we got to hang out with Gas and the crew in a sequel.

Read if: You’re still upset Science hasn’t created a hoverboard yet (c’mon, Science); you’d let Putty date your sister; sometimes it really can only be solved with a match and some moxie.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Book Review: Trouble the Waters, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan, and Troy L. Wiggins

Arley Sorg | 1688 words

Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue
Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan, Troy L. Wiggins, eds.
Paperback
ISBN: 9781734842272
Third Man Books, January 2022, 404 pgs

When I think of Sheree Renée Thomas, what first comes to mind is her set of groundbreaking anthologies: Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (published in 2000), Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004) and later, the special issue of Illinois State University journal Obsidian, “Speculating Futures: Black Imagination & the Arts” (2016; co-edited with Nisi Shawl, Isiah Lavender III, and Krista Franklin). Dark Matter was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and both Dark Matters won World Fantasy Awards, making Thomas the first Black World Fantasy Award winner. All three books are wonderful, and any serious short fiction aficionado should include these in their library. Added to her many accolades, she also recently took over as editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Seeing Sheree’s name as an editor on a project immediately gets my attention. Add to this the editorial perspective of Troy L. Wiggins, who was editor at the outstanding FIYAH Magazine (before passing the role to DaVaun Sanders; Wiggins is still publisher); and Pan Morigan, who was previously unknown to me, but has a long and fascinating multi-disciplinary list of credentials (such as “recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in music composition” and “grants with Chrysalis Theater from the Ford Foundation and the NEA to produce Chrysalis Theater’s inter-cultural, multi-disciplinary theater works”), and I had to give this book a look.

If this isn’t enough – and it should be – a glance at the table of contents reveals gems from legendary authors Nalo Hopkinson and Linda Addison, acclaimed authors Andrea Hairston and Maurice Broaddus, and many other respected genre folks, such as Christopher Caldwell, Marie Vibbert, Kate Heartfield, and more. What I learned about Sheree during our interview for Locus Magazine (bit.ly/3ltV1bo) is that she isn’t simply a genre writer; she’s an individual who moves in many circles, whose interactions with various artistic communities go well beyond genre. This speaks to her partnership here with Morigan, but it also means that the table of contents offers a host of authors who aren’t “the usual suspects.” In other words, these three editors have gathered excellent work from writers many SFF anthologists and readers probably don’t know about, and probably haven’t read. In doing so, they expand the SFF field, and they simultaneously bring fantastic writers into the field who might not otherwise be here.

Trouble the Waters features a few notable reprints, such as Rion Amilcar Scott’s “Numbers” (from 2014 anthology Long Hidden as well as Scott’s own 2019 collection The World Doesn’t Require You), Jaquira Díaz’s 2014 Kenyon Review story “Ghosts”, and seriously underrated author Ama Patterson’s “Seamonsters” (from 2006 anthology Scarab). But it’s mostly filled with lots of high-quality original work. All told it’s a stunning gathering. I’ll highlight a few stories here as examples.

Elle L. Littlefield’s “Mississippi Medusa” opens with a great voice, capturing a touch of that oral storytelling feel. Cool, vivid, but not overwrought imagery, filigreed by perfect little details, sells the moment. At the same time, the story edges into lovely “larger than life” territory. The style is an effective combination of dialect and literary flair with horror notes. Littlefield’s narrative sketches family and community nicely, while delving into the way people respond to the strange. In this case, “strange” is a newborn who resembles a snake.

“The Sea Devil” by Susana Morris uses the speculative to examine otherness, in particular an otherness which is felt sharply and irrevocably. Protagonist Gem feels this otherness: she is different from the people currently around her; but she finds comfort and power in this difference. She is glad to be unlike those around her. She respects the decision of her sister Akira to live with people who are unlike them, even if it’s a decision she doesn’t entirely understand. For Gem’s part, she’s on a mission of vengeance, and once it’s complete, she can’t wait to get back home. It’s a well-told story which is on the one hand about being who you are and what that means, and on the other hand, about standing adamantly against violence, specifically domestic abuse – while also speaking to the nature of violence and power in the framework of society and history.

Jamey Hatley’s “Spirits Don’t Cross Over ’Til They Do” opens on a scene reminiscent of some of the best shows and movies about warfare, but the story itself is far more thoughtful and interesting than those productions tend to be. Rabbit Grace is on his second tour of Vietnam. The initial scene captures that camaraderie of military boys, the banter and the vibe, making expert use of dialogue. From there the story becomes a character study of sorts: Rabbit is a young man changed by the war, but changed in strange, subtle ways which he doesn’t really understand himself. He remembers being whole, once, and feeling love; and now, he is unmoored. At first, the narrative is a deft, understated exploration of trauma and loss. A sneaky momentum builds through the read, dragging the reader into emotional depths and intensity, until everything culminates in a truly thought-provoking ending. It’s. . . different, and kind of incredible.

“Call the Water” by adrienne maree brown grabs you from the outset with captivating storytelling, both in delivery of lines and its intriguing characters. The opening moments, the story set-up, is nothing less than a punch in the chest – if you have feelings or any sense of empathy, anyways. Added to this is the brilliant way brown lends meaning and gravity to something incredibly simple; how the meaning is layered, and how it feels both personal and important beyond oneself. The story is heavily, unapologetically political, speaking against systems which deny essentials to the already underprivileged. It’s a clear polemic against greed, bad politics, and even those who thoughtlessly play along. In the near future of the story, vulnerable communities in Detroit (and indeed around the country) are left without working water for extended periods, due not only to a catastrophic event, but also due to privatization of what water remains and subsequent price hikes. Protagonist sinti might be able to do something about it, but she’s not sure about her power, and she’s not sure about the consequences. You may read this piece and think the premise is a bit far-fetched, but you’d be wrong: a similar real-life situation happened in Detroit, leaving people who couldn’t afford the rates without water for extended periods. Yes, folks: this is now, this is today, this is your America. brown’s story works very well, not only as political commentary, but also as a depiction of sinti’s personal journey to empowerment. Ultimately, this story is about how power rests in decision. sinti finds her way to making her decision; by implication, we are on our own journeys, and must decide if we are willing to do what it takes to help our neighbors. Really well done.

One of my favorites of the book is definitely Jasmine Wade’s “All of Us Are She.” When reviewing, I write notes as I read, and my notes for this one are. . . extensive. The narrative is immediately intriguing, tying American history (slavery) to personal history smoothly. The voice is confident but relatable, and the story makes wonderful use of the framework of a grandmother telling a story. Thoughtful details lend this a realness – I was brought back to my mom and my grandma telling stories. This realness is important, because it effectively builds plausibility in the tale as well as investment in the reader. Wade draws striking parallels between contemporary and colonial power dynamics: the way people wield power, dehumanize people, and use people, all without self-examination. Meanwhile, throughout all of this, it’s also a powerful story about belonging, and doing so in defiance of those who would control you in one way or another. We get this story through the journey of the protagonist, who has to come to terms with who she really is, as well as with the ways she has rejected who she is in the struggle to feel comfortable with the people around her. As she discovers herself, she also uncovers truths about her mother (look: this is layered parallels in story, folks – there’s a lot of skill on display here), and the transitions and struggles she had. In a way, there is an illustration of the ways (white) society gets people of color to reject family and culture and even self. The way the things someone says can get inside you, even when you know better. One of the highlights of this theme is the idea of “suspect” family stories: those tales told by parents and uncles and grandparents and aunts that (if your family is anything like mine) you eventually feel couldn’t have possibly happened. But ultimately, Wade’s story is a metaphor for rejecting the pain and frustration of a society which really doesn’t care for you. Finding peace and power of place in your imperfect, flawed, amazing family; and becoming who you really are. It’s absolutely brilliant.

If you want some wonderful tales, gathered together by a team of editors who clearly know what they’re doing, go get this book. Spend some time with these pieces, sit with them. The work on offer deserves your thoughtful attention.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Author Spotlight: Maria Dong

Laurel Amberdine | 1170 words

How did “In The Beginning of Me I Was A Bird” come together for you? Did it fit your usual writing process?

Most of my stories just start with a single emotion or random what-if. I’m also an inveterate pantser—if I’m not curious about where the story’s going, I don’t write it. For “In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird,” I started writing about the rabbit that lives on the moon, who apparently enjoys making rice-cake and granting wishes, and one of the wishes was relief from an illness brought by seeds that descend from the sky.

None of that made it into the story, because—as happens with most of my stories—once I jot down the beginning and the hook, I usually get stuck. In this, I noodled into and out of that file for almost a year before I decided to do a tear-down.

I think that as I’ve developed as a writer, I’ve gained three main tools. The first is faith that I’m eventually going to get to the end, because I usually do, even if I have no idea how and it really doesn’t look like I will. The second is perseverance (rejections, blah blah). The third is actually knowing when to give up on something. I think that’s the real paradox of being a writer—you have to have so much blind faith and perseverance, but at the same time, you’ve got to be able to pivot when something isn’t going to get there.

So I started over, with the bit about the seeds, which became the first core of the story—and I wanted to thank you for these questions, because they made me realize that I tend to conceptualize a story as having two main cores. The first is the inspiration: whatever you need to get started.

The other core is the message: essentially, what are you trying to say? Once I figure out the message, I usually have what I need to finish. I should clarify that I write very instinctively, so it’s not like I say, oh yeah, here’s the message—I just wrote the little bit with the cat and the woman that follows the narrator around, and it kind of came together from there: a story about our place in the natural world and how that relates to isolation.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

The fancy answer is that in the last few years, I’ve come to realize my attraction to genre fiction is partially attributable to the particular axes I inhabit. They’re all liminal spaces and often invisible, and it makes me acutely aware of how unreliable our understanding and observations are. From there, it’s a very short jump into reinterpreting reality.

The true(?) answer is that this is what I like and how I operate. I tried to write a book last year that was just a straight mystery, and I lost all will to finish it—until I went back and pulled in elements from the fantasy space: voice, prose style, actions and observations that bend reality.

This book actually will be my debut, and it tickles me that it’s being marketed as literary-leaning contemporary suspense, because when I read it, it’s clear to me that the person that wrote it is a fantasy author, if that makes sense.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

The only way for writing advice to have any real utility is when it’s specific to the situation—your piece, your art, your career, and your goals. There’s no right way to do this—and even if you think you know what you want or what you’re doing, things change. Art changes. Culture changes. You change—and you should, because if you don’t keep pushing yourself, you’ll get bored and complacent.

This is a tough industry. One thing I can say is that from my experience, it doesn’t get easier as you become more successful. I mean the rejection and the anxieties, yes, but also the process of writing. Your challenges and goals are going to scale up with your ability, so if you’re hanging in there for the day it gets easy—you probably shouldn’t.

I guess none of this is advice, so I’ll give you one nugget that I’ve found true for me—earlier, I was talking about the inspiration of a story, versus its message. I’ve come to realize that for me, successful short stories usually involve marrying these two elements in an interesting or novel way.

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

I’m so boring! I like to read. I like to play video games (and I love a well-done old-school point-and-click, like Unavowed or Thimbleweed Park.) I watch TV. My friends and I have a weekly D&D campaign we’ve done over Zoom since the beginning of the pandemic that is still going strong.

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

I’m not sure I’d call this a trend, but I’d really love to see more mid-level independent publishers in the SF/F space, and particularly ones that are open to science fiction. The constant market pressures of only having four to five major imprints in the SF/F space mean that really interesting, novel, creative books are being turned away because they aren’t at the peak of marketability. Anything perceived as remotely risky, like character-driven SF, is shut down pretty hard unless you already have a strong following. Because so much science fiction relies on novelty at its core, the genre’s always going to be a little bit risky—so this constant press toward safer and safer books has made it a tough sell across the board.

I’d also really like to see more publisher/media acceptance of science fiction elements outside of the science fiction space. It’s so strange to me that you can stick magic in something and stick it on the “commercial” shelf, but the merest whiff of SF elements means it has to be silo’d off.

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

I had a pretty decent run of short stories published in 2021, which you can find at mariadong.com. I have a novel, Looking Glass Liar, coming out in 2023. You can add it on Goodreads here (bit.ly/3D7QHoo), although the page currently has an old title for the book (The Configurations of Katrina Kim).

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: Jendayi Brooks-Flemister

Laurel Amberdine | 686 words

How did “Up Falling” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This story is based on a dream I had in spring 2019. A wild, sad dream, where I was desperately trying to jump to the moon. And on the jump, I saw these fantastic colors all around me. Purples and pinks streaking past me. And I remember waking up literally feeling like I was falling. Like I was being pulled into the Earth. It was terrifying and so intense. So naturally, I tried to recreate it with words. And after several drafts, I think I was finally able to capture the beauty and wonder I felt in my dream.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

I’ve been writing genre fiction since I was eight. Genre fiction started out as a way to escape for me. I grew up moving to a new town every year until late middle school into high school. It was hard to make friends because of how often I had to say goodbye. On top of that, I grew up being sexually abused and feeling like I wasn’t safe . . . like the world wasn’t safe. So genre fiction was a way for me to create worlds where I could be safe. I started with fantastical elements, like talking dogs or magical portals to other worlds. But as I grew older, I gravitated more towards science fiction because of the sheer possibilities within it. I could tell my story the way I wanted to, without others making choices for me.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

I wanted readers to take note of the humanness of this story. Not just of the drive and passion that Aliishi has for salvation and safety, but of the humanness in Jumplead that Aliishi never really sees. That this story isn’t just about one girl’s determination, but two people’s drive to survive together, to learn each other enough so that they can get what they want and need most. The way Jumplead is Aliishi’s teacher and parent, and the way Aliishi becomes Jumplead’s student and child, is complex. I love their relationship so much.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I’m currently reading No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull. I might be biased, since he was my advisor during my MFA at NC State, but his writing constantly inspires me. I’m also in awe of N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, and Tomi Adeyemi. Those three powerhouses fueled my determination and drive to pursue writing as a potential career. But not just that—they’ve inspired me to want to inspire others. I hope one day someone can look at my work and say, “Who inspires me? Ah, well have you heard of Jendayi Brooks-Flemister?”

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

Oh gosh, what am I not working on? My ideas and the stories I want to tell pull me in so many directions! Right now, I’m currently working on the first draft of my debut novel. It’s a speculative fiction, fantastical multi-perspective narrative with themes around othering, displacement, loneliness, sensuality, and so much more. It’s still heavily in the works, but I hope to have my first draft completed within the next few months so I can start querying in 2022!

I also love short fiction as a medium to tell impactful stories, so it’s not like I’ve abandoned that at all. Hopefully I’ll have more short stories out soon, but for now, you can find my work in Anathema Magazine, Santa Fe Writers Magazine, and Constelación Magazine. I’ll also soon be out in Asimov’s, so be on the lookout! I always post updates on publications, and I’ll soon start a blog on my website, jendayibrooksflemister.com.

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: Vanessa Fogg

Laurel Amberdine | 657 words

How did “An Address to the Newest Disciples of the Lost Words” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I’m fascinated by the process of translation from one language to another. I’m fascinated by how a foreign language might have the perfect word for something that has no single word in one’s native tongue (like the Japanese word “komorebi,” which means “sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees” or the German word “schadenfreude”—both words which have no single-word equivalents in English). I love the website The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which features entirely made-up words for complex and/or very specific feelings and phenomena. I’m just fascinated by the concept of words in general, and I’m also obsessed by the inadequacy of words. Of how writers use words to try to say the unsayable—to invoke emotions and states that are beyond language. Of how ultimately futile this process is, and yet how we keep trying, and how sometimes we seem to get close to succeeding. And so from all these different thoughts the idea came to me: what if there were a magical language with Words that really could say exactly what it is we want to say? That could truly encapsulate a thought or concept or feeling? A language with a Word for everything?

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

I usually spend some time thinking, researching, and taking down notes before I write a story. I usually need to have the ending, and some major plot points, fixed in my head before writing. I think I spent a longer time than usual in that note-taking phase for “An Address to the Newest Disciples.” I read about the Rosetta Stone, the precise hand gestures in traditional Southeast Asian dances, and a bunch of worldbuilding/background stuff I’ve already forgotten. Unusually for me, the narrator’s own story—the bones of his plot—didn’t come until I actually started writing. I started off just planning a list-like story about imaginary words, and then the narrator’s personal story and journey started to come through.

Where are you in this story?

I am, unfortunately, the narrator at the point where he is struggling with words. But I just have to wait and hope that, as for him, the words will eventually flow again.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

Books I’ve read recently and loved: She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan; Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge, translated by Jeremy Tiang; Tortured Willows: Bent, Bowed, Unbroken, an anthology of dark fantasy/horror poetry which is a thematic companion to the editors’ Bram Stoker Award-winning anthology of short stories, Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women. Books I’m reading this week: I’m revisiting Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link and dipping in and out of Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: Volume 2, which covers stories from 2020. Some books on my nightstand right now: collections from Maria Haskins (Six Dreams About the Train and Other Stories) and A.C. Wise (The Ghost Sequences). All the authors mentioned here are inspirations to me. Some more inspirations I want to mention: Sofia Samatar, Ken Liu, Alyssa Wong, Carmen Maria Machado, Lev Grossman. My god, if I could just write like Sofia Samatar.

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

I’m not writing much right now, but I should have at least one other story coming out in 2022. For a complete list of my published work, readers can visit my website vanessafogg.com.

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: Lincoln Michel

Laurel Amberdine | 668 words

How did “Cale and Stardust Battle the Mud Gobblers of Hudson Valley” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I believe the initial idea came to me after I watched a video on how Singapore imports and dredges sand to shore up its land mass, spawning illegal dredging operations and disputes with neighboring countries. As climate change worsens, these battles for every resource—even sand—will increase. Most Americans still think of climate change as a problem happening somewhere else or in the future, so I thought, why not bring this already existing dystopian climate reality back home?

I live in NYC and it was pretty easy to imagine a (near) future where storms are increasing, sea levels are rising, and the rich and powerful do whatever they can to protect their Manhattan investments. (Not that the characters in this story don’t have their own privilege and narcissism of course.)

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I try to read as widely as I can, across genres, countries, and time periods. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of history books and horror stories. For some reason, that combination seems to speak to my present state of mind.

In terms of authors who directly inspire my fiction, some of my favorites are Italo Calvino, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoko Ogawa, Franz Kafka, Octavia Butler, Joy Williams, Kobo Abe, and Jorge Luis Borges. But I could swap in dozens of other names of course.

Where are you in this story?

I’m not someone who writes too autobiographically, at least in a straightforward way. I certainly steal lots of snippets from real life to recycle and remix in fiction. I think most writers are like birds flying around and looking for shiny objects on the ground to snag. I steal from whatever and wherever I can to build my fiction nest.

That said, maybe some of my stories involve multiverse “what if?” versions of myself. What if my life had taken a different path, or will take one in the future? Etc. I don’t have a child or own property in the Hudson Valley (or anywhere for that matter). On the other hand, I do have friends who have those things. So perhaps I imagined a pair of multiverse Lincolns on that life path.

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

This might put me at odds with the greater SF/F world, but I’d love to see a return to more expressionistic and surreal worldbuilding. There’s nothing wrong with the logical “realistic” worldbuilding that’s popular today. I love a lot of books like that. But some readers seem to think that’s the only way to write. So many of my favorite classic SF/F books would never hold up to the current worldbuilding expectations. Imagine trying to apply those standards to, say, The Martian Chronicles?

Often the surreal, the bizarre, and the impossible can capture the feeling of reality better than anything else. Especially these days.

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

Well, my debut novel, The Body Scout, was recently published by Orbit so that’s a pretty good place to start! It’s a sort of body horror cyberpunk noir set in a futuristic baseball league. It has philosophical Neanderthals, genetically edited CEOs, cybernetic loan sharks, and lots of other fun stuff.

In terms of what I’m working on, I’ve been revising a new novel that I’m calling “Pale Fire meets Star Trek” but I probably shouldn’t say more than that until it’s done.

You can find links to my stories and books at lincolnmichel.com.

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 | 224 words

Coming up in February, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Isabel J. Kim (“Plausible Realities, Improbable Dreams”) and Sharang Biswas (“NeuNet”). We also have a flash piece (“Bad Code”) from Stephen Graham Jones, along with an SF reprint by Karin Lowachee (“Lyceum”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Isha Karki (“When We Were Gods”) and P H Lee (“The Honest Fox, or, A Truth Shared is Not a Truth Lost”). We also have a flash piece (“How to Abandon Your Sourdough Starter”) from Theresa DeLucci. Our fantasy reprint is by Anjali Sachdeva (“Not Creator, Nor Destroyer”).

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: Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, Shiv Ramdas, Julianna Baggott, Ashok K. Banker, and Phoebe Barton.

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

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

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

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

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

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

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

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

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

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

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

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

The Editors

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

TL;DR Version

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

Why Patreon?

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

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

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

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

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

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

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

Thank You!

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

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

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor & Book Reviewer

Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Interns

Mayookh Barua

Madison Brake

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

Chris Kluwe

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.