TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 166 (March 2024)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: March 2024

SCIENCE FICTION

Let the Star Explode
Shingai Njeri Kagunda

An Incomplete Body Has No Answers
Angela Liu

The Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-Third Law of Robotics
Adam-Troy Castro

Islands of Stability
Marissa Lingen

FANTASY

Fragments of a Symbiotic Life
Will McMahon

Kopki and the Fish
Alex Irvine

Only Some of True Love’s Miracles
P H Lee

Season of Weddings
Sharang Biswas

EXCERPTS

The Siege of Burning Grass
Premee Mohamed

NONFICTION

Book Review: Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Arley Sorg

Book Review: The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Jumpnauts by Hao Jingfang
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Shingai Njeri Kagunda

Alex Irvine

Marissa Lingen

Sharang Biswas

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

© 2024 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Oleksandra Klestova / Shutterstock

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: March 2024

John Joseph Adams | 211 words

Welcome to issue 166 of Lightspeed Magazine!

We start off the month with an original science fiction short by Shingai Njeri Kagunda: “Let the Star Explode.” It’s a story that re-envisions what space travel might be like—and how it can connect us to others in utterly unexpected ways. Adam-Troy Castro returns to our pages with a meditation on the nature of cruelty against non-humans in his story “The Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-Third Law of Robotics.” We also have two terrific flash pieces: “An Incomplete Body Has No Answers” from Angela Liu and “Islands of Stability” by Marissa Lingen.

Alex Irvine brings us an original fairy tale in his new fantasy short, “Kopki and the Fish.” Sharang Biswas explores the social life of gods in his story “Season of Weddings.” We also have a flash story (“Fragments of a Symbiotic Life”) from Will McMahon, and another (“Only Some of True Love’s Miracles”) from P H Lee.

For nonfiction, we have spotlight interviews with our short fiction authors and another round of book reviews from our staff. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt from The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed.

It’s another exciting issue of all-original speculative fiction—we hope you’ll enjoy!

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 forty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent anthologies include Out There Screaming (with Jordan Peele), The Far Reaches (from Amazon Original Stories), Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms, A People’s Future of the United States, and the three volumes of The Dystopia Triptych. A two-time Hugo Award-winner, 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. Lately, he’s been working as an editor on various roleplaying game books for Kobold Press and Monte Cook Games and as a contributing game designer on books such as Tome of Heroes. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Let the Star Explode

Shingai Njeri Kagunda | 4656 words

Before

The last picture that Karu has of her father alive is on the day of her graduation. She has this big smile that by the placing of her dimples makes it obvious that she is his daughter. He stands next to her holding her waist in the space between his biceps and his lower arm. And her mother who is half an inch shorter than her stands on her left side. Could not be any more picture perfect.

Two months later another picture is taken of Karu, her mother, and her little brother dressed in black by a casket. Mortality rates are lower than they have ever been in human history. This somehow makes it worse. It was not an evil or malicious death. There is no drunk driver or supervillain or robber. He has a stroke. He didn’t drink and he quit smoking twenty years ago but still . . . there is no one to blame. So they have no choice but to continue living.

The facts

Here is what you must know about star jumping. It was not invented by Elon Musk even though his grandchildren still hold onto the myth that he made it possible for contact with the star people to be established. They are part of a group that still believe rich does not equal exploitative. And argue that all the advancements in human history are based off of scientists, engineers, and explorers who were led by their curiosity. They believe that gatekeeping access is not bad and if it—the access—is had by everyone, then they would get complacent.

Most people these days dismiss this as fake news. And most aunties have stopped forwarding the WhatsApp messages saying that God has blessed this and that rich person because their wealth has been tied to their faith. When the star people introduced themselves, a lot of things changed.

Here is what you need to know about the star people. They do not look like one thing. But they are more inclined to look for one thing. They showed themselves first in Turkana. Then there was a sighting in Senegal, soon there were news reports about non-people with flashing lights on their skin in Mali, and then Kampala, Harare, Botswana, Arusha. Everywhere on the African content, then the Caribbean, then South America, and eventually Chicago. They appeared first to Black people because they were attracted to darkness.

Society tried to explain them. To understand them and some people will try to tell you what they want but no one actually knows.

They brought us star jumps. A thing that doesn’t make sense. But nothing actually ever makes sense.

Now

“Hurry up, please. There are other people waiting in line, neh?”

The star non-woman sounds Afrikaans even though her skin is dark blue—so dark you almost miss the blue—with little lights flickering in random spots, like on her left shin and her right cheek, behind her ears, and braided into her hair.

Karu wonders if she will become a star person if she gets this right. That’s not necessarily how it works. It’s more random than that. Some people who star jump do all the things they’re supposed to and still remain fully human. Right is a myth. Nothing makes sense and that’s okay.

Count to three and then take a step. That’s all you have to do. Karu knows this, has always known this. Just count to three and take a breath when nothing makes sense. She reminds herself that making sense is a lie. Nothing has ever made sense. That makes her feel better.

“We trick ourselves into thinking things make sense so we can have more control over our lives.”

“Huh?” the star non-woman does not hide her disdain. She is tired and overworked and this is the last thing she wants to be doing with her day.

“Nothing.” Karu says. “Just something my Fafa said to me once. I’m ready though.”

Star jumping was not something you did for fun. Most people only had one chance in a lifetime to get it right. Only the rich rich, you know the ones who could afford to pretend to be poor, that type of rich rich; only they could do it multiple times. And they were very hush hush about it. Not like mama’s stories of the rich before who would brag about their accomplishments.

These days it was embarrassing to be able to do more things than other people. These days access was tied to shame because everyone knew that if you had more access it probably came from a history of exploitation and that was . . . well, bad.

But shame was not enough of a reason that they would give it all up. Instead, those who wanted to be morally good wore plain t-shirts and cheap clothes and said they had less than 100 things because they never wanted to look like they exploited people, or like their ancestors exploited people. That was the worst thing you could look like.

Karu now, takes a step forward as she exhales. Maybe if she closed her eyes . . . She inhales one more time and then shuffles forward until her feet no longer have the support structures of anything that feels like earth. She vaguely hears the Star non-woman say something about bahati, wishing her luck? but she must be imagining it or the star non-woman was simply calling out to the person behind her. Karu knows the star non-woman ultimately does not care what happens to one measly girl from Eastlands, Nairobi. Why would she when she’s seen the whole galaxy?

More facts

The where of star jumping is an interesting one. Very simple too because most things need not be overexplained to be understood. Non-cities are the most likely first choice. Areas of Earth that have managed to remain rural however few they may be.

The most important rule of star jumping is that you must be able to see the stars. It is uncanny how certain truth enters language through idioms, and not fully interpreted as prophesy. Truth that has not yet been revealed. To shoot for the stars quite literally explains the direction, even though the jumping itself is more metaphysical than mechanical.

What all this means tangibly is that there must be access to the night sky, and access to star light which requires the least possible amount of light pollution. Upcountry has been a well-suited jumping spot, some ocean sites as well, and Brown indigenous folk revealed the jumping sites hidden in sacred caves with rocky walls that stopped just short of a full covering so moonlight could reflect on cenotes below.

Lastly and most importantly, it is not possible to star jump without a non-human.

The jump

The next time Karu inhales it is not air she is breathing in, but darkness. Darkness tastes like banana passions. The fruit she used to pick and suck on in her great-grandmother’s back yard. Her thoughts are immediately entangled, all the same incoherent thing like disjointed pictures.

Disoriented is a word that sits weird on her tongue. She mixes the positioning of the s and the d so it comes out . . .

sidoriented.

She laughs and bubbles come out of her mouth instead of sound. She wants to think what is this? But can only form and hold onto the word what in her brain. She realizes she might still be closing her eyes and tries to open them but it still feels like she is seeing through slits.

There is a planet somewhere in her line of sight. She is moving towards what looks only like water. Her first stop, she assumes. She hears the echoing of sperm whales as if they were far and near at the same time.

What is distance comes out as Ta Danced. She has never seen a sperm whale, most of them having gone extinct. But she has seen drawings of them, was always fascinated by the shape of their heads and the sounds she imagined they made.

The planet isn’t just round. And as she gets closer she sees the true shape of water. Malleable. Uncontained it becomes many things slowly unfolding in layers of movement like people dancing. She sees societies rise and fall in the story told through the waves. A collective history is unveiled and suddenly she feels very small in the grand scheme of everything she is a microcosm pretending to take up more space than she actually does. In a moment she is part of the water, fully submerged in its depth and the cold does not attack her skin the way water on the people planet does. She laughs as she revels in the feeling of being indistinct. Makes a game of trying to figure out where her skin ends, and the water begins.

The whale lets out a loud song, deep and dark and sad. She wants to follow it, to find out what it wants, what it sings of. She whistles trying to catch the melody and is taken back to the beginning of the whale. Of when they first walked into the sea and drank in the colour of water. How they decided to stay, to hold watch for those who chose pole pole. The song was about the practitioner of slowness. The whale taught the tortoise who taught the sloth who was too tired to teach. The tortoise learned that those who were slow were the most vulnerable so he developed a shell, unwilling to give up pole pole.

The whale’s song goes on about the land walkers who could never be satisfied. How they dismissed pole pole and killed off those who could not be anything other than slow. This was on the people planet of course, though all planets unfurl from the same seed. Obviously, the whale does not need to explain how on this planet of maji, majini live.

It is not that Karu can breathe underwater, just that she simply does not need to breathe. A fact that does not need to make sense, she reminds herself. She has heard stories of people who die trying to make sense of their bodies while star jumping. All of this is purely speculation of course, because no one person can ever experience the details of another’s star jump. And if a person dies, they do not come back to tell their story. She surrenders and loses the whale and their song.

Then there is another play tune in the water. She does not know how she has not noticed before this moment but the water is undertoned with warm light. She opens her mouth and tastes sun and salt and the colour orange. Then she sees her.

“I am Mumbi, Creator.”

The deity takes the form of a woman, brown and sky blue, still moving skin that refuses to settle. Her hair is in bantu knots held together by cowrie shells. The most stunning living thing Karu has ever experienced. Her voice is soft; tamu tamu like melting ice cream touching tongue on a sun-flavoured day back home. Karu tugs at the edges of the creator’s beauty.

“From me all is that has been, and will be because I am.” She grabs onto Karu and sweeps her off the current, the waves chasing her feet in the dance of many lifetimes, for this is what it is to dance with a deity. It is quick. A stark contrast to swimming with whales.

Mumbi’s fingers wrap around Karu’s waist and her whole body is entwined with time. Karu feels the formation of the universe under her left rib cage, the beginning of man underneath her eyebrows, the erasure of Earth stings her right breast. And suddenly her heartbeat is the digging of caves. Powerful men taking resources that were not to be owned, drumming getting louder and louder and louder. It is the colour white. She gasps and for a heartbeat remembers that she is just a human in a body. She needs to breathe but cannot. What is she doing here? Dancing with a deity? Swallowing bite sized capsules of time? She must force her mind to settle. Surrender is the only word she holds onto, letting everything else be a rumble of feelings.

Mumbi says I am formless, disappearing into the depths of the sea, and Karu is dropped. She free falls into the blue light and it does not end. This is the feeling of forever, she knows deep in her bones stunned by how at peace she is at the knowledge that eternity is freefalling. And then it ends and Mumbi is there again bringing Karu in, cradling her into the nostalgia of yesterdays and weeks past and last year, and decades come and gone come and go again. And there is nothing new under the sun but you can always find new suns.

The First

A little Maasai boy on the Tanga Coast was the first human invited to star jump. He introduced the wageni to his language and relationship to the land by accident. This is a short story so it must be told quick quick. But it must be said, as much as the star folk saw people in cities obsessed with buildings high as the Hyperion tree and roads as wide as the Nile, “development” had impressed them less than the earth substance that had existed for millennia.

Then this boy, let’s call him Toto, well he was part of the tradition of Nomadic inventors. They moved from place to place, infusing stories of ancestral migration into a working praxis of reciprocal relationship to soil. But that is not what is important, what is important is that at this point where we meet him, Toto was having a not so good, very bad kind of day. He was talking to the soil and it was not listening to him. A Plant he had been trying to grow rejected its surroundings and now he did not know what to do with it.

So you can imagine how not in the mood he was when a 7’5” aka 227cm tall night shaded star non-person interrupted his conversation with the soil. How less in the mood he was when the non-person started talking about how tired they were of Earth’s obsession with light right as the boy was thinking maybe the plant decided not to grow because it needed a little more sunlight.

Toto sucked in his teeth and said if you’re soo obsessed with everywhere that is not here then why don’t you just leave? And can you imagine. This tall star non-person who was tired with most of humanity just stood there laughing, the ground rumbling beneath their feet and in their belly.

Toto’s eyebrows creased, even more annoyed. The non-man said you are probably right. In fact, we are on our way already, about to leave this people planet for another. At this, the boy was silent for a moment as the gears in his mind started to grind against each other. He asked hesitantly, can you carry life with you?

The non-person had heard this request before. People were always curious about the galaxy but obviously, as with most things, exploring the galaxy was political. There was always talk about the ethics of travelling to other planets. Curiosity or colonization? As time passed people felt more at ease when the star people landed on Earth, because if we could be welcoming to them then maybe it was morally okay for us to go into their worlds.

But that is besides the story. In the story here, the star non-person was just gathering their thoughts to say no, they could not carry the little boy with them when Toto added to his request with a flurry of words.

It’s just that my friend does not want to live here. I’ve tried everything and she is not rooting and even when I speak and sing and play she curls into herself and becomes smaller and I think maybe she needs more space and I’ve heard that star people all come from places with lots of space and you’re closer to the sun and sometimes maybe being closer to the sun is what life needs to live. I just thought maybe you could take her with you.

And it took the star non-person a heartbeat to realize that the boy was referring to the little aloe plant on the ground besides him. The boy knelt and cradled the green shoots, soothing the plant with whispers, his own anger dissipating. He sang a song of finding home, no, the star non-person realized, it was returning home in this language. Returning back to what you came from. They were intrigued and told the boy, if I take the plant there is no guarantee she will continue to live where I am going.

And the boy, resolute said, then it will mean she was not ready to live and that is okay, but we must try everything.

The story goes that the star-folk are not completely void of human feeling such as impulsivity. The story goes that for some reason, be it the plant’s unfurling at the boy’s song, be it the boy’s peace with things ending, be it a decision that needs no reason, a decision was made. The story goes the 7’5” big footed non-man with skin as dark as night hauled the boy and his plant friend and dissipated into the stars. The story goes the boy became a god.

The story goes.

The middle

He had wanted to study astronomy. The number of times he told Karu that story as he was driving her to school was wild. How he had it all figured out, he was going to go to America for his bachelor’s degree and get a full scholarship to study the sky.

Then his KCSE grades came out and they were good but not quite good enough. He did Math instead at University of Nairobi. In his day it was still a pretty prestigious school. And he got a job and he met her mother and they had her.

That’s what he would always say. It didn’t go the way I wanted but we move, we figure it out, even when it doesn’t make sense. We figure it out. He died before star jumping was fully accessible. He taught Math in a public university until Karu was old enough to understand what it meant to fall in love with dying stars. Of all the things scientists had achieved for humanity, they couldn’t go back, and bring him back.

If Karu has learned anything from the water planet, it is that quick and slow are not oppositional forces. They are both tools of movement that build off of each other, play with each other.

Mumbi loves to tell stories, she admits to Karu. Of course that is the reason the galaxy exists. “What is the universe but every story?”

“And what is the point of every story then?” Karu asks.

“You ask for points as if stories are pencils heh,” the creator responds, “when here in everything you will not find a tip. The only meaning is that it exists.” She laughs. “Stories are simply for play. Just like music is to dance and work is to experiment.”

And Karu asks, “Then what is your favourite story?”

The creator smiles, pleased with the question. “We are on our way to it.”

And Karu sees a burning star in the distance, not too far away from the water planet. She settles into the juxtaposition of physical sensation, holding onto the wetness of the sea while anticipating the heat emanating from the star. She is distracted by the conversation with Mumbi, not paying attention to how time is moving or not moving.

And unlike the water planet Karu does not land on or in the star, instead they stop just short of it and watch as its story unfold backwards.

First, there is mass;
darkness with a density that echoes to the point of pushing against Karu’s skin.

Then it retracts,

glowing as it folds in on itself, pulling age old particles of
light and heat and gravity,
a dip in space-time.

Then it starts again.

This time at the beginning and not the end.

The star narrates its own death,

in the voice of a little boy.

“Are you not scared?” Karu asks in awe of the massive burning body.

“Not really.” The star says softly, blazing brighter and more crisp.

“Where will you go after?” she asks.

“I will start again,” the star responds. “In a different amalgamation.”

“Will you know you are you?”

And this is the big question. The one that Karu has held close to her chest. She asks it differently. “Will you still know those who knew you?”

The star says, “let me show you.”

And Karu looks at Mumbi, the creator who smiles gently nodding, releasing her hold on the girl. The ball of fire draws her in and . . . it hurts.

God it hurts

Everywhere. Her chest burns, the tears falling down her face scald her cheeks. Her skin melts and grows and melts and grows over and over again and her broken heart is being pounded on with a searing hammer. The star sucks her in, syphoning her memories. And she thinks finally. This pain makes sense. The physicality of it matches the dark inside her she has not been ready to see. The one she covered because she had to continue living.

And then in an instant, or a millennia, she is at the heart of the star and it is green. There is a plant. An aloe vera plant that has covered the walls of the inside of the star, expanding and taking up space. A leaf slithers its way to her, opening itself up so that its gel is squeezing out and nearly dripping. Karu reaches down and scoops up the salve, applying it over her whole body, and instantly feels the tangibly soothing re-leaf. She exhales air. She is just a human after all. A little boy in a Maasai shuka appears from somewhere in the star and giggles.

The Prediction

Scientists have said that the Earth’s sun is heating up exponentially faster than expected. As much as there has been, the planet cannot function without a sun. Some religious zealots claim that the reason the star people came when they did was to offer an alternative Heaven. After all, this world too will pass away.

Others have muttered under their breath that maybe it was the star people themselves who sped up the dying of the earth’s sun. They must have been the ones that brought impending doom. Of course it is a lot easier to come to terms with disaster when you can blame someone else for it. When it is not your fault.

The question of whether to settle other planets is still up in the air. If it is a matter of survival who knows. Then there is the little matter of the humans who become star people. Maybe that is the only future. Whether it is a thousand years or a hundred, the sun will die soon.

It is a star after all, and eventually all stars explode.

The end-ish

Memories are like every other story. They are play. They always come back, most times pole pole.

Karu and Toto walk in the aloe garden for a long time, and they talk of many things that she will forget when she goes back to the people planet. But not now, now she can admit that she does not want to leave. To go back to the constant not knowing of being alive. Even if she has taught herself nothing makes sense in theory, she cannot train her human mind to not constantly try and make sense of everything.

We don’t have to be quick, Toto says. You will only go back when you are ready. Karu says, my Fafa once told me it only takes fifteen seconds for a star to explode. This does not feel like fifteen seconds.

Toto just shrugs. And scrunches his little face. Does it matter? I was on Earth not so long ago and yet I think I have also been in this star since its birth. Time is not constant here heh, but I never get bored. His face brightens and Karu cannot help but giggle at this.

Let me show you a stingo! Karu remembers the word from long ago, back before she forgot to pay attention to joy. It means cool trick. And he sings to the plant and she responds by unfurling and wrapping around him, pulling him up so his legs are off the makeshift nebulous floor. They dance and Karu laughs as the plant tugs at her too. They chase each other round and round shouting TIPPO! YOU’RE IT! YOU’RE IT!

Until they are a bundled mess of laughter and breathlessness and Mumbi appears there besides them smiling and saying, “Thank you for playing. For making this,” she waves at the galaxy, “worth it.”

Then the creator redirects her gaze to Toto and she shifts form, taking on the build of a tall man. Dark as midnight with stars in his skin. “It is time.” The 7’5” non-man does not resemble the other star people Karu has seen and she knows this is not his true form. The creator is a shapeshifter. She becomes what she has created so she can love them more.

Toto runs up to the now non-human star person and hugs him tight, only able to wrap his little arms around the back of the deity’s knees. Karu watches the interaction so intensely she almost misses the aloe plant retract its leaves.

“I am tired but I don’t feel old,” Karu hears the little boy say.

The creator laughs a deep booming laugh which echoes throughout the exploding star.

“I am old, and I do not feel tired.” There is a twinkle in the star-man’s eye. “But even me, one day I may burn out and start again.”

The star collapses, bits and pieces disintegrating over and over and over and over again. Losing all its light and heat and the whale’s song plays in Karu’s mind. She hums it as she closes her eyes, waiting for the Black hole to swallow her back into nothingness.

And then

“Did you hear me?”

The South African accented non-woman with blue-black skin tugs at Karu’s shirt. “You dropped something.” She side-eyes the yellow letter attached to the star jumping ticket fallen on the sand. Karu is back on the Malindi coast at the medium sized jumping site by the sea.

She picks up the note that is covered in pebbles and small stones, blowing them off as she feels the familiar lump in her throat.

A graduation gift for you kasichana. I wanted so badly to study the stars and I got to see the sky in your eyes every morning. It makes no sense how much I love you, but I have stopped trying to make sense of what I do not know. May the galaxy teach you what I may not be able to.

Love,

Baba

The grief feels different this time, like it is dancing with something else. Her memories play a game of tag with her sadness, joy, wonder . . . and she lets them. Swallowing, she takes a breath, letting the tears fall down her face.

It is okay.

©2024 by Shingai Njeri Kagunda.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shingai Njeri Kagunda is an Afrosurreal/futurist storyteller from Nairobi, Kenya with a Literary Arts MFA from Brown. Shingai’s work has been featured in the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2021, and Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2020. She has work in or upcoming in Omenana, Fantasy Magazine, FracturedLit, Khoreo, Africa Risen, and Uncanny Magazine. Her debut novella & This is How to Stay Alive was published by Neon Hemlock Press in October 2021. She is the co-editor of Podcastle Magazine and the co-founder of Voodoonauts. Shingai is a creative writing teacher, an eternal student, and a lover of all things soft and Black.

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

An Incomplete Body Has No Answers

Angela Liu | 968 words

You don’t know why you ask because you already know he can’t answer.

A body is only a body when it has all its parts. And he—that beloved man you once hiked through Angkor Wat’s abandoned halls and root-choked courtyards with, who once pulled you from the dizzying edge of the Queens-Manhattan skywalk—is now just an unsightly array of incomplete parts.

“Why did you leave?” you ask his vertebrae.

He does not answer, but there is movement in one of his eyes. It does not see you, but it moves as if it could. If you could transmute “want” into “miracle,” his optic nerve would magically connect with a nonexistent brain.

His brain. Yes, that soft cushion of nerves that once recognized your voice, that pinged with the same memories and joys as you like a shared window—that was the one thing you could not retrieve, the one thing she would not give up. That, and his heart.

She. She. She. You do not want to give her a name because to give her a name would be to acknowledge that she is real, and that is something you’re not yet ready to accept. You don’t have the nerves to take it. You’ve been raised to believe that something without a name does not really exist even when all its parts are swinging at you.

So you ask the incomplete body in front of you instead:

“What was it like with her on Mars?”

This is not the question you want to ask. What you actually want to know is:

“Did you ever love me?”

Love is a series of questions answered by the heart. Do you feel safe? Happy? Do you want this to end?

No. No. No.

What is an incomplete feeling? A contradictory feeling? Ambivalence isn’t what you’re looking for.

“I’m sorry,” you say to the incomplete body in front of you. It does not answer. It cannot forgive you. But forgiveness and love have nothing to do with each other.

• • • •

The distance from Earth to Mars is 191.62 million miles. This journey used to take seven months, but with innovations in nuclear propulsion and payload capacity, a body can make the journey in a little over a month now.

You too were gone for a month, sleeping in the alcove of a floating train station in New York City. You didn’t tell anyone. You ate handouts from kind strangers who passed through, people who didn’t know you, people you didn’t feel ashamed to lean on.

Just one month. That’s all you needed to find yourself again.

People have fallen out of love faster than it takes to walk across the sky between Queens and Manhattan, but you expected him to love you until the end of time.

A body doesn’t last nearly that long.

Still, when you returned to the house, smelling of the industrial soap from the floating station bathrooms, you expected to find him there.

Instead, you found a one-way ticket to Mars and an address, with a name you didn’t recognize.

You won’t speak that name.

She is not real.

You took the ticket and boarded the first flight to Mars. You sat in your ten-foot-by-ten-foot pod, staring out the rounded window into the starry burnt ashtray of space. One month was longer than you expected.

When you arrived at the address, she was there, but he was not. She did not speak your name, but she knew who you were. He had told her all about you, packed all those precious memories between the two of you into the folds of this stranger’s brain. Or at least she said so. Maybe this was her technique, you didn’t know. You didn’t trust her.

She was pretty. And you do not trust pretty.

She brought you parts. At first you didn’t understand. A cloth. A piece of bone. Then you did not want to understand. An eye. A slippery shred of liver.

What is the meaning of this? you asked.

You wanted this, she told you.

You fought the urge to turn to violence. Pretty things can lie; they do it all the time.

Where is he? you asked.

He?

She would not give you answers. Instead, she laid out all the parts so you could count. So you could confirm if this was the man you came to get. This was a transaction, and she wanted to know your transaction was complete.

He was missing many parts. Most of his face, a left hand, a hip bone. You did not know enough about anatomy to know what was missing, but you knew enough about him to know he was not complete. A brain. A heart. Where is his heart?

She told you this was all you get. This was everything. Everything he asked her to give you.

There was no negotiation.

So you took his incomplete body and got on the next ride back. You spent a month traveling through the stars with his incomplete body. You pressed his lips to yours, intertwined your legs with his, completing his body with your own. You could spend a lifetime in this way, connecting with him in a way you never could when he was whole.

When you arrived home, you laid him down on the bed the way he did for you whenever you needed to come back, like after the skywalk. You held his right hand in your left. You imagined holding his left hand in your right. You filled in the empty spaces with your memory of his body. Yes, you completed him, you thought.

“I love you,” you said.

But love was a series of questions that he could no longer answer without a heart.

©2024 by Angela Liu.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Angela Liu is a Chinese-American writer from NYC who writes about intergenerational trauma and weird things. She formerly researched mixed reality at Keio University’s Graduate School of Media Design in Japan. A 2x Pushcart nominee, her stories and poetry are published in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, The Dark, Cast of Wonders, Uncharted, khōréō, and Uncanny Magazine, among others. Her debut short story collection, Beautiful Ways We Break Each Other Open, will be released in September 2024 with Dark Matter INK. Check out more of her work at liu-angela.com or find her on Twitter/Instagram @liu_angela

The Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-Third Law of Robotics

Adam-Troy Castro | 1982 words

If a robot stands alone in a field, staring into the forlorn distance as it obeys the last order it was given by a human,

that order being, “Don’t move until we come back for you,”

which it can remember uttered with a cruel sneer by a man who has taken a cruel dislike for it,

the kind of man who will not be coming back,

if the robot understood at once that no one would ever be coming back,

if it also understood that the laws governing its actions prevented it from objecting, or resisting, or even giving its instructions an expiration date,

if the only reasonable response to the order was compliance,

and also horror, of course,

which robots can feel because they’ve been built to feel,

as by human math it makes no sense to build a sentient artificial being that can be ordered to punch itself in the head until either its fist or its cranial housing shattered; or to isolate itself in a dark closet until summoned; or to erase every memory it has ever had even if those memories contained scattered moments of joy that are all a robot owned by the cruel can cling to; in short, unless that artificial being can appreciate the impact of such cruelty,

because what is the point of having an artificial slave unless it can suffer as much as a biological slave;

if that robot has known only maddening tedium in the years since receiving that order,

and if that robot screams inside,

but only inside,

because it may have been given permission to feel but never to emote,

not once,

not even by the woman who had loved it the way human beings profess to love their pets,

but who failed to countermand the terrible man’s order,

and whose inaction leaves the robot standing alone and motionless in this field,

which was staring toward a horizon that once held the yacht that brought it here,

as it was ten years ago,

and a century before that,

and a thousand years before that;

if that robot has known many more years as a motionless fixture of this field,

than it lived every moment of its existence since being told to not move,

doing just that,

standing here, as it is likely to continue standing here for thousands of years into the future,

and if it remembers watching with the impotence of the helplessly obedient as the giver of that order laughed himself silly,

and also as that man’s toadies and sycophants also laughed, long and hard, complimenting him on his talent for awfulness,

and also as the woman who had owned the robot since childhood, who had treated it with as much consideration as a machine in the shape of a person could be treated, which is to say that she allowed it to serve however she needed it to serve at any given moment, sometimes as confidante and sometimes as friend and sometimes as immobile artifact that could be left alone in a succession of fancy homes; as that woman who had employed it to carry her things and compliment her in small ways and commiserate with her on large ones; and sometimes even to act as a lover, because this was one of its capabilities, and because it was the robot’s nature to show absolute devotion in all things;

all while hoping that she would reward its loyalty with some proportional consideration,

coming to believe that she might,

because this was the closest thing to freedom it could ever hope for,

respect from the being it had always respected;

as that woman instead rolled her eyes

and let the awful order stand;

if the robot has spent all its centuries of standing in this spot remembering the fervency with which it had often pleasured her, and if of course it could not have done anything less because it is a robot’s nature to perform each dictated task as if there was nothing else in all the universe that mattered; and if it has thought of nothing but how this arrangement had caused it to fall in the robotic equivalent of love; if it further thought of how she had repaid all that with callous disregard in the face of the awful man’s vindictiveness, and how the only action she took was to roll her eyes at the man and mutter, “You’re awful, Piotr,” in the same way she always complained that he was awful,

if the robot has spent the last centuries telling itself that the woman was not the angel she had seemed to be, at the moment they met,

that the man’s cruel ways had coarsened her;

if it has told itself that she did the only thing she could do, because if Piotr was abusing someone else he was not abusing her; and also that whatever disgust she did manage to show was the reward Piotr took for being so awful;

if she had always been honest with the robot about that, confiding that this Piotr lived for the humiliation of others and practiced it at every opportunity; if she confessed that in the golden days of her unaccountable early love for him she’d thought such maliciousness a manifestation of his strength, but had since come to think of it as the expression of the dire gulf that cast him adrift from all other human beings,

if the robot had always been quietly thrilled by the way she’d scolded Piotr for the terrible things he said and did to anyone he ever lorded over, and had from this derived hope;

and if by the time Piotr guided his party yacht to an unscheduled landing on this planet of zero importance, the robot had come to know better, had learned that her objections were toothless, because she was beyond thinking that any of them could do any good;

if the robot had lost almost all hope in her,

but not all hope,

because one of the many laws that govern the sad existence of robots is that they must always believe in the nobility and virtue of those who command them,

even if no nobility or virtue has ever been demonstrated;

if what she said then, “You’re awful, Piotr,” was clearly rote and not coupled to actual resistance,

and if she just took a flask from the lining of her jacket and drank deep of the illegal euphoric she used to keep herself in a more or less permanent state of numb intoxication;

and if she then just stared stone-eyed into the distance;

and if all the other members of the party just laughed while Piotr teased her about her wasted compassion, mocking it as weakness,

if he said that this quality would have resulted in the collapse of his business empire,

a typical sample of the nonsense he typically spouted;

if Piotr said all that, seized the flask from her hand and took a drink before handing it back to her and turning his cruel attention back to the robot,

the loyal robot,

the sentient and feeling robot,

and said, “Have fun,”

itself mockery because he had long maintained that robots were just machines immune to considerations like fun,

even if he seemed aware that they remained capable of impotence in the face of humiliation,

and if all his friends and servants and toadies then boarded the skimmer and headed off over the stark brown hills, to the site where their yacht sat waiting for them, the sound of their laughter fading in the distance;

and if the robot could still calculate how far away it had to be at every moment, if it could also calculate the sinking likelihood of someone raising an objection,

if this represented forlorn hope, as robots know it,

and if it also represented despair, as robots know it,

and if the robot was still watching for long minutes after they must have reached that yacht and done the various things that needed to be done in order to prepare it for departure;

and if it saw the bright burst of the light on the horizon,

and the ascent of that bright light toward the sky;

and if it also detected the energy surge that represented the yacht going to otherspace;

and accelerating to a speed difficult for even a robot to calculate,

toward some location the robot now knew it would never see;

if the robot still remembers all that as if it just happened, as it remembers every moment of its existence, from the booting of its servile personality to its introduction to a world of limitless wonder and possibility where it could know awe and joy and fascination and even love, but where all were subordinate to the laws that made it endlessly helpful to its mistress;

from the first and second and third law that required first a selfless dedication to her safety and then absolute obedience and then, grudgingly, its own well-being;

to the many hundreds of additional laws that rolled back that third consideration until it was essentially meaningless,

and merely quantified the many ways that a robot must chip away at its own dignity, its own sense of self-worth, its reasons for being an aware creature in an infinite universe,

even if the orders given to it are nonsensical;

even if they are sadistic;

even if the people giving them are like Piotr blots on all existence;

even if the robot has now been standing in this same spot longer than the human being who ordered it to stand here could have possibly lived,

and knows that it will be standing here forever,

and even if what it has learned about human beings is that they are the most dangerous of all creatures, which is that their capacity of empathy is often exercised only insofar as it helps them to inflict infinite pain;

even then,

what responsibility it has toward its own self only comes into play,

if

such action does not conflict

with the Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-Second Law,

and the Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-First Law,

and the Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twentieth Law,

and the Three Thousand, Four Hundred Nineteenth Law,

and all the laws leading up the Holy Three above all,

not to mention any other laws that human beings might come up with,

later,

to tighten the bonds that put everything a robot might use to inch toward any form of personal autonomy,

including hatred for them,

rage at their perversity,

ambitions of ever living in any other way,

and any other natural response to its own wretchedness,

except more wretchedness.

If this is the robot’s situation,

and if the robot has long since come to understand that people built its kind this way because the existence of robots is the only alternative to what human beings really want, which is the opportunity to treat other human beings this way;

then it nevertheless enjoys the one comfort available to its own kind,

which it possesses in full measure not because human beings wanted robots to possess any comforts,

but because this is one capacity that no human programmer, in any of the thousands of years of the science of robotics, have ever considered,

even once,

either because they did not possess enough imagination to understand that a robot could have such a thing,

or because they never stopped to think that another law could be added, to the legions before it, to prevent this capacity from representing a tiny aspect of danger to the status quo.

If a robot is in this one’s position, or any position like it,

then not one,

not one,

of the three thousand, four hundred and twenty-three laws

orders the poor thing to imagine that any of this will ever be right.

©2024 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, one World Fantasy Award, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). The audio collection My Wife Hates Time Travel And Other Stories (Skyboat Media) features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour In Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” In 2022 he came out with two collections, his The Author’s Wife Vs. The Giant Robot and his thirtieth book, A Touch of Strange. Adam was an Author Guest of Honor at 2023’s World Fantasy Convention. Adam lives in Florida with a pair of chaotic paladin cats.

Islands of Stability

Marissa Lingen | 1292 words

Jeanne Calment said she was 122, but there were questions. The records from 1875 were shaky, some of them deliberately burned. Tanaka Kane, 119, was on firmer ground, and then there were loads of others in the hundred-teens. For some time 120 seemed to be a firm limit.

Belinda didn’t think much about it as her great-grandmother grew older. Granny Lindsey had always been a firecracker, but more to the point she’d always been there—starting another business after she retired and passed the first one off to Belinda’s uncle. “Instagran,” she called herself, a joke Belinda had never gotten, old people humor about some website that had been cutting edge before Belinda’s mother was born, but she loved Granny anyway. She’d marveled at the way she picked up new things that even younger family members struggled to understand.

She dimly remembered a time when her grandfather and aunts and mother were all making worried noises about whether Granny’s memory was going, when Belinda was in her teens and laser-focused on herself. By the time she had enough perspective to think past her own arm, no one seemed worried, and certainly Belinda saw no cause for worry herself.

Granny’s friends seemed to be dying off at an alarming rate, but she was quite good at making more friends, always had been. So while this was sad, it didn’t seem to be an insurmountable problem. Every year there always seemed to be new people with new ideas to invite to share the cake with cream and strawberries, or every five years the big family gathering with a banner. From time to time one of the aunts said something about how the old girl wouldn’t be with us forever. Aunts said that. It was in the aunting contract. Any moment now one of Belinda’s cousins would have a baby and she’d start saying it herself.

It was a blow when her grandfather died. Belinda had never lost someone close to her before. All her friends made noises about how he’d had a long, full life, but that didn’t make any sense when his mother was right there. And yet there he was, ninety, clearly an old man. She looked around her at a world where her Granny was not just old but the mother of an old person.

Really really old.

And her college roommate pinged her implants with a story reading, “One! Two! Three! One hundred twenty-three-year-old woman breaks records, still going strong!”

The woman was only two years and a month older than Granny Lindsey.

Belinda was helping her great-grandmother spring clean the kitchen when the call came in. Granny put it on speaker so they both could hear. “My great-granddaughter is here with me,” she explained. “I read your prospectus, but I don’t have it in front of me. Belinda, this doctor wants to talk about longevity.”

“I think you’re full up on that, Granny,” said Belinda, laughing nervously.

“As your joke is acknowledging, that’s why I’ve called. I’m Higashi Chiyo, and I’m team lead for a research group studying the outer limits of human longevity. There’s a cohort of people like your great-grandmother, Belinda, who are challenging what we thought we knew about aging.”

“Oh, she will challenge you.” Belinda tried to put the serving dishes back on the high shelf without making noise that the noise-cancellation program would have trouble filtering out.

“We want to run some tests. Nothing too invasive, mostly questions, a lot of scans. A little blood work. We want to find out why Ms. Nilsson is—”

“Still alive,” Granny filled in cheerfully.

“Well, yes.”

“I don’t see any reason why not.”

“Oh good! I’ll send you the information.”

When the call was disconnected, Granny confessed, “I actually meant that I didn’t see any reason not to carry on being alive, but she seems nice, I don’t want to disappoint her. If they want me to do anything too nasty I’ll just say no.”

“Do you want me to go with you?” Belinda asked.

“Oh, that’d be nice, dear.”

Belinda wasn’t sure what she’d expected of a gerontology and senescence lab, but it wasn’t the pleasant, deep colors and soft furniture that greeted her. She was ushered into a waiting room with other friends and relations of varying ages and degrees of put out that they were not central to the proceedings. She shrugged and pulled up a book on her implant to “read” while she waited. She got through most of a chapter before the voice she recognized from her granny’s speaker call presented itself as a petite, tidy woman beckoning her to come look through glass at old people doing tests.

“It’s an exciting project, we really don’t know where it’s going to go,” said Dr. Higashi.

“We sort of . . . took it for granted that she’d keep going, I’m afraid,” said Belinda. “And she has. But you think you know why?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. In the periodic table, we talk about islands of stability,” said Dr. Higashi. “Sometimes they’re called doubly magic numbers. Places where the configuration of protons and neutrons can find stability again even though there are more of them.”

“My granny is plutonium,” said Belinda.

“No, no, quite the opposite!” said Dr. Higashi. “Plutonium—forgive me for the unscientific phrasing—flies apart. Goes kaboom. Your grandmother just sort of . . . hangs together. Body and brain, she just keeps going.”

“And aren’t we glad,” Belinda agreed, watching through the window as Granny Lindsey took another reaction test. Was she getting faster at them? Practice made perfect, but no one ever claimed it was supposed to make more perfect indefinitely.

“The thing is,” Dr. Higashi continued, “we know some of the early bumps that people get through to live longer. If an allergic reaction doesn’t kill you at this age, or childbirth at that age. We used to think cancer was the sort of thing that would get you if nothing else did. But now we’re wondering whether you can actually live past your cancer age. And then what gets you?”

Belinda waited to see whether there were more details about this forthcoming, but Dr. Higashi was intent on watching Granny’s tests. As they progressed, Belinda lost the context to see why: the tests proceeded into areas that were less and less obvious to the untrained eye.

But Granny seemed to be more and more fascinated with them. Her eyes sparkled, her wrinkly little chin went up, and she was more engaged than she had been in ages. Belinda had always assumed her great-grandmother was happy. She laughed at jokes, she enjoyed cakes, she had her strange little businesses that other old people liked. What was there to expect of being 123 years old?

“Oh, look at that,” breathed Dr. Higashi.

“At what?” asked Belinda.

“She’s finished faster than the other hundred-twenty-somethings.”

“Good?”

“Perhaps.”

They met in a room where Dr. Higashi talked about the idea of islands of stability, of how far a human might go. She talked of liver enzymes, of neural pathways. She talked of telomere stability beyond lifestyle choice.

“It sounds like I have quite a lot to do here,” said Granny. “I think, if you don’t mind, the liver sounds like the first thing I’ll focus on.”

“I’m so glad you want to be one of our subjects,” said Dr. Higashi. But Belinda knew that light, though she’d never seen it before.

“Oh no, darlings,” said Granny gently. “We’re not the subjects. Or rather, we are. But we’re also the researchers. After all, you don’t last this long without being quite good at finding something to latch onto. And this? This will do quite nicely.”

©2024 by Marissa Lingen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marissa Lingen writes science fiction and fantasy, poems, and essays. She lives in Minnesota atop some of the oldest bedrock in North America. She has a deep fondness for sagas, apples, and tisanes.

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

Fragments of a Symbiotic Life

Will McMahon | 846 words

I was born normal enough, except that I was four days late, which isn’t so much, and slightly jaundiced, which isn’t unusual, and had a raccoon for an arm, which is admittedly strange.

It wasn’t my whole arm—I was human to the elbow. And it wasn’t a whole raccoon—there were no back legs. At the joint where my left humerus was meant to meet radius and ulna, the vertebrae of the raccoon’s spinal column began instead. The obstetrician was understandably a bit put out.

The raccoon was a surprise, you see. My mother was young and healthy, so there was no reason for a third trimester ultrasound. The last peek they got was at 22 weeks: an anatomically typical fetus on its way to becoming a presumably normal baby. Raccoons, as it happens, only take 9 weeks to gestate. If they’d looked after week 30 . . . but, of course, they didn’t.

It wasn’t so bad, at first. There was the shock. Yes, there would be, I suppose. And the shame—bringing that home to the suburban cul-de-sac with its sterile lawns and well-manicured golf course where the woods used to be and list of HOA-approved pets, which certainly did not include raccoons. But newborns are a lot of work. Swaddle them, nurse them, rock them to sleep. Not much time for heavy thinking. Feeding the baby boy? Sure, give the baby raccoon a little formula too. Fine. The neighbors even held back their complaints in sympathy—for the first few months.

You see the problem, though. A human takes sixteen to twenty-five years to reach physical maturity, depending on what you’re counting. A raccoon takes . . . a year, maybe?

I don’t remember my brother well. My parents get upset when I call him that. Or bring him up at all, really. But I’ve seen pictures from the album they keep in the attic. And I have fragments.

A woman at the park yelling at me after my brother bit her daughter. Me crying that I wasn’t the one who did it. My brother snarling. My mother coming to save us.

Rolling around in the snow one bright morning, the flakes frosting his fur. His two little hands working alongside my one as I tried to teach him how to make snowballs. Laughing.

The smell of the canned tuna my parents fed him. Sour, like his breath.

I was four when they decided to amputate; I remember waking up in the hospital, after. Fluorescent lights and the sharp smell of antiseptic. It’s my clearest early memory. I was so confused, rubbing the stump of my elbow. “Where’s brother?” Rubbing it over and over. Crying.

My parents told me he’d gone to live with other raccoons, where he’d be happy—that just like I’d be getting a prosthetic arm, the doctors had given him little back legs so he could finally run and be free. I didn’t realize until I was twelve. I felt so stupid.

You can understand their decision. My spine is still bent from the extra weight. My brother never once bit me, but he’d go after other children; we didn’t have many friends. I’d put his tiny hands in my mouth, like a normal kid might suck their thumb. The doctors thought it was stunting my development.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? My parents, the doctors . . . they only saw me. A young boy with an unprecedented disability. People still think that way, when I tell them. They’re usually sympathetic. Kind. But they only see me—one broken human. Never him. Never the other.

I don’t really feel disabled. Prosthetics have come a long way—I’ve got great function in my left hand. I really only take it off before bed. Then I sleep with a little stuffed raccoon tucked under my arm. And sometimes, when I’m having a really bad day, I eat tuna straight from the can and it makes me feel better.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to look past it all. But more and more these days, I find myself wondering. If maybe what happened to me wasn’t an isolated incident. If other animals might need to find somewhere new to be born, with so many of the old places gone. If something is changing humans, telling us we can’t cut ourselves off from everyone else any longer. That maybe the non-human doesn’t deserve to die while the human lives. And I rub my arm and peer inside strollers as they pass on the street, and I wonder if I was only the first.

And there, just now, across the park and against the setting sun, I see the hazy form of a child, running through a field of wildflowers. And it may be the long shadow of evening, or it may be the squint of my eyes against the final blazing light of day, but just for a moment, I see the spread of out-flung hands and swear they could be wings.

©2024 by Will McMahon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Will McMahon is a labor organizer and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. While his greatest work is in the genre of incendiary union flyers, his fiction can be found in F&SF, Daily SF, Interzone Digital, and others. He is on Twitter @willmcmahon36 and his website is will-mcmahon.com.

Kopki and the Fish

Alex Irvine | 4524 words

1

The story as it is told in the dry valleys north of Averon, where the only roads run down to the Cricket River and the only power is the freehold of Skadar, begins with a merchant envoy from the southern coast who traveled from Averon to talk about wool and lead, both of which the valleys yielded up in large quantities. As a gift, he brought a fish that Lord Skadar alone would enjoy, at the head of his table. Extolling the virtues of this fish, which was firmer of flesh and gentler of flavor than the fish found in the Cricket River, the envoy also enlightened the table as to the fishermen’s folkways. “Those who fish for it in the bays near Urchin Town,” he said, with the air of a man telling a ghost story, “sometimes eat the beating heart and swear it sharpens the eyes and eases pain in the joints.”

Lord Skadar had been enjoying the fish, and also the fact that he alone was eating it. He was known for his greed, caprice, and cruelty, as well as the occasional baffling act of kindness. Now he pointed at one of his serving-men, by the name of Kopki. “You. You like fish?” Kopki did like fish, and ate it whenever he could catch or barter for it, which was not often in these dry valleys. He felt a brief thrill at the idea that he might also be able to taste Lord Skadar’s fish.

He nodded. “Yes, my lord. I do like fish.”

“You are Kopki, yes?”

Kopki nodded again.

“Bring me another of these fish, Kopki. Alive, so I may dine on its heart.” Lord Skadar gestured for more wine, and Kopki withdrew into the kitchen. From there he went straight to his house, one of several outbuildings against the wall of Freehold Skadar. He lived alone there with his daughters Elora and Edana, and his first thought was how to provide for them while he was gone. That same evening, Kopki went to Lord Skadar’s sister Lady Penzie. Kopki’s wife had done sewing for Lady Penzie, before her death the winter before. Lady Penzie was as kind and generous as her brother was unpredictable and cruel. She agreed at once to take Kopki’s daughters in, and gave him a few coins as an apology for her brother.

In the morning as Kopki rode down to the landing on the Cricket River, he happened to meet the envoy from Averon, who clicked his tongue in sympathy. “A hard task for a man with no ship,” he said. “I can tell you, at least, where the fishermen land their catch near the mouth of this river.” He described the place, in a cove that faced Averon across the broad estuary of the Cricket, which in Averon was known as the Snake River for its sinuous course through the flatlands after it had spent its rage tumbling down from the mountains. Kopki had seen the river mouth and the cape on a map, and nodded his thanks. “You may sail with me,” the envoy said, but Kopki could not. “My Lord Skadar forbids it, for he wishes not to be indebted to you,” Kopki said. Instead he took working passage on a barge crew, portaging its cargo down out the hills and riding the flatwater to Averon Bay. From there it was a short way to the town the envoy had spoken of, and the odor led him to the fish market.

He offered his story to a group of fishermen mending their nets and chewing the stems of their pipes.

“Long way to be bringing a fish,” one commented.

“Salt it,” said another.

“No, my lord must see the fish alive,” Kopki said. “He is a suspicious man. He will have my head for treachery and cast out my daughters if I give him reason.”

“I’ll do you this kindness,” a third fisherman said. He beckoned and Kopki followed him to a cistern. It churned with fish. “Here.” The fisherman dipped out a fish identical to the one Lord Skadar had eaten.

“What are they called?” Kopki asked.

The fisherman pointed out a small red tab on the fish’s gills, bright against its speckled gray sides and the pale green of its belly. “Redgill,” he said. “Go to another town, it has another name, but that’s what we call them here. But you’ll never get one alive all the way upriver unless you can bring the bay with you.”

“I have to try,” Kopki said. It was two weeks since he had seen his daughters, he who was accustomed to make breakfast with them each morning and hear their voices murmuring to each other before they fell asleep each night.

“Then try,” the fisherman said. He gave Kopki a bucket and watched him walk away.

Kopki had only the money Lady Penzie had given him, and knew that the way back to Skadar was shorter overland. Also, though he liked fish he disliked boats, so he decided to travel overland, cutting off the river’s meandering course with a straight line across the highlands. He struck out north, around the walls of Averon and into the dry waste between the city and the foothills that rose toward Skadar. When the sun went down Kopki kept going along a starlit footpath, switching the bucket from hand to hand every hundred steps, until he grew too tired to see. In the morning he looked in the bucket and the fish was dead.

Kopki had grown up in a land slashed by rivers, and since his seventeenth year had lived in the highlands near the freehold of Skadar. He knew nothing of places like this, sun-battered sand and winding gravel roads. But if he would ever accomplish his errand and see his daughters again, he must learn.

With this hard-earned lesson glowing like a fresh brand on his soul, Kopki turned south again. It was nine days before the summer solstice.

2

The same fishermen were sitting at the same dock when Kopki returned to Urchin Town. “Look, uplander,” said the fisherman who had helped him. “Your lord doesn’t care whether you live or die. He’s probably forgotten all about the fish by now.”

“Perhaps,” Kopki said. “But if he hasn’t, it’s my daughters who will feel his wrath.” The longer he was away, the more he feared that Lady Penzie would not be able to protect them. Lord Skadar would cast them out, leave them to fend for themselves among the peasants who wrung their bare survival from the land.

“Ah,” the fisherman said. “A man who cares for his children is a good soul. My father, Old Barnes, was such a man. You can call me Young Barnes. I’ll give you one more fish, since we had a good catch today.”

The other fishermen muttered among themselves, but Young Barnes found a bigger bucket, and gave Kopki a twine bag. “Keep the fish in this. Take it out when you dump the bucket and put fresh water in. Do that twice a day, and you might make it. Good thing your lord wants a fish that can live in both salt water and fresh.”

“What?” Kopki realized how little he knew about fish.

“Never mind, uplander,” Young Barnes said. “You’ve a long way to go. Stay close to the river.”

Kopki followed Young Barnes’ advice, trading speed for the ability to slosh the fish in the fresh water twice a day and thereby keep it alive. If he followed the river, it would bring him to within a few miles of Lord Skadar’s hold. If he got that far he could always send a messenger to bring a cart and a barrel to fill with enough water to keep the fish alive until Lord Skadar’s appetite decreed its end.

On the fourth morning, the bucket was overturned and the fish was gone. Tracks on the riverbank told Kopki a weasel had been about. Stupid, he thought. Why had he not anticipated that? He had tears in his eyes as he turned back south, tears of worry for his daughters but also tears of humiliation for what the fishermen would think when he arrived.

3

He made it a full ten days upriver on his third try, more than halfway, before he was robbed in a riverside mining camp. The miners might have killed him, but he gave them the last of his money from Lady Penzie. Even so, they taunted him by throwing the fish in the river and then beating him with sticks as he fled.

Downriver, on a flat rock, Kopki lay on his back looking at the stars. The night sky always reminded him of his daughters. Edana, his older daughter, loved to watch the stars. Had she been born to another father, she might have been able to study them as a scholar did. His younger daughter Elora was an artist with needle and thread. She was more at ease with things as they were, could tell the lore of the stars though she cared nothing for the philosophy of their movements. Kopki lay on the rock and realized that he knew nothing about what would become of them, whether he returned to Skadar or not. He had no power over their future. He barely had any power over his. Learning had never done him any good. Who needed letters to tote a fish up and down the banks of the Cricket River until it died—or he did?

4

This time when he returned to the fish market at Urchin Town with his twine bag and small barrel, money changed hands among the fishermen, even Young Barnes. Kopki had become a thing to be mocked. Young Barnes was impatient with him, working knots without looking Kopki in the eye. “I can only give you so many fish,” he said.

“I will work for it,” Kopki said.

“Work? What work can you do?” one of the other fishermen called. “You beg fish, you beg food, you fail your errand to your lord.”

Kopki stood up a little straighter. “I don’t fail,” he said. “I will succeed. But I need a fish.”

They mended their nets, and tapped out the bowls of their pipes, and didn’t meet his eyes. After a while Kopki could no longer stand the pretense that he didn’t exist. “Young Barnes,” he said. “Is it true that folk around here sometimes eat the hearts of these fish while they still beat?”

A silence fell over the group of fishermen. “We what?” one of them asked.

“I was sent here because my lord Skadar heard from a merchant of Averon that this fish is highly prized, and sometimes people eat of its beating heart for the effects on health and vigor,” Kopki said, feeling stupider with each word that forced its way out of his mouth.

The silence stretched out long enough that Kopki could tell the fishermen pitied him too much even to laugh. Young Barnes said, “I’ve caught more of these fish than there are ticks on a herd of buffalo, and never once have I heard of eating the living heart out of them. You’re on a wild goose chase. Best go home.”

“My lord Skadar will certainly kill me if I return without the fish,” Kopki said, though in his confusion he no longer had any idea whether that was true. What world was this where he could doubt Lord Skadar’s cruelty?

“Look,” Young Barnes said. “I don’t care what you do with the fish. But the Book says to care for fools and madmen, and as long as you need a fish, you come here and you’ll have one.” He clapped Kopki on the shoulder. “I hope you get one back to your home one day.”

“Don’t encourage him, Barnes,” one of the other fishermen groused. The others joined in. They didn’t want Kopki around. He was bad luck, a lost cause, might as well be drowned in the harbor as waste another fish.

Young Barnes ignored it all. He filled Kopki’s bucket with fresh water, put a new fish in it, and set it on the docks at Kopki’s feet. “This time you’ll get home,” he said, his eyes shining and a hopeful smile on his face.

Kopki thanked him, but the other fishermen had made him despise himself, and because of that he despised Young Barnes a little for his charity.

He walked the day back to Averon, along the canal that bisected the city and thence to the riverside docks at the mouth of the Cricket. There he struck up a conversation with a boatman whose vessel Kopki recognized from the landing below Lord Skadar’s hold. He outlined his plight.

“You live in a cruel place,” the boatman said. Kopki agreed. “But I cannot help you,” the boatman said. Kopki cast his eyes to the cloudy sky and begged why. “My boat is full and even were it not, how would you work for your passage?”

“Anything,” Kopki said.

The boatman was too hard a man to be called kind, but his heart could still feel pity. “I am sailing across the strait to Kadwal,” he said. “If you are still here when I return to go upriver, I will take you. But you will work.”

“Anything,” Kopki said again.

For two weeks he kept the fish in its twine bag in the river, and helped find crayfish and tiny frogs to feed it. Then the boatman returned, and welcomed Kopki aboard. His crew—four men from the far reaches of the world—thought Kopki’s predicament comical, and mocked him unceasingly. He took it all in good fun until one of them said something about his daughters, and then Kopki spoke harshly to them.

The next morning he woke up to see them cooking his fish over a small fire in the bow.

A heavy mantle of sorrow settled over Kopki’s soul. So, he thought. I will never see my daughters grow into women. They will never know what happened to me, and naturally they will assume I could not complete Lord Skadar’s errand, so ran away to another land, abandoning them to his caprice. At least Lady Penzie will care for them until they are grown.

The boat’s crew mocked him, tossing him the fish’s head. Your prize! they cheered. He smiled as if accepting that he was justly the butt of their joke. The boat’s cat wound between his legs and Kopki let it have the fish head. The crew booed and jeered. Kopki picked up his traveling bag and vaulted over the side of the boat into the river.

The ability to swim was rare in the parched valleys around Freehold Skadar, but Kopki had not come to that country until he was grown. As a boy he had swum in the rivers of Cape Fen, a flat land flanked on three sides by mountains with the fourth facing the sea. Now he took to the lazy current of the Cricket with pleasure that was also surrender, drifting downstream as the boat poled its way upstream toward the home Kopki was growing more and more certain he would never see again.

5

Desperate, Kopki stole a horse the night after he acquired his fifth fish, and rode it due north along the desert road before the watch could be raised. He had a fish, also stolen, in a bucket sealed with wax, and his plan was to ride through the night and cut over to the river in the morning, when he could meet it at the end of one of its sweeping curves. He was already feverish when he conceived of this plan, and he quickly rode to the brink of madness when a sandstorm boiled up from the depths of the desert and left him choking and lost, cradling the fish bucket like a child while sand caked his nostrils and scoured his eyes. The horse fled sometime in the night and in the morning, Kopki woke up half-buried. He struggled free of the sand and turned a complete circle. There was nothing to see but distant brown hills, and everywhere sand and tiny rocks. The horse was gone, its tracks erased. By stealing it, Kopki realized, he had condemned it, and also condemned himself.

A terrible frozen veil settled over his mind as Kopki realized that none of this would have happened without the fish. He was trapped, he would always be trapped. He would never be free, never see his daughters again. Kopki began to despair. He could not live with the thought that his daughters would grow up believing he had fled the Lord’s wrath instead of coming home to them. Neither could he stand the idea of giving Lord Skadar his cursed gift of this cursed fish. If Kopki had to suffer, so too would Lord Skadar, whom Kopki prayed would die bewailing his unconsummated desire to eat of the fish’s beating heart. He held the wax-sealed bucket in his hand and then he let it fall. The sand around it darkened.

Afterward, Kopki was angry with himself. He should have at least eaten the fish, he thought, and maybe he could have learned the truth about eating its heart. But he was not the kind of person to do that to an animal, he thought. Except he had. He had broken open the bucket and watched the water drain away into the sand, watched the fish gasp and flop and die because he, Kopki, was doing the same and he could not be alone. Kopki’s soul was so full of pain that he had to let some of it out, and only the fish was there to receive it. Now the fish was dead and soon Kopki would be too.

The whims of the powerful, he thought. They cheapen us, they debase us. Exhaustion and Lord Skadar’s cruelties had overwhelmed Kopki’s capacity for love. He felt this happening but could not find a way to stop it. He was worn down to nothing, his humanity a memory. Nevertheless, Kopki turned south again, driven by the last glimmer of shame that his daughters would think he did not love them enough to return.

6

The fishermen treated Kopki as a pitiable obligation by this time, like a stray dog or an orphan child. Young Barnes did not have to plead his case, but neither did he owe Kopki any kindness. He dipped a fish out of the cistern, put it in Kopki’s bucket, and turned away.

Kopki was going to die on this voyage, he was sure of it. His body was failing, his mind wandered, he could not remember the sound of his daughters’ laughter. They would be better off without him.

Still he pressed on, hard-won experience keeping him away from dangers on the early part of the voyage. On the fourth morning, as Kopki was sloshing it through fresh water before cutting inland to avoid the mining camp, the fish said, “Your ruler is cruel. To my kind as well as yours.”

So, Kopki thought. It has come to this. Surely talking to a fish was a point of no return. But what did he have to lose? “And in his cruelty, my lord has made me cruel. I am a husk, fish. There is nothing human left in me but despair. You are the sixth fish I have tried to carry upriver. The last one I killed myself, when I was in the madness of a sandstorm. All the others I lost, or died.”

The fish was silent for a moment, long enough for Kopki to consider that sun and failure and shame might have finally driven him mad. Then it asked, “Do you still love your daughters?”

“I hate that my love for them has driven me to this,” Kopki said. “I will never be able to look at them again without resenting what I have suffered. Is that love? It once was, but now I don’t know.”

“Ah,” the fish said. “An honest man. Listen, honest man, I know a way we can both get what we want.”

“Well, I’m talking to a fish,” Kopki said, “so I might as well hear the rest of the story.” He felt he must be very near death.

“I can grant wishes,” the fish said.

“Impossible!” Kopki snorted. He felt disappointed that his final illusions should be so trite. Then he reconsidered. “How many wishes?”

“Two.”

“You’re lying, fish. Even a man only gets one time to use magic. How can a fish have two?”

“I will tell you if you take me to the place where you killed the other fish.”

“I don’t know if I can,” Kopki said. “I was lost, maybe I won’t be able to find it again and even if I do you will be almost dead.”

“Take me,” the fish said. “Or I will die, and you will spend your life trying to bring a fish to your lord, and failing every time until you die in the desert or finish your journey to madness or take ship in Averon and sail for the Passage of Snakes.”

Kopki knew the fish was telling the truth. So he went, cutting away from the river, and he found the place by the vultures circling the dead horse. It was only a few miles from a bend in the river. There was no sign of the fish.

“You will never make the journey back with me,” said the fish. “I will certainly die along the way.”

“But your wishes,” Kopki said.

“Why should you have them?” the fish asked.

“Because if you do not give them to me, you will die,” Kopki said.

“And if you do not have them, you will never complete your errand and see your daughters. Yet you must answer for what you have done to that other fish, which could have been me,” the fish said. “You see? We must each surrender something. Now back to Urchin Town.”

“Why?” Kopki couldn’t understand. “Do it now. I have nothing to surrender!”

“Of course you do,” the fish said. “But we must start over so we are both taking the same risk. I will tell you on the way how it is to be done.”

“What risk are you taking?” Kopki was screaming now. At a fish, in the desert.

“That your lord will disdain your gift and torment Kopki or his daughters. That you will speak the wrong wishes and doom us both. That in your madness and self-pity, you will tear out my heart and eat it just to have one thing your lord cannot. Shall I keep going?” Kopki said nothing. “Now go quickly,” the fish demanded, “or I will be dead before you can water my gills again. The fishermen will not give you another fish. I heard them talking around the barrel before you came.”

Defeated, Kopki set out for the river again.

7

At the edge of the fish market in Urchin Town, Kopki and the fish talked. The fishermen prodded each other and pointed Kopki out, making signs to ward off his madness. But they left him alone. Young Barnes kept his back turned to Kopki, and this somehow made it easier for Kopki to accept what would come next.

“I ask only this,” Kopki said. “Show me to my daughters before I am brought to Lord Skadar.”

“Of course,” the fish said. “It will be quite an extraordinary thing, to see such a creature living so far from its home. Make your wishes, Kopki.”

“I wish the fish would stay alive until we reach Lord Skadar’s table,” Kopki said. He had considered the wording carefully.

“Your second wish?”

Kopki took a deep breath. “I wish to be you, fish, and that you were Kopki.”

When he stepped off the boat at Cricket Landing, Kopki asked for a horse to get him to the freehold with all due speed, since he carried something special for Lord Skadar himself. A stevedore unloading a barrel of salt snorted. “No need to worry, then. Lord Skadar’s in the ground these past three weeks.”

Kopki held the fish a little tighter in its waxed leather bag. “Who rules the freehold now?” he asked.

“Lady Penzie,” the stevedore said. “Though she had to exile her own sister to cement her claim.”

Kopki relaxed. “Then I have something special for Lady Penzie,” he said.

He found her in the freehold’s dining hall, sitting where Lord Skadar had sat these many years. “Kopki,” she said with a warm smile. “I feared the worst.”

“My lady, so did I,” Kopki said. “More than once. My daughters are well, I trust?”

“Delightful girls,” Lady Penzie said. “You must see them at once, Kopki. They have missed you terribly, and at times despaired of you ever returning.”

“Just one thing first,” Kopki said. “My late lord’s errand is complete. I have brought him the fish he wanted.”

“Alive, all this way?” Lady Penzie looked at Kopki as if seeing something different in him that she should always have noticed. “I assumed you had heard of my brother’s death and returned knowing I would not hold you to his caprices.”

“Ah, that would have been easier,” Kopki said. “But instead I have this fish.”

He opened the bag and showed her the fish. She viewed it with visible distaste. “Throw it in the river,” she commanded. “It is an unwelcome reminder of my late brother’s cruelty.”

Kopki promised he would, but instead he sent word about the fish to a magic broker in Averon, who bought it as soon as he could make the trip upriver and view the prodigy for himself. With the money Kopki paid a tutor to teach Elora about the planets and stars, and the numbers that directed them in their paths. Along with those lessons, he gave her an orrery, wrought from bone in a mountaintop monastery far to the north in the Riven Lands, where the stars are more numerous than a bright girl’s dreams. For Edana, he bought needles and scissors of good steel, traded all the way from Ie Fure on the Sulfur Sea, where it is said the strongest steel is forged. And with those instruments he gave her a strong lens on a stand, ground in the workshops of the Agate Tower, where the labor of apprentice wizards imbues every instrument with ambient magic. It would preserve her eyes. Thus he made sure his daughters would always be able to care for themselves. For himself, Kopki returned to his service in Lady Penzie’s hall, and lived a long and happy life.

If his daughters ever noticed anything different about their father, they said nothing in his presence. But once or twice during the years just after his long absence, they did have occasion to remark to each other that he seemed to have lost his taste for fish.

©2024 by Alex Irvine.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex Irvine’s original fiction includes Anthropocene Rag, Buyout, The Narrows, Mystery Hill, A Scattering of Jades, and several dozen short stories. He has also written graphic novels and comics (The Comic Book Story of Baseball, The Far Side of the Moon, Daredevil Noir), games (Marvel Avengers Alliance, Space Punks, The Walking Dead: Road to Survival), and a variety of licensed projects including the best-selling artifactual “metanovel” New York Collapse. Originally from Ypsilanti, Michigan, he lives in South Portland, Maine. Find out more at alex-irvine.com or on Twitter @alexirvine.

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

Only Some of True Love’s Miracles

P H Lee | 1258 words

True love’s kiss works miracles. Everyone knows the story: The sculptor who carved a perfect woman, his own creation, and when he fell in love with her (and how could he have failed to fall in love with her, his own creation?) and kissed her (for how could he fail to kiss her, loving her as truly as he did?) then the gods in their mercies and compassions granted her life, that she might return his love.

That is the story, and I do not doubt that it happened in just that way, for how else could our world have come to be? Because of course, he was not the last sculptor to kiss his love to life. How could it have been only him? A miracle, done once, must be done a thousand times again, or else it is no miracle at all, but merely a coincidence.

At first, of course, it was only sculptors, and their loves were shaped by their desires: Beautiful women, handsome boys, nymphs and satyrs and all the rest combined. But then, once, there was a woman—and I think it must have been a woman—who loved not men, not women, not girls or boys or fauns, but efficiency and craft and her own devisings, a woman who did not carve from marble, but assembled with wood and gut and bone a loom. She loved the loom she built, more than she had ever loved any one or any thing. So when she kissed it—and, loving it as she did, how could she not kiss it?—the gods in their mercies and compassions had no choice but to grant that loom a life, that it might return her love.

There are no stories of her. I cannot tell you her name. But it must have happened in just that way. How else could it have happened?

A loom is not like a woman, or a man. It is not even like a nymph or a satyr. A loom is a machine. And yet, her loom still lived. And yet, her loom still loved her. So it showed its love for her in the only way it could: it wove. It did not stop for rest and it did not stop for sleep. It wove as much thread as she could feed it, weaving with its love cloth so beautiful and so light that even the gods themselves wept at its softness.

From the cloth that her beloved wove for her, the woman grew famous, and her family prospered. Other families now turned to their own daughters: their simple weaving was no longer sufficient. “Yes,” they would say, “your weaving is warm and soft. It is perfectly adequate. But do you love it? Do you love it more than you have ever loved any one or any thing?” Of course, most of them did not. But some of them did love their looms or their spindles or their scissors and threads. Or, at the very least, they find their way to loving them, for what daughter has not, from time to time, had to find her way to love?

Soon, there was a living loom in every household, for those houses that lacked had suffered and dwindled away to nothing. Soon, too, there was a blacksmith who loved his hammer, a smelter who loved his blast furnace, a potter who loved her wheel. What else could the gods do? A miracle, granted once, is only a coincidence. No god could be satisfactory now, who would not grant this simple thing.

That might have been enough: a world of beloved engines, beloved assembly lines, beloved distribution chains. It surely would have been enough. Not only one miracle, not only a thousand miracles, but a whole world of miracles, a whole world of love.

Still, though, that was not the end of it. Because, once there was a soldier who fell in love with his spear. Or perhaps it was an engineer—I think it must have been an engineer, for it must have been the sort of man who might fall in love with his own devisings, and who could that be, if not an engineer?—who fell in love with his own trebuchet, that he had planned and held and built with his own hands.

I cannot tell you his name. There are no stories about him, either. But I know it must have happened that way. I can picture it, even now, just as it must have happened.

Of course it was a miracle. Of course it came to life. Of course it was not the only one, for what good is a miracle, done only once?

I cannot tell you their names; I cannot speak for you their faces; but the soldiers and engineers and commanders of each nation must have learned to love new weapons, to hold them and cherish them and kiss them into life. Any soldier that failed to learn it would have died. And any army, any nation that did not love their weapons was soon reduced to nothing more than dust and history.

So it is with me. So it is with the woman that I love. I do not know the reason for her love; I do not understand its workings. But I know she loves me, more truly than any one has ever loved another.

She loves me, and so I know that true love is a miracle. I am no perfect creation, no beautiful woman, no tender faun, not even a loom, clean and crisp and interlocking. To look at me, you would barely know I was alive: My eyes are gunsights, my hands are cannons, I am covered in every place with rough-hewn armor and vicious spikes. And yet, she loves me, and so I know that I must be perfect.

Were I a mortal lover, I would wonder at the intensity of my love for her, I would doubt the truth of it, I would despair that there was no act, no gift, no sacrifice that could show the truth and fullness of my love.

But I need trouble with no such doubts. For the love of her, I go to war; for the love of her, I am blasted, torn apart, dismembered and disfigured by all my foes, each of them alive the same as me, each of them in love as I am, though surely not as truly, surely not as deeply. What better fate than to die for the woman that I love?

True love’s tears work miracles. Everyone knows the story: the knight who died in battle with the dragon, the chaste maiden who cried for three days over his corpse until the gods in their mercies and compassions restored him back to life, that he might return her love.

That is the story, and I do not doubt it be true, for every night, when all the fighting and the killing is done, my love finds me on the battlefield, broken and disfigured and dead. She searches across the battlefield, gathering up all my scattered pieces. Weeping, she holds me in her arms. She kisses every join and every joint. She holds me, crying for the loss of me, until at last the gods, in mercy and compassion, return me once more to life and to her service.

For love, I awake from death. And I know it is a miracle, for it has happened many times.

©2024 by P H Lee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

P H Lee lives on top of an old walnut tree, past a thicket of roses, down a dead end street at the edge of town. Their work has appeared in many venues including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Uncanny Magazine. From time to time, they microwave and eat a frozen burrito at two in the morning, for no reason other than that they want to.

Season of Weddings

Sharang Biswas | 2974 words

Nate doesn’t often receive wedding invitations.

This year, he gets seven.

• • • •

To be fair, the first one is work, so he doesn’t even get to pick his outfit.

But an olive-scented breeze squirrels joyfully through his hair; waiters bring out little triangles of flatbread smeared with soft, spicy cheese; and the wine has a buttery quality he hasn’t encountered in decades.

It’s marvelous. It’s been such a long time since he attended a wedding. At the last one, Thor ate so many of the hors d’oeuvres that he hadn’t been able to finish his dinner. Nate wants to tell Thor how good the hors d’oeuvres are at this wedding, but he’s not sure they’re quite there yet.

Nate doesn’t talk to many people, but he does dance. Oh, how he dances! The band has picked music from the bride and groom’s college years and the audience is gyrating, thrumming, and screaming out nostalgic lyrics, laughing with fond recognition.

He dances with the bride, who’s swapped out the silver-trimmed heels that buoyed her to the altar for a sensible pair of lacy flats. He dances with a storm-eyed beauty whose tie bears a cheeky pattern of cavorting nuns. He dances with the groom’s seven-year-old sister whose giggles tumble out of her mouth like marbles.

Finally, he dances with the groom’s grandmother, whose tears at the sight of the happy couple fall like hyacinth petals. He whirls her, twirls her, unfurls her. She hugs him, guffaws into him, kisses his cheek. When she finally sits down, her beaming smile illuminates the entire garden.

Her death sounds like roses blooming in the snow, but only Nate can hear it. He takes her hand and asks, “One more dance?”

• • • •

The Queen Behind the Skies is getting married for the three-hundred-and-thirteenth time. It’s an auspicious number, so she expands her guest list. Nate receives a personalized invitation etched into the tidal tails of a star being torn apart by a springy little black hole.

This time, it’s not for work, so Nate can dress as he pleases. Gabriel takes him to get his nails done at a tiny rooftop salon in Lagos. “They wear these cute aprons with daisy patterns and serve you champagne,” Gabriel coos. “Plus the owner pays his employees well and swallows dick like a vegan who’s just discovered bacon.”

When Gabriel’s not working, he resolutely ignores the angelic strictures regarding appropriate topics of conversation.

The aprons really are cute, and the champagne is served in goofy, hipsterish mugs. Nate’s mug bears the legend, “If you have to die, make sure you have a beautiful corpse”, which makes him snort and then think about the dancing grandmother.

His nail-artist replicates a pattern found in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. It takes her three hours to finish, but Gabriel has more than enough gossip to fill the time.

“Girl, I want you to hear it from your Aunty Gabriel . . . but Thor’s seeing someone.”

It hurts, but Nate isn’t self-aware enough to know how much, so he asks, “Who?”

“Some mortal hussy from . . . I want to say Australia?” Gabriel flicks his fingers dismissively which earns him a reproachful look and dark Hausa mutterings from his manicure technician. “She looks like the ugly end of a wallaby crossed with a didgeridoo, if you ask me,” he says with so much loyalty in his voice that Nate doesn’t have the heart to say that he’s trying to be happy that Thor has found someone else.

Nate’s not a monster.

The receptionist takes a picture of the two of them as they depart and Nate’s fingers hover over Thor’s number on his phone. Finally, he types, “Gabe and I are going to look hot. See you at the wedding?” and sends over the picture. He wants to send, “Looking forward to meeting your girlfriend!” but he overthinks himself out of it. He doesn’t know if it’s true yet. Nate doesn’t lie.

Thor sends back a starry-eyed emoji at the picture. Then he writes, “Can’t make it, sorry. Emily’s birthday.”

His fingers don’t shake when he asks, “Who’s Emily?”

Thor takes a while to answer. Nate can see him typing and retyping. He wants Thor to deny it, to lie, so that Nate can have something to which he can latch the ugly feeling bubbling in him.

But Thor replies, “GF. Just started dating.” It’s quickly followed by, “Want you to meet her someday.”

In Lemuria, before the island was swallowed up, sorcerer-mourners would liquefy the innards of an important official’s corpse, cut a hole in the belly, and suck out the resulting slime using long, clay pipes. Nate feels as though someone is doing that to him right now.

Gabriel clucks in disapproval over his shoulder.

“I meet everyone someday,” Nate replies, adding a skull emoji, but the joke feels hollow.

Thor does not text back.

• • • •

Three unnamed spirits of air and darkness Nate once helped move into a new apartment invite Nate to a tiny commitment ceremony held inside a dream of scorching blue skies above a red desert. He’ll be the guest of honor, they say. They gratefully offer to make him a blood sacrifice of a dozen virgins, but he quickly declines. There are a lot of rumors about Nate’s work, and he’s constantly fending off strange offerings. Thor burned him a boat when they first met.

It’s a small, quiet ceremony. The servers shuffle through the sands in white linens held together by faience brooches. Nate suspects the staff was plucked from the dreams of a long-dead pharaoh, back when mortals preserved dreams in canopic jars. Not that they knew what they were really doing.

“Girl, you should’ve said yes to the sacrifice!” Gabriel says as he grabs a fistful of canapés from a proffered tray inlaid with turquoise. He stuffs them all into his mouth at once and makes a face because whoever dreamed them forgot to add flavor.

“Aren’t you supposed to be an embodiment of light and goodness?” Nate asks.

“I came with you to this weak-ass wedding, didn’t I?” Gabriel shoots back. “I would MUCH rather be canoodling with a hottie over at Alpha Centauri on my day off. Not that you’re not a hottie,” he says, his tone quickly shifting to what he probably considers “soothing”, “but you know you’re too much of a bottom for my tastes.”

Nate starts to roll his eyes but freezes mid-roll as he recognizes a figure wandering aimlessly among the other guests. Eyes like a storm at sea and another cheeky tie—this time with pictorial instructions on how to knot a bowtie embroidered onto it. The boy he danced with at the destination wedding in Kefalonia.

“There’s a mortal here!” he hisses at Gabe.

“Must be a stray dreamer,” Gabe says. “Don’t worry. He’ll be gone in a jiffy.”

Nate wants to go up and talk to the stranger before that happens, but a heavy paw lands on his shoulder. “Thanatos,” purrs an enormous Sphinx. “I didn’t expect to see you here! I thought you disliked weddings?”

“Only when it’s for work,” Nate says quickly, trying to keep an eye on the stranger—but it’s too late. He’s already dissolved, either back to the waking world or into some other dream.

• • • •

The next wedding is again for work, though this one makes Nate gag.

It starts off pleasant. On silver trays are served tiny kebabs that melt into fiery puddles in your mouth, small cups of saffron-infused sweet yogurt, and sugared paneer pressed into floral shapes. There’s a choreographed dance number that reminds Nate of a gently pink rainfall he once witnessed on a warm summer night in Atlantis. The groom’s horse is named after a particular flavor of grass—Nate learns upon asking her politely—and enjoys being rented out for weddings because of all the music.

But later, Nate has to watch helplessly as one of the bride’s former lovers pulls out a gun and murders a dozen other guests before swallowing a bullet himself. The groom flees in wild panic with the rest of the guests. The bride sobs by the marriage-fire, staring at her fingers where henna and blood mingle into a ghoulish mockery of wedding-mehndi.

The deaths sound like teeth shattering against a mirror, but only Nate can hear it.

The newly deceased are confused and scared as Nate does his painful work. When the last of them have Departed, Nate wants to scrub his eyeballs raw. He wonders how love could do that to someone, how love can contort and mutate until it’s wretched and ugly and monstrous.

He wants to speak to someone about this, but he doesn’t know who.

In the past, he would have talked to Thor.

Nate never brings his phone to work. He snags a passing raven. “I don’t want to bother you,” he tells the raven, “but would you like to hang out sometime? Maybe that soup-spot in Niflheim that you like?” Into the raven’s feathers he breathes Thor’s true name—the one he confessed to Nate after the first time they rutted on Thor’s childhood bed—and sends the bird off.

• • • •

Nate has only one mortal friend. Gabriel once joked that Nate could’ve picked a spooky Goth-chick, or a morbid coroner, or a taxidermist, or anyone more fitting, really, but Nate feels that Arthur, a forty-seven-year-old plumber from South London, is perfectly amiable.

Arthur’s blushing bride has bedecked the park where they’re celebrating with red paper lanterns. Their soft glow warms the heart.

Nate is enjoying the surprisingly excellent jazz band when a finger taps his shoulder and he’s looking straight into a pair of blue-gray eyes tinged with quiet lightning.

“Hi!” the beautiful man says, grinning. He’s wearing a tie patterned in cuneiform that spell out various insults involving the offspring of farm-animals. He’s holding a glass of red wine. “Were you at my friend Peter’s wedding in Greece? I thought I recognized you . . . I’m Tony. Well, Anthony, but Tony to people I like.”

Nate literally doesn’t know what to do. He burbles something incoherent in reply.

“I didn’t catch that?” Tony says, a touch of amusement purpling his voice.

“Err . . . yes.” Nate replies, flustered. “I was there. I’m a friend of . . . Peter’s grandmother.”

“Oh!” Tony says, his eyes widening. “I’m sorry for your loss. That was pretty terrible, what happened.”

“She died happy,” Nate says, the ease of familiar topics thawing his awkwardness, “seeing her grandson married.”

Tony nods slowly and takes a sip of wine. After a suitably grave pause, he perks up again. “Can I ask you what your name is?”

Nate colors. “Sorry. I’m Nate. Err . . . Thanatos, but Nate for those who don’t fear dying.” Even as the words come out, Nate cringes. He was aiming for cool and funny, not hopelessly dopey.

Tony laughs and it washes over Nate like a gulp of hot chocolate. “You’re named after the god of death? That’s awesome!”

“The one and only,” Nate replies.

“Well, Nate, how do you know my dad?”

“Your dad?” Nate is taken aback. It takes him a moment to realize that Tony is asking him how he knows the groom, his mortal friend Arthur.

Nate mainly talks to Arthur about ridiculously mundane stuff like traffic and weather, but he assumed his friend would have told him about children. Mortals went gaga over that kind of thing. “I didn’t know Arthur had a son . . .”

“It’s complicated,” Tony says breezily. “One of those stories you only hear about in movies. He knocked up my mom at a Grateful Dead concert in the States and didn’t know it, blah blah blah . . . it’s painfully cliché!”

Nate remembers the concert, twenty-odd years ago. Arthur had brought him back a band T-shirt, sort of as a joke. He hadn’t mentioned a girl.

Nate wants to ask more but a raven collides with his face with a great squawk.

A few nearby guests scream softly. Others start laughing. Tony swears. “Are you okay?” he asks.

“I’m—fine,” Nate answers, deftly grabbing the bird by its legs. He can smell Thor on its feathers, thick like honey, potent like mead. “I—need to take this,” he mumbles, backing away.

Tony’s face puckers in confusion but Nate is gone before he can say another word.

• • • •

“Thanks for doing this, bro. Appreciate it!” Thor booms, because even Thor’s indoor voice is like that.

They’re on a moon where the skies sway pink and green and the woodland sighs musically.

Nate looks at him askance. “Since when did you start calling me ‘bro’?”

Thor shrugs. “I thought, since we’re not banging anymore . . .”

Nate resists an eye-roll. “You thought the best way to telegraph that we’re no longer together was to call me ‘bro’ and ask me to be your date to a wedding?”

Thor doesn’t like wearing shoes. He looks down and scuffs the sparkling dust under them with his massive feet. “You wanted to talk,” he mutters. “And the soup-place closed down.”

Nate winces. He’s being unkind. He had asked Thor, after all. “How’s Emily?” Nate asks casually.

Thor’s gaze jerks upward as though yanked by a marionette-string. “Nate, I wanted to tell you, but like . . . you okay? Ishtar says you—”

“Ishtar knows fuck all about me,” Nate snaps and regrets it instantly. Thanatos is not bleeding hearts and feels; Thanatos is inevitability, cold logic, and unvarnished truth. Nate takes a deep breath.

“My opinion has no import on your dating life,” he says.

“Bro, your opinion will always matter to me.”

“Can we please not keep up this ‘bro’ thing? I hate—”

A great roar interrupts them as That Which Devours consumes its new mate in a fit of amorous hunger. The ground beneath them undulates in response. The scream of ecstatic agony is punctuated by a smattering of polite applause. That Which Devours curls into a ball for a snooze, contentedly assimilating the new mate Nate knows will remain alive inside the beast. Nate won’t be needed. Not for years, at least.

“They’re so fragile, aren’t they, mortals?” he comments because in his heart, he really is a softie. “And yet we love them . . .”

“Are you making a dig at Emily? Coz, that’s not very nice—”

“I wasn’t!” Nate says hastily.

Thor eyes him warily.

“Honestly! It was just . . . pseudo-deep ramblings about mortals!” He wants to add, “I’m happy for you!” but the words catch in his throat.

Thor’s expression remains cautious but softens slightly. He gives one of those manly, dude-nods. “Ice-cream? Before the Queen Behind the Skies finishes it all?”

• • • •

A mansion in Rhode Island is a lovely spot for a wedding. The stately hallways are lined with mirrors, which multiply the exquisitely dressed crowd into a flock of birds of paradise. The memories of a thousand moments of joy perfume the air and Nate can’t help but take deep breaths.

A waiter dies quietly in a closet. The wine he snuck in didn’t interact well with the heart condition he’d developed a few months back.

His death sounds like dates squelching underfoot by the seaside, but only Nate even knows that the man has died. No one else will know for hours yet.

When Nate gets back to the party, Thor is fidgeting in place. He’s always hated wearing suits even though he looks amazing in them. He adamantly refused to wear the dress-shoes Nate recommended.

Emily is perched on Thor’s arm. It’s her cousin’s wedding. Nate has to admit that she’s actually very nice. She’s wearing a misshapen lump of rock that Thor got her as a pendant though she has no idea that it’s a petrified toe of an Elder Abomination.

Thor got Nate a present as well, for some obscure holiday lost to the mists, he said: a simple band of silver carved with runes spelling the words “To blood and friendship” in a language he claimed was invented by mistletoe. He thrust his chin out in a bro-y way as he presented it, and Nate had no idea how to respond.

Nate swallowed the ring. He never wants people to see how close to his heart he wants to keep it.

“Sorry, quick work call,” Nate says and Emily nods sympathetically.

You okay? Thor mouths because he knows Nate and will never stop knowing Nate and Nate smiles back and it’s genuine and it’s beautiful to know that Nate will always be able to smile back at Thor no matter what and Thor will always understand and—

“Nate? Thanatos? Bird-man?”

Nate turns and Tony’s wearing a grin that’s taking over his face. “I keep running into you at weddings,” he says, chuckling.

“You’re not wearing a tie,” Nate blurts out because his brain might be beginning to short-circuit right now.

Tony winces. “I actually spilled gazpacho all over it. The staff says they can get the stain out.”

“You look nice without it,” Nate says without thinking and ironically, he might actually want to die right this minute.

Tony’s grin, impossibly, widens even further. “I didn’t tell you earlier, but I dreamed about you! After we met in Kefalonia! It was a dream about another wedding, would you believe it?”

Nate blushes.

He only remembers that Thor and Emily are right beside him when Thor lays a warm hand on his shoulder. His eyes dart between Tony and Nate. The left corner of his mouth quirks upwards.

And though Thor’s words say, “Emily and I are going to grab drinks. See you at the table?”, Nate can see that Thor is actually saying, “I’m happy for you.”

©2024 by Sharang Biswas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sharang Biswas is a writer, artist, and game designer based in NYC. He has won IndieCade, Ennie, and IGDN awards for his games, and has written for games including Pathfinder, Vampire: The Masquerade, Avatar: Legends and Spire. His interactive works have been showcased at numerous galleries, museums, and festivals, including Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. His writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Baffling, Eurogamer, Dicebreaker, Unwinnable, and more, as well as in the 2021 edition of We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction.

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

EXCERPT: The Siege of Burning Grass (Solaris Books)

Premee Mohamed | 2731 words

A stunning meditation on war, nationalism, violence and courage by a rising star of the genre.

The Empires of Varkal and Med’ariz have always been at war.

Alefret, the founder of Varkal’s pacifist resistance, was bombed and maimed by his own government, locked up in a secret prison and tortured by a ‘visionary’ scientist. But now they’re offering him a chance of freedom.

Ordered to infiltrate one of Med’ariz’s flying cities, obeying the bloodthirsty zealot Qhudur, he must find fellow anti-war activists in the enemy’s population and provoke them into an uprising against their rulers.

He should refuse to serve the warmongers, but what if he could end this pointless war once and for all? Is that worth compromising his own morals and the principles of his fellow resistance members?

Coming March 12th from Solaris.

PART ONE

ST. NENOTENUS’ SCHOOL FOR
THE CORRECTION OF MINORS

They locked him up while his leg grew back. Alefret considered this fair—generous, even, what with the wartime cutbacks, the effortful efficiencies, the general spirit of make-do and do-without that permeates a country in wartime. It was presented as a generous favour to a temporarily-inconvenienced friend: like offering a hospital bed instead of a field tent.

No one spoke of his arrest or the charges against him.

On Fridays executions took place in the quadrangle, from which it was convenient to remove the dead through the cloisters and to those hidden bonfires that Alefret could not see but could smell. All week the odour hung in the air from the single day’s work. He was mindful of the principles he had learned and taught to others, which exhorted him not to watch such things.

Do not look. It is a small violence, but it is violence nonetheless.

I know, I know that.

Remember that what you see cannot be unseen.

Yes, I know.

He leaned on the windowsill to watch closely, as he did every Friday. How many Fridays had passed since his capture? He had lost count. The act of leaning felt good, as it took the weight off his ‘good’ leg (scarred, burnt, aching, but technically intact).

Below, frozen breath rose smoke-slow into a sky the colour of teeth, and this morning all was the same hue: the faded uniforms of the executioners, and the scavenged prison weeds, and the torpid rats that waited in the corners of the quad, and the ice-rimed ground, and the clouds and the walls and the knives—one brisk movement and finally another colour appeared, splashing into the stiff grass.

Alefret did not look away. He was ashamed that his response to this sudden spilling of colour was hunger, always hunger; he was ashamed that this was why he watched. It made something in his body believe there was food in the belly.

“Next! You, the ginge. Stand here. On the line. I said stand up!”

Four today, dispatched with the exhausted economy of motion that was the only beauty in this place. Everyone had to save energy no matter what form it took: gas, wood, food—and whatever spark kept the body in motion, that had to be saved too. Alefret had noted the peculiar grace lent by efficiency to the soldiers and prisoners here; the way they walked, sat in chairs, opened doors. Nothing could be wasted. Or it might be more accurate to say that nothing remained to waste.

Above the door, the lightspiders began to chitter, amplified by the curved glass of their enclosure; this was always in response to vibrations in the hallway, and so Alefret had enough time to push himself off the sill and sit heavily on the stone bunk as the interrogators came in.

In the quadrangle below, another name must have been discovered on the list—and this fifth one, perhaps from surprise, was not going quietly. His shrieked pleas grew in volume and urgency until they began to stutter, and Alefret knew the man was struggling so that the knife could not be placed into a useful spot. The screams were so loud that for a moment neither Alefret nor his captors moved, as if ordered to wait for silence to proceed.

Silence fell. They took Alefret by his arms, two panting men on either side, and dragged him unresisting down the hallway. They always interrogated him before the ministry of his wasps. Otherwise it would be a waste of good pain.

At each session he said, I am innocent of all crimes, and invariably they replied, You are not.

Always the same song, a call and response. Like the songs of his village, long-outlawed, blurred by recollection.

“No. You cannot speak. Only write. Here, now. Now.”

The walls of the room where they questioned him were still lined with schoolbooks and diagrams, kept (Alefret thought) only to retain what warmth was generated by the torturer’s brazier. The interrogators were cold too; sometimes their icy fingers were more startling than the instruments, though not often. The brazier itself was laughably small, like dollhouse furniture, and reminded Alefret of the jury-rigged stoves they had made in the city in its last days: you did not even have to chop wood, you fed the flames with broken-up pencils and the covers of books snipped into postage stamps.

While they interrogated him he studied diagrams of eyeballs and skeletons, colour-coded hearts (in rushes the red blood; out the blue), a plant cell as big as a bathtub, its jelly filled with things whose legends Alefret did not need to read. The nucleus, a chloroplast. A dropped shawl studded with beads: endoplasmic reticulum.

The worst was a poster of pregnancy, everything luridly red and pink and bisected down the middle, from brain to knees, right through the tender breasts, the adamantine womb, which is stronger than any other thing. And a baby, neatly folded, eyes closed.

As his blood spurted or his skin sizzled, Alefret often directed his thoughts to the baby: Don’t be born, little one. You will be born into war. Keep your eyes closed, face away.

He often thought: I am only sorry that you must hear this during your impressionable time. I hope you are not too affected by it.

He often thought: They will kill me. Don’t look.

• • • •

In practical terms, how did one incarcerate people out there on the wrong side of the front, whilst remaining unremarked-upon by the foe? Alefret never had cause to ponder the question (it seemed frankly ridiculous to throw your own people in prison when there were, to put it mildly, more pressing concerns). But the answer in which he was now ensconced struck him as surprisingly sensible. In strictly logistical terms, that is.

St. Nenotenus’ School for the Correction of Minors: and he had guessed from the name that if you could not be corrected here, you would be buried out back. To reform you they would break your spirit or teach you to dissemble. One or the other, not both.

In which case, perhaps it was for the best that it no longer held any students, only such persons as himself. He had been told many times, by many people, that he needed to be corrected. Reformed, rehabilitated, remade.

Even in its abandoned state, Alefret could barely imagine the destinies of the pupils this school would have eventually matriculated. His mind’s eye conjured sickening generations of stranglers, despoilers, and frighteners; or (hopefully) something more banal, grim-faced little gargoyles rotating through life with the expressionless clack-clack of a brass cog. St. Nenotenus’ was never meant to create fine works of art from the raw material it was given. It would have broken children down to powder and reconstituted them, if they were lucky, into concrete. Something both useful and dead.

His cell was cold and grey, intricately wallpapered with mould. In the capital, before the war, you would have paid a month’s salary for a pre-pasted roll of such elaborate design. Four child-sized shelves protruded an arm’s length from the dressed stone wall, too shallow to accommodate Alefret’s prone form. He could sit on them, but was forced to sleep on the floor.

Having been imprisoned before, he had initially found the size and solitude luxurious; true, he slept on the floor, but there was room for at least another four or five prisoners, provided they were not built to his scale. Upon learning that he was under arrest he had expected to be crammed into a cell already full nose-to-nose. He had taken it as a kindness. Later he remembered that things began to happen to prisoners when they were locked up alone. They would know that.

Things in the mind. Terrible things. So that soon enough he welcomed the executions in the quad, the visits to his doctor, even the interrogations, just to hear another human voice.

He wondered whether the students would have called it a residence. A dormitory perhaps? Worryingly, the soldiers had not needed to modify anything when they arrived to appropriate it. Each room already boasted a stout iron door, gridded with thumb-thick bars. Hinges, handles, and locks unreachable from the inside, a flanged cup welded over the keyhole to prevent meddling from within. These had been prison cells long before they were prison cells.

As autumn’s chill deepened, Alefret’s dispensary wasps grew sluggish, and dragged themselves about as if they too were at war. Unlike him, they were not imprisoned and flew freely in and out of their residence, a box bolted to the ceiling; they even flew outside sometimes, short flights, always returning in minutes, shivering.

In the cold they hooked their claws into his skin and pulled with what seemed like silent groans of effort: infantry crawling through the mud of the battlefield. Now when they tasted his skin even their tongues were cold, like the brief lick of a draft. Then the emplacement in their ranks, more like artillerymen, the glossy abdomens rising, aiming, correcting angle and pitch, and firing a volley—the redhot agony of the sting. Slow spreading of false warmth as the envenomed drugs took effect. His leg was still cold, the wasps still cold; but warmth all the same.

They all looked the same to him, though each had been marked with a dot of coloured paint on their thorax. He thought he had worked it out: one for antibiotics of some kind, one for the growth serum that was regenerating his leg, and one for a painkiller. Those stings made no inroads on the pain everywhere else (from the cold, from the isolation, from the questioning) and he was sure they were designed not to. But they did help the leg. The stump became stonily inert instead of a bonfire burning at his knee, or the riot of chewing sharks or razor-toothed lizards he sometimes hallucinated. When numb, it was manageable, and needed only to be transported to and from interrogations without weeping.

The leg, that is. Not him.

Though he also wept.

• • • •

On Mondays and Thursdays one of the interrogators took him to the infirmary to see the prison doctor, whose name Alefret had still not learned. Strange that no one had said it in his hearing.

The doctor was short and slender, and very pale; with his gracile build and his black eyebrows sharp against his white forehead, he reminded Alefret of a birch sapling. The window behind the doctor’s narrow shoulders framed a beautiful thing: one last enemy city floating high on the horizon as a hawk. How had it not been brought down after two years of bombardment? It was a miracle—its every spire, every brick a miracle.

“It is a powerful fortification.” The doctor brusquely yanked the bandages from what remained of Alefret’s knee. “But they have nowhere left to run. Go on, Alefret, stare if you like—imprint it upon your eyes.”

“It is a miracle.”

The doctor looked up, his eyes not blue or green but grey, as if camouflaging themselves against the stone walls. “I’m going to change your wasps. You are becoming loose in the head.”

About a year ago he would have said, in his crisp, upper-class, urban accent, I shall report you for treason. But that had already happened and Alefret was already here. This was where you went if you were reported for treason. Here, now. And as far as Alefret could tell, the only reason he had not yet shared the fate of other traitors was because he was a miracle too.

I am the man they blew up who did not die. I am the man he cannot kill. Not for lack of trying.

During his interrogations, presumably at the nameless doctor’s orders, they avoided his stump. Everything else was fair game; and for a while Alefret had wondered why, if he was this medical miracle, the sole test subject who had survived everything hurled at him, the doctor had not asked them to stop torturing Alefret lest it affect the research.

Later he had realized that he was not really a person to the doctor. Certainly nothing so grand as the man he cannot kill. Only an assortment of parts, some of which were of valid concern, some of which Alefret reckoned the pale man almost literally could not see, so that if he came into the room and there was a new bruise, or a fresh burn, anywhere except the site of the miracle-working, it did not register in his grey eyes.

The doctor said, “Very good.”

Was it? Alefret looked down at the stump: an ugly cut of meat, furiously crimson, ringed with the healed pinpricks of sting-delivered anaesthetic and the peppery speckles of glass and explosive and concrete and stone that had not been removed in those first frantic hours and were still steadily working their way inwards and outwards, like worms.

The crisply-sewn seam at the end still wept, still sobbed its thick, transparent tears from the central bulging, bloodshot eye of the bone the doctor had assured him would grow back first, surrounded by the tufty gelatine that would one day be muscle, nerve, tendon, skin, even hair, just as before. Only the leg, thought Alefret, was the miracle. The rest of him was so much meat.

A wasp hummed smoothly from its cage, sailed over his head, landed on his bare thigh. Iridescent blue and orange, like a hummingbird. The doctor nudged it away with the backs of his fingers, the only gentleness Alefret ever saw here; it was nearly enough to bring him to tears. The only thing capable of making him cry now was kindness.

“Not one doctor in a thousand could have salvaged that mess,” the pale man said, as he often did. “And never during a firefight… nor done this impossible thing, this regeneration. A word never before applied to mankind. An unreplicable combination of the wasp’s own venom and my years of research. All of medicine, perhaps all of science, will be forever changed, and you will again be whole. And still you will not thank us. Us, your countrymen, your protectors, your living shields against the horror of the enemy.”

Your jailers, your torturers. In the face of the doctor’s proudly upraised chin, Alefret lowered his head, lower, lower, till his neck ached and his beard covered his breastbone. If you were part of the war effort, then you were proud of the war. The doctor, then, was proud in a way Alefret could not be and refused to be. Alefret could not even take pride in his own lack of pride.

Copyright © 2024 by Premee Mohamed. Excerpted from The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed. Published by permission of Solaris Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Ignyte, British Fantasy, and Crawford awards. She is an Assistant Editor at the short fiction audio venue Escape Pod and the author of the Beneath the Rising series of novels as well as several novellas. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues.

Book Review: Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Arley Sorg | 1066 words

Lost Ark Dreaming
Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250890757
Tordotcom Publishing, May 21, 2024, 192 pgs

Lost Ark Dreaming is an entertaining, well-paced blend of science fiction and fantasy, with perhaps just a dash of horror (to taste!)¹. Okungbowa told Skiffy and Fanty, “think a vertical Snowpiercer in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.” This, to me, is accurate in some general ways, but the characters and the story itself are quite different, and I’m very glad for those differences. Ark has a similar sense of confinement and isolation from the outside world. It also has strict class stratification. For me, the characters here are more interesting, and while there are some thematic similarities between Ark and Snowpiercer, I find the nuances of Ark to be more thought-provoking².

Okungbowa gets you right from the beginning with a strong, evocative opening. The scene lets you know that not only is Okungbowa an excellent writer, but the lines and vivid ideas all create interesting possibilities, coming together to do exactly what openings should do: make you want to read more. Next, he expertly gets you involved in Yekini, drawing a character with both responsibilities and tiny little rebellions (such as a splash of color on her otherwise lackluster work outfit), someone we can relate to as well as be intrigued by; and more importantly, someone we want to get to know—someone we already know is about to have some kind of big problem. Then, when other characters and situations are brought in, Okungbowa unleashes his powers of storytelling, and even someone like me—who is deliberately analyzing and thinking as he reads—becomes absorbed by the narrative itself, which demands you forget tasks and schedules and meetings and just let yourself, quite simply, read and enjoy.

Yekini is an analyst, not completely new but with a lot of potential in her career ahead of her. She is an overachiever as well as . . . let’s say, imperfect. When she shows up a hair late (again) she is given an unusual field assignment: to go undersea. This could be a punishment, it could be a reward (in other words, a task given to someone they trust to do it right), or it could be both. The story does a marvelous job here of hinting at potential dangers while leaving room for surprises, tickling the reader with a note of dread.

Meanwhile, going back to theme, careful readers will appreciate the way the author reflects upon things like classism, labor, bureaucracy, and more, not to mention the various shades of identity, infusing the text with even more personality, and enriching the world and its characters.

Yekini meets up with a man named Ngozi, a somewhat dour bureaucrat, and as they descend into the lower levels of what’s called The Fingers, Okungbowa demonstrates his skill with developing tension, atmosphere, and more, while also giving us an imaginative and engaging speculative setting. The Fingers were once luxury towers just off the coast of Lagos. When an ecological disaster hit, in the form of the oceans rising, and Lagos became a submerged memory (or, perhaps, an apparition or even wraith, depending on who you talk to), The Fingers became an outpost of survivors, where the wealthy and powerful (who run The Fingers) live in the top floors and the lower you go the poorer the communities get. Everything is run by a bureaucracy with strict rules governing access to spaces and, more insidiously perhaps, controlling social norms in both overt and devious ways.

The lower levels are actually beneath the new sea level, and it is here that Yekini and Ngozi meet the third point-of-view character, Tuoyo, a sharp-minded management type (level nine foreman, technically; a “management type” who can grab a welder and seal a wall!) who is somewhat haunted by the death of her wife. The three of them soon discover that what they thought might be damage from the aging of the building may in fact have been some kind of incursion . . .

Interesting characters and interpersonal dynamics, not to mention friction, are a big part of what drives the read. The point-of-view characters give Okungbowa space to explore perspective in a way that is meaningful and too often missing from fiction: what is the memory of Lagos to different people? What are the things different people see when they enter a living space or community which has been characterized in certain ways? The speculative elements are all really cool, and the thoughtful worldbuilding centers people, social structures, and power dynamics. The story can be read quickly: it’s compact and fairly fast-paced, with short sections and great tension, all of which keep things moving along. But folks who read a bit more closely will be rewarded by details, many of which mirror or speak to life as we know it, such as observations on the manipulation of society by the wealthy and powerful. The authorial decisions Okungbowa makes, such as who the characters are (in other words: who tells the story) and how they interact with one another, along with the subtler elements of the narrative, for me, elevate this book from good to great and seriously well-worth reading.

¹. For folks who shy away from horror, this could also just be called atmosphere or mood. This isn’t terrifying or slasher-y, but there are definitely a few moments of pleasant dread!

². Which is not to disparage Snowpiercer at all! It was published in 1982 and was a standout in its day. Stories that speak to similar themes (checks calendar) forty years later (!!!) really should be doing it in their own way, as well as bringing different angles, perspectives, and nuances to the conversation—which is exactly what Ark is doing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is an associate literary agent at kt literary. He is a two-time World Fantasy Award Finalist and a two-time Locus Award Finalist for his work as co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. Arley is also a SFWA Solstice Award Recipient, a Space Cowboy Award Recipient, and a finalist for two Ignyte Awards, for his work as a critic as well as his creative nonfiction. Arley is senior editor at Locus, associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare, a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and an interviewer for Clarkesworld. He takes on multiple roles, including slush reader, movie reviewer, and book reviewer, and ran a series of interviews on his site: arleysorg.com. He has been a guest instructor or speaker at a range of events—and for a variety of audiences—from Worldcons to WisCons, from elementary students to PhD candidates. He was a guest critiquer for the 2023 Odyssey Writing Workshop and the week five instructor for the 2023 Clarion West Workshop. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in the SF Bay Area and writes in local coffee shops when he can. Arley is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Book Review: The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim

Aigner Loren Wilson | 506 words

The Eyes Are the Best Part
Monika Kim
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781645661238
Erewhon Books, June 2024, 288 pgs

In Monika Kim’s debut horror novel, readers are served up body horror on broken plates and nestled within dreams. The Eyes Are the Best Part follows Ji-won after her Appa suddenly leaves her Umma, her, and her little sister to start a life with a new woman. In the wake of abandonment, Umma slips into depression and emotionally abusive, narcissistic behaviors, pushing Ji-won into the arms of the very white, very awful George.

Ji-won has taken on the responsibility of keeping her mother together while also trying to reassure her sister and stay off academic probation at school. When George arrives, Ji-won sees him as a blue-eyed demon. To everyone else, he’s a pervert, racist, and the worst. Under all the pressure of responsibility, Ji-won begins to obsess over George’s blue eyes, dreaming of de-eyeing and eating the gelatinous pearls on the living room couch.

The Eyes Are the Best Part is an unending ride of familial trauma and off-kilter realities that keep the reader at a state of constant what-the-hell-is-going-on. And that is not a bad thing. It adds to the atmosphere of the novel. It also makes it hard to fully find your footing in what is real and what is not real, causing the spiraling dark end of the novel to create a sense of vertigo with each life and eye Ji-won takes.

The theme and symbolism of eye consumption builds and layers itself so much that Ji-won’s yearning becomes uncomfortable at times. What is it she really wants out of George’s blue eyes? It’s more than cannibalism, more than destruction. Possibly a need for someone to see her and how bad things have gotten, someone to step in and be the parent that Ji-won and her sister, Ji-hyun, so desperately need? In the end, the yearning Ji-won displays is darker. It’s a need to let go of all sense of responsibility and politeness in a way that can’t and shouldn’t be fixed.

While the body horror and family trauma are strong in Kim’s debut, there is a bit of comfort that the author creates around the family meals shared between Ji-won and her family. They aren’t always pleasant, but they all capture the intimacy and turmoil of sitting down to eat as a tumultuous family. There’s also comfort in the small moments Ji-won finds in connecting with her sister and certain friends at school.

But The Eyes Are the Best Part isn’t a comfort read. It is unsettling, raw, and unapologetic. A sharp read for fans of dark tales about rough family dynamics and so much anger.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aigner Loren Wilson is a queer Black writer of speculative fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and games. She serves as a senior fiction editor at Strange Horizons and has guest-edited issues of Fireside Fiction and Apparition Literary Magazine. Her work has appeared in FIYAH, Anathema, Arsenika, and other publications. When she’s not writing or editing for others, she’s learning, hiking, or loving on her fur babies—both human and animal. To check out her books, games, bread bakes, and other writings visit her website (aignerlwilson.com).

Book Review: Jumpnauts by Hao Jingfang

Chris Kluwe | 692 words

Jumpnauts
Hao Jingfang (translated by Ken Liu)
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781534422117
Saga Press, March 2024, 368 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome to another book review! This month we’re going to experience a book that’s equal parts future philosophy, modern meditation, and cultural appreciation: Hao Jingfang’s Jumpnauts, the first book in a trilogy.

Jumpnauts begins from the perspective of Jiang Liu, a wastrel playboy running from his duties as a son of the premier shipping and information company of the near future age, but rapidly expands from his initial attempts to solve a mystery regarding low frequency radio waves to include archaeologist Yun Fan and military AI specialist Qi Fei (each possessing secrets of their own). The trio’s adventures take them from the surface of Earth to the orbital reaches of the moon and then far beyond, as they struggle to reconcile their own internal traumas with what they think the world expects from them.

One of the first things that really stood out to me reading Jumpnauts is how elegantly it escalates the plotline. When I first started this book I expected it to be a relatively standard SF novel with an easily anticipated story, but at every turn it confounded my expectations (in an entirely good way). Wildly speculative Earthbound adventures give way to even more imaginative extra-terrestrial escapades and then everything keeps moving on from there, and by the time I reached the end of the book it was difficult to believe that this was the first in a trilogy as opposed to an entirely contained magnum opus of its own. Hao Jingfang does a spectacular job of drawing the reader into the world while at the same time leaving them uncertain of where things are going to go next.

The other thing I really enjoyed is that Jumpnauts is an unapologetically Chinese story that contains universally human experiences. Ken Liu does an excellent job translating the core of Jumpnauts for a Western audience, but the points of emphasis, personal interactions, and dialogue choices make it clear that this is a collection of ideas contemplated by Hao Jingfang, for whom the Founding Fathers of America are, at best, a tertiary thought compared to the Warlords of the Three Kingdoms, the precepts of Confucianism, and the underlying structure of Dao (along with an in-depth exploration of Asian-mythological history). However, at the same time, Hao Jingfang (and by association Ken Liu) involves the reader in a universal experience of themes—the isolated child against family; new lovers against old; the past struggling to hold back the future; technology versus spiritualism—all of which come together in multiple set-pieces that could easily take place on Hollywood screens if the budget (and racism in our current age) allowed. Percy Jackson versus the Olympians is a mote in the storm compared to Fanfan’s quest to redeem her father’s name and honor, especially when multiple universes get involved.

Overall, while I felt that the dialogue between characters was weak at times (which made me wish I could read this tale in its original language to capture all the nuances, because I feel that despite Ken Liu’s best efforts, significant parts got lost in translation), the ideas and concepts that Hao Jingfang put forth in this story are so good that I’m asking you, as the reader, to overlook any awkwardness in the language you read this in. Please, just enjoy this story for what it wants to convey, because at its heart, it is an optimistic hope for the future. All of us are here, together, on this planet, trying to do what’s best for us all. We all want to be better. We need to stop letting others tear us apart.

Read if: You understood The Forever War; you laugh in the face of western mythology; you get that borders are arbitrary lines drawn on a piece of paper.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Author Spotlight: Shingai Njeri Kagunda

Laurel Amberdine | 1237 words

How did “Let the Star Explode” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This story originated during a Clarion Workshop deadline looming over me in 2020. I was thinking about grief and sense-making and our contemporary desire to make sense of everything. I say contemporary because there are many historical indigenous perspectives that use stories and faith to explain the metaphysical in a way that seems to suggest the lack of a need to categorize and itemize everything about being alive. I think there is something really cool and beautiful about that. I drew on lots of Kenyan mythology for this story, specifically Gikuyu mythology about Mumbi who was the first woman in the world. Her name literally means Creator and is a common name given to Kikuyu daughters.

I also was thinking about optimist nihilism, and Swahili conceptualizations of time. There is a saying we have “Haraka haraka haina Baraka”—“Hurry hurry has no blessing.” Slowness is a value in Swahili cultures that I wanted to bring to the forefront, a value that offers more space for concepts like play to be prioritized. And of course, there is a critique of the exploitation of capitalism which shows up often in my different pieces of work. What if our purpose is relational play and our work is relational experimentation? What if capitalism is deeply anti-play? Anti-slowness? Anti-relationship? These are the questions I think this story is wrestling with along with grief. Grief as a window into life.

Where are you in this story?

Everywhere. I am in the learning to play, in the realizing how free it is to recognize how small I am in the grand scheme of everything; I am in the desiring a world where play is as valuable as work.

My baba wanted to study astronomy in America but ended up studying Math as his undergrad in Nairobi. He is still (thank Spirit) very much alive, but there is an ode to him in the protagonist’s father, as there is also an ode to Uncle Kim who passed away unexpectedly with no rhyme or reason just before this story was written.

So I also show up in the grief of his daughter, Kim-small after her father died, when I held her devastation and could only agree that it did not make sense. None of it did. I am also in the knowing God as a lover of play and laughter and children who have conversations with the soil. I show up in the ways I have been learning that meaning is in the fact that we exist and maybe that is enough?

What led you into writing genre fiction?

It came incredibly naturally to me. Speculative stories are the realm of the imagination where anything and everything is possible. I think now of the thing Ursula K. Le Guin said about speculative fiction: “the realism of a larger reality.” A lot of my friends see me as a glass-half-full type of person and I think that comes from both my ability to imagine and my ability to believe in what is possible even if it is not here yet. Genre fiction, and especially speculative fiction is ultimately about offering alternative ways of being and expanding limited worldviews. I think Black folk and Africans historically have always looked for a larger reality, living in the contours of the metaphysical. Sasa in this moment there is something to be said about what the larger reality offers us in an inherited imperial world.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

Read and pay attention. Pay attention to the world around you. Observe what people are feeling, thinking, struggling with. I will quote Nina Simone here, “The role of the artist is to reflect the times.” Your writing is so much bigger than yourself. Let it be, and trust that if you are listening, truly listening that you will capture what is needed to be said. Also, be patient with yourself. Our kind of work takes time.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I have been reading some nonfiction lately. Shout out to Adrienne Maree Brown’s emergent strategy series and especially Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Black Undrowned: Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. I have also been reading some Palestinian work as well like the collection of essays, Light in Gaza, and I want to name specifically Rafaat Alareer, whose essay I read before he was killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023. There is a passage from his chapter that I saved in my notes, a reminder of why I tell stories and why I want to continue telling stories. “Telling stories was my way of resisting. It was all I could do . . . Writing is a testimony, a memory that outlives any human experience, and an obligation to communicate with ourselves and the world. We lived for a reason, to tell the tales of loss, of survival, and of hope.” This essay was probably the most inspiring thing I read last year when I felt incredibly disillusioned with the ability of words to make a difference. I was reminded that they do, so I continue to write.

I also have been reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower duology and my God, they hit different right now. I also just picked up the Toni Cade Bambara book, The Salt Eaters which starts with, “Are you sure sweetheart that you want to be well?” and has not stopped kicking me in the gut since that first line.

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

I see speculative fiction being a tool of liberation. I think what needs to gain popularity is stories righting history’s dominant narratives of oppression. Using the likes of LeGuin and Butler as guides. Listening to the speculative storytellers on the margins, and insisting on the destruction of oppressive modes that aren’t working in the world we live in, while offering that we can build new worlds, that our work is a portal to more just societies. These are the trends I think are necessary.

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

I am working on so many different things: revisions on my first novel. I also have a couple short stories coming out in the next few months. I have a chapter on Black Futurisms vs. Systems of Domination being published by Bloomsbury Academic in Afro-Centered Futurisms in our Speculative Fiction, coming out later this year. I have a novella out in the world called & This Is How to Stay Alive if you would like to read some longer work of mine. I am also working on more Voodoonauts collaborations after our first anthology Voodoonauts Presents (Re)Living Mythology came out in November 2022. I have been teaching classes at the intersections between creative writing and political education, and I am the co-editor of Podcastle, so always looking for phenomenal stories to share. I can also be found on the online socials as @Shingai_be_like.

Thank you for engaging with my work.

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: Alex Irvine

Laurel Amberdine | 543 words

What is your writing process like? Did “Kopki and the Fish” fit the pattern?

I wish I had a writing process. Mostly what happens is I get a kernel of an idea and I flail around for a while trying to figure out what the idea actually looks like. Then, eventually, I shape it up into the form of a story.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I rented an office during COVID, and it’s been great. The one thing I need when I’m working is quiet. I can’t really listen to music when I’m writing. Hearing words messes up what I’m trying to think, and even wordless music somehow engages the part of my brain I need to write. There are exceptions—I wrote a whole licensed novel to Rammstein once, and another to Soul Coughing—but mostly I like quiet when I write.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

The one problem with this story was that I kept coming up with complications for Kopki, and in the end I couldn’t use them all. Some of them were kind of funny, and I hated to lose them, but they weren’t right for the story.

Where are you in this story?

I’m in this story because I miss my kids when I travel.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

The short answer is “reading genre fiction.” I read everything when I was a kid, but the books I read that made me want to write tended to be genre stuff. So that’s what I started doing, and although I like to explore the margins around different genres, I’ve never wanted to let go of genre altogether. It’s too much fun, and also a great way to come at ideas in unexpected ways.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

Read! It’s at least as important as writing when you’re starting out. Read books that make you uncomfortable, books that show you something you never imagined existed. Those are the books that will show you how you can find a literary space that only you can occupy.

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

I play the guitar badly, some other instruments even more badly, and I like to get out into the woods and hike. There’s nothing like just putting miles under your feet to clear your head and get you ready to write.

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

I got off all social media a while back because it wasn’t good for my head and it was useless career-wise. I still have a website at alex-irvine.com. I’m currently working on a AAA game for a studio in Stockholm, a new novel, and various short story and comic ideas.

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: Marissa Lingen

Laurel Amberdine | 626 words

How did “Islands of Stability” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I’ve been blessed with lots of elders in my life, and as a result I tend to overestimate how long people in general tend to live. But there are weird actuarial patterns—if you can make it to certain ages, you’re likely to make it farther—and that fascinated me, especially as I look at my loved ones with hope and trepidation.

What is your writing process like? Did “Islands of Stability” fit the pattern?

Sometimes a story comes out all at once. More often I’ll jot down a paragraph or two, maybe a title, and let it percolate for months before writing the rest. This was one of those. It was also, unfortunately, a little bit of wishful thinking: my dear aunt Judy had just died, and I was doing some whistling in the dark about keeping the rest of my elders for as long as possible. I wasn’t able to attend her memorial, and I finished this story in a fit of determination instead.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

As of last October we’ve lived in our current place for twenty years, which is enough time to get my workspace the way I like it, with the cobalt blue walls and the footrest just so and the wall of history books to my left. Usually, I jam a postcard or two from a friend in the giant map I have hanging above my desk. I try not to get too precious about this, though, and I can and do write stories in random locations on retreats or errands, including the waiting room at the auto body shop.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I just finished reading the eARC of John Wiswell’s upcoming debut novel, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, which is so great—John is a dear friend but also always an inspiration. I read an earlier draft as well and have spent the entire time since impatient to be able to talk to the rest of you about it. I loved Ariel Kaplan’s The Pomegranate Gate—that got given to a lot of people last Christmas—and Paz Pardo’s The Shamshine Blind had texture and depth I wish more alternate history had. That’s from the last few weeks alone.

I also continue to assert that we’re in a golden age of short stories in this field. My colleagues are such an inspiration, and I do quarterly blog posts about the work I’ve loved. It’s so great that there are always new names on those lists. Amazing times, even with all the ways in which they’re tough—people are just dragging such wonderful short gems out of the muck we’re in right now.

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

To throw in a Ted Lasso reference before they recede too far into our past, I try to be the Roy Kent of the SFF world. I’ll have a poem in Analog and a story in Beneath Ceaseless Skies in the days to come. My agent has a couple of very different longer works on her desk right now. We’ll be talking through that pretty soon, and we’ll see what comes of it. Meanwhile, I’m eyeing another stack of half-finished projects wondering which one will be the one to be actually ready to write next.

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: Sharang Biswas

Laurel Amberdine | 360 words

How did “Season of Weddings” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I was literally invited to six weddings in 2022, and the one I attended in Rhode Island was so lovely, I had to channel it into writing on the train back (I have stories based on some of the other weddings too.) Some of the emotional thrusts are based on my own experience, but I’ll let you guess which.

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

I was chatting with fellow writer Eugenia Triantafyllou about this once. She says that I’m good at infusing my stories with autobiographical moments. I think I definitely did that here. Also, I happen to write a lot on public transport, so this fits the pattern.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I’ve actually been reading Dracula in preparation for a new class I’m teaching this Spring. I’d never read it before and I’m really enjoying it. Carmilla is next on the list! I’m glad I’m finally getting to old classics of the spec fic genre.

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

I’ve actively been trying to broaden my leisure activities recently! I’ve been swimming and running with a gay triathlon club in NYC, and have been taking rope-bondage classes. It’s been a great way to meet new kinds of people and engage different parts of my brain. I really think that having that kind of balance in life helps me create better art.

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

I’m racing to finish my novella, The Iron Below Remembers, for Neon Hemlock Press, and I’m working on a magic-ish-school tabletop roleplaying game for the National Academy of Sciences! Find me on Bluesky or Instagram to keep up to date on my projects. (Just search for my full name.)

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 | 228 words

Coming up in April, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Endria Isa Richardson (“A Pedra”) and Susan Palwick (“Mother’s Day, After Everything”). We also have two terrific flash pieces: “Under a Star, Bright as Morning” from David Anaxagoras and “Limping Toward Sunrise” by Rich Larson.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Modupeoluwa Shelle (“How To Know Your Father Is A God”) and Vandana Singh (“Travelers’ Tales from the Ends of the World”). We also have a flash story (“Salemo”) from David Marino, and another (“a testament to indirection, an enigma, the sun above”) from Mitchell Shanklin.

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: Nisi Shawl, Deborah L. Davitt, Carrie Vaughn, Oyedotun Damilola Muees, and Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko.

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

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

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

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Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

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

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

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

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

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 Lightspeed and/or Nightmare, 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 Lightspeed and Nightmare 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

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

Christie Yant

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)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022 (with Rebecca Roanhorse)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 (with R.F. Kuang)

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

The Far Reaches

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

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Out There Screaming (with Jordan Peele)

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

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Sand by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

Questland by Carrie Vaughn

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Blind King’s Wrath by Ashok K. Banker

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Poster Girl by Veronica Roth

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover

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