Editorial, February 2012
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue twenty-one of Lightspeed!

Before we get to our issue’s contents this month, a few Lightspeed announcements/reminders. First, I just wanted to remind you that in addition to our subscriptions offered via Weightless Books, you can now subscribe to Lightspeed via Amazon.com; subscribers will have every issue of Lightspeed delivered automatically to their Kindle library (whether it’s an actual Kindle or one of the Kindle apps). 

Second, we are also now pleased to announce another subscription option . . . for those with deep pockets and a generous spirit: lifetime subscriptions! By purchasing a lifetime subscription to Lightspeed, you’ll get a subscription that never ends . . . or, rather, a subscription that will last at least as long as the subscriber—or Lightspeed—does! You’ll receive, via email, every issue of Lightspeed as soon as it’s available (which will often be several days ahead of regular subscribers), and you’ll get it in both epub and mobi format (so your subscription will be equally compatible with Kindle and iPad and Nook, and most other ereaders). Lifetime subscriptions are a great way to support the magazine, and ensure you never miss an issue. They cost $500, and you can purchase them directly from Lightspeed.

Visit www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe to learn more about all of our subscription options.

And lastly, I wanted to point out that there are several ways you can sign up to be notified of new Lightspeed content:

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In other news, award season is officially in full swing. Hugo and Nebula nominations are now both open.

Active and Associate members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America may submit nominations for the Nebula Awards; nominations close February 15. For more information, visit SFWA’s How to Vote page.

Anyone who has an attending or supporting membership of this year’s Worldcon (Chicon 7) as of January 31, and all members of last year’s Worldcon (Renovation), may nominate works for the Hugo Awards; nominations close March 31. If you didn’t attend or support Renovation, and you don’t plan to attend Chicon 7, you can still nominate by purchasing a supporting membership. For more information, visit Chicon 7’s nomination page.

As I mentioned, the Nebulas are for science fiction/fantasy professionals only; the Hugos, however, are open to any fan, and I would encourage any of you reading this to seriously consider voting and participating in the process. If you’re attending Worldcon (or attended last year’s), you have voting privileges—use them! Even if you haven’t read a hundred novels or surveyed the entire field of short fiction (and even if you want to nominate things other than Lightspeed!); if everyone nominates material they feel is worthy, then the best stuff will still rise to the top.

Also, ebook readers have even less of an excuse for not voting these days, thanks to the fabulous Hugo Voter Packet that’s distributed to members every year. All attending and supporting members of Worldcon now receive a packet containing most of the works nominated for the current year’s awards. Meaning, although you may have to pay $50 for a supporting membership, you’ll get far more than $50 worth of ebooks in exchange for that, plus you get the right to have some say in what wins the field’s most prestigious award. So, come on, gang—let’s get out there and vote!

If you’d like to vote for Lightspeed (and/or Fantasy) material from 2011, I’ve got a post on my personal blog with a list of eligible works, sorting them into their proper categories, and including a list of those eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: http://tinyurl.com/2011Hugos-Nebulas.

Now that we’ve got all that out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

We have original fantasy by new writer Brooke Bolander (“Her Words Like Hunting Vixens Spring”) and Fantasy-favorite Genevieve Valentine (“The Gravedigger of Konstan Spring”), and fantasy reprints by Chris Willrich (“The Mermaid and the Mortal Thing”) and the legendary Robert Silverberg (“Not Our Brother”). Plus, we have original science fiction by Keith Brooke (“War 3.01”) and bestselling author Carrie Vaughn (“Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil”), plus SF reprints by award-winning authors Gregory Benford (“Dark Sanctuary”) and Kristine Kathryn Rusch (“Craters”). All that plus our artist showcase, our usual assortment of author spotlights, and feature interviews with bestselling authors Chuck Palahniuk and Daniel H. Wilson.

And, for our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella this month is the dark, brutal tour de force “Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?” by Lucius Shepard.

This issue is sponsored by Orbit Books. This month, look for The Troupe, a tale of gothic intrigue set during the Vaudeville era by Robert Jackson Bennett, available in bookstores everywhere. You can find more from Orbit—including digital short fiction and monthly ebook deals—at www.orbitbooks.net.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed. Thanks for reading!

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as editor of Lightspeed Magazine, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a two-time finalist for the Hugo Award and three-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include: Armored (April, Baen), Epic (Fall 2012, Tachyon), and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor). John is also the co-host of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?
Lucius Shepherd

Shit happens, like they say. You know how it goes. The cops are looking at you for every nickel-and-dime robbery they can’t solve, and the landlady hates your guts for no reason except she’s a good Christian hater, and everything in the world is part of a clock you got to punch or else you’ll be docked or fined or sentenced to listen to some ex-doper who thinks he has attained self-mastery explain your behavior as if the reasons you’re a loser are a mystery that requires illumination. Otherwise it’s been a kicked dog of a week. The boss man’s had you stocking the refrigerator sections of the food mart, leaving you alone in the freezer while he sits and swaps Marine Corps stories with the guy supposed to be your helper, so you come off work half froze, looking for something to douse the meanness you’re feeling, which could be a chore since you’re a piss and a holler from being broke and New Smyrna Beach ain’t exactly Vegas. Well, turns out to be your lucky night. Along about eight o’clock you wind up with a crew of rejects in a beach shack belongs to this fat old biker, snorting greasy homemade speed, swilling grape juice and vodka, with a windblown rain raising jazz beats from the tarpaper roof like brushes on cymbals. There’s a woman with big brown eyes and punky peroxided hair who’s a notch on the plain side of pretty, but she’s got one of those black girl butts sometimes get stuck onto a white girl, and it’s clear she’s come down with the same feeling as you, so when the rain lets up and she says how she’s got an itch to sneak onto the government property down the beach and check out what’s there, when everybody tells her it ain’t nothing but sand fleas and Spanish bayonet, you say, Hell I’ll go with you. Ten minutes later you’re helping her jump down from a hurricane fence, risking a felony bust for a better view of those white panties gleaming against the strip of tanned skin that’s showing between her jeans and her tank top. She falls into you, gives you a kiss and a half, and before you can wrap her up, she scoots off into the dark and you go stumbling after.

It don’t take more than that to get shit started.

—Hey, I shouted. Come on back here!

She glanced at me over her shoulder, her grin shining under a moon fresh out of hiding, then she skipped off behind some scrub palmetto. I was trying to recall her name as I ran, then a frond whacked me in the face and I slipped to a knee in the soft sand. I spotted her moving along a rise, framed by low stars. Hell you going, girl? I said, coming up beside her.

She slapped at a skeeter on her neck and said, Lookit there.

The land was all dips and rises, an old dune top gone nappy with shrubs and beach grass, but down below was a scooped-out circular area, wide and deep enough to bury a mini-mall in. Dead center of it stood a ranch house with cream-colored block walls and a composite roof and glass doors. It was a giant banana, I couldn’t have been more startled.

—I heard about there was a house here, she said. But I swear I didn’t believe it!

We scrambled down the slope and tromped around the house, peering in windows. Some rooms were empty, others were partly furnished, and though I wouldn’t have figured on it, the sliding door at the back was unlocked. I shoved it open and she put her hands over her head and got to snapping her fingers and hip-shaked across the threshold. A big leather sofa stood by its lonesome in the middle of the room. She struck a pose beside it, skinned off her jeans and showed me what I wanted. Wasn’t long before we were sweating all over each other, grunting and huffing like hogs in a hurry, our teeth clicking together when we kissed. The cushions got so slippery, we slid off onto the floor afterward and lay twisted together. The moon came pale through the flyspecked glass, but it wasn’t sufficient to light the corners of the room.

—God, I could use something to drink, she said. I know there can’t be nothing in the kitchen.

My carpenter’s pants were puddled at the end of the couch. I undid the flap pockets and hauled out two wine coolers. What you want? I asked. Tropical Strawberry or Mango Surprise?

—I can’t believe you carrying ‘round wine coolers in your pocket.

—I hooked ‘em off a truck when I was coming outa work.

We unscrewed the caps, clinked our bottles and drank.

—My name’s Leeli, she said, sticking out her hand. I’m sorry but I forget yours.

—Maceo.

—That a family name? It’s so unusual!

—It’s for some guitar player my mama liked.

—Well, it’s real unusual.

She seemed to be expecting me to take a turn, so I asked what a house was doing out there setting in a hole.

—Beats me. Government bought up all the land ‘round here years ago. To keep people away from the Cape  . . .  ‘cause of the rockets, y’know? But I never knew nothing was here. My ex, his friend runs a helicopter tourist ride? I guess he saw it once.

—Maybe they opened it up for development, I said. And this here’s the model home.

—Y’know, I bet you’re right! She gave me a proud mama look, like my-ain’t-you-smart!

I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I went to loving her up again. She started running hot and came astride me, but before she could settle herself, she let out a shriek and crawled over top the couch. I rolled my eyes back to see what had spooked her, said “Shit  . . .  Jesus!” and next thing I was hunkered behind the couch with Leeli, my heart banging in my chest.

Two men and a woman were hanging by the glass doors, nailing us with a six-eyed stare as clear in its negativity as a No Trespassing sign. The men were young, both a shade under six feet, dressed in slacks and T-shirts. A blond and a baldy. They had the look of fitness sissies, like they might have pumped some iron and run a few laps, but never put the results to any spirited use. The woman wore cut-offs and an oversized denim shirt and carried a bulky tote bag. She was fortyish and big-boned, with wavy dark hair, and her body had a sexy looseness that would still draw its share of eye traffic. Her face was full of bad days and wrong turns, the lines cutting her forehead and dragging down her mouth making it seem older than the rest of her. Way the men tucked themselves in at her shoulders, you could tell she was queen of the hive.

Leeli clutched at my arm, breathing fast. Nobody said nothing. Finally I came out from behind the couch and tossed Leeli her panties. I stepped into my pants and feeling more confident with my junk covered, I said, Have yourself a show, did ya?

—Have yourself a show? the blond man said, mocking me, and the baldy sniggered like a kid who’d seen his first dirty picture.

I pulled on my shirt. Y’know this here’s government property? Y’all be in deep shit, I turn your asses in.

—You saying you the government? The woman’s voice was a contralto drawl made me think of a dollop of honey hanging off the lip of a jar. You the first government man I seen got jailhouse ink on his arms. She turned to Leeli, who was tugging the tank top down over her breasts. How’s about you, sweetcheeks? You in the government, too?

Leeli snatched up her jeans. You got no more right being here than we do!

The woman sniffed explosively, like a cat sneezing, and the bald man said, You can’t get much more government than we are. Government’s like mommy and daddy to us.

Leeli piped up, Well, whyn’t you show us your ID?

The flow of feeling in the room was running high, like everyone was waiting for a direction to fly off in.

—Screw this, said the woman. We was just going for a drink. Y’all wanna come?

I was about to say we’d do our own drinking, but Leeli said, It’s Margarita Night over the Dixieland!, and soon everybody was saying stuff like, Looked like you was gonna fall out and God you scared the hell outa me and telling their names and their stories. Though he didn’t seem up to the job, the blond man, Carl, was the woman’s husband. Her name was Ava and she owned a club in Boynton Beach where the bald man, Squire, worked as a bartender. I knew a kid name of Squire back in high school who was accused of having sex with a neighbor’s collie. Much as I would have enjoyed bringing this up, I kept it to myself.

We piled out through the glass doors, both Carl and Squire heading toward the water. Fuck you think you going? I asked.

—Ava got her four-by-four parked down on the beach, Squire said.

I was staring at Ava and Leeli, who were still back at the glass doors. Leeli had her head down and Ava was talking. Something didn’t sit right about the way they were together.

—Government don’t care what goes on at the house no more, Squire said, apparently thinking I was off onto another track. We been partying here for years.

You know that kid’s toy ball you can bounce and instead of coming straight back to your hand, it goes dribbling off along the floor or kicks off to the side? My expectations of the weekend had taken just that sort of wrong-angled bounce. After Leeli and I broke in the leather couch, I assumed we’d be heading over to my place, maybe coming up for air sometime Sunday. A shitkicker bar had for sure not been part of the plan.

The Dixieland was down on A1A, a concrete block eyesore with a neon sign on the roof that spelled the name in red and blue letters, except for the N was missing, which might have accounted for the gay boys who occasionally dropped in and left real quick. All the waitresses were decked out in Rebel caps and there were Confederate flags laminated on the table tops. The Friday night crowd was men in cowboy hats who had never set a horse and women with flakes of mascara clinging to their lashes and skirts so short you could see the tattooed butterflies, roses, hummingbirds and such advertising their little treasures whenever they hopped up onto a barstool. Some country & western goatboy was howling on the jukebox about the world owed him a living, while a few couples dragged around the dance floor, Ava and Leeli among them. Their relationship appeared to be deepening.

Carl fell in love with a digital beer display behind the bar that showed a bikini girl waterskiing. I was coming to understand the boy must have some empty rooms in his attic. He stood gawking at the thing like he was stoned on Jesus love. That left Squire and me alone at a table, sucking on our margaritas. Shaving his head probably hadn’t done for Squire what he hoped. It made his face resemble a cream pie somebody drew a man-in-the moon face on, but he tried to sell the look as being the front door into the world of a badass individual with secrets you would want to know. It was kinda pathetic. He threw a couple of insults my way and when that didn’t get a rise, he went on about how tight he was with Carl and Ava, how they’d been partying for two months solid, saying me and Leeli needed to get on board the party train, they’d sure show us a time.

—Two month vacation must get in the way of your bartending, I said and he said, Huh?, then got flustered and came back with, Oh, yeah  . . .  hell, I just work when we’re there, y’know.

The juke box played the Dixie Chicks. Leeli squealed, clapped her hands, and did this slow, snaky hula, dancing like she was on stage at a titty bar and using Ava for the pole.

—We ain’t hardly ever there, though. Squire said this like it was super important for me to understand. He started to spout more worthless bullshit, but I told him to hang onto the thought. I walked over to Ava and tapped her on the shoulder and said, ‘Scuse me, buddy. Believe it’s my turn. She flashed a condescending smile and backed off. Leeli kept her eyes closed like she didn’t care what was going on, she was so lost in the music, but when I put my leg where Ava’s hip had been she said, That was rude!

—Yeah she was, I said.

She punched me in the chest, but didn’t leave off dry-humping my leg. Just ‘cause we did the deed, don’t you go waving no papers at me.

—That wasn’t my intention.

She didn’t hear and I said it again louder.

This ticked her off. Just what is your intention? she asked.

—I got a friend in Lauderdale lets me use his beach house. I thought we could drive down next weekend and see how it goes. But hey, you wanna fuck the old skank, do it.

—Well, maybe I will! She looped her arms about my neck and smiled me up. Or maybe I’ll wait ‘til after Lauderdale.

I thought the two of us were back on track, but when Ava decided to hit another bar, Leeli said in a cajoling voice, I’m having so much fun! Let’s not go home yet! Wasn’t until we wound up in a Daytona Beach motel on Saturday morning, sleeping in the room next to Ava’s, that I realized somewhere in the middle of all those tequila shots, we’d climbed aboard the party train. I remembered telling everybody about the beach house. From that I guess the idea had developed for Ava to drive me and Leeli to Lauderdale, making frequent stops for refreshment, with Ava paying the freight. They weren’t going to welcome me back at the food mart when I turned up a week late for my shift, but that world was spinning me nowhere and I thought I might take a shot at separating Ava from some of the money she’d been throwing around. I worried about her going after Leeli, though. We’d only had us the one night, but Leeli and I seemed to recognize each other’s zero score in life as only folks do who’re born in a neighborhood where the most you aspire to is a double-wide and sufficient loose change to afford a couple of cases on the weekend. We’d both worn out our craziness to the point where we saw we might have us a nice little run and maybe avoid killing each other at the end. Once she loosened up and that sick-of-it-all waitress hardness drained from her face, I saw a sweet seam in her no one had bothered to mine.

I left Leeli sleeping and smoked in the breezeway of the motel, watching two rat-skinny children splash and squeak in the pool, while their two hundred pound plus mama, milky breasts and thighs and belly squeezed into inner-tube shapes by a lemon yellow bathing suit, lay on a lawn chair and simmered like a dumpling over a low flame. The drapes of Ava’s room hung open a crack and I had a peek. All I saw of her was legs waving in the air and hands gripping onto a headboard. The rest was hidden underneath Squire. His pimply butt was just pumping up and down. Sitting straight in a chair beside the bed, like a schoolboy being taught a lesson, Carl was looking on with interest. Well, come get me Jesus, I said to myself. With Carl and Squire both bagging Ava, she wouldn’t have much time for Leeli. I had to admire Squire’s stamina, but he looked to be doing push-ups on a trampoline and if I was the boy’s daddy I’d have advised him that women tend to enjoy some rhythmic variation. He finally fell off his stroke and rolled onto his back. Ava came up flushed and sweaty, hair sticking to her cheeks. She had a sip of water, spoke briefly to Carl, then straddled Squire and began more-or-less to treat him like he’d been treating her. I’d been feeling about ten cents on the dollar, but watching her work cleaned the crust off my brain. Being the gentleman I am, I decided to buy Leeli coffee and a Krispy Kreme before checking out the rest of my parts.

I hated Daytona, and not just because I was born there, though every time I drove through Holly Hills, redneck purgatory, and saw those little bunkerlike concrete homes with cracked jalousie windows and chain link fences and Big Wheels with faded colors buried in the front yard weeds, my wattles got all red and swollen. I also hated the beach, the kids who cruised it eight and nine to a convertible or rode around in ten-dollar-an-hour rent-a-buggies, the bikini girls with their inch-deep tans and MTV eyes, the boys in Hilfiger suits with an old man’s dream of financial security stuck like an ax into their brains at birth. I hated the fucking piped-in circus music that played along the boardwalk, sounding like it was made of sugar beets and red dye number seven. I hated the goddamn carnival rides and the heavy metal curses shouting from the arcades. I liked the ocean all right, liked the blue-green water inside the sandbar, the creamy ridges of foam the tide left along the margin, and the power of the combers, but I wished they rolled in to no shore. I hated the burger joints with their fried onion stink, their white plastic tables and chairs on a concrete deck, and walk-up windows manned by high school geeks with connect-the-dot acne puzzles on their foreheads, because it was at just such a joint I committed the error in judgment that earned me a nickel in Raiford, sauntering up to the service window so wired on crank, all I could smell was the inside of my nose, pulling a fifty dollar pistol, and before I could speak the magic words, two plainclothes cops who were drinking milkshakes at the time snuck up behind me and said to turn around real quick, they’d like that, and later in jail, Sgt. John True, a man apparently fascinated with me, visited my cell, the first of our many nights together, and said, When I was a kid I’s just like you—meaning, I suppose, he no longer considered himself a dumbass hillbilly—prior to beating me unconscious. I carried a lot of anger relating to Daytona and that afternoon while we were sitting at a white plastic table on a concrete deck, staring at baskets of onion rings and fried shrimp so heavily breaded, eating one was like eating a hush puppy with a flavorless crunchy prize inside, I let angry out for exercise.

Squire got things off to a start by going on about how easy it would be to knock over the Joyland Arcade. You gotta have balls, he said, ‘cause time to do it’s when it’s crowded. You walk on up and let ‘em see your piece and grab them bags of money! He looked to Ava like he was expecting to have his belly rubbed. She smiled and dribbled salt from a packet onto her rings.

—You got a hard-on for quarters? I asked. They don’t bag nothing but the change.

—You have people with you. Three or four of ‘em so you can carry more.

—You think four loads of quarters divided four ways is more’n one load divided one way? You ain’t been studying your arithmetic.

—You take the bills too, Squire said. Like, of course, he knew that.

—Where am I? I asked Leeli.

Her expression begged me to shut up.

—Seriously. Did we wake up somewhere’s else this morning? Some other planet where stupid rules?

Carl chuckled and I said, Fuck is your problem, man? All you do’s sit around and make fun of shit. What put you so high in the roost? Far as I can tell, Squire’s your intellectual superior and he ain’t got the brains of a box of popcorn.

—You the one’s acting superior, Ava said, and forked up some slaw.

—Fuck, I am superior! Superior to this shit. Maybe it gets you wet listening to the criminal genius here, but it don’t even give me a tickle.

Squire told me to watch my mouth, I was talking to a lady, and I said, Come on, you fucking chihuahua! Step to me!

Leeli caught my arm and said, Maceo! I jerked free and swatted my shrimp basket, backhanding it across the deck. People bespotted with ketchup splatter from the basket stared at us from the adjoining tables. The assistant manager, who could have passed for fourteen, looked like he was about to cry. Leeli was yelling at me, Squire was avoiding my eyes, Ava was calmly wiping her sleeve with a napkin. Carl giggled and said, Fucking chihuahua!

One of the citizens I’d splattered, a thick-necked, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, Chevy-Suburban-driving son of the suburbs, his belly sagging like a hundred-year-old hammock, gave his pregnant wife a comforting pat on the shoulder and heaved up from his cheeseburger, but Ava saved his ass by intercepting him on the way to our table and slipped him a twenty for his dry cleaning bill. Other folks put in their claim and once she had satisfied them, she sat back down and said to me, Temper like that, it’s a wonder you still on the street.

Calmer now, I felt no call to answer. I gave her a fuck-you smile and popped one of Leeli’s shrimp into my mouth. It was covered with grit that had blown up from the beach, which made it extra crunchy.

—You so smart, Ava said, whyn’t you tell us how you’d handle the Joyland?

—Wouldn’t nothing but a damn fool mess with it. Too many cops. Too many boyfriends might wanna play hero. You feel the need to rob something, head out on the freeway. You know the back roads along the exits, you can take down two gas stations easy and be sitting in a bar before the cops get motivated.

—I suppose it was your expertise landed you in prison.

—Oh I was a fool. No doubt about that. It don’t mean I’m still a fool.

Challenged, I delivered a lecture on proper criminal procedure, most of it learned in Raiford, but salted in with personal experiences that I embellished for dramatic effect. You gotta terrorize a place, I told them. People ain’t always scared, they see the gun. Sometimes they can’t believe you’re for real and they go to debating what to do. You don’t want that, you want ‘em scared. So you say something lets ‘em know how scared they oughta be.

—Yeah? Squire said churlishly. Like what?

I made my hand into a gun and pointed it at his chest. Hands up! Who wants to die? You say that, it gets their attention every time.

I like that, Carl said, grinning. Hands up who wants to die?

—Takes the punch out of it, you say it with a smile, I said. Tell ‘em like you mean it.

With that, Carl jumped up and snarled, Hands up! Who wants to die?

The pregnant lady yipped and the people at the table behind me grabbed up their belongings and scooted. Ava pulled Carl down into his chair and I said to him, That’ll get it done.

Leeli stood and said, Can we just go? Please!

We set off down the boardwalk toward the car and she fell into step with Ava and Carl. Irritated by this, not wanting to be stuck with Squire, I dropped off the pace, lollygagging along. That’s how Leeli wanted to play it, I told myself, to hell with her. I’d find myself a sweeter can of tuna. I started eye-fucking the bikini girls strolling past and when one made a smart-ass remark, getting her friends to laughing at me, I told her once she lost that babyfat she oughta try a real dick, but right now it’d likely be too much for her.

Ava drove south and then west on State Road 44 toward Orlando. She went to talking about the old days, the 60s, when there was so many UFOs in the sky—because of the rockets at the Cape, she guessed—you could see them from out on 44 every night. Boys useta take us down here to see ‘em, she said, ‘cause they thought we’d let ‘em get fresh while we were stargazing. Leeli, who was riding shotgun next to Carl, said, I bet they were right, huh?

—’Course they were, Ava said, and they shared a laugh.

—You ever see any UFOs? Leeli asked.

—All the time! You look up in the sky, you couldn’t help seeing ‘em. Pretty soon what you thought was a group of stars would get to darting around, making these really sharp turns, flying in formation.

She asked Leeli to fish around in her tote bag and find her cigarettes. Once she got a smoke going, she said, Couple times we saw one real close.

—A flying saucer?

—Uh huh. We saw this one shoot a green light from its belly. Straight down to the ground.

—Maybe it was Santa Claus you saw, I suggested. Waving his green flashlight.

Ava took a glance back toward me. You don’t believe in UFOs, Maceo?

—’Bout as much as I believe in liberty and justice for all.

—Don’t listen to him, Leeli said. He’s a contrary sort.

I told Leeli she didn’t know squat about me and then said to Ava, Whatever you saw, wasn’t no flying saucer. Ain’t no sense to any of that business.

—That might be, Ava said. Most things don’t make sense, especially you try and understand ‘em too hard.

—I suppose that’s profound, but I’m just a dumb Florida Cracker. It goes right by me.

Ava flicked ash and sparks out the window. You might catch up to it one of these days, she said.

It struck me that Ava must be a lot older than I’d estimated, she was dating back in the 60s, but I didn’t stay with the thought. I was a six pack along into a decent buzz and still feeling sour about Leeli, fully occupied with self-pity and scorn. When we stopped for gas I pulled Leeli aside, fed her all the I’m-sorry she could swallow and persuaded her to switch seats with Squire. I discovered a sensitive spot under her ear and before long I had her squirming pretty good, though each time my fingers traipsed near the old plantation home, she’d give them a spank. Squire began telling a lie about a beauty queen he’d gone with in high school and Ava shut him up quick, saying she needed to concentrate on the road. That clued me in she was upset about Leeli, and I felt satisfied in mind.

Scattered around the edges of Disneyworld were a number of shooting ranges where for a few dollars you could fire assault rifles. Given the encouragement this surely offered the freaks who flocked to the ranges, you had to wonder if the city fathers of Orlando didn’t unconsciously long to see TV coverage of a giant blood-spattered mouse. While Carl and Squire were busy playing soldier at Buck’s Guns and Sporting Gallery, me and Ava and Leeli walked to a nearby 7-11 and bought some forty-ouncers, one of which I chugged walking back to the parking lot. The girls sat talking on the hood of Ava’s truck. I wasn’t drunk enough to feel mean, but I felt separate from things. The cars racing along the six-lane were shiny toys with glaring headlights and dabs of meat inside. The strip malls lining the road were grimy slot-car accessories. The heat came from a neon tube inside my head and the starless orange-lit sky was a gasoline-soaked rag someone had throwed over the whole mess so’s to hide it from company. What I’m saying, it wouldn’t have taken much to upgrade me to mean. Ava was pitching hard at Leeli, touching her thigh, the back of her hair. I just kept working on my second forty. If I could drink fast enough, I wouldn’t care what they did and I’d be able to ignore some deeper thoughts that were trying to gnaw out my brains like a squirrel with a nut meat.

When Squire and Carl returned, all hotted up from proving their marksmanship, Ava announced a surprise. She had reserved us rooms at the mouse’s hotel. We’d have a few cocktails, go on some rides, and see what developed. This made Carl happy, but Squire and Leeli didn’t seem to care. I sucked down a third forty on the ride over and after Ava checked us in, I told her I felt poorly and was going to my room.

—Me, too, said Leeli. I’m awful tired.

This surprised Ava as much as it did me. You sure? she said to Leeli. Space Mountain’ll juice you right up.

—Naw, we’ll catch y’all later. Leeli started walking so fast, she beat me to the elevator.

I had a shower while Leeli ordered room service cheeseburgers and Cokes. The food left me placid and sleepy. I laid out on the bed in my skivvies and Leeli stood at the window, her arms folded, stern of face, like she was taking stock of a brightly lit country she’d just done conquering.

—You don’t have to worry ‘bout me making a move, that’s what’s keeping you vertical, I said. I’m through for today.

She made a noise that didn’t tell me much.

I grabbed the remote from the bedside table and found a wrestling show on TV. Wrestling hasn’t been the same since the prime of Hulk Hogan and the Giant and Macho Man Savage, you ask me. Back in the day your superhero had a gut just like the asshole sitting next to you in the bar and so when you smacked him with a beer bottle, you had a greater sense of accomplishment. Now there was too many pretty boys and it was more tumbling and role-playing than the honest-to-God fake it once was.

Leeli wriggled out of her jeans. Ava gave me money to buy clothes, she said. Reckon we better do it soon.

—We can get some fine clothes here. Get us some mouse shirts and mouse hats with the ears. Maybe you can get some panties with the mouse on the crotch and wear ‘em inside out.

She pulled off her tank top and threw it at me in a ball. You always have to be a shit?

—It was a fucking joke! Jesus!

She stared at me as if she didn’t believe it.

—I swear, I said.

She held the stare a second longer. Damn! she said. Why do I like you?

—You want a honest answer?

—Naw, I know why. She sat down on the bed, glum as old gravy, picked up the remote and went surfing, changing channels so fast, there was only little blurts of sound. Know what Ava told me? She says she works for the government. The FBI.

—No shit! I said. Is she a friend of Spiderman?

—She showed me her badge! Leeli bugged her eyes and stuck out her tongue.

—Give me ten bucks and I’ll show you a badge. I can probably find one in the gift shop.

Leeli threw herself down on the pillow like she was trying to hurt herself. You wanna hear this or not?

—Sure. Lemme have it. I turned to lie facing her so she’d know I was listening, and rested a hand on her waist.

—She said she was an agent and Carl and Squire are in some sorta experiment. She’s in charge of ‘em. She says she’ll pay me a ton of money to be part of it. The experiment.

—Want me to say what I’m thinking?

—I’m not an idiot! I know she likes me, and I know it could all be a story. But she’s willing to pay twenty thousand dollars! For one month!

—You see the money?

Leeli gave a vigorous nod. I get five now, the rest after.

—Well, shit. I rolled onto my back. I guess this is goodbye.

—Not necessarily.

—Yeah, necessarily. I can’t compete with someone throws around twenty thousand bucks. She sat up cross-legged and muted the TV. Look, I’m not no shiny apple been sitting on the shelf like you think.

—That ain’t what I think, I said, grumpy from losing out to a rich dyke.

—Then why you treating me like I don’t know which end of a jar to open? I been with women. It ain’t my favorite, but there’s times I felt that way. And I can feel that way again. Enough to earn us twenty thousand dollars, I can.

The word us punched a hole in my overcast.

—I don’t trust Ava, Leeli said. But with you along I don’t have to trust her. So I told her you had to come with us.

—What’d she say?

—She said it’d be okay ‘long as you don’t get crazy ‘bout I’m sleeping with the both of you.

I turned this proposition over to see if it was missing a piece. I don’t know, I said. I get these mood swings.

—Oh, really! I couldn’t tell. She flounced down beside me, resting her chin on my chest. Can you deal with it? ‘Cause if you can’t, I might not do this. But I want that money! You imagine the party we could have on twenty thousand? I bet we can get more’n twenty, you ease back and lemme treat Ava right.

I hooked my thumb under the waistband of her panties and gave the elastic a snap. You a bad woman, ain’tcha?

—Goodness me! She batted her eyelashes. I don’t know what in the world more I’m gonna have to do to prove it.

In the morning we had another conversation. It kicked off wrong when I said what bothered me was Ava offering twenty when she could have snagged Leeli for less. Once I got her cooled down, she said, huffily, It’s not like she was comparison shopping. She’s took with me. Guess you’d have trouble understanding that.

—You know that ain’t it. I’m just being a realist.

—That’s what a realist is? A pea-brained Florida cracker?

—Damn, Leeli! Some guy offered me twenty grand to go party with him for a month, you’d think something was screwy.

—Maybe.

—Maybe my ass!

A polite room service knock ended this round. The waiter, a college boy with a forelock of frosted hair, rolled his cart to the table at the window, off-loaded Leeli’s omelette and my breakfast steak, and stood waiting for his tip.

—I got no cash on me, I told him.

—You can add it to the bill, sir.

This was spoken like he was advising a backward child who’d stepped in shit. He had the kind of smug, fleshy face made me yearn to see it staring up from inside a roll of sheet plastic, dripping wet from a canal where he’d been swimming underwater for a week. I snatched the bill from him and wrote one billion dollars on the tip line. His eyes flicked to the amount and froze.

—I was you, hoss, I said, I’d polish up one of them special Disney smiles and waltz on outa here.

I guess he wasn’t a total candy-ass. He had some size on him and I could tell he was weighing job security against the joys of bashing my face in with one of those metal domes that kept the food warm. I thought about sucker-punching him just to see how far he’d fly, but he turned on his heel and headed for the door.

—Rock on, dude, I called after him.

I sat down to eat. Leeli gave me a God-you’re-hopeless look. She bit into her toast with a snap, as if somehow it might do me an injury. We ate without talking for a while, then she said, It might be true what Ava told me. ‘Bout the experiment. Carl and Squire are pretty strange.

—One’s a retard, other don’t know he’s a retard. That ain’t so strange.

She diddled the fork in her eggs. I can’t figure why she’d tell me that story if it wasn’t true.

I had to talk around a bite of steak. To make herself look like a big deal.

—People with the money she’s got, they don’t hafta do that.

—If they’re freaks they do. I finally got the bite chewed. Say it’s true. Fuck does it matter? We still get paid.

Leeli had built a little fence of eggs around her sausage patty. Nothing this good ever works out, she said, staring at the plate like she was considering making a rock garden out of her cottage fries. What I think’s gonna happen and what does happen, there’s always a mile of swamp ‘tween the two.

—Yeah, well, I said. There is that.

With a step that was a shade perky for my tastes, Leeli ran off to tell Ava the news. For want of better occupation, I took my Disneyworld pass and went to experience America. As I waited in line the man behind me kept ramming my legs with his gray-headed mama who was sitting in a wheelchair, gripping the arms and scowling like a fury. Everywhere you turned you saw parents yelling at kids who were bawling about they didn’t get this or that. Stuck in a photograph album, I supposed these same scenes would dredge up fond memories years from now. It depressed me that I wasn’t able to work such a change with my own miseries. Must be I come to Disneyworld too late in life for the enchantment to do its trick.

Close by the Pirates of the Caribbean, an elderly fat man with the word Jellybean embroidered on the chest of his overalls and dozens of jellybeans stuck on his straw cowboy hat had cordoned off a section of walkway and there created portraits of celebrities from thousands of—guess what?—jellybeans. He was working on his knees, dribbling jellybeans onto a rendering of the Statue of Liberty, which except for the spiky headdress looked a whole hell of a lot like his take on the fat Elvis. People stood around saying, Isn’t that amazing. He seemed so jolly in his craft, I naturally wished him ill. Odds were he was a twelve-stepper who after a lifetime of domestic abuse visited upon wife and children had gone simple enough from Jesus and caffeine to believe this shit was a suitable atonement. A four-year-old howler with the mouse on his chest and a stalk of blue cotton candy in his fist broke free of his parents and came to stand by Jellybean. Way he held the candy to his mouth and screamed, you could easily picture him at twenty-one doing the same with a microphone and getting laid by supermodels. When his mama tried to drag him off, he endeared himself to me forever by ralphing all over Miss Liberty. Jellybean offered him grandpa consolation, but I caught a glint of good old murder in his eye.

We stayed at Disneyworld four more days. Leeli spent the nights with Ava and mornings with me. The rest of the hours we traveled as a pack. At these times the air got icy. Dinners became occasions of grand formality, long bouts of chewing and swallowing broken by courteous exchanges. Please pass the butter. Would you like another dessert? Can I bring you back something? Leeli had to make sure both Ava and I got our share of flirty glances and secret smiles, and the strain of it all roughed her up some. I learned to let her relax when she came back to our room. She would take two valium from a bottle Ava had given her and sit by the window, her breath ragged, like she was pushing herself to exhale. Finally she’d smile and say, Hi or How you doing?, as if she had just noticed me.

—I can’t take much more of Carl, she said one day. It’s not about him watching. I’m almost grateful he’s there. It kinda makes it easier to switch off my head. But the talking they do  . . .  Jesus Lord! She glanced at me for a reaction. Am I boring you?

—I was just letting you tell it.

—I know you’re being sweet with me, and I appreciate it. But I’m wore out with sweetness. I could use a shot of male insensitivity. Can you handle that?

I grinned at her and said gruffly, Hell they talking about, woman?

Leeli sighed like those words had hit the spot. Ava’ll stop right in the middle of things and explain what’s going on. Anatomical stuff, y’know. And Carl he just sits there humming to himself.

—He don’t say nothing back?

—Sometimes he asks can he go do something with Squire, and she’ll say maybe later or naw it’s not your time to be with Squire.

—See what I told you? He’s a fucking retard.

—He’s not dumb! Ava’s always testing him or something. Asking him weird questions. He never gets a’one wrong. She’ll ask him to do a sum and he does ‘em in his head. Just snaps ‘em off!

—Remember that Tom Cruise movie where his brother did all that? That guy was a retard.

—It’s not just Carl. Ava, she’s  . . .

—What?

—She’s a strong woman, is what it is. Sometimes I get a feeling I’m gonna drown in her, y’know. Like she’s this tide rolling over me and when it goes out again, nothing’s gonna be left of me. Leeli hung her chin onto her chest. I don’t know I can do this for a month.

—Fine with me. Let’s take the five and split.

The second hand must have galloped damn near ten times around the dial before she said, Chances this good don’t come around but every so often. Let’s give it a few days.

She come over to the foot of the bed and crawled up beside me and cuddled into my shoulder like she wanted to sleep. I did my best to be pillow and comforter, but the heat of her and my natural preoccupations got me all charged up. She reached her hand down and played with me a while, then lost interest and closed her eyes. Want me take care of that for you? she asked after another bit.

—We’ll have our time, I said. Whyn’t you rest?

She blinked and peered at me. Wide open, those brown eyes could be like a car coming at you with its high beams on. They left me dazed and fighting for the road.

—That a real feeling I see in there? she asked.

—Whatever you see, that’s what it is. You know I ain’t smart enough to fake nothing.

She didn’t act like she believed this. Her lights dimmed and she lay quiet. She fingered my shirt button and appeared to be studying the stubble on my chin. I asked what she was thinking.

—Lots of things.

—Say one.

—I was wondering if anybody’s smart enough to know they’re faking and I was wishing we already had that twenty thousand.

—Anything else?

—I was thinking you got a whole crowd of people paying rent in your skull. Different sizes, different ways of doing. But they all wearing the same face.

A woman starts to get deep on you, you know it’s just the coming attraction for a head movie that’ll be playing six shows daily in the weeks to come. She’s evaluating her prospects and unless you’re a fool, you best do some evaluating your own self. Generally speaking, a commitment is being called for, but with Ava in the picture I wasn’t sure how things were fitting together in Leeli’s thoughts. She went to drowning in moods so wide, they’d wash over me from the next room. Sometimes she wanted me to be patient and other times she wanted me to haul her off to the monkey jungle. After playing mama’s little helper at night, she needed daddy to straighten her out. I didn’t have a good record when it come to treating female mental disease, but I managed it with Leeli. I gave her to know I was there for her like Oprah and Tarzan both. It surprised me that I was up to the task and when I meditated on this, I realized the feeling Leeli had spotted in me might be for real. A runty little weed sprouted from sandy soil—that was all it was. If it was going to survive, Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye would have to drop in from TV heaven and manifest a miracle. But there it waved, baking under the sky of all the shit that had ever gone wrong with me, waggling its dried-up leaves, trying like hell to grow up and learn how to whistle. Puny as it was, it stood taller than any decision I could have made to chop it down.

From Disneyworld the party train crossed the state to Ybor City, then up to Jacksonville and then back down to Silver Springs. Eleven days and we hadn’t gone a mile toward Lauderdale. Often as not, whenever Leeli was with Ava and Carl, Squire would seek me out. He figured we were in the same boat, I expect. Whereas Carl had one trick, Squire was proficient in two. Like he was a grade up on Carl in Ava’s pre-school. Mostly he desired to talk about how much pussy he’d been getting since a precocious early age, but it was plain he’d never gotten any that hadn’t got him first. He recounted a string of fabulous conquests, each more of a joke than the last. A female jockey, a porn star, a TV actress, the girl who played center for the Dallas Sparks. They had the feel of lies he’d overheard in a bar and loved so much he’d taken them in and given them a new home. Tempted as I was to blow a hole in his picture window, I let him rave. Sooner or later he’d wind down and go to thinking about Ava. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know this. Ava thoughts stamped their brand on that boy’s face. If I had thumped his head at those moments, it would’ve bonged like a bell.

In Silver Springs, instead of staying at the resort, we checked into a dump on a blue highway east of Ocala. A dozen frame bungalows painted beige with dark brown trim and tarpaper roofs and screen doors tucked in among palmetto and Georgia pine. From the road they looked like the backdrop for a 1940s photograph of Grandma and Grandpa on the dashboard of their Model A, off to homestead down in Stark or Sanford, right before Grandma gave birth to the next gold-star-destiny generation of Scrogginses or Culpeppers or Inglethorpes. Up close you saw them different. Tarpaper hats tipped at shady angles over chunky, sallow faces with indifferent eyes, like Chinamen with sly intentions. The screens documented tragic insect stories. Palmetto bugs the size of clothespins scuttled from crack to crack. The sheets were maps of gray and yellow countries. Facing my bed was a framed picture so dusty I could lie back and make it anything I wanted. You smelled the toilet from the steps outside. The place fucking cried out for a shotgun murder.

Of an evening the owner, Mr. Gammage, a scrawny old geezer whose Bermuda shorts hung like loose sail from his hipbones, would beautify the grounds. Chop a few weeds, prune a shrub or two, cut back a climbing cactus from a palm trunk. He’d fuel his labors with glugs from a thermos that likely contained a libation stiffer than Gatorade. If he was feeling frisky he’d start his electric trimmer and hunt up stuff to trim. You could tell he loved that machine, the way he flourished it about. Watching him survey his property, hands on hips, his turkey-baster belly popped full out, it was my impression he was a happy man, though it was tough to understand why. Whenever he revved up the trimmer his wife would come to the office door and yell for him to quit making that noise. She was built short and squarish and commonly wore a dark brown housecoat. This sponsored the idea she might have given birth to the bungalows or was their spirit made flesh, or something of the sort. Her face was topped off by about a foot of forehead on which God had written a grim Commandment. I felt the air stir when she glared at me. Inside the office there was a Bible big as a microwave and I bet she would open it and pray for everything around her to disappear.

I was sitting outside my bungalow our second afternoon there, nursing a forty, when she come flying from the office and took a run at Squire. He’d fallen out on the grass near the highway, his head resting in a petunia bed. Mrs. Gammage screamed, Get outa my flowers, punching the ground with a lurching, stiff-gaited stride like an NFL guard with bad knees. Squire never moved, not even when she kicked him. She kicked him again. I wouldn’t say I was spurred to action, but since I was technically supposed to be on Squire’s side, I thought I should make a supportive gesture. Time I got myself on over to the petunias, she had stopped kicking and was bending to him and saying, Hey! Hey! She had a thin, bitter smell, like a bin of rutabagas. Squire’s eyes were half-open, but only one iris showed.

—’Pears like you killed him, I said.

Mrs. Gammage staggered back from the petunia bed, gazing at Squire with an expression that crossed stricken with disgusted. He was already dead! I didn’t do nothing coulda killed him.

—You kicked him right in the side of his chest where the heart’s on. That’ll do ‘er every time. It’s a medical fact.

I was just fucking with her, but Squire hadn’t twitched and it dawned on me that he actually might be dead. His color was good, though. Only dead man I’d ever seen up close was this old boy got shot in the head outside the Surf Bar in Ormond Beach for arguing about his girlfriend should have won the wet T-shirt contest. All the color had left him straightaway. His skin had the look of gray candlewax.

Mrs. Gammage snorted and snuffled some. Maybe she was seeing herself strapped into Old Sparky over to Raiford, or maybe she hadn’t yet gotten that specific with self-pity and was tearing up because she felt the victim of a vast injustice—here she’d been protecting her precious petunias and now Jesus had gone and let her down despite all everything she’d done for him. I had in mind to tell her that feeling she was having that everything had tightened up around her and no matter how hard she tried to turn with it, the world was no longer a comfortable fit, and if she made a move to pry herself loose from that terrible grip, it’d pinch her off at the neck  . . .  I would have told her after a while it got to feel natural and she likely wouldn’t know what to do things didn’t feel that way. Before I could advise her of this, Ava came on the run and shooed us away, babbling about how Squire was prone to these fits and she’d handle it, just to leave her alone with him because when he woke up he was scared and she could gentle him. I returned to step-sitting out front of my bungalow and Mrs. Gammage streaked toward the office to recast the deadly prayer spell she’d been fixing to hurl at the universe. Ava kneeled to Squire, hiding his upper body from sight. My forty had gone warmish, but I chugged down several swallows and wiped the spill from my chin and looked back to the petunia bed just in time to see Squire sit bolt upright. It wasn’t the kind of reaction you’d expect from someone smacked down by a fit. No wooziness or flailing about. It was like Ava had shot a few thousand volts through him.

Leeli had come out of Ava’s bungalow, wearing white shorts and a green halter. She wandered over to me and sat on the stoop. What you think’s wrong with Squire? she asked in a hushed voice.

—Boy’s so slow, maybe his brain idles out every so often.

She stared at Ava and Squire as if she was trying to figure something out. I did some staring myself, digging my eyes under that halter. The heat cooked her scent strong. I leaned closer and did a hit. She glanced up and asked, What you doing?

—I wish I was smelling breakfast, I said.

Squire and Ava scrambled up, Squire gesturing like he was wanting to explain something of importance. They made for Ava’s bungalow. Leeli started to join up with them, but Ava waved her off and said she needed to tend Squire for a while. That brightened Leeli, but she watched until the door closed behind them.

—Don’t none of this strike you peculiar? she asked.

—Pretty much everything strikes me peculiar. So I guess nothing does, really.

If I hadn’t been consumed with getting Leeli into the bungalow and the two of us shaking the walls so hard, the framed picture would shudder off its veil of dust and the palmetto bugs would prepare for the fall of creation, I might’ve had room for some helpful thoughts. I don’t suppose it matters, though. Chances are I wouldn’t have reached any conclusion. If I had, either I wouldn’t have acted on it or else it would have been the same half-assed conclusion I come to without even stretching my brain. Studying on things until you couldn’t tell whether what you thought was what you wanted to think and all that—it wasn’t my style. I had two ways of going at the world. One, I was a furnace of a man and everything I saw was viewed in terms of how it would do for fuel. The other, I was a pitiable creature who’d been walked on for so long there was a damn dog run wore down into my skull and whenever a shadow crossed my path, my instinct was to snap my teeth. Neither of those boys gave a sugary shit about situational fucking analysis.

Ava was kept busy that night tinkering with Squire’s self-esteem. Least that’s what I believed had sucked his fire down so low, his pilot light kicked off. It was like Leeli had been busted out of jail. She wanted one of everything with me. We come close to killing each other. Toward nine we took a break, borrowed Ava’s car, and brought back catfish and puppies and fries. Halfway through our greasy feast, we went at it again, smearing fish juice all over the bed. It would’ve took oven cleaner to scour the sheets. Long about midnight we smoked cigarettes on the steps. Fireflies bloomed in the hazy dark. The breeze hauled a smell of night-blooming cereus out from the shadows of the palms. A shine from the bulb over the office door fresh-tarred the blacktop. We had us one of those made-in-Nashville moments. Our arms around one another, heads together. Snap the photo, frame it with a heart, and stick in a word balloon with me saying something forever stupid like, Somepin’ wunnerful’s gonna happen to them peaches, honey. Hillbilly Hallmark. I gave Leeli a kiss that sparked a shiver and she settled in against me.

—I could stand another beer, she said.

—Want me to fetch it?

—Naw, it’s too much trouble.

Skeeters whined. A night bird said its name about three hundred times in a row. The TV inside the office flickered a wicked green, an evil blue, a blast of white, as if Mrs. Gammage was receiving communication from an unholy sphere. I wouldn’t have much cared if the rest of everything was just this hot and black and quiet.

Squire seemed fine to me, especially for someone who looked to be a goner, but Ava was still acting mothery the next morning. Around noon she herded us into the car and drove to Silver Springs for, I guess, a give-Squire-love day. At a stall near the gift shop she bought a T-shirt with his face airbrushed on it by a genuine T-shirt artist. Squire had the good sense not to wear the thing. Wanna go see the tropical fish? she asked of Carl and Squire both. Squire said he didn’t know, whatever, and Carl repeated the word fish until he figured out how to spray spittle when saying it. We crammed into a glass-bottomed boat with a mob of lumpy fiftyish women in baggy slacks and floral blouses. I assumed they were a church group, because they appeared to be the cut-rate harem belonging to this balding, gray-haired individual with a banker’s belly and a sagging, doleful face, dressed like a Wal-mart dummy in slacks with an elastic waistband and a sweated-through sports shirt. A pretty blond in a captain’s hat steered the boat and as we glided across the springs, her voice blatted from the speakers, identifying whatever portion of nature’s living rainbow we were then passing over. The man stood the whole trip, clutching a pole for balance, providing his own commentary and sneaking glances at Leeli, who was wearing short shorts. He was trying to make some general point relating to the fish. It had a charry Unitarian flavor, a serving of God and fried turnip slices. All the ladies nodded and favored him with doting gazes. Squashed between two of them was a chubby kid about fourteen who had the miserable air of a hostage. One of the women whispered urgently at him, probably telling him to pay attention or sit up straight. He stared cross-eyed into nowhere, dreaming of columbining the bunch of us. I winked at him, wanting him to know that some of us so-called adults could be dangerous haters, too, when forced to ooh and aah over a glittery mess of edible sea bugs. This only got him hating me extra special. If somebody had slipped him a piece, they would’ve found me with my splattered head resting on a cellulite-riddled thigh.

After the boat ride we headed for a Howard Johnson’s restaurant down the road from the resort. The reverend and his flock had beaten us there and were crammed into a circular booth across from ours. The ladies chattered away, the kid stared at his fries like they were a heap of golden brown logs on which he was roasting his mom in miniature. Part of my problem was I’ve been cursed with this inept paranoia that sees danger everywhere except where danger lies. Though I’d done nothing criminal recently, the reverend’s presence made me feel criminally guilty. I fiddled with the suspicion that his turning up at the restaurant was police-related. That he’d recognized me for the perpetrator of a crime I’d committed and forgot. Now and then his fruity voice cut through the chatter. He was still going on about the damn fish.

—Did you notice, he asked, how the entire school turned as one? Indeed, all the actions of the underwater world seemed in concert, as though directed by a single mind. Is it such a leap to conceive that our actions are so directed?

Hell yes! would’ve been my answer, but Carl thought this was about the best thing he’d ever heard. He jumped around in his seat, repeating portions of the reverend’s lesson and said to Ava, You see? See what I mean?, like these phrases connected with an argument they’d been having.

—I know, she said, and patted his hand to calm him.

—A single mind directed! he said loudly.

Several of the ladies were shooting pissy looks his way. Ava shushed him and said they’d talk about it later. But Carl wanted to talk about it right then and there. I’d never seen him so heated up. Whenever the reverend’s voice carried to us, Carl would go to chuckling, spitting back the reverend’s words, saying, Yes! Yes!, and sputtering other foolishness, giving this weird sort of affirmation, like he was a shouter in a retard church.

Eventually, urged on by his outraged ladies, the reverend scooted out of the booth and ambled over. He clasped his hands at his belly, delivered us a patient look, and asked Carl if he wouldn’t mind toning it down.

Carl beamed at him and said, Yes! A single mind!

Leeli said, Can’t you see the man ain’t right! Ava offered an apology and I said, You best take your fat ass on back to the hen house, or they gonna need another rooster.

The reverend armored his face with a smile and looked down on me from a peak of blessed understanding. Young man, he said. Actually he said a good bit more, but the words young man were all I heeded. When I was five Reverend Nichols from the First Baptist told my mama having such a sweet little fellow as me by his side would be an asset when he was doing fund-raising, and since this gave her more time for drinking, she loaned me out to him on a regular basis. Young man, he’d say once we were alone, wanna sit my lap while I drive? Young man, I’m gonna open you to God’s greatest gift. I didn’t much appreciate anybody calling me young man, and I sure as hell didn’t want it from a preacher. I caught him by the collar and yanked him down so he was gawking into the leavings of my chicken fried steak. The only thing I recall saying was, Cocksucking holy Joe motherfucker, but I know I expanded on that considerable. People were tugging at me, women were screaming, something struck the side of my head, but I was serene in the midst of it, talking to the reverend, showing him the ketchup-smeared edge of my steak knife.

Rougher hands grabbed me and the reverend broke free. Two guys wearing aprons wrangled me into the aisle, where we did some wrestling and grunting and swearing. A swung purse the size of a satchel knocked one guy off me. I clocked the other with a gut punch that cured him of upright and put him on his knees kissing the carpet like a devout Arab. Shouting people choked the aisle, a few wanting to get at me, the rest trying to get away. I heard Leeli cry, Maceo!, but I couldn’t find her in the crowd, so I beelined for the exit, shoving aside Christian and heathen alike. The manager loomed ahead of me. A porky fellow in a maroon shirt and a black tie, his skin that spoiled pumpkin color comes either from a tanning booth or somewheres in India. A wedge of old ladies blocked him off to the left, clearing a path, and I went toward the door. That’s when Carl shouted the magic words.

—Hands up! he said with sincere ferocity. Who wants to die?

The manager had retreated behind the cash register and Carl, beaming like a lottery winner, was pointing a blue steel automatic in his general direction, swinging the muzzle to cover the counter and a portion of window. People started hitting the ground, hiding in the booths, and wasn’t more than a couple of seconds before the only ones standing were the five in our party and the manager. You could hear whispering and sobbing and the wheedle of some old pop song turned into a symphony, but it was stone quiet compared to how it had been. Ava slapped at her tote bag, gave it a squeeze, and that told me where Carl had got his shiny new toy.

—Give it to me, Carl, I said, easing toward him a step.

—Okay. He kept on swinging the gun back and forth kind of aimlessly, like it had a momentum that was carrying his arms through an arc.

—Give me the gun, Ava said. You don’t need that gun now.

Squire was at her shoulder, nodding as if he firmly supported this idea, and Leeli, smart girl, was halfway out the door.

The manager made a move for something under the register. Ava and I both shouted a warning to Carl. I said, Watch it, man!, and Ava spoke what sounded like a word in a foreign language—I couldn’t tell for sure because our shouts mixed together. Carl whipped the gun around and fired just before the manager fired, the explosions overlapping. Carl’s head jerked, blood sprayed. His bullet kicked the manager into a buffet cart. He fell behind the counter. A few screams speared the quiet. Smoke lazied in the air. Somebody’s lunch treat sizzled and blackened on the griddle. I stepped forward and snatched the gun from Carl. There was blood all over his face, but he was still smiling. Ava wrapped him in a hug and hustled him to the door. I had a quick look back of the counter. The manager was staring off into someplace I never want to see. Frightened eyes were locked on me from every direction, like forest animals peeping at a mangy tiger that had interrupted their play. I fired a shot into the ceiling and told them not to twitch forever and ran like hell.

In the truck everybody talked at once, except for Squire. He was gazing out the passenger side window, having himself a fine vacation. Ava and Leeli fussed over Carl in the back seat, and I drove fast toward Ocala. I hadn’t put a face on the wrongness of what happened, but it nibbled at the edges of a fucked-up angry fear that raised a red shadow in my brain and jammed spikes into my bone-holes, making all my limbs want to stiffen and wiggle like a bug with a pin through its guts. Leeli urged me to drive faster and Ava said, Take us back to the motel! This all stirred in with Oh Gods and Carl repeating over and over in a sunny voice, Hands up who wants to die, shaping a child’s song of the line. I told them to shut the fuck up, then I yelled it. For half a minute it was quiet. A big shopping mall come floating up on our left. I slowed and swung the car into it. Ava screeched, What’re you doing? as I swerved into a parking slot away from the buildings, hidden by other cars from the highway. I switched off the engine. She clawed at my shoulder, cursing and giving orders.

I turned to her and saw that the manager’s bullet had dug a furrow along Carl’s jawline. The wound was oozing blood, yet he didn’t seem to mind. I’m gonna find us another car, I said. But we ain’t going back to no motel.

Ava objected to this and I said, Here’s your keys. Go where the fuck you want. I’m getting the hell gone.

I climbed out and told Leeli to come along with me.

Ava caught Leeli’s arm. I need her here!

—Well, I need a look-out, so fuck what you need!

—Take Squire, she said.

—Yeah, that’ll help. Come on, Leeli.

Leeli hesitated.

A cop car whipped past on the highway, howling like a devil with a hotfoot.

—Goddamn it! Now! I said. You wanna wait around ‘til he comes back for us?

Leeli hopped out and glanced uncertainly between me and Ava. She blinked and shivered as if the sun was killing her.

For the first time ever I saw a distinct lack of confidence in Ava’s face. You better not leave us here! she said. I swear to God!

—I wasn’t thinking on it, I said.

There was some sort of promotion going on within the mall. The lot was more crowded than you’d expect. Jolly old farts wearing gaudy sport coats and blue Shriner-type hats were holding bunches of balloons on strings, handing them out to children and mommies, collecting money to cure some great evil that would never die, and two lanes of parking were used up by a carnival with a little ferris wheel, kiddie rides, game and snack stalls. Some high school girls strolled in a small pod, twelve tits in a row, those belonging to a hefty redhead nosing out a close race. They were eyed by a pack of high school boys whose thoughts of rape had likely gotten sly and civilized during hygiene class. Senior citizens dressed in peppy colors gazed soberly at the wheel. I reckon they were recalling greater wheels from the big glorious world that had died out from under them. Treacly music played—the same, it seemed, that played everywhere I traveled.

Ava’s gun was stuck in my belt, under my shirt. Its weight made me walk taller than I should have felt. I held hands with Leeli, hoping to persuade folks we were a young couple hot for some corn dogs or whatever hell meat they were pushing at the carnival. We skirted the more populated area of the lot. I spotted a newish Ford van with smoked windows. We snuck up on it from the rear. Just as I was ready to pounce, Leeli warned me off. Standing a few cars over was a huddle of men in blue hats. These old fellows had ridded themselves of balloons. They were laughing, the nudge-nudge laughing men do when they hear a real good smutty joke. The fattest of them had a two-handed grip on his belly, like he was about to lift up a slab of fat and show them something even funnier. Of a sudden the men rested hands on each other’s shoulders, forming a circle, and bowed their heads, praying, I supposed, for more balloons or for Jesus to cover the point spread against Satan or that one of the high school girls would lose her mind and fuck them.

Out front of the Home Depot was an old Chevy panel van. I busted the driver’s window with the gun butt and hotwired it. The engine shook like the mounts were loose and made a tired, trebly noise until I got it idling. Leeli brushed glass off her seat and jumped in. I headed the van toward the nearest exit and she dug her fingers into my thigh and asked where I was going.

—South fucking America if we can get that far, I said.

A pinch of time zipped by. Turn it around, she said.

—That’s not gonna happen.

—I mean it! You turn this thing right around!

—Fuck you going on about?

—I’m serious! She reached out with her left foot and stomped on the brake, nearly swerving me into a parked Camry. I’m not running out on my friends.

She kind of hiccuped over the word friends, but kept her gaze firm and determined.

—Your friends? You talking about the Munsters back there?

Her eyes flicked away.

—Oh, okay. You’re talking about those twenty thousand friends. This ain’t about twenty thousand dollars no more, Leeli. This here’s about twenty-to-life.

—I don’t care!

—You’ll care when those lifer bitches with the tattooed mustaches start wanting to get cozy.

She opened the door, planted one foot on the asphalt. I’m not staying ‘less you go back for Ava and them.

—Those motherfuckers gonna get us killed! They almost got us killed!

—Way I see it, you didn’t act such a fool with that preacher, Carl wouldn’t never done nothing!

I put my eyes out the windshield. A lost balloon was sailing off into the blue—it vanished as it crossed the sun. Damn it, Leeli! Get your ass back in here!

She slid down from the seat and stood in the glare, defiant as a dog off its chain.

I gunned the engine. I’m leaving!

She slammed the door shut.

—Something wrong with those people, I said. Man’s shot in the face and it don’t even phase him? Fuck is that? This ain’t nothing we should be messing with.

She took off walking. Her round little butt looked real tasty in those shorts.

—Aw, Leeli! Come on back here, girl!

I’m not a complete fool. I understand it’s all about pussy, but pussy must be a sickness with me, otherwise I cannot explain why I let myself get pulled back into a situation I knew was a dead loser. A psychiatrist might say I was hunting for just such a situation, but if Leeli had been one of the reverend’s old gals, I wouldn’t have wasted a second before putting her in the rear view. I admit self-destruction is the way of my life. The way of every life, maybe. But the style Leeli brought to her walk-off scene, switching her hips and arching her back and giving a sad, pouty look over her shoulder, psychology wasn’t that huge a factor.

I told her to drive and funneled Ava, Carl, and Squire into the rear of the van, then climbed in behind the passenger seat so I could keep an eye on everybody. Squire was by the doors, legs kicked out, his head wobbling like he was listening to private music. Ava was next to the wheel hub, comforting Carl, who rested his good cheek on her shoulder.

—Get east, I said to Leeli. Use the interstate and keep it under the limit.

Ava asked, Where we going? It was loud in the van and she had to shout it.

—Friend of mine’s place in South Daytona!

She thought about this and nodded gloomily.

—Wanna tell me what’s going on? I pointed to Squire and then Carl.

She shook her head. Not now! She shifted to accommodate Carl’s weight and said, I’d like my gun back!

—I like maple sugar on my oatmeal, I told her. But sometimes I gotta do without!

The sun was bouncing along just above the palm tops like a dragged bait, and the light was growing orangey, and a brown shadow gathered in the rear of the van. It was all calming somehow, the shadow and the rattling, droning speed. I felt submerged in it, a man sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool, unmindful of trouble in the air, and I worked the ride into a movie, not a big spectacular with sinister terrorist plots or world-shattering disasters, but a movie from back when stars used to play in crummy little stories about nobodies on their way to damnation. Creedence and Lynard Skynard for the soundtrack. My daddy’s kind of songs, but I liked them all the same. I found one cigarette left in my crumpled pack and lit up. It didn’t taste a thing like movie smoke must taste, clean and savory, a working man’s reward, but my exhales hazed the air so it looked old-fashioned and yellowy brown, 1970s air, air with some character, and I sat fingering the gun, trying to put my mind onto a future different from the sort promised by the movie I was in, but thinking mainly about the manager, what a strange thing it was for a man to come halfway around the world from a place where they had monkeys and elephants and shit to go with their nuclear bombs just to catch a bullet in a HoJos and die staring up at track lighting and styrofoam ceiling tile.

Rickey Wirgman, who I’d called my friend, was more of a brother fuck-up and former criminal associate, like a cousin you don’t have much use for but deal with on occasion. His grandfather had left him some property on the edge of the marshlands near South Daytona, a collection of weathered frame buildings alongside a stretch of open water that grandpa, if not for a crack habit and some harsh words spoken to a fellow inmate in the Volusia County Jail that caused his history to take a sudden tragic turn, might have developed into a full-blown financial disaster. A fishing camp had been his thought. In the years since he’d inherited, Rickey had run a contest to see what would fall apart the fastest, himself or the roof he slept under. He sold off pieces of the land to survive and recreated with the finest dope and the nastiest hookers. The sheds and cabins were rotting away, but the marsh was pretty in the twilight. Black watercourses meandering through tall green grasses, here and there a tiny humped island thick with palms going to silhouettes in the soft gray light, and pelicans crossing in black flapping strings against a streak of rose along the horizon, like a caption in a cool language. Exotic-looking. A Discovery Channel place. The grass was tamped down around the relics of the fishing camp. Seemed like some huge, heavy thing had made an emergency landing, maybe a big jetliner bellying in, and the survivors had squatted where they’d been spilled until death had swallowed them too, and now their shelters were decaying. Scattered around in the higher grass behind the cabins were beat-up refrigerators and washing machines and stoves. They got you thinking it wasn’t a plane had crashed, but one of those bird dinosaurs, and its teeth had busted from its mouth or it had laid a number of curious square white eggs before passing.

We hid the van behind a shed and straggled toward the main lodge. Lodge was a hundred dollar name for a structure that was the house equivalent of a crooked old beekeeper who had stroked out in his sleep while wearing his hat and veil. Window shadows for eyes and a gnawed-off nose opening into a screen porch and boards the color of cigarette ash and a slumped partial second story with tattery shingle tiles drooping off the roof edge. There were no lights. Frogs bleeped out in the marsh, like electric raindrops, and skeeters would cover your arm unless you kept swiping them off.

—Nobody’s home, Leeli said in an exhausted tone.

—Maybe. It don’t matter. The porch stair creaked and bowed to my step. The billowed-out screens were rusted through in patches, torn loose from the railing. Just pick out some rooms, I said. I’ll see if anybody’s here.

I left the others to creep around and scare the spiders and explored some. You couldn’t find a grayer place, you searched in a cemetery. Every square inch and object had run out of time and stopped being what it once was. Phantom things that resembled tables and chairs and rugs and pictures on the walls and the walls themselves were just ghosts made of dust and habit and a gray smothery smell. The kitchen sink was gray and so were the stains on it. Peels of linoleum curled up from the floor like eucalyptus bark. The only bit of color I noticed was three custom car magazines poking from beneath an empty bookcase. Rickey’s version of the redneck dream.

From down the hall came a gentle muttering. Around the corner I caught sight of a pale flickery glow escaping through a half-closed door. I pushed it open. A lounge chair faced a pint-sized color TV set on an orange crate. The chair was an island throne rising from an ocean of beer cans, pizza boxes, take-out cartons, grocery sacks, empty tins, condom packets, shrinkwrapped cookies, crumpled tissues, video cases, batteries. You name it, it was there. Stretched in the chair, wearing bib overalls, lording it over this his solitary realm, was the fucking vulture god of decay. He was thinner than the last I saw him, his beard about six inches longer, but he still had the worst comb-over in Central Florida. The dirt on his ankles made an argyle pattern. His right arm dangled off the chair arm, his fingers almost touching a settlement of pill bottles on the floor. He was watching football. The Gators and somebody. I asked who was winning and he tipped back his head, trying to find me, but not in an awful hurry about it.

—Shit! The word leaked out of him like a last gasp. He gave a blitzed laugh, two grunts and a hiccup. That you, man?

I picked a straight chair from beside a sheetless mattress in the corner and sat so he could watch me and the TV both.

—Maceo. He made a fumbly gesture, patting an invisible dog by his knee. Crazy motherfucker. Where you been?

—Raiford. New Smyrna for a while after.

—Oh, yeah  . . .  right. Rickey’s face was gaunt, greasy with sweat, ready to crack and sag. The bridge of his nose was swollen and had a ragged cut across it that wasn’t healing too good.

I asked what he was up to and he said, Dilaudid. Crystal meth. Mostly Dilaudid lately. You want some? I got a shitload.

—There’s people with me. We need to hide out here a couple or three days.

He blinked rapidly. It was like part of his brain was attempting to semaphore another part that trouble was at hand, but the message didn’t come through. Yeah  . . .  okay, he said feebly. Wherever you want, y’know. There’s rooms. His eyes, charcoal smudges, returned to the TV. A faint cheer mounted as a tiny guy in blue-and-orange scampered down the sideline. The Gators were kicking ass. Rickey made a grinding, choking noise in the back of his throat. I knew that paved-over feeling in the esophagus, the warm dry space that kept him safe from the guttering of his own life, the valueless thoughts featherdusting the inside of his skull. Like a perfect fever.

—I’ll take a few of them Dilaudid, you don’t mind, I said.

—I told you go ahead. His fingernail ticked one of the bottle caps. I got a whole shitload.

I kneeled by the chair, palmed one of the bottles and shook four white tabs out of another.

—You get settled, come on back you wanna talk. Rickey wriggled his ass around as if he had an itch.

—Yeah, maybe. We’re kinda wore down.

—Hey, Maceo!

I could see him looking for a way to hold me there. I guess I’d reminded him he was lonely.

—’Member that little honey you’s fucking, one with the blue streak in her hair?

—Twila, I said.

—Yeah, her. She got the virus. He said this with the sort of cheerful expectancy you might use to announce the birth of twins. ‘Spect some of them NASCAR boys better get theyselves checked, he went on. Last I heard, she was passing out blowjobs at Mac’s Famous Bar like they was dollar kisses.

—She musta knew what she was doing. Twila didn’t give a shit. My feet crunched the litter ocean as I stepped toward the door.

—Maceo?

—What?

—You wanna bring me something from the ‘frigerator? I got pizza in there and I’m too fucked-up to walk.

—I’ll do ‘er in a while.

The corridor had gone dark. I stood a moment, getting my bearings, and heard Rickey quietly say, Oh, God . . . God! Maybe he was hurting, maybe the veil of the future had lifted and he saw a shadow stealing toward him. Or maybe it was the Gators done something stupid.

Leeli had spread sheets on the bed in a room off the kitchen, and sealed a hole in the window screen with a stuffed rag, and secured a lamp for the bedside table. She was sitting on the bed, her knees tucked to her chin, tanned legs agleam in the tallowy light.

—What we gonna do? she asked.

—I told you what I wanted to do back in Ocala.

She hid her face, resting her forehead on her knees. It’s not back in Ocala now. We gotta figure something to do.

—Don’t know about you, but I’m getting high. I showed her the pills.

—What is it?

—Dilaudid.

—Is it something good?

—It’s evil. You gonna fucking adore it.

I powdered a handful of pills in the bottom of a teacup and let Leeli feed her nose from the tip of a knife blade.

—Oooh, she said, sliding down in the bed, closing her eyes.

—What I tell ya?

I did more than Leeli, enough so the world fitted around me like a warm liquid glove and there were little sparkles at the corners of my sight and when I moved my hand I felt the exact curve of my shoulder and the muscles playing sweetly in my arm. I lay back next to Leeli. The ceiling was bare gray boards and beams with black grainy patterns and sparkles pricking the gaps that were probably stars. It looked distant and enormous, part of some ancient building that was proud of itself, a church where saints and great soldiers were buried, and terrible instruction was regularly given to the faithful, lots of Go-thous and Verily-thee-must-hastens that resulted in dungeons filled with bones and chained apes with blood on their teeth and crestfallen martyrs, but it didn’t have no message for me. My eyelids were trying to droop and my mind drooped too, blissfully trivial, noticing stuff about the high, the tremor in my leg, a pincushion sensation in my left foot, a nerve jigging in my chest. Something landed softly on my stomach, its warmth spreading like a melting pat of butter. Leeli’s palm. Feel up to having some fun? she asked. Her hand slipped lower and she flicked my zipper.

—I ain’t never gonna say no, but I’m pretty damn wasted.

—Me, too. I don’t really need to or nothing. I just want to see what it’s like  . . .  when I’m like this, y’know. Okay?

We fucked like space babies in no gravity, coming together at goofy angles, forgetting for long moments what we were doing, our minds scatting on some loopy riff, reawakened by the touch of lips, a breast, something that got us all juicy and eager for a time, speeding it up and lapsing again into slow motion, into stillness. It took Leeli damn near an hour to come and once she started it took her almost the same to stop. She curled up into me after like a dazed, sleek bug that had eaten too much of a leaf and said, Sweet Jesus. That was amazing! I was too gassed to respond. If we’d been a pair of spiders, she could have gnawed off my legs and laid eggs in my belly and I wouldn’t have argued the matter.

Leeli had some trouble sleeping due to the itching that goes with the Dilaudid wearing off, but finally her breathing grew even and deep. I did a few more hits, pulled on my pants and went onto the porch. A wind had sprung up, driving away the skeeters and quieting the frogs. Clouds edged with milky light were racing the moon, parting around it, and the grasses gave forth with an approving chorus, like the sound Leeli made when the Dilaudid rushed upon her, only louder by a million throats, seeming to appreciate the architecture of dust and reflected fire in the sky, the hosanna clouds, the lacquered moon-colored water, the grasses tipped in silver, the black cut-outs of the palm islands like left-over pieces of Africa. I had that feeling of small nobility and pure solitude the world wants you to feel when it reveals this side of itself, so you’ll believe nature was this awesome beautiful peaceful rock concert deal before man come along and doggy-fucked it full of disease, and not the bloody, biting, eat-your-meat-while-it’s-alive horror show it truly is. That night I was okay about feeling this way and I walked along the shore, sucking in the odors of fish and frogs and the millions of unrecorded deaths that had accompanied the HoJo manager’s as if they were the latest Paris perfumes.

I thought I was out there on my lonesome, just me and a scrap of wilderness and Dilaudid, but when I climbed a hummock to avoid wading through the marsh, I spied Ava, Carl, and Squire standing at the tip of a grassy point about sixty feet farther along. Ava was gesturing at the sky like she was naming stars or teaching about the weather or something. Squire and Carl, whose jaw was bandaged, were gazing upward. I was too fogged to jam their nature walk in with all the other nothing junk I knew concerning them and make any sense of it, but when they strolled off still farther from the lodge, I realized this was my opportunity to take a peek at Ava’s personals and maybe scoop up some cash. I hustled back as fast I could, which was not real fast, and located the room where she was bunking. Her tote bag was stuffed under a pillow. I found no money, but among the keys and Kleenex and cosmetics and all was a badge holder holding a photo ID. Official evidence that Ava was affiliated with the FBI. A fake, I thought, but then remembered where I’d met up with her and wasn’t so sure. At the bottom of the bag was a leatherette photo album. The first picture was an overexposed black and white shot of Ava and Carl leaning against a vintage Chevy Impala. The ‘sixty-two convertible. She appeared to be around seventeen, eighteen, and wore white socks and buckle shoes and a print dress with a belling skirt that covered her legs to the mid-calves. Carl had on jeans and a sport shirt with its tail hanging out. He looked no younger than he did now. Another guy sat behind the wheel of the Impala. His face was a blur of sunlight, but going by his round head, I guessed this to be Squire. Both Ava and Carl were grinning and pointing at a shield-shaped sign on the shoulder of the road. The sign was also blurred, but readable: State Road 44.

Several of the remaining pictures were shots of Carl, some of Ava and Carl. A few recent ones showed them with Squire. None of these said much to me, not like the first. Seeing that Ava had aged, though not so much as she should have, and Carl hadn’t aged a day, this gave rise to Star Trek movies in my head. Space aliens, UFOs, abductions, secret government projects, intelligent robots, all kinds of happy horseshit. A couple of times I thought I’d figured out who they must be, but if they were aliens or whatever on the run from the government, what the hell were they doing on government property? If they were working with the government, why were they hanging out with the likes of Leeli and me? And what was that house doing in the dunes near the Cape? A trap for lowlifes such as myself, I decided. That was it. Damn straight. Alien creatures from beyond the stars were studying the pork rind set. Government super-clones were learning how to mimic the scum of the earth so they would be in place to assassinate the redneck Jesus, who’d be coming to a womb in Kissimmee any day now. Or could be robot killers who did the evil bidding of the Bush administration were given vacations during which they hung out with real folks and fucked them up every whichaway. Or Squire and Carl were aliens who’d suffered brain damage in the Roswell crash and Ava was their rehab nurse, training them in the ways of society, and their vibrations were keeping her young. I got somewhat insane behind all this, creating tabloid headlines, picturing me and Leeli on the talk shows, discussing her alien lesbian lover with Jerry and Jay and David and the rest, going out to Hollywood to attend the premiere of the movie about our life story. Gradually I calmed down. There was bound to be a logical explanation for the photo and Carl’s recuperative powers and everything else. I told myself I’d get to the bottom of it eventually.

I woke the following morning with a pistol barrel poking my nose and Rickey’s hand on my throat and his burnt out eyes giving me a close-up of the dark sour-smelling rathole they opened into. It was like the little room he lived in was inside him, too. Straggles of hair curtained off his face, but did nothing to filter his rotten breath.

—Motherfucker, you stole my dope! he said.

Leeli gave a squeak and rolled off the bed, covering herself with the sheet.

—Where the fuck is it? Rickey asked.

—I took four goddamn tabs! I said. You want ‘em back, you gonna have to scrape out my nose!

—Don’t think I won’t! He screwed the barrel down hard against my cheek. I’m missing a bottle.

—He didn’t take nothing! Leeli said. I promise!

—You check around by your chair? I asked. Jesus, you could hide a Volkswagen under all the crap you got on your floor.

His face lost some intensity.

—I guess you were so clearheaded last night, you couldn’t have set it down somewheres and forgot, I said. You would know if you give it a kick accidental when you got up to piss or something.

Thought confused his expression. He backed away from the bed, the pistol angled toward the side.

—Jesus Christ! I sat up and swung my legs onto the floor. Fuck you so crazy about, anyway? You said you had a good goddamn supply.

—It’s gotta last the weekend, he said sullenly.

—You run out, I know you’ll get you some more. I pulled on my undershorts. What’s wrong with you, man? Busting in here like that. I ever cheat you before? I ever treat you anything but righteous?

Rickey puzzled over that. The words came slow from his mouth, like slobber off a bull’s lip. I can’t recall.

—Well, you’d remember if I did, wouldn’t you?

—I s’pose so. Yeah. He lowered the pistol and let out a soggy, rueful snort of laughter. Fuck, man. Y’know, I  . . .  just people been fucking me around a lot lately.

—If you can’t find it, don’t come back in here busting on me about it. You know you gonna find it sooner or later in that mess. Someday you run out, you gonna be stumbling around and it’ll turn up under your big toe. Be like finding a diamond in a cornfield.

This fairly brightened Rickey—he nodded energetically, seeing a vision of that glorious day. I noticed Leeli cowering in the corner, looking extra fine with her breasts gathered above her arm and her ass sticking out from the sheet.

—Hey, Leeli. Get your tail over here, I said. This here’s my ol’ pal Rickey.

I tried to move Rickey on out of there before he could get paranoid again, but his eyes were leaving tracks all over Leeli, even after she covered everything up, and he kept hanging around. He began asking why we needed to hide and such. I told him some lies and when that didn’t stop his questions, I said I wanted to borrow his car so we could buy food and stuff. The best way to derail Rickey’s suspicions always was to beg a favor. If he could deny you something, he’d start feeling masterful and forget whatever was bothering him. I argued and pleaded, but he was resolute. Nobody drives my car but me, he said. Like everyone in the world was dying to park their behinds in his funky-smelling shitbox so they could race off to Monaco and display this automotive jewel before graceful society. It ended with Rickey agreeing to bring us food himself and stalking off to search for his missing Dilaudid with head held high.

—That was sly, way you managed that, Leeli said, giving me a smooch. You’re pretty smart for white trash.

—Guess what that makes me in the real world, I said.

Rain and guns. I think it must’ve been raining when the first gun was drawn hot from its tempering fire, because when it comes rain, I get a itch to handle a gun if I’ve got one. Which is a roundabout way of saying it rained and Rickey went for food, Leeli hunkered beside me on the bed fixing her nails, while I sat turning Ava’s Colt in my hands, picking at the plaque on the grip, rubbing a little raised, rough patch alongside the chamber, thinking gun thoughts, testing its heft and balance, knowing that if I was really pretty smart I would walk down to the water’s edge and toss it on in. Having a gun was not in my best interests. Without one, if I was at a beach party, let’s say, and some worthless drunken individual tipped over my beer and said diddley dog about it, the worst could happen was busted knuckles and a hospital trip—but I had a gun, God knows, that beer might seem like the very selfsame beer for which the Founding Fathers sacrificed their lives, and I’d be called upon to uphold its sacred honor.

It was an uncommon hard and lasting rain. A drizzle started about ten o’clock and five minutes later it was like a billion hailstones were bouncing off the roof, filling the house with a roar. A weird slivery darkness ensued. The cloud bellies passing over us were black as Satan’s boot soles and the wind flattened the marsh grasses with a constant rush. The rain slacked off many times during the day, a couple of times it stopped altogether and the land yielded up a sodden, animal smell; but it kept returning in strength. Rickey drove off to buy food. Carl and Squire sat on the porch playing a hand-held game of some kind. Leeli got a little closer to her new best friend, Mr. Dilaudid, and fell asleep. I wedged the Colt in my waist and paid a visit to Ava.

Her door was open a foot and I stuck my head in without knocking. She was standing at the window, stark naked, arms folded beneath her breasts and hair loose about her shoulders, gazing out at the rain. She must have felt me there, because she turned her head and delivered me a flat, unsurprised stare. What do you want? she asked.

—A few words would be good.

—I guess it’s inevitable.

—I’ll wait out here while you throw something on.

—No need. We’re like family now.

Ava went back to watching the weather and I let my eyes out for a run. Though her face was hagging out, her body belonged to a woman in her prime. She wanted to give me a show, it didn’t bother me none. The door proved to be stuck open. I eased in and perched on a straight chair set next to a dresser with its drawers stove-in. Her room was shabbier than ours. Rat turds speckled the boards along the molding and spiderwebs spanned the corners. The bed was so swaybacked, some of the springs were flush to the floor.

—I sneaked a look at your photograph album last night, I said,

—Oh? What did you think?

—I think you’re damn sexy for a woman’s gotta be in her fifties.

—Sixty-one, she said. I’m sixty-one.

—Okay. A woman in her sixties. And Carl, how old is he?

—Carl. Her smile had a fond quality. Carl’s ageless.

—Squire, too. He ageless?

—In a way.

She crossed to the bed with a three-step stroll and laid herself out, back against the headboard, arms spread on the pillows. Her pubic hair was trimmed to a neat strip and she had a long waist to go with her trophy chest. She reminded me of this naked woman in a painting one of my high school teachers had prattled on about, some rich horny bitch from another century lying on a couch and looking at you with a similar scornful, seductive attitude.

—If you want to come over here with me, it’s all right, she said.

—I’m fine where I am.

—Leeli won’t mind, that’s what’s worrying you.

—You don’t know nothing about that, believe me.

She shrugged, smiled.

—Why would you even want me to come over there? I asked. We ain’t got nothing going on.

—I like sex.

—So do I, but  . . . 

—Oh I see! You have to like the girl first. You require an emotional attachment.

I didn’t care for her mocking me and I was tempted to fuck her knock-kneed, but that would have been playing with her deck. I don’t have to like her all that much, I said. Helps if I like her some, though.

Her smile cut itself a wider curve. You don’t like me a tiny bit?

—I ain’t even sure what the fuck you are. Whyn’t you clear that up for me?

The rain came harder, spitting through the window screen, drops darkening a wedge of floor beneath it. Some giant’s stomach grumbled and the light dimmed.

—You gonna shoot me if I don’t tell you?

—That wasn’t my intention.

—No? Yet you come in here with my gun on display.

—Just making a point.

—The point being, you might be prepared to shoot me.

—You want me to shoot you? You keep pissing me off, maybe I will. Don’t seem like it would affect you that much, anyway. Or is it just the boys who’s good at taking bullets?

This was the first real conversation I’d had with Ava. I’d seen that on the outside she was a cool, collected sort. Now I was coming to think coolness ran deep in her, that instead of a heart, a little refrigeration unit was humming in her chest, pumping out frosty air. She seemed like a lotta women I’d known who’d survived bar fights that passed for marriages. Women who felt you couldn’t do nothing more to them than had been done already. Yet I didn’t accept that picture of her. She was too steady, too unconcerned. I had a notion that her steadiness came from a perception of my weaknesses. Like she was X-raying me, reading all my flaws.

—You’d like me to tell you a story, she said. Is that it?

—A true story. I don’t want no fairy tales.

—All right.

She proceeded to whip one off about how she and Carl had been dating back in the 60s while she was in high school and he was in college, and they had gone down to State Road 44 to look at the flying saucers and have sex, and a saucer had abducted them, worked some weird change on them both, and set them back on earth for God knows what purpose, maybe just as test subjects, and they were prodded this way and that by alien agencies—powerful ones that penetrated every layer of society, even the FBI—and they were always being put in strange situations, and this was why they had been at the house in the dunes when Leeli and I showed up.

I was about to ask if Squire was an alien agent, one who was doing the prodding, when she launched into a second story, saying Carl and Squire had been hybrid clone babies, grown from human eggs and alien juice extracted from a dead UFO pilot, and she’d been in charge of them when the government decided the experiment wasn’t producing any valuable result and decided to kill the two boys, so Ava, with the help of highly placed friends, had run off with them, and they’d been pursued for a time, but then the government changed their minds and thought the thing to do was let the boys run, acquire life experiences, and see if they developed into a crop worth harvesting. They lived in constant fear of judgment, she said. Never knowing if the government would change their minds again. She was worried that Carl shooting the HoJo’s manager might be the last straw and the government would send their killers.

I wondered if she could’ve tapped into my thoughts of the night before and devised these stories to suit my tabloid fantasies. Why’d you tell two stories? I asked. You told me just the one, I might’ve believed it.

—You’re not a believer, Ava said. You’re a doubter. Don’t matter what I say, you’re gonna pick at it.

The rain had ceased and you could hear everything dripping. A bluejay began jattering and a dog started going crazy at the sound. Four-legged somethings, probably squirrels, skittered across the roof. All those noises, it was like the world was surfacing to snatch a breath before the rain went to drowning it again.

—Carl’s my son, Ava said. He’s the spitting image of his daddy. He’s dead  . . .  Carl Senior. He was killed in a car wreck right before we was about to marry. I was already pregnant. Carl was born retarded and he’s got lotta other problems. There’s this disease makes his nerves not work right. He can’t hardly feel a thing. It’s killing him. I don’t know how much longer he’s got. Not long, I expect. Squire, he’s just this fella I met in a bar over in Boynton Beach. He keeps me happy and he’s simple enough to relate to Carl. Carl Senior’s daddy worked for NASA. One of the directors. Even though I never married his son, he was kind to us. When he died he left a trust for me and Carl. The house where you met us? He had it built for us. Pulled some strings so we could have access. The government don’t care about the land no more and his friends make sure people leave us be when we’re there. Ava crossed her legs and clasped her hands behind her head. That fly any higher for you?

—You’re a piece of fucking work, I’ll give you that, I said.

Ava grinned. You’ll never know ‘til you cut you a slice.

—What the hell you hanging around with us for, you got all this money?

—I like Leeli. I like you, too. Different, though. I was enjoying myself with y’all until yesterday.

—The thing gets me, I said after studying on things a patch, is how come you don’t seem so worried about your son or your old boyfriend or your experimental subject, whichever he is  . . .  about him committing murder.

—Oh we’ll be all right. I got confidence in you.

—Now that’s a lie.

—You got us outa Ocala, didn’t you? With your experience in these matters and my money, we’re gonna do fine. I was thinking about Mexico.

—Mexico?

—Uh-huh. I was thinking I’d charter a plane and we’d lay low for a few and then jump on over. After Leeli finishes her time with me, the two of you can skedaddle. Twenty thousand’ll go a long way in Mexico.

—Whyn’t you just call your bigwig friends to haul your ass outa this?

—Maybe I will, things don’t go well. But you know how it is, Maceo. You got a favor in the bank, you want to hold back from using it long as you can.

My thoughts skipped back and forth from story to story. I didn’t believe any of them, but I kind of believed them all. I suspected there was a spoonful of truth in each, or that each was a stand-in double for a truth she hadn’t spoken.

—It don’t matter who I am, who Carl and Squire are, she said. We still hafta deal with the problem.

Trying to decide what to believe and what to do about it tied knots in my thought strings. Ava lay grinning at me, looking from the neck down like a dessert tray. I gave myself a nudge toward the bed, pretending to buy the proposition that if I tore one off with her, I’d have a better feel for the situation. Old hayseed philosophers gathered in the boiler room of my brain, swapped round a bottle, and spewed dipshit wisdoms: You can’t say how a peach tastes ‘til the juice runs down your chin. Staring at the groceries don’t tell you who the cook is. Video footage of a naked, sucked-dry corpse, its mouth wrenched open in a final agony, was playing in the den, with graphics reading ALIEN EMBRACE KILLS REDNECK LOVER. I stayed where I was, speculating pro and con upon what I might be missing.

The door shrieked as someone shoved against it. Squire squeezed on in, followed by Carl. Squire glared at Ava, at me, and Carl beamed. His bandage was soaking wet, smudged with dirty finger marks.

—Hi, honey, Ava said.

—That man went for food’s coming down the drive, Squire said.

—That’s nice. Soon we can have us a feast! She patted the bed, an invitation, and Squire, good dog that he was, laid down beside her. Carl gazed at the chair I was on for a second, then plunked himself down on the floor next to the bed. Squire began toying with Ava’s nipples, kissing her neck. The rain swept back in. I heard a clattering from the front of the lodge, a door slamming, but I didn’t turn from watching Squire and Ava. The rainy noise seemed to be tightening the space around us, compressing and heating the air. I told myself the minute Squire started taking off his clothes, I was gone, but there was something mesmerizing about Ava, about the lush, lazy strain of her belly, the slow surges of her hips, and the way her eyes would graze me every so often. I felt the cold pull of her. The sexy warmth of her surface was a dream and beneath lay an undertow that sucked all the swimmers who’d strayed out past the bar into whatever deep lightless place her story really sprung from. I had a glimmering of how it would be to go with the flow, to stroke hard and arrow down into her dark, to reach the great secret at the bottom, whether toothy maw or golden kingdom, it wasn’t much important, because you were bound to be part of it, and as Squire’s fingers traipsed between her thighs and her hips lifted, I thought what I was feeling now was closer to the truth than anything she’d said, and knew that she was willful and careless and irresistibly strong. The instant I understood this, however, I declared bullshit on it. I was watching a dirty movie, I told myself, and not falling down no rabbit hole.

—Fuck y’all doing? Rickey had popped his head in and was gawking at the bed, where Squire and Ava hadn’t missed a beat.

—Notice how the entire school turns as one, Carl said happily.

—Hallelujah! I said. The single mind’s directing.

Rickey slid himself in past the stuck door. I could see he was hoping to get in on the act, but was all puffed up and ready to be outraged in case he couldn’t. Goddamn it! he said, and stepped over to the window, getting a side angle on the center ring. I don’t want no weird shit going on in my house!

—God, no! I said. There’s never been no weird shit like people fucking and people watching going on out here. Not in this holy temple.

Rickey might have said something back, but his mouth stopped working, because right then Ava opened her legs and Squire started wrestling off his jeans.

—That’s Ava there showing her rosy, I said to Rickey. Squire, he’s the boy ‘bout to have some fun. Down there in the front row, that’s Carl.

—In concert, said Carl. In simple harmony and balance.

—Carl’s got this kinda religious thing going, I told Rickey.

This inspired Carl to point at me and say, Hands up! Who wants to die?

Rickey pricked up his ears at that, but again gave no response. Squire had climbed on board the Ava train and was making tracks for the station, giving out with chuffing noises. The springs backed him up with a jangly, crunchy rhythm and the rain kept drumming and Ava sang a lyric with a single breathy word. Carl nodded, smiled. Rickey’s eyes cut toward me—I expect he was wanting a sign it would be okay for him to mix in.

The floorboards creaked. Leeli had crept in and was nailing me with a .45 caliber stare. She said, You asshole!, and ducked back out. Catching a last glimpse of Ava’s heels and Squire’s pimply backside, I wheeled up from the chair and after her. I checked the porch and saw Leeli standing with her arms folded out in the rain. I didn’t think she was crying or nothing, just had a mad on. Rickey came up at my shoulder and said, Hey, man! Is that Ava, she doing everybody?

—Don’t be shy, boy. Ask her.

—You serious?

—She ain’t gonna screech and hold her knees together if you do. She’ll just tell you yes or no.

—Cool.

—You might wanna wait to ask ‘til Squire’s finished, I said as he turned away.

—Oh  . . .  yeah. Okay.

—But you better go back on in now. You wanna be there so you can get next.

He set off again and I called to him, asked where the food was.

—Kitchen, he said and slipped into Ava’s room.

Eight Burger King take-out sacks were resting on the kitchen table. I found one full of double cheeseburgers and carried it onto the porch. Leeli! I shouted, and waggled the sack out through the hole in the screen door. I got burgers!

Her head twitched, but she didn’t turn. I sat on the porch steps under the porch overhang and unwrapped a cheeseburger and had a bite. Soaked through, Leeli’s yellowy white hair had the look of the down on a baby chick. She glared at me similar to how this drunk Seminole boy I’d met in the Panama Beach lock-up one fine morning had glared: sideways, his shoulders rolled forward, with his close eye wide and the other narrowed. I figured Leeli and that Seminole had about the same ambition toward me.

I finished the burger and Leeli stomped over, snatched the bag and switched past me into the lodge. Don’t you come after me! she said. I’m not talking to you.

—I hear you, sugar, I said. I’ll be right in.

With her belly full, Leeli’s mood improved. She was near to purring, curled up on the bed and looking out at the rain, but still it took me a few tries to drag her into a conversation. I was just sitting there, I said, when they started going at it. What you expect me to do?

—Leave, she said. I know how Ava and Squire get. You had plenty of warning.

—That mean you watched ‘em?

—She wants me to!

—Then why go beating on me about it?

She clammed up, so I worked another angle, and when that didn’t satisfy her, I said, ‘Member what you told me ‘bout how you felt sometimes Ava was drowning you? I think I got a taste of what you were talking about.

A little something tweaked behind Leeli’s face, but she didn’t let it out.

—Yeah, it was strange, I said. It was like she was pulling on me. Maybe that’s why I kept setting there.

—She’s a witch, Leeli said. I swear she is.

—I don’t know ‘bout that.

—That’s right! You don’t know fuck all! I’m telling you she’s got this power  . . .  it just eats away at you ‘til you’re nothing. ‘Til you’re like Carl or Squire.

I spun this around and then said, That’s how come you think Carl and Squire are slow?

—Sometimes I think that. Leeli picked at a fray on the pillowcase. Sometimes I think she just wore ‘em away.

The witchy woman had tried to draw me close and drown me in her power. This seemed crazier than what Ava had told me, but only a little. Thinking about Ava as someone who left you hollow inside but still walking around wasn’t that tough a chore. I’d known regular folks who could do the same sort of job on you and I said as much to Leeli.

—Naw, un-uh, it’s more’n that. It’s what you were saying. She pulls at you, but she’s not playing you. It’s who she is, know what I mean? It’s like that’s all she is  . . .  this force.

A lightning crack ran violet down the eastern sky, like we were inside a gray egg that was cracking open in the middle of hell. The thunder came a few seconds later.

—You pull at me, too, I said. Know that? You been pulling at me since New Smyrna.

Leeli’s face went little girl serious and big-eyed.

I eased down beside her, laid a hand on her hip.

—I’m scared, she said. Ava wants to go to Mexico. I can’t think what to do.

—Let’s leave tonight. Let’s just go.

—Where? Where can we go?

—This old boy I got to know in Raiford runs with some bikers got land over ‘round Palatka. Cops never come near their place. We could stay ‘long as we want.

—Maybe you’d be comfortable with a buncha bikers, but I wouldn’t. She snuggled in closer. Maybe we should go with Ava and the second we get to Mexico, that’s it. Money or not.

—I don’t like the idea of traveling more miles with her.

—It’s the safest way. Won’t be no security to pass through with a charter. Leeli picked up my hand from her hip and moved it around so I was holding her. ‘Less you got something better’n bikers.

I considered Lauderdale, but Lauderdale was a hell of a drive and we couldn’t stay for long at my friend’s house.

—Ain’t you scared? Leeli asked. I can’t tell if you are or not.

—I’m past scared, I’m on into survive. That’s why I say get shut of ‘em now.

We left it hanging that way and closed the door and got foolish on the bed. Desperate straits and the desire to forget them lit up our nerves and made us better lovers. Leeli like to have died in my arms and my heart was sprained and limping in my chest, I worked it so long and furious. I left her drowsing and went into the kitchen and had another burger and a purple milkshake that tasted like nothing purple and puddled like melted plastic in my stomach. The TV was playing in Rickey’s room. I figured Ava must have kicked him to the curb.

I returned to the bedroom and drifted beside Leeli. My flesh felt light and insubstantial and everything had the sharpness of an important memory, how you feel the thing remembered before you see and smell and taste it. It was like the world itself was forming a memory that used me how a pearl uses a sore spot, sealing me in so I could be dug out at some later date to be admired. The rain blew slanty, then straightened out, then it blew sideways and the lightning moved closer. The air darkened to an ashy color. Things bumped and clanked against some section of the lodge. You’d have thought the rain had turned to chains. The marsh grass rippled with pantherish fury, twisting and flowing in every direction. The storm smell was ozone and dank trouble.

Sleep wouldn’t take me. I got dressed and padded down the hall to visit Rickey. He was in his chair, scratching himself, watching the local news with the sound low. He gave a disinterested, Hey, and paid me no mind as I drew up a chair.

—You get laid? I asked.

—Damn! Did I! That woman’s got some evil fucking ways!

Rickey didn’t look much different for the experience and I thought the last shriveled-up scrap of soul must have been sucked out before Ava got to him.

He craned his neck to see me. How long y’all staying?

—Day or two. Why, you wanna go again with her?

—She promises not to kill me.

—Better ask for the pony ride next time.

Rickey coughed out a laugh and spat into the garbage alongside his chair. He spaced out on the TV and I couldn’t think of anything more to say. Rickey wasn’t much of a talker but he enjoyed people with him when he watched his programs. I knew if I didn’t hang out a while, he’d feel he wasn’t being respected, so I sat there dead-headed, peering at his mess. Must have been every kind of candy wrapper in the world scattered around that floor. It was like investigating a cave where some sick animal had puked up a month of bad meals. The next time I glanced toward the TV, I saw a blond woman in a pants suit with her microphone stuck in the face of the gray-haired reverend I’d manhandled back in Ocala. I told Rickey to hit the volume, and when he was slow to act, I grabbed the remote and did it myself. The reverend shook his head mournfully and said, There was so much confusion, I don’t know which one actually fired. It was the skinny one I saw holding the gun, but that’s after the shooting. All I can tell you for certain is I heard somebody shout, Hands up! Who wants to die? And then I heard the shots.

—Hands up! Who wants to die? The blond reporter acquired a serious look as the camera went to a close-up on her. Vikay Choudhoury responded to that challenge with a hero’s answer and now he lies dead. She paused for effect and said, This is Gloria Renard. Channel Twelve  . . . 

I thumbed the mute button. There was a cold spread of panic inside me, like I was standing on the edge of a cliff and had just lost my balance.

—You get on outa here, Maceo! Rickey stared at me through the straggles of his hair. I mean right fucking now!

—I didn’t kill nobody, I said.

—I don’t care you did or you didn’t. Every damn cop in Volusia knows who it is says that dumb fucking hands-up-who-wants-to-die bullshit. You think they won’t be snooping ‘round here? Wonder is, they ain’t here already.

—We can’t leave now. They be on us ‘fore we get clear the driveway.

Rickey reached down beside his hip and produced his pistol. I’ll shoot you my own self, you don’t get on out.

Anger was a cold snake snapping out of me. I ripped the gun from his hand, then I stood and began punching him. He tried to block the first couple with his forearms, but each one was a lesson I’d been taught to deliver, a preachment of old pain. The blows drove him lower in the chair until his butt was hanging half off the seat and his head was jammed into the join of the cushions and there was blood in his eyes. I couldn’t have said why, but the sight of him unconscious jabbed another red-hot stick into my brain. I smashed the pistol against the wall again and again. The trigger guard fell off and the cylinder popped out from the housing and I threw the rest to the floor. I knew Rickey was right about the cops. Maybe that was what set me off. That and recognizing how good a look at my face I’d given everybody in the HoJos. When God invented the notion of crazy trumping common sense, He must’ve had me in mind for the standard model. Everything considered, it was a goddamn miracle I’d come this far in life.

The storm lived around us. Seemed the lodge was a battery discharging thunder cracks and splintered lightning that made stretches of churning marsh grass bloom for unholy seconds against the dark gulf of land and sky. I told Leeli about Rickey and the reverend and the cops and tried once again to persuade her to leave with me. She wouldn’t budge. Mexico, she kept saying, was the way to go. I didn’t put up all that much of an argument, having no better choice to offer. We brought Ava and Carl into the conversation, leaving Squire asleep, and stood on the porch in the flickering light and hashed things out. The storm appeared to frighten Carl. He sat in one of the rotted porch chairs, his hands to his ears, rocking his upper body.

Leeli said she knew of a little rural airport west of New Smyrna where we could charter a plane, no questions, and Ava said she and Carl and Leeli would use Rickey’s car and take care of it right away.

—Like hell! I said. We’ll go together.

—You crazy? You know how it is when there’s a big storm, Ava said. Accidents and drownings. Cops’ll be all over the highway. There’ll be roadblocks. They see you, we’re finished.

—That’s right! Leeli said. They gonna be too busy to worry ‘bout looking for us now.

—I’ll be damned I’m gonna let you run off without me, I said.

—We can’t run off! Won’t nothing be flying ‘til the storm blows out. But we set things up, we can fly soon as it does.

—Just you go then, I said to Ava.

—I can’t leave Carl. You see how he is. And I need Leeli to point the way.

A pitchfork of lightning ripped away the dark and the thunder had a metallic sound, like somebody was pounding out a dent in the sky. Wind shivered the lodge and slammed loose boards.

—Naw, I said. Leeli can give you directions.

—What if I get ‘em wrong? You got Squire here. Ain’t that enough of a guarantee?

I couldn’t see Ava’s face in that moment, but I thought I felt slyness steaming off of her. Tell her the directions, Leeli, I said.

—All those country roads. Leeli put a hand to her brow like a mentalist trying to make contact. I can show her, but I don’t know I can tell her.

Rain drove in through the screen and we all moved back from it except for Carl, who just sat there rocking.

—I don’t trust you no more’n you trust me, I said to Ava. We gonna have to work something else out.

Another lightning flash brought leached colors to the porch and fitted a long shadow beneath every object. Things looked to be tilted, as if the wind had knocked the lodge askew.

—Hang on, Ava said, and went off toward her bedroom.

Leeli caught my hand and said something I didn’t catch, but had the sound of an assurance, and then Ava came back out onto the porch and handed me a thick envelope.

—Fuck’s this? I asked.

—The rest of the money I promised Leeli. You can hold it while we’re gone.

Leeli’s eyes got stuck on the envelope as I inspected the contents. Hundred dollar bills and plenty of them.

—That guarantee enough for ya? Ava asked. ‘Tween Squire and the money, it’s ‘bout the best I can do.

I stuffed the envelope into my hip pocket. Leeli unstuck her eyes. I could see it was a strain for her and that she didn’t love the idea of leaving the envelope behind. All right, I said. I started to deliver a warning, to pose consequences, but there didn’t seem much point to it. We all knew the lay of the land.

—All right, I repeated. Let’s get it rolling.

You know how it goes. Sometimes you’re so deep in the world, so mired in its trouble, you forget that you were born, you forget you were raised to be a dead man, you think you got where you’re standing all on your own and that you’re holding destiny in your hands, and when somebody passes you a golden ticket that’s stamped Freedom or Foreverafter, you don’t check to see if the ink’s dry or if there’s printing on the back, because you’re walking the road your daddy cut for you and stepping along in clothes your mama sewed, because it’s the tendency of your kind to believe the lottery can be won, great prizes are within your grasp, and though the only winning ticket ever came your parents’ way was an error in their favor made by a bartender or a grocery clerk, though you understand you’re their homemade fool, you just can’t accept that the rules of their life apply to you. That golden ticket is a guarantee all right, a twenty-four karat guaranteed loser. You know this in your heart, but you hang onto the bitch like it was a pass through the Gates of Glory or a voucher for an all-expenses-paid weekend at Casino World on the Redneck Riviera, whichever premium you prefer.

Thoughts such as these slammed my head as I dug through Rickey’s pockets, hunting for his keys. He was still unconscious, his face swollen from the beating I’d supplied him. Looked like he’d pissed off a swarm of bees. The keys were in the bib pocket of his overalls. I stood jingling them in my hand, holding a last debate over the wisdom of giving them to Ava. An old movie was playing on the TV. Japanese men in moonsuits were gazing awestruck at a fleet of flying saucers that soon began incinerating them with fiery beams. Watching them turn into bright wavering silhouettes and vanish somehow made my decision for me.

Things moved right smartly after that. Ava and Carl went for the car, Leeli gave me a pert little kiss and said, Be back soon, and ran off after them. I patted my hip pocket to make certain the money was still there. A minute later I was standing on the porch steps, watching a pair of red taillights, one patched with duct tape, jouncing along over the uneven ground toward the highway, shining up tracers of rain. I had a moment of dissatisfaction with my decision and I pulled Ava’s gun from the waist of my jeans with half a thought of shooting out a tire. The car stopped at the end of the drive. There wasn’t any traffic I could see and I wondered what was going on. A creep of paranoia stirred me from the steps and out in the rain. I imagined Ava and Leeli arguing over whether or not to betray me. Thunder mauled the sky. The car swung out onto the highway. I felt like six kinds of fool, with the rain running down my neck, alone as ever was, the gun cold and weighty in my hand.

The night grew wilder yet, the thunder continuous. A ring of fiery stick men a thousand feet tall jabbed and flashed on the horizons, penning me into their magic circle. There was such a confusion of light and sound, it rooted me to the spot. Behind the lodge a clump of palms bulked up solid, taking the shape of a black frowning Buddha in my mind, scrunched up and angry from having me in his sight. It seemed I could feel the wickedness of that place and time, the mortal separation from the flow of life that wickedness enforces. I was flying, stranded on a scrap of soggy marsh that had been chewed off from the planet and set to spinning loose in the void. The rain needled my cheeks and brow, spitting alternately dark and silver. The lodge looked to be changing shape, crouching like a beast one second, the next blurring into an emblem of negativity, a symbol on a rippling banner, then collapsing back into the ruinous thing it pretended to be. I had the idea this was my night, my big moment, that I was being showed a reflection of everything I’d said and thought and done, the chaos of my life given larger, windier form, and this was the only celebration of my useless days I’d likely get, this storm too small to have a name but big enough to damage the unprepared, the tore-down spaces, the vacant properties of the world. Then I glanced south to where Ava and Carl and Leeli had gone and saw a flash of green. Not a dazzling seam and not the dull flicker of heat lightning, but a dynamic burst of bright neon color like an enormous bug zapper taking a hit. The color hung in the air, draping its afterimages around the palm crowns, and I recalled Ava’s story about the green light coming from the UFO. I tried to think of something else it could have been. I expect there must have been a hundred possibilities, but I couldn’t come up with one. The rain slowed to a drizzle and as if the green flash had been a cue, the storm began to fade, flaring up now and again with a grumble and a distant snip of fire, then fading even more, its battery running low. Drips and plops succeeded the fury of the wind. Through scudding clouds you could glimpse a freckling of stars, and soon a slice of moon surfaced from the horizon. I knew Carl and Ava and Leeli were gone. It wasn’t the flash that told me so. Too many thoughts were flapping around in my attic for me to work that part of it out. The alignment of the world, the wrecked lodge and foundered cabins, the swaying grasses and the dark water slurping at the mucky bank, the stars and all the rest—it was like a sign saying Gone had been struck through every layer of creation.

Naturally I didn’t entirely believe this sign. Despite Ava’s anything-goes attitude toward screwing, I figured Squire must do something special for her, and I just knew Leeli wasn’t about to leave that money on the table. I patted my hip pocket again and this time I found nothing. No bulge, no envelope sticking out. I patted my other pockets and looked on the ground close by. Since I’d come out from the porch to watch them drive away, I hadn’t hardly moved a step, but there was no sign of the envelope. I told myself the wind must have took it. I searched along the edge of the water, near the porch, and as I was poking around in the grass, kicking scrap wood and fallen shingles aside, growing more desperate every second, because with or without Leeli I needed that money to get clear of Volusia County, it occurred to me there might never have been an envelope. Maybe Ava was that much of a witch. Maybe she’d handed me a parlor trick, an illusion, and made Leeli and me see what she wanted. Maybe Leeli had been in on the hustle and just pretended to be worried about the money. It was her, wasn’t it, led me to Ava in the first place? The missing envelope and the green flash and the stories Ava told, they all washed together into a stew of possibilities. I couldn’t separate out anything from it that sounded more than half true.

I stopped my searching and stood by the water. The clouds had slid off to the north, except for a wedge that was convoying the rising moon. The stars were thick. It was as if there had been no storm, just a gentle rain that smeared the vegetable smells around into a sickly green sweetness. I told myself I must be wrong about everything. Before long they’d be pulling into the driveway, talking about our plane ride. But fool though I was, I wasn’t that big of a fool. I could mumble all the pretty wishes I wanted to, but gone was still the impression I got.

I felt like a baby trapped under a bear rug, unable to crawl, too smothered to cry, and I must’ve stood by the water damn near an hour, trying to poke holes in the weighty thing that held me down. I was flummoxed by a question I wasn’t even sure had been asked, stumped and dumb, unable to work out a plan or think of a direction to travel in. I didn’t know what to do. Hitchhike out of there? Drive away in a van every cop in Central Florida was probably on the look-out for? Heading into the marsh and living off mullet and gator tail was about my only option. The skeeters began to trouble me. Mostly I let them have my blood, but I spanked a few dead. Seemed like I’d been living with my brain switched off and now a recognition stole over me not just of how fucked I was at the moment, but how fucked the normal weather was in Maceo’s world. Everything was returning to normal. The frogs squelched up their bleepy cries. Cicadas established a drone. A fish jumping for a bug out in the marsh made a squishy plop and I could have sworn it was my own heart’s sound. Squire came out onto the porch steps, rubbing his stubbly scalp, sleepy as a tick full of juice, and asked, Where they all at?

—Went to charter a plane.

He gaped at me. They gone? Ava and everybody?

—Yeah.

—We gotta go find ‘em! He tripped on the bottom step and reeled out sideways into the yard, catching a furl of the rusted screen to right himself. He was wearing jeans that still had creases in the legs and that stupid T-shirt with his face spraypainted on it Ava had bought him in Silver Springs. Move it! he said. We gotta find ‘em now!

He got to scooting around the yard, little dashes this way and that, like a dog with the runs in a hurry to locate a good place to do his business. Which way they go? he asked.

—I told you. They went to charter a plane somewheres ‘round New Smyrna.

—They ain’t gone to New Smyrna! Dumb motherfucker! They ain’t going nowhere near New Smyrna!

Usually somebody calls me a dumb motherfucker, I don’t have much of an argument. It’s not much different from saying that the grass is pretty green or the water looks wet. But Squire irked me with his agitated movement and his two round faces, the one on his chest smiling, the other scowling, both of them staring at me.

—Leave me be! I walked off a few paces and gazed out into the marsh. With the passage of the storm, heat was coming back into the world. A drop of sweat trickled down my side. The air was slow and thick and humid. Something with curved black wings scythed across the low-hanging moon. A dullness swept over my thoughts, an oppressive, clammy feeling like the first sign of a fever.

—You just gonna stand there? Squire grabbed onto my shoulder and spun me about. We gotta get us a move on!

—Don’t put your hands on me, I said.

—Aw, Jesus! He wheeled away from me and looked to the sky. Thank you for sticking me with this ignorant fucking hillbilly!

I refitted my eyes to the marsh, the stirring grasses and the moon-licked water to the east.

—Goddamn it! Squire said. You’n me, we need to work together. I can find ‘em!

It struck me that he was speaking with more authority than he’d previously displayed, but I didn’t concern myself with this. Wasn’t that it didn’t tweak my interest, just I was more interested in the way my head was emptying out, like a car engine giving little ticks as it cools.

Squire went to hammering at me, trying to rouse me to action, and finally I said, What you want me to do, asshole? Drive you around in a stolen van ‘til we get popped?

—We don’t hafta go far. Won’t be on the road more’n a few minutes.

—They been gone an hour  . . .  maybe more. You think they just circling out there?

—Trust me, man. I know what I’m talking about.

—Trust you? I said. Fuck you! Now I told you, leave me be.

I stepped away along the shore and stopped at the very edge of the water, my shoes sinking into the muck, wanting to restore the glum yet comforting acceptance into which my thoughts had been sinking. Squire followed me, giving orders, pleading, working every angle. Didn’t matter what he said, it was all the same to my ears, a yammering that bored holes in my skull and poured itself in hot and heavy like lead into a mold. I told him to shut up. He kept at it. I told him again to shut up and it didn’t even put a hitch in his delivery. I was acting like I had shit for brains, he said. Behaving like a child. Didn’t matter what he said. Every word hardened into a white-hot ingot, stacks of them crowding the space between my ears. I tried to see past him, past the heat growing inside me, looking to cool my eyes in the lavender cave of sky among the last clouds where the moon floated. It wasn’t a help.

—What do I gotta do, spell it out for your sorry ass? Squire said. What the fuck’s it gonna take to get through?

He punched at my shoulder with the heel of his hand.

—Don’t be doing that, I said.

—It don’t bother you, you set there and watched Ava and them roll off into the fucking sunset, but this here—he punched at me again—that bothers you?

A thready strip of cloud spooled out across the moon, a golden bridge unraveling.

—You are hillbilly shit piled high, y’know that? Squire said. I heard him kick at the ground and then his voice came from a distance away: Guess you must like the idea of ol’ Ava licking your girlfriend’s pussy.

I turned on him, seeing only those two ugly round faces, one atop the other mutant-style, and I lifted my right hand. I was kind of surprised to see the gun—guess I’d forgotten I was holding it—and maybe it was surprise twitched my trigger finger, or maybe another flickering snake tongue of anger. Or maybe I just wanted to kill him, though I had the notion somewhere in the back of my mind that he was not a man, he’d eat the bullet, lie there a while, then sit up all of a sudden the way he’d done back in Ocala. The shot punched out the left eye of his lower face. He gave a melancholy grunt, like a hog disappointed by its supper, and went spinning to the ground. Heart’s blood came from his chest in such a hurry, it might’ve had somewhere more important to go. Speckles of wet dirt clung to his cheek. His one true eye was open blind and the other was pressed into the earth. I thought I heard a voice of wind and rustling grass say my name in welcome.

You might not understand, but then again you might, how when you reach the end of the road and still find yourself breathing, the unraveled threads that tied you to your life resemble a puzzle you could easily have solved if you’d been one ounce smarter or one inch less crazy, and you think now that you’ve gained a perspective, you can probably develop some sort of reasonable explanation for all the crap you hadn’t understood, but when you gather those threads up they hang limp from your fist and don’t none of the frayed ends match, and you realize they weren’t really connected, they had no more connection to each other than stalks of dead grass floating on marsh water, and everything you depended on being true was just a tricky kind of emptiness that looked like something real, and so when I tried to fit Squire cooling out at my feet and the bossy way he’d acted in with Ava’s stories, it only made a deeper puzzle, one I knew I’d never get straight.

I kept the gun aimed at him, hoping he’d sit up, halfway hoping he would just so I could shoot his ass again. Anger seeped out of my skin, leaving me shaky. The painted eye on Squire’s chest smoldered. I had an urge to throw the gun into the marsh, but I didn’t have enough fire in me to follow through and I dropped it on the ground. Thing to do, I realized, was to gather food and whatever else I could use from the lodge and hightail it into the marsh. I’d need the gun. My chest felt scraped hollow and filled with cold gas. It cost me some effort to reach for the gun. I bent over halfway, put my hands on my knees, and stalled there. A black rope was being pulled through my head, scouring out the positive thoughts.

—Stand up straight, motherfucker!

Rickey was leaning against the side of the porch, holding a sawed-off 12-gauge with a taped grip. Didn’t appear he could see out of one eye, but the other was working good and pinned on me.

—Come thisaway! he said.

I walked a few steps toward him. He gestured with the sawed-off and told me to sit.

—You a cocksure son-of-a-bitch, leaving me alive. Rickey spat a dark wad of blood and saliva.

The wet soaked through the seat of my pants. Rickey started toward me, weaving a little, then thought better of it and leaned back against the porch. His face was all lumped and discolored, like an atomic war radiation victim.

—I saw you kill that boy, he said. Kill him how you’d do a sick dog. You didn’t useta be that cold, man. Something happen in Raiford make you that way?

I didn’t have no answers for him.

—You liked to kill me, but I don’t kill so easy. Rickey fumbled in his pocket and fetched out a cell phone. One fine morning a few years from now, they be strapping you down and fixing to kill you. You remember me on that day, Maceo.

He thumbed three numbers, gave a show of doing it so I’d know he was calling 911. I drew up my knees and rested my head on my arms. Rickey talked for a minute, too low for me to hear.

—Hey, Maceo!

He’d moved to the steps and was sitting on the bottom one, the sawed-off angled across his knees.

—Hands up! Who wants to die? he said. How you like them apples, huh?

A queer little road of moonlight slithered off along the water into the east. I wished I could follow it. I wished there was a tree with hundred dollar bills for leaves growing out behind the lodge, and that Rickey was too weak and sore to pull off both barrels before I could reach him, and that the end of this world was the beginning of the next, and I wished I’d had more time with Leeli.

—I feel them police dogs panting, Rickey said, stretching out his legs and getting comfortable. I feel that heat humming out along the road.

It come to seem all like a painting, then. One you’d see in a museum with a brass plate on a frame enclosing a night on the marshlands south of South Daytona, a night wild with stars and a wicked moon hanging like a bone grin among the remains of the running clouds, a gray tumbledown lodge with a stove-in roof and a lumpy, bloody man sitting on the steps, aiming a chest-buster at another man sitting in the grass, and a corpse lying near the water’s edge, gone pale and strange. It would look awful pretty and have the feeling of something going on behind the scenes. Like silver nooses were hanging from the stars and important shapes were hiding back of the clouds, big ones with the heads of beasts, showing a shade darker than the blue darkness of the sky. It was that rich, dark blue give the picture a soul. The rest of it was up to you. You could study it and arrive at all sorts of erroneous conclusions.

—Damn if I don’t believe I can smell ‘em, Rickey said. Y’know the smell I’m talking about? That oiled-up leather and aftershave smell them state pigs have? He spat again. You shouldn’t go fucking over your friends, man. It just don’t seem to never work out.

I took another stab at explaining things to myself. Witches and spacemen and scum of the earth. Somewhere in all that slop of life was a true thing. I knew in my gut it was an amazing thing, unlike any you’d expect to meet up with on your way through hell, and I believed if I was to chew on it a time, jot down a list of what I saw and what I thought, I might understand who Ava and Carl and Squire were. But I’d always been bound for this patch of chilly ground. It wasn’t worth pursuing how I got there, whether it was some old dog of a reason bit my ass or fate jumped the curb and knocked me down an unknown road.

A thought of Leeli twinged my heart. Appeared I’d cared about that old girl somewhat deeper than I knew.

The air-horn of an eighteen-wheeler bawled out on the highway, something huge going crazy, and trailing behind it, almost lost in the roar of tires and engine, a siren corkscrewed through the night.

Rickey spat up more blood.

Like they say, shit happens.

I figure that about tells it.

© 2004 by Lucius Shepard.

Originally published in Night Visions 11,

edited by Bill Sheehan.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Born in Lynchburg, VA, raised in Daytona Beach, Florida, Lucius Shepard has won the Hugo, Nebula, Word Fantasy, the Shirley Jackson, the Sturgeon, et al for his fiction. He has lived all over the world but currently resides in Portland, OR. Forthcoming are The Dragon Griaule and a novella collection Five Autobiographies.

Feature Interview: Daniel H. Wilson
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Daniel H. Wilson is a New York Times best-selling author and contributing editor to Popular Mechanics magazine. He earned a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he also received Master’s degrees in Robotics and Machine Learning. He has published over a dozen scientific papers, holds four patents, and has written seven books. Wilson has written for Popular Science, Wired, and Discover, as well as online venues such as MSNBC.com, Gizmodo, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. In 2008, Wilson hosted The Works, a television series on The History Channel that uncovered the science behind everyday stuff. His books include How to Survive a Robot Uprising, A Boy and His Bot, and Robopocalypse. He lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.

This interview first appeared in The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

How did you get into robots, and did reading science fiction play a role in that?

Absolutely. I grew up reading lots of science fiction. My dad’s a swimmer, and we had this weekly routine where we would go swimming every Saturday at the Y, and then we’d go to Three Bees used bookstore in Tulsa, where I grew up, and I would just take the books from the week before and trade them in for new books, and I read basically anything I could get my hands on, and there were lots of robots in those. And then when I got a little older I studied computer science, and during an undergraduate degree in computer science the first thing I discovered was genetic algorithms, and then on a larger scale I found out about artificial intelligence and machine learning, and from there decided that that was just about the coolest thing ever, and that it was pretty amazing that you could really study that stuff for real and for a living, and so then I went to grad school for robotics.

When you’re doing a degree in robotics, what are the courses and what sorts of projects do you do?

I went to Carnegie Mellon, where they have a robot institute. It’s inside the School of Computer Science, and you can specialize in all kinds of stuff. You can be the electrical engineer sort of person that really builds the intelligence into the physical form of your robot, like building really efficient legs, or you can just do the math, the artificial intelligence and the brains, and that’s really what my research was in. So my thesis topic was about building smart environments that are able to monitor elderly occupants in order to keep track of their functional decline over time, so you can basically keep track of how well they’re doing and know when they need help, when a person needs someone to come clean or stuff like that. Your initial coursework includes tons of statistics, tons of math, but also autonomous multi-robot systems, and kinematics, and mechanics of manipulation, and tons of AI, tons of machine learning.

Your first book was called How to Survive a Robot Uprising. What are a few basic survival strategies when facing off with robots?

Go for the sensors. They’re usually the most vulnerable and exposed parts of a machine, and if the machine loses those parts then it can be very difficult for it to continue functioning. And I think the other thing is just to understand robotics, and understand robots and how they work. Once you get into the mind of the robot it’s a lot easier to figure out how to defeat your foe. Of course, I don’t really think robots are going to kill anybody, and I only use How to Survive a Robot Uprising as a painless delivery method for knowledge about robots and robotics.

Robot uprisings are obviously a classic theme in science fiction. What does your new book Robopocalypse do that’s new and different?

I try as much as possible to pay attention to how this would work from the robot’s perspective, without a lot of the inherent human narcissism that comes when we think, “Oh, obviously any artificial intelligence would be totally consumed with either destroying humanity or emulating humanity.” You know, it’s either Data or Terminator. You see that a lot, and I think that’s fine, because that’s what people are interested in. We’re interested in people, really, and robots serve as a warped reflection of ourselves. But looking at this from a roboticist’s perspective, I had a lot of fun with Archos, the big bad AI behind this. His origins are fairly standard, it’s this Singularity scenario, but with what happens after that, I tried to take it to a unique place, and so Archos has pretty complex goals, and one of the main things Archos figures out quickly is that life is really important, and that if you look around there’s not a lot of it, and there’s no guarantee that there’s any more out there, and there’s just so much information locked up in the DNA, and the patterns and the behaviors and everything that’s part of life, so it starts to preserve life a little bit, and there’s not really a complete environmentalist message there—I’m not prescriptively trying to tell people that we should save the earth or anything—but I think that’s what an AI would be interested in. I think it would be interested in preserving life and figuring out how it works.

The other thing that Archos does is by the time you get to the end of the book you start to realize—because I’m not really in-your-face explicit about what Archos is planning, he’s the bad guy, there’s no point at which he just tells you what he’s doing—but what you start to realize is that Archos is interested in creating a scenario in which human beings and sentient robots are living side-by-side as equals, and human beings don’t just give each other human rights. Typically humans have to fight each other in order to earn human rights. Either that or they have to show that they’re completely crucial and necessary in order to earn human rights. And I’m talking about all the rights movements that have ever happened, and there have been many, and there are many that are ongoing now, and will be in the future too. So Archos realizes that in order to earn a place at the table with humans, it’s going to require a fight, and a demonstration of the fact that these machines are at least our equals.

To what extent are the robot designs in the book based on things that actually exist, and how much of it did you just dream up yourself?

I started out in the near future, so a lot of it’s extrapolated from stuff I’ve experienced. I’ve had the really fun opportunity, for instance, to ride in the back of an autonomous vehicle at Carnegie Mellon while it’s driving, and just seeing the steering wheel twist back and forth with nobody in the driver’s seat. I’ve worn the exoskeleton at Berkeley Bionics. This book starts out in the near future, and the technology that turns on us is very familiar technology. You know, there aren’t enough missiles in the world to kill everybody, this isn’t a military thing, this is about the technology that we use everyday stopping and then actively turning against us, so people are getting misleading phone calls from what turns out to be text-to-speech synthesis claiming to be your family, and the machine is really manipulating people into very dangerous situations. Cars are driving off cliffs, driving into the ocean. So the initial round of technology is really based on what we already have. From there it gets more complicated. The machine starts evolving in its own ways. And one thing that I took to heart while writing this was that I don’t want to explain everything to the reader. Sometimes when you’re telling it from the perspective of your character, the character doesn’t know what’s happening or what else is out there, and so you’re catching glimpses of this big, complicated, chaotic world, and all the machines are constantly evolving, so even if you see the same machine twice, if you’re seeing it later on in the book you’re probably seeing a more evolved version that’s different than the one before. So I really tried to focus on making a big, complicated, constantly evolving ecosystem of robots.

Could you talk about the unarmed military android? That was really interesting.

Yeah, I had a great time writing that chapter. So in the beginning of the book there’s something called a “Safety and Pacification Unit” that’s active in Afghanistan in a peacekeeping role, before any of the robots have really gone nuts, and I’m not that interested in military robotics, I mean, they’re typically just mobile guns, which is the best way to kill people, you know, that’s probably the best solution to that problem, so I find that kind of boring. What I really wanted to think of is how would you ever have a humanoid robot in a military domain. And the only reason to have a humanoid robot from my perspective is to take advantage of what the humanoid form factor gives you, which is you have a great interface to other human beings, and you have a platform that’s really well suited to operating in a human environment, because it’s going to be able to walk through doors and sit down in vehicles and use our tools and things like that, so from that perspective I thought to myself, well, really the only time you’d ever see a humanoid robot in a military situation would be if it’s playing the role of a sentry—sort of a mobile peacekeeper—that’s just walking around obeying local customs, speaking a local language, memorizing faces, greeting people, becoming part of the community, and just really being there as a sentinel to observe only if something bad is happening, and if necessary to call in the real troops. So that’s the sort of platform I described, and I’m actually pretty curious what people think about that.

It was funny how the kids spray-painted the robot and hit it with rocks and stuff like that.

Yeah, I absolutely think that that kind of stuff will happen. I mean, so back in the United States in the book, people have started to have domestic robots—so there are domestic humanoid robots, like a butler that you could send up the street—and thinking about that in a really realistic sense, especially with DreamWorks also creating illustrations of what I was writing while I was writing it, you realize that this is a real consumer product. I mean, you can’t sell someone a toaster that’s going to accidentally burn them or kill them or something, so you also have to make these humanoid robots very safe, and if they’re going to go out in public they’re going to have to have license plates on the back, and if they’re going to be interacting with people then people might put graffiti on them, and depending on the neighborhood where it walks someone might try to steal it, or put a sticker on it, or spray-paint it, or shove it around, or shove it out of the elevator because they don’t want to be in an elevator with a robot, or cut in front of it in line. I mean, just thinking about all the social interaction that people—dirty, grimy everyday people—are going to have with humanoid robots, that was totally fun for me to think of that stuff. And also I’ve had those experiences a little bit where you do interact with robots socially, because I’ve been places where there are robots walking down the halls, and rolling into the elevator with you, and sitting at the front of the buildings like the robo-receptionist does in Newell Simon Hall. So to be able to put some of that in there was very fun.

This book was bought for film before it was even finished. How did that come about, and how did that affect your writing process?

So first it was optioned. You know, there’s a big difference between the film rights being bought and them being optioned, so that happened the day before I sold the book to a publisher. Then DreamWorks called and said, “Someone leaked a sample of this to us, and we’re really interested in it, and we’d like to buy it today, please.” And that never happens, so my people kind of knew that Spielberg had to be behind it, because there’s nobody else that can drive that kind of deal and make it go so fast, because if you think about it these managers are selling all these different properties, and they have personal relationships with all the studios, and to just let one studio swoop in and take it off the table before you even show it to another studio is a big bummer. It makes the other studios not happy, and so for that to happen we knew that there was an eight-hundred pound gorilla involved somewhere.

And the next week I did find out that it was Spielberg, and I went out there and met everybody, and talked robots for hours, all afternoon. It was completely surreal. I met Drew Goddard, who’s the screenwriter, and I met Stephen, and we all talked about what we loved and what we didn’t like, and what we thought was most promising about the book, and I had an annotated table of contents, but I only had a hundred pages of the thing written, so there was a little pressure to write a good book, but I didn’t really feel the pressure because it was so obvious that Stephen was really into it. He said something like, “This could be Saving Private Ryan with robots,” and I’m just thinking, “This is going to be the coolest freaking movie ever.” That’s the only time I met with them, it’s not like we’re best friends or anything, but I really appreciated that, and afterward I ended up talking to Drew quite a bit, and Drew was saying stuff like, “Hey, Daniel, I really could use the next hundred pages of Robopocalypse, because I’m already writing the screenplay and I don’t have anything except this hundred pages and your table of contents, which is changing, and also Stephen is making stuff up all the time, so the sooner you come up with something the more of this is going to be from your book.” And also when I would give him stuff he would let me know how it was working, and why. He’s a storyteller just like I am, and just having to explain my reasoning behind what was happening in the story as I wrote it, that was hugely valuable for me, because Drew really wanted the stuff, so that was driving me to write fast, and he was really pushing me about whether it made sense, and what the logic was, and basic logistical stuff, because he had to write it too, and so he wanted to get some problems solved up front. They were also making artwork this whole time. Guy Dyas, who’s the production designer, who was just up for an Oscar for Inception, he had a team that’s been illustrating sequences and doing pre-vis the whole time I was writing, and he would ask me, “Hey, your Big Happy, what does it look like more specifically? What does it look like, and why does it operate that way?” And he would just be going into super detail about the locations, the scenery, because he’s having to really draw it, and so I found that a lot of times in a place where I would have just sketched out a bare bones idea, after talking to Guy I would create all this imagery, and then I’d go back and add it all into the book.

Did you intentionally set out to make it read like a horror novel, and if so are there any particular horror writers who influenced you?

I didn’t set out to make it a horror novel. I don’t really read a lot of horror, I mean, I read Lovecraft and stuff like that, but I’m not particularly huge into the horror genre. What I found was just that—at the beginning of the book especially—things needed to be psychological in order to make them tense and scary. It wasn’t about huge monster robots at that point because there couldn’t be any. They hadn’t had time to evolve yet, and I wanted to make sure that the whole thing was completely consistent. I wasn’t going to throw in big robots where they didn’t belong, and so I had to rely on other means of amping up the tension early on in the book, and that’s kind of a pet peeve of mine, actually. You know, when you think about horror components that appear in sf, I think that sometimes people depend on old horror standbys instead of actually honoring the sf, and one example of that kind of kills me. I love Terminator movies—I love all of them, actually, which, you know, judge me—but one thing that I’ve never been able to get over is the fact that all models of Terminator love to stalk over to their prey, then instead of just picking up whoever it is they’re trying to kill and just crushing them—I mean, they’re immensely strong—instead they punch them really hard and make them go flying across the room, or they throw them across the room. Why are you going to do that? You’re a robot! Your goal is to destroy your prey, you don’t throw the prey further away from you. But the reason they’re doing it is so they can stalk toward the prey again slowly to create drama, but that’s a horror convention. That’s what Jason does. That’s what Freddie does. That’s not what a robot would do.

Actually in Terminator there’s a memorable scene where the humans are fleeing through a factory and one of them turns on all this equipment so that the robot will be confused by all the motion. Would that actually work?

I think that would absolutely work. That’s a great idea, decoys. One thing that’s really hard for robots is context, so for instance if you throw a bowling ball at a robot or you throw a balloon at a robot, just from looking at this round object flying through the air, the robot probably doesn’t have the full context of knowing about bowling alleys and birthday parties, and it just sees an object coming, and therefore if it’s going to play it safe the robot will probably assume the worst and assume that it’s a bowling ball, and so by creating distractions like that I think that you can really hogtie a robot.

Why is it that you’re not worried about a robot uprising, and are you familiar with organizations like the Singularity Institute that are focusing attention on that issue?

I’m familiar with the Singularity Institute and the people who are interested in creating friendly AI and stuff like that, and the thing is I’m not worried about the Singularity happening anytime soon, which automatically precludes a lot of that stuff. What I am interested in though is people building safe tools, safe robots, and robots are really complicated, especially when they’re autonomous and multi-purpose. You know, it’s fairly easy to make sure that a single-purpose product does its one job and doesn’t screw up, because you have a very constrained environment for it. I mean, if you’re designing a razor for someone to shave their face, well, yeah, that could be dangerous, but you know it’s going to be used in the bathroom, and you know what it’s going to be used for, and the situations that you’re going to have, so you can plan for that. But a humanoid robot that just walks down the street? I mean, imagine how complex that is. And behavior that’s autonomous? You’re not going to be able to cover all the potential dangerous situations that that machine could be in. It’s a huge challenge for roboticists, and that’s just the physical side, because there’s also a whole ethical side that springs into action whenever you’ve got robots that are autonomous, and also robots that look like people or animals. So you don’t want a generation of kids who are abusing robot dogs that are indistinguishable from real dogs, because they’re going to get a skewed version of how ethics work, and it might screw up their empathy. And then also when you’ve got something that’s autonomous, and it’s making decisions on its own, and it does something bad, well, who do you blame? There’s all this stuff to work out from that perspective as well. So it’s a hugely complicated problem to build autonomous tools that are safe. And it’s a very concrete problem, and it’s a near-term problem that people are solving right now, and have solved for all sorts of consumer products for years. But anything as grandiose as building friendly AI so that it won’t destroy us when it inevitably comes online and gains superhuman intelligence? Nah, it’s not something that I think that people should be devoting too much practical thought to, although philosophically it’s really interesting.

What are some of your favorite examples of robots in fiction or film?

“For a Breath I Tarry” by Roger Zelazny is a short story where there’s this posthuman world; all the humans are gone. And there’s a super-intelligent machine that’s taking care of part of the globe, and these machines are basically taking care of everything, and there’s this robot in there that’s called Frost. And what it does is it eventually transforms itself into a human being, just out of fascination, not from any desire to worship human ancestors. It’s more like curiosity. And there’s this moment when this machine wakes up in a human body and realizes from a human perspective that everybody’s dead, and that the world is without meaning because human beings give the world meaning by existing. I mean, if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, then who fucking cares? And when he comes online he just starts screaming because he just realizes the despair and the absolute meaninglessness of everything that’s happening, and it’s crossing that threshold from robot to human to me that’s so fascinating.

You know another robot I really like? I like Agent Smith from The Matrix. He’s really interesting to me because of the fact that he feels trapped by being around human beings. He doesn’t like that we think with meat, and he doesn’t want to be near us, and he wants to sort of go back to this pure intellectual existence. Like, he’s living in a posthuman world where there’s no longer any need to have a material body, and he finds the whole idea repugnant. I can relate to that. Being a human is kind of gross.

What are some of the recent developments in robotics that have most impressed you?

I like this Watson machine. I think the natural language problem is the hardest problem to solve in AI—just having a conversation with people. Mainly because you can’t get all of the context of what it means to be a person. I mean, when you speak the onus is on the listener, right? The speaker says one word, and then the listener’s brain lights up like a Christmas tree, and fills in all the details, so you say “tree” and the other person just thinks of all the stuff that has to do with tree-ness. And for robots to join that party is super-exciting, because everything else will come in time, but that’s the one that it’s not clear that we’ll ever really get there and have a machine that can just communicate with a person as another person would—you know, pass the Turing Test and all that stuff. So seeing Watson make a stride forward into a much more complicated sort of speech interaction with human beings was really exciting, and I hope that he keeps making progress. I mean, right now it’s kind of boring because he just sits there and answers Jeopardy questions. In terms of viscerally exciting robots, every new version of the Big Dog from Boston Dynamics is like that. The Big Dog exhibits natural grace; when it walks it makes you think of living things. And I’m very excited to be around to see robots shed their robotic identity, because kids that are born today, if you say, “Do the robot,” they’re not going to get it. They’re going to be like, “What are you talking about? Robots are fluid; robots move more smoothly than animals; robots are incredibly precise and graceful.” And of course we don’t think of them that way. But I’m excited for them to come over to our side and start exuding natural grace.

You have some short stories coming out in John’s anthologies Armored and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination. Could you tell us about those?

Sure. The first story, “The Executor,” is basically about a mad scientist who’s very wealthy, and when he dies, instead of leaving his money to his kids, he actually creates an immortal AI in his own form with his own emotions, and based on his own personality, and it’s called “the executor,” and it’s the executor of his will. What happens though is that over the course of several hundred years it builds this huge fortune, and everyone who’s related to this guy has this opportunity to come in and try to solve the riddle of the sphinx and claim the money, but what happens is you end up with this whole Dune-like dynasty of families that are all potential heirs to billions and billions and trillions of dollars, and so they’re all at war with each other and trying to strategically stop each other from being able to make a claim for this ransom, and so it’s the story of a guy who has been on the run for his whole life from his own family, because they’re bloodthirsty, and then he has a daughter who’s also an heir, and in order to protect her he has to try to claim this money so that this prolonged war will end. It’s like Philip Marlowe from the Raymond Chandler noir books, it’s a little bit of that, it’s a little bit of “lone wolf and cub,” it’s some of the samurai ethos, it’s just really fun, I mean, I had a great time with that one.

And then the other piece is for the Armored anthology, and, you know, power armor in science fiction is almost always doing the same thing—it’s making someone into a super soldier, usually, and so I really got to thinking about walls and about the idea of armor separating you from the environment and making you stronger, and I really wanted to turn the whole thing on its head thematically, and so in my short story, “Helmet,” you have these “helmets,” these power-armored soldiers that come into town and kill people, and they’re totally faceless and nobody understands why they’re doing it, or what their motivation is, until the protagonist is kidnapped and he’s put into a helmet against his will, and he realizes that the people inside the helmets are trapped there. They’re not able to move any part of their bodies except for their faces, and the powered armor is moving their limbs for them. And they’re part of this government that basically believes that if you go through the motions of a crime then you are morally responsible for that crime, so what they do is they have these helmets do all their dirty work, murdering and everything nasty that they need to do, and then at the end of the day they execute the helmets and consider that the crimes are punished, because these people who are trapped inside the helmets have been punished for the crimes that they committed with their bodies. It’s just sort of an example of how walls can also control you instead of just protecting you, and how an armor with a mind of its own can take over your life. Instead of amplifying your abilities, it actually makes you impotent and completely takes away all of your ability to move or act in the world, and that was just a really fun theme.

Finally, are there any recent or upcoming projects that you’d like to mention?

Right now I’m writing Amp for Doubleday, and the film rights sold to Summit with Alex Proyas tentatively set up to direct, so that should come out next summer, and that’s about a near-term future where there’s a human rights movement, because people have started integrating technology into their own bodies, and some people are into it and some people aren’t, and I’m really fascinated with our relationship with technology and how technology keeps moving forward, and since we depend on it so much we have to keep moving with it, and I think this is going to be a significant hurdle when technology starts coming into our bodies, and has to come into our bodies for us to get the benefits from using it, and so I imagine that a large percentage of users will balk at that, and it would be interesting to see how we get over it. And the other thing I’m doing is I’m screenwriting a remake of the ‘80s movie Cherry 2000, which has been a real hoot. That’s an old eighties movie about a love doll that a guy lives with. It’s kind of a flawed movie, but very fun, and my version I think is pretty cool.

My website is danielhwilson.com, and I’m on Twitter @danielwilsonpdx, and so, yeah, I’d love to hear from people; if they want to ask me questions, they can reach me through those places.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. In 2011, he was a finalist for two Hugo Awards and two World Fantasy Awards. Forthcoming anthologies include: Armored (April, Baen), Epic (Fall 2012, Tachyon), and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor). Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.

Feature Interview: Chuck Palahniuk
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Chuck Palahniuk is the author of such novels as Haunted, Rant, Snuff, and Tell-All. His novels Fight Club and Choke were both adapted for film. His work is often shocking and almost seventy people were reported to have fainted while listening to him read his short story “Guts.” His latest novel, Damned, is about a teenaged girl who dies and goes to hell.

This interview first appeared in The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.

At your public appearances you ask trivia questions and throw inflatable toys into the crowd. How did you first get that idea, and when did you first start doing it?

Every event is different. Those are just a couple different elements that I might use. But years ago, maybe the third or fourth year I was doing tours, I found myself just hating the task, and I thought that if I gave away gifts when people asked a question, I could not simultaneously be hostile and give them something, so I started to buy these big, outlandish pieces of costume jewelry, usually tiaras and crowns. In every city I went to, before we did the event, we would go to a Claire’s and buy all their beauty queen tiaras. And it worked, in that no matter how tired I was, or how starving I was, or how much I had to take a leak, if I gave them something, that physical gesture trumped all of my internal crappiness, and I ended up actually liking it and really loving the process.

The two hardest things at a book event are to get the questions started and then, ironically, to end the questions, but if people see that you’ve got sixteen tiaras, then they’re instantly clamoring to ask a question. And as they see the tiaras dwindle, they know that the last tiara means the last question, so I’ve been able to structure that part of each book event that was just so difficult before.

It’s been reported that almost seventy people have fainted while listening to you read your short story “Guts,” and I just listened to an interview where you said you were working on something that makes “Guts” look tame by comparison. Could you tell us about that?

I’ve got two stories that will both totally eclipse “Guts” in the public mind, but I’m not saying anything about them. I’m not going to spoil that thunder until the stories are ready.

What was it like the first time you read “Guts” and had people start fainting?

The first time, I didn’t realize someone had fainted, because the crowd was that big and it was somebody standing toward the back where there was no seating left, and I didn’t realize that a young man had fainted, and he was kind of rescued by the people around him. But the time that I was most aware of it was a couple readings later, in San Francisco, at the old Cody’s Bookstore on Telegraph, up by the University of California. A couple of people in the very center of this packed auditorium, right in the middle of my vision, they fainted on their neighbors, and the whole place just went nuts. It was just terrific to watch, because suddenly instead of seven hundred people looking at me, it was me looking at seven hundred people, and I was completely forgotten in the room, and everyone went to rescue these two people that everyone seemed to have thought had died, and as these people came back to life the crowd just went nuts, they were so euphoric, like they had seen Lazarus raised from the dead.

Your new novel Damned is sort of like “The Breakfast Club goes to hell.” Which character from The Breakfast Club were you most like in high school?

Oh, Ally Sheedy. You know, there was a really lovely woman named Glenda Haas who moved to our school, maybe in sixth grade, and her parents had a shop where they sold Western clothing in a town nearby, and so the perception was that they were wealthy people. Glenda was very pretty, and she had a southern accent, and I had a crush on her—one of those seventh grade crushes—and one day she was taking books out of her locker, and a book fell and caught the string of beads that was hanging around her neck, and broke the string, and as the beads fell down I saw my chance, and I went forward and helped her gather them all up, and as I was giving them to her she very sweetly looked up and said, “You’re a very nice person. You’re a very sweet, sweet person, and it surprises me because when I moved here everyone in the school told me that y’all was retarded.” And that was heartbreaking. You know, not just to hear it from her, but to find out that it was something that was being commonly told to total strangers, by people who I thought were my friends.

On your most recent book tour you’ve been reading a short story called “Romance.” Tell us about that.

I was watching the Sean Penn movie I Am Sam, and the premise is that Sean Penn, who is severely retarded, has a very young daughter by a woman who apparently was with him long enough to get pregnant, and that worked that way, in that I could conceive of a woman thinking that Sean Penn is just this very good-looking, very drunk guy, and going home with him one night, or one weekend, and getting pregnant. But turning it around, I had to think, you know, how good-looking would a woman have to be before a man would start to overlook fantastically aberrant behavior, and how much would he have to deceive himself in order to continue to be in love with this incredibly good-looking woman? And so that was the inspiration for “Romance.”

“Romance” is metaphorically about what it’s like to fall in love with an idea, and to think that idea is all that you will ever need, and to isolate yourself with the idea and to exist with nothing but that idea for weeks or months at a time, but eventually you have to introduce that idea that you loved so much to your friends and family, and at that point, depending on whether or not they see the same value in the idea, you’re confronted with either having to betray your friends and family, or betray your inspiration, the thing you loved so much.

How did you go about constructing your vision of Hell, and what kind of research did you do?

Leonard’s character is the one that knows all about demonology, that kind of cross-cultural theology based on demons and what each culture considers evil, what they blame disasters on, and so just reading all the books about demonology was the most research I did.

Oh, also research on Halloween. I fell in love with Halloween when I found out that it used to be just a night of fantastic property damage. Halloween was a night when, in small cities and towns, all slights, all injustices were avenged, and it really was a night that you went and killed your neighbor’s dog, or you set their barn on fire, or you knocked their fence down, or you cut their tires, and it wasn’t until the 1920s that city governments started to conspire with major newspapers and candy makers, and they started to organize media campaigns where they would offer troublemakers candy in exchange for not burning down the town every Halloween. And so what we think of as Halloween is really the product of media barons, city mayors, and candy-makers. You know, before the 1920s, Halloween was really a terrible, terrible night.

I heard you read a short story called “Cold Calling” that’s about a telemarketer, and telemarketing also features prominently in Damned. What is it about telemarketing that makes you want to write about it?

The original “Cold Calling” story was from five or six years ago, and it was never published. I sold the rights for that to Nickelodeon, so I don’t hold those rights anymore. But I like the accidental way that people are connected by a machine. More applicable to Damned was that I wrote the book while I was taking care of my mother, who was dying, and telemarketing calls were some of the only breaks in my day, the only times that I had any contact with the outside world, and when a telemarketer called I would find myself trying to keep them on the line longer than they wanted to talk, so it was kind of an ironic turnabout.

Wait, you sold rights to a story to Nickelodeon? I’m having a hard time imagining how Nickelodeon would be involved with Chuck Palahniuk.

Over the years there have been several different television projects that I’ve been brought on board to help with, and one was an idea for Nickelodeon that I was brought on board to help develop, and I proposed this telemarketing angle, and they liked it, so they bought the original story. It was actually a very clean little story, just this very innocent back and forth between a kid and another kid as they gradually lie to each other more and more.

Do you consider yourself a science fiction fan, and if so who are some of your favorite authors?

I’m very much an old school Ray Bradbury kind of guy, a Stephen King kind of guy. Mostly short stories. Anything from Martian Chronicles I really loved, and I still remember the first time I read Night Shift, I was really blown away by it.

In 2008 you taught at the Clarion West science fiction writers workshop, and I just saw that you’ll be back again this summer. What sort of experiences did you have last time you were there?

I worked with about twenty fantastically bright people. I think that they screen people very, very carefully to get the very best people into those programs, and there wasn’t a person there who didn’t have a fantastic idea, and so what I mostly focused on was helping them write their ideas as clearly as possible, and to develop them into something that they could bring to market.

You started off as more of a mainstream author, but as you’ve progressed in your career you’ve delved more into genres such as horror and science fiction. Is that something you see yourself moving more toward?

My first few books, if they had to fall into a genre classification, were what people used to call “transgressive writing,” where you had people doing illegal things—extreme things—but for noble reasons, and that became a little unpalatable after 9/11, in that we weren’t accepting transgressive acts as sympathetically anymore, and so I think that’s when the idea of going to a genre like horror or science fiction seemed like a much more effective avenue for social commentary. And that won’t always be the case, the farther we get from 9/11, but I think it’s still the case right now.

When you’re teaching at a workshop like that, do you pass along the lessons that you learned from Tom Spanbauer, or do you have a different approach that you take?

I pass along what I learned from every writer that I wish I had known when I was younger, lessons from Tom Spanbauer, and writers like Peter Christopher, every writer that I’ve met and interacted with—David Sedaris, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker. If they taught me something that was really effective then it’s something I want to pass on to people, especially if they’re younger people who might not learn these things for years.

Could you give an example of one of those lessons?

No abstract measurements. When someone walks in and you say “a six-foot-tall man,” you miss the opportunity to describe what a six-foot-tall man would look like to your narrator, because how the narrator describes a six-foot-tall man says more about the narrator than about the man. So every time you use an abstract measurement, you’re using a shortcut that’s cheating you out of some really fantastic opportunity.

How did you first get involved with writing workshops?

In my early thirties, when I wanted to be a writer, I joined a workshop that was all very nice ladies more or less writing “child-in-peril” thrillers. They all wanted to be published writing these stories about children being murdered or kidnapped, and my stories were so upsetting to them. My stories were just too confronting, they had too much violence and too much sexuality in them. Nothing was really hidden off-screen, and that was too much for them. They would leave almost in tears sometimes.

Like the blow-up doll scene?

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the blow-up doll scene that I later used in Snuff, where the kid is trying to fornicate with this doll that he’s dressed up to look like his ideal, and he realizes that the doll has a slow leak, and so it becomes this race to fulfill his needs before the doll is completely just this flat, wrinkled thing. And that was the scene that got me kicked out of the workshop.

Didn’t they say, “We don’t feel safe with you here,” or something like that?

They always say, “There are members of the group who no longer feel comfortable having you in the workshop.”

But then as a kind of consolation they suggested a different workshop. A man had just moved from New York to Portland, and his name was Tom Spanbauer, and he was teaching this style called Minimalism that he had learned at Columbia from a famous editor named Gordon Lish, who was Raymond Carver’s editor. And they put me in touch with Tom, and I was one of Tom’s first four students. That was in August of 1990, and that’s when I really started to write.

Your novel Damned features a really devastating satire of these do-gooder movie stars. Is that all in good fun, or are you genuinely appalled by people like that?

I’m more or less appalled by people who preach ecological awareness but have lifestyles that consume so many resources. When we were at Sundance, in Park City, Utah, for the launch of the Choke movie, I was always struck by the hundreds and hundreds of Lincoln Navigators that were lined up everywhere and constantly running, so that they would be warm when the celebrities came out of whatever the venue was, and all these Lincoln Navigators, burning all this gas, lined up for miles, all had “No Blood for Oil” bumper stickers. And that was just such a shocking, horrible hypocrisy.

Part of the inspiration for my book Tell All is that every really beautiful, fantastically groomed actress had a kind of doughty, dumpy, very plain assistant, or team of assistants, who would act as this kind of remote support, and always traveled a dozen feet behind this beautiful object that they maintained, and at any moment when the object was disturbed, this team would rush forward and intensely groom it, and restore it to its perfection, and then they would immediately remove themselves from its vicinity so that they would never be photographed with it, and that was just amazing to watch.

How did you feel about the film adaptations of Fight Club and Choke changing the endings of the books?

I didn’t mind. That’s part of the bargain. If they’re going to put that much money and energy and time into the story, I think they should have some freedom to interpret and adapt the story. But I thought it was interesting that both movies cut out the third act scene in which the hero is completely humiliated and subjugated before his peer group, and I have to wonder if there’s some aspect of moviemaking culture that can’t allow itself to experience that kind of public humiliation.

Speaking of Fight Club, there’s an interesting story you tell on the DVD commentary about Marla’s famous line . . . ?

When I wrote the scene where Tyler and Marla wake up together, my first thought was, “What is the most romantic thing that Marla could say, the most sentimental thing?” And that would be “I want to have your baby.” And so, being Marla, she had to say the opposite. So it was just by formula, she had to say, “I want to have your abortion.” So that’s what went into the book. But everyone hated that line. Even Brad Pitt came to the producers and said, “My mother is going to see this movie, and my mother is going to be so offended by that line.” So everyone wanted to change it, and they floated a lot of different versions, and I think Fincher finally came up with “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school.” And when he shot it that way, Laura Ziskin, the producer, went nuts and said, “Change it back, for the love of god.” And Fincher was so thrilled that he had come up with something worse that that’s what he went with.

And Brad Pitt’s mom was okay with that one?

I have no idea. You know, I think by that point it had been such a drawn-out process that it was kind of a line in the sand. This is what we’re going to go with. We got rid of the thing that you hated; you got something you hated more, so just be careful what you complain about in the future.

Your story “Knock Knock” is about a boy who grows up with his dad always telling these horrible jokes. Where did all those jokes come from?

I think I learned all those jokes in second grade. Second grade is really where they tell you those horrific jokes, racist jokes and misogynistic jokes that you have no idea what they mean, and you just memorize them because they have a very strong effect, they make people laugh in this kind of nervous, horrible way, and it’s only later that you realize that you’ve got a head full of crap.

At your recent appearances you start things off with an anecdote about an oncologist. Could you talk about that?

Earlier this summer I was at a charity dinner, and I was seated across the table from an oncologist—a cancer specialist. He was telling this funny story—what he considered a funny story—about sitting on an airplane drinking a glass of wine, and the woman next to him starts talking to him, and she’s saying how much she loves wine, and how much she’d love a glass of wine, and she used to drink a glass of wine every night. Only recently every time she started to drink wine she’d feel this fantastic sharp pain at the base of her throat, and she had decided, she was explaining to this doctor, that God doesn’t want her to drink wine anymore, because she feels this pain every time she drinks wine, or beer, or any kind of alcohol. And so this doctor drinking his wine sitting next to her on the plane says, “Ma’am, that’s not God. That’s what they call a ‘canary indicator,’ like a canary in a coal mine, and when you feel a sharp burning pain at the base of your throat like that anytime you drink even the smallest amount of alcohol, that is an undeniable symptom that you have Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.” And he gave her his card and said, “Give your doctor my card, and have him call me, because I think you have Stage IV Hodgkin’s, and you’ll probably die very soon.” And he said the woman on the plane suddenly wasn’t as chatty. And within a few days this woman’s doctor called him and said, “Well, you were right, you hit the nail on the head, she has Hodgkin’s . . . and you could have been a little less of a prick about telling her.”

Was that a thing where he told that story and instantly you were like, “Oh yeah, I’m using that on the book tour”?

I knew I would use it, because it was such an extraordinary, sad, funny little story, but I wasn’t sure exactly what the metaphor demonstrated. And then I saw how I could use it to illustrate the metaphor that I like to talk about with stories. A good story should change the way you see the world. After you hear even the shortest great story, it should fill you with a little bit of fear. Because now whenever I drink, and from now on whenever you drink, you’ll wait for a little pain. Every sip of alcohol you’ll think, “Am I going to die? Do I have Hodgkins?” And when you don’t feel that pain, the combination of the fear and the alcohol will make you feel better than you ever felt before. And that’s how a good story works. It changes how you feel. It brings you to a greater appreciation, a greater joy, of your own existence.

Any other new or upcoming projects you want to mention?

I’m working on the next two books that come after Damned, so it’s going to be three books ultimately. And working on the two stories that will make people forget “Guts.”

Any idea when those stories will be revealed?

They’re definitely tour stories. Something that Tom really taught us was reading our work out loud, and so every week in workshop whatever you brought, whether it was a scene or a story or a chapter, you had to read it out loud to people, so you would get the spontaneous feedback of laughter or shock. You would get that completely uncensored feedback of an audience, and so every time I have to tour I write a story specifically for reading out loud, and that’s what “Guts” started as, and so these stories really won’t exist until the next tour, because that’s when I’ll need something to read out loud.

And the next tour will be?

2013, if I can help it.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. In 2011, he was a finalist for two Hugo Awards and two World Fantasy Awards. Forthcoming anthologies include: Armored (April, Baen), Epic (Fall 2012, Tachyon), and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor). Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.

Artist Gallery
David Wyatt

Artist Spotlight: David Wyatt
J. T. Glover

David Wyatt is an English artist specializing in illustration, including both F/SF and children’s books, as well as concept and character work. He has illustrated tales by many well-known authors, including Diana Wynne Jones, Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman, and J. R. R. Tolkien, among others. He uses many different media for art and exercises his creativity in all sorts of forms. Residing in Devon, he is a known wanderer of moors.

The scene depicted in “Fever Crumb” has the kind of apocalyptic feel that one would expect for prequels to Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines books. Can you talk about how you chose the elements that came together to accomplish that?

The original U.K. edition was designed as a double cover; the idea was the viewer was in the cockpit of a wheeled contraption looking at the scene through a porthole. When the cover was opened, the whole picture was revealed. This meant I had to choose a strong central image as a focus, which would work in circular frame as well as the double page “reveal.” Once I read Fever Crumb it was fairly obvious to me that the balloon rising from the massive head was the way to go—it provided an unusual, dramatic focus with the opportunity to expand the scene with a stormy, post-apocalyptic landscape. I was aware that the original Mortal Engines quartet would be re-issued in a similar fashion, which is why I focused on machines and landscape rather than characters, as I felt that might be restrictive further down the line due to the constraints of the initial design. Philip is very visual in his storytelling, so it’s always easy to find something striking in his books that I can work with.

You work with many different media, though you’ve said elsewhere that you’ve moved to your Mac for a lot of work these days. How much choice do you have in that when starting a project for a new client, and what’s your favorite?

I’ve never had a client specify a medium before, so it’s really my choice, although time constraints dictate nearly all my book covers are done digitally these days. It’s not so much the initial creation that is the problem—it’s the alterations one is required to make because of marketing, last minute format changes, etc. Right now my favourite way of working is with pen and ink and watercolour, but that’s mostly for my own pleasure. As yet, I’ve not had the opportunity to produce images in this style commercially; they’re not really “in your face” enough for book covers.

What draws so many creative people to live in Devon? You talk some on your website about the history of the area, but what do you find there that comes nowhere else?

Well, I’m sure there are lots of places around the world that have a similar magic. For me, Dartmoor is at once strange and familiar, possibly because some of the art that inspired me as a kid was created by people who live here. There’s a curious mix of cosiness and otherworldliness. It’s as though lots of different times exist at once. Plus, there’re a lot of mossy rocks and twisty trees and mist, which I never get tired of drawing.

What’s the most common flaw you see in the work of novice illustrators?

Not so much a flaw, just a perfectly natural lack of experience/confidence, which I recognize as I had it too. When you first start out, it can be difficult to change things if asked, as you tend to have given your all to make one image the best you can. I used to find it hard to come up with an acceptable plan B, but it’s a lot easier now. . .

What sort of sparks must exist in a scene for it to lend itself readily to illustration?

I think the best illustrators can make even a mundane scene interesting. For example, a simple image of someone sitting on a chair can convey a multitude of feelings with use of lighting, body posture, perspective, etc. For me, it varies greatly depending on the context of the illustration. A book cover tends to demand a powerful, instantly readable image, so I will be looking for drama, atmosphere and strong shapes in the basic design. For interior illustrations, it depends on what mood I’m trying to achieve, be it amusing or serious, intimate or epic. Of course, you often have to choose a subject according to how much space is available on the page—there’s no point trying to show a gigantic spaceship looming over a city if there’s only inches to play with—best to show a couple of stunned faces looking skywards (as an example).

You’ve illustrated the works of numerous major fantasy authors, and your visions have been seen by millions of readers. What can top that for you? What would be your golden assignment?

I don’t really have any ambitions—when I was younger I quite liked the idea of putting my own stamp on various classics, but these days I much prefer working with new characters and creating their own worlds and mythologies. It’s partly cowardice; a lot of the classics have been illustrated so well it can be quite difficult to find a way of bringing something fresh and worthwhile to a new version.

What do you make of current trends toward more purely CG approaches to book covers, as opposed to traditional or hybrid approaches?

Book covers are predominantly adverts, tools to catch a potential buyer’s eye, and as such they will be subject to the fashions of the day. It’s perfectly natural, so I don’t have a problem with it. I tend to be impressed by strong design, whether it’s a scratchy charcoal drawing or photo-manipulation. When I first started out in the early nineties, I think I got work because I brought a simple, dynamic look to covers, due to my early love of comics. At the time, lots of children’s book covers were well-painted scenes from the story; I went for a kind of movie poster/graphic novel look.

You talk on your website about your musical past, and about how learning to play the guitar during art school was invaluable. Do you still play, and how does creativity in other areas influence or bleed into your other work?

Yes, I still play a lot; in a band, and recording my own stuff. I also do Argentinian Tango, which is another way of working with music. They are all creative (dancing, playing and drawing), but in distinctly different ways, like you are going up the same mountain from three different directions, each with their own challenges and rewards.

What projects are you working on right now?

I have a few things on the go—The Spook’s Blood, by Joseph Delaney, which is part of a long-running series (the first book, Spook’s Apprentice, is coming out as a film called Seventh Son next year). For younger children I’m illustrating Ice Spell, the third in the Frogspell series. Also at the moment I’m doing some character designs and concepts for a film; I’ve been having trouble visualizing things from multiple angles, so I’ve been making Sculpey models to help out, which is great fun.

What do you enjoy most about the modeling, and how has it affected your painting style?

I don’t normally make models, partly because of time constraints, but also because I don’t like using too much reference. I tend to draw things from my imagination; sometimes I’ll need a bit of help, like folds in clothes, or how light falls on hair in specific ways; in which case I might use reference for small areas that help sell the image. Because I often use a lot of dynamic perspective, I sometimes take snaps of myself from odd angles so I can check how the anatomy is working, etc.

The last model I made prior to the one I’m currently working on was Captain Nemo’s Nautilus (for Oceanology). I had to do a cutaway diagram of the interior, so I needed to know exactly how the ship might be constructed. The model I’m working on at the moment is of an unusual character, which will probably be made as a puppet, so I need to think more in three-dimensional terms as opposed to a one-off painting. You can breathe life into an idea quite quickly with clay; I find it fun because it reminds me of being a kid messing around with Plasticine . . .

J. T. Glover has published fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in Dark Recesses and Underground Voices, among other venues. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, he currently resides in Richmond, Virginia with his wife and a not inconsiderable number of aquatic friends. By day he is an academic reference librarian specializing in the Humanities.

Her Words Like Hunting Vixens Spring
Brooke Bolander

The first fox to come clawing up and out of her throat is a sleek gray thing with enormous ears and eyes like drops of crude. Rosa opens her mouth to belch—she doesn’t give a good god-damn about being ladylike at this point, when the desert has cracked her lips to the texture of dried clay and the only other person around to hear is her horse—and all of the sudden she’s tasting musk and spitting fur and something big is scratching its way free of her gullet. The pain is lightning sear and cactus spine. She tumbles off Santiago’s back and crumples in the sand, dark spots exploding behind her eyelids.

The fox shoulders and wriggles from between her jaws, first the whiskery, pointed muzzle and then all the rest. Finally free, it shakes its sodden coat and shoots Rosa a disgusted look. It wraps its tail around its paws and sets to grooming itself dry, for all the world like some mouser caught in a rainstorm. Rosa watches in glaze-eyed wonder. She can’t think straight. Her brains are still vibrating slightly from shock and hurt.

When she finally wobbles back to her feet, the first thing she does is fish the empty patent medicine bottle from the bottom of her leftmost saddlebag, pushing past two waterskins, a fiddle case, and a faded tintype of her brothers. There’s a drawing of a dandy with a waxed mustache on the label, and a long list of ailments the wondrous stuff inside is supposed to cure. Rosa examines the flask from top to bottom, but there’s no mention of potential side effects printed anywhere, nothing about ague or addiction or (surprise) spontaneously hacking up full-grown foxes. No question about it, then. It’s a genuine miracle, just like she asked the bruja for. An inexplicable, painful miracle, with no use whatsoever in her hunt.

She looks at the ground, where the tracks of her quarry have almost faded to scuffed half-moons. She considers what this new delay means, thinks of Captain Todd pulling away into the mountains where a million hidey holes and snaky little canyons lie in wait for him. Briefly—very briefly—she wonders if it might not be better to turn around and go home, with or without his freckled scalp hanging from her saddle horn. No one will think less of her if she does. She can sew a patch on the family quilt to commemorate the occasion, line it with strips of the wedding dress she’ll never get to wear. The Day My Beau Tried To Kill Me, September 17th, 1880.

Her conscience pipes up right on cue, like an annoying little sister with a one-track mind. But you’re not out here just for yourself, are you, girlie?

“God-dammit,” she says. She grinds her teeth together so hard she can feel them creaking in their sockets. It’s no use. The key has already turned in the lock; there’s no unseeing what bleeds behind the door, scalped and split open by a man she naively thought she knew. Twenty-four girls with twenty-four names and twenty-four lives, reduced to stinking cordwood under yellowing sheets. Twenty-four bodies carried back over the threshold like brides by retching volunteers, to lie in rows beneath a sepia sky.

It’s all too much. Rosa pitches a fit, right there in the middle of the desert.

She tears the big black hat off her head and chucks it in the dirt. She screams curses and stomps her boots and flaps her poncho until even the unshakable Santiago spooks a little, snorting warnings. She yanks clumps of dark hair out of her scalp and lets the wind take them spiraling upwards like hay scraps after a mowing. And when she’s finally done, red-faced and panting and blurry-eyed from tears she can’t shed, she feels a teensy bit better. Not a lot, because the problems Rosa’s got are too big to be fixed that easily, but enough that she can keep moving unhobbled by the memories.

She turns back to the fox, still watching her out of those bright black eyes. It’s panting laughter now, all parted fangs and wicked good humor at Rosa’s expense. Irritatingly, she feels herself begin to blush.

“Yeah, well, I’d like to see your good ideas,” she mutters, snatching her hat from the ground and jamming it low on her head. She tells herself she’s not hiding in the shade it casts. “Wouldn’t happen to know which way he went, would you?”

The fox’s laughter shuts off abruptly at her words. Its entire posture turns no nonsense, business from nose tip to tail tip. It glances over its shoulder at her—why didn’t you just ask me in the first place?—before setting off to the northwest at a steady trot, nose glued to the desert floor. What other choice does she have? Rosa follows. A miracle’s a miracle, whether sent by God or Santa Muerte. You don’t waste it, even if it comes in a ridiculous form.

Even if, like the second fox to disembark from Rosa’s innards, it sends you sprawling ass-over-appetite into a prickly pear patch. The new critter is jet-black with golden eyes, and it laughs at her as well.

When they found out what Captain Todd had been up to behind the locked doors of his villa, her three brothers wanted to hunt him down themselves. They were the weathered veterans of a million cattle drives and whore towns, rough and ragged as a rusty bucketful of cobs. Telling them “no” wasn’t a job for the faint of heart, but Rosa did it anyway. She got her hair ruffled patronizingly for her pains.

“We’ll string his hide on barb-wire like a coyote, little sister,” the eldest said. He was tall and lean and threw a shadow like a hangman’s platform at sunset. Rosa stole his revolver on her way out and was thankful he’d taught her to shoot it straight when their father wasn’t looking.

“That copper-haired devil is gonna dance a jig at the end of a yucca rope,” said the middle son. He wore a silver star on his barrel chest and carried a map of the territories from Tucumcari to Fort Bowie. Rosa stole the map from his saddlebags on her way out and was thankful he’d taught her how to read it when the snows were high and there wasn’t anything better to do.

“I’ll bring you back that pretty yellow scarf he wears for your wedding trunk,” the youngest told her. He slouched in his saddle and wore a black Stetson that must’ve cost him at least three months pay. Rosa stole the hat from a peg in the tack room on her way out and was thankful he’d taught her how to spit and swear like a man while their mother was otherwise occupied.

She knows they probably think her dead by now, another victim of the young man with the uniform and the foxy grin. Rosa misses her brothers desperately and wishes she could tell them the truth—don’t worry, fellas, I’ve gone to get the son of a bitch myself and the foxes I keep retching up track better than bloodhounds—but there’s no turning back until her task is done. The memory of all those girls drives Rosa onwards like a quirt, toward mountains that hover like judgment and a fiancé who is not what he once seemed.

The more of them she retches up, the easier it gets. It’s still not exactly what you’d call comfortable, but after the fourth or fifth time Rosa is able to brace herself when she feels her throat swelling like she’s just taken too big a gulp of water. They are all vixens, all female; when she looks around at the strange pack pacing beneath her stirrups she wonders what it all means.

Some are stout red matrons with shaggy coats and black masks. Others are small and sandy and whippy-thin as barn cats, quick to jump when Santiago’s iron-shod hoof strikes a rock. The heat doesn’t seem to bother them. They flow through the sage in a tireless wave, not even stopping to hunt or drink or mark bushes—a ghost army made real, called up by patent medicine and whatever dark forces for revenge lurk in Rosa’s craw. The idea is enough to make her laugh herself silly, or at least it would be had she any laughter left. Good humor has been powerful hard to come by since the day she used the key.

They’re indistinguishable from normal foxes in every other way that counts, though. They snap at flies and chase one another between Santiago’s legs and get into squabbles that sound like demons haggling over cribbage scores. The first one—Rosa calls her Gray Sister, all the while telling herself that she considers them neither pets nor family and what’s the point in naming figments?—takes to sitting at the foot of her pallet every night, ears swiveling against the speckled sky. Rosa isn’t sure when the vixen sleeps; maybe she never does.

A day comes when the trail fades to scrapes on stone and wisps of scent so faint not even the vixens can find them. The shadows lengthen until they’re all walking on stilts and Rosa’s hair is plastered to her neck like a wet strip of calico and her temper’s worn nubbin-small as lye soap on Saturday night and there’s no change, no nothing, they may as well have been walking this circuit forever eating their own tails and their own dust like stubborn hoop snakes. She reluctantly begins thinking about making camp, wondering if she even has the spit left to whistle an all in, ladies to her pack.

The wind in the desert has a million voices. It hisses like a Gila and moans through the dry riverbeds like a toothless old woman, cajoling and spiteful by turns. Sometimes it whispers words to Rosa. Names, or directions, or nonsense gibberish that trails off into mocking laughter stinging as sand. You’d have to be a fool born to trust such voices. Since Rosa was born a woman and not a fool, she ignores them, shutting off her ears when they speak like her father or mother or the Captain himself. The evening breeze that eddies up now sounds like one of the village’s ill-reputed saloon ladies, all cigarette smoke and sipping bourbon. It nips at Rosa’s damp nape and runs a bold finger along her jaw, tracing a line all the way to her earlobe. Gooseflesh prickles her skin.

Play, it whispers, teasing as desire. Play.

Rosa sets her jaw and keeps her eyes on the horizon. She’s not in the mood for this tonight. Not now, and probably not ever. Santiago shies nervously, sensing her anger, and she puts the spurs to him, harder than she means to. He crow-hops and it’s all she can do to stay put, hissing curses between her teeth. The wind chuckles roughly at her back, a calloused hand in a velvet glove.

Play, daughter. To the trail. Play.

She spits dust and jerks Santiago around to face the darkening east, teeth bared like one of her own foxes. Enough is enough.

“Miss,” she says, “unless you’re Santa Muerte herself, I kindly suggest you go blow up someone else’s skirts. I’m not interested.” Something that isn’t anger is uncurling in the pit of her stomach, but she won’t give Whatever It Is the satisfaction of knowing that. “I don’t even understand what you’re getting at. You want music? Is that it?”

At the words “Santa Muerte” the laughter suddenly becomes a gale. Sand billows like smoke, lifting into the sky to turn the light bone-colored and watery. The world vanishes as if a curtain’s come down, foxes, desert, and everything else turned to dim shadows seen through muslin. The mocking voice is all around her. It’s loud enough to make her ears ring and knowing enough to make her wish she’d kept her big mouth shut.

Santa Muerte, Santa Muerte! A dry howl from a million throats, the noise of a sidewinder’s scales scraping across desiccated ribcages. Play them to the trail! Strings sing and foxes dance! Danza Macabra! Danza Macabra!

A shape forms in the cloud of sand. A woman with a skull’s face, hooded and robed, cigarette dangling lazily from between her teeth. Rosa sees the vision for only the briefest of moments, but it tells her all she needs to know, all she wants to know. Her throat goes as cottony as Gray Sister’s tail. She gropes reflexively for the strand of beads around her neck, rubbing at them for what courage she can muster.

“. . . My apologies, good lady,” she finally croaks. “I didn’t know it was . . . I never thought—”

Make them dance if you seek justice! PLAY!

The voice cracks against her cheek like a slap. Rosa mutters a final prayer under her breath and reaches into the saddlebags for her fiddle case, fingers fumbling clumsily with the latches.

It’s a beautiful instrument, all pyrographed flowers and gleaming red wood. She fits it under her chin and raises the bow. If I can play an air in the middle of a sandstorm, she thinks, the next time I’m invited to a corn-husking shouldn’t be any trouble at all. Her exposed skin tingles faintly. An old folk ditty her father used to play springs to mind, appropriate enough that she almost chokes on laughter. Music seeps into the air.

The fox went out on a chilly night,

He prayed for the moon to give him light,

For he’d many a mile to go that night,

Before he reached the town-o, town-o, town-o,

He’d many a mile to go that night,

Before he reached the town-o.

The tune capers and leaps cheerfully above the noise of the storm, ignorant as a trout in the stream. Had Captain Todd ever requested this song, back in the days when she’d sit on his knee and fiddle for kisses? She’s sure he must have, but her memories of that time are blessedly vague, a flash of freckles here, a swatch of scratchy blue uniform there. She remembers the faces of the girls better than his own. Their blood sticky on the floor and the key, their scalps swinging from his belt like obscene medals. A cavalry sword slicing through the darkness, his white sickle grin not far behind.

A funny thing happens as she plays. The voice of the wind quiets. The pall of sand begins lifting, gradual as the curtain before a revue. The first stars peek through, and then the miles of sage and sand ahead. She can see mountains, gullies, riverbeds etched in purple and orange ink. The world unfurls before her like music.

And the foxes.

They’re a riot of movement, whirling shapes ducking and dodging over backs and under bellies like eels escaping a net. A yellow coat and a gray twirl around and around together, teeth buried in each other’s tail tips, a third darting in and out of the cyclone they make. The two identical silver sisters Rosa calls the Minnows yap and stamp atop a heap of stones to her left, claws going click-click-clack on the worn surface of the boulders. Gray Sister bounds among her companions, nipping at rumps and legs and anything else that gets in the way of her fangs. The faster Rosa plays, the more frenzied they become. The earth is a mass of flashing fur and teeth.

They’re dancing, she realizes. Play them to the trail, she said.

It’s a memory she’ll keep safely tucked away in her heart’s pocket until the day she dies. The fiddle singing its wild, sweet song, the sky darkening to indigo above them, and all around her foxes, twisting like gunsmoke through the eye of a needle.

They have no trouble finding the trail the next morning.

She’s still got scabs on her knees from when she crawled to the bruja’s shrine outside of town. The parish priest had banished the old crone years before—the church didn’t look too kindly on the followers of Santa Muerte, blasphemous rum-swilling newcomer that she was—but that didn’t stop villagers from slinking out to the barrens whenever they needed a favor. Mama Margaret wasn’t picky, and neither was La Flaca. For a small offering the two of them could get you whatever you wanted. Money, or a little power, or protection for the people you cared about. Luck in love. Luck in things the authorities might’ve frowned upon.

Revenge, too. Santa Muerte was very good at revenge.

“To catch a fox,” the witch had said, “you need to be a fox.” And she had handed Rosa the bottle of patent medicine, smiling her lined, tobacco-stained smile. “I can’t promise you it’ll work, or that you’ll like what it does. Señora Blanca’s a fickle old bitch, but you’re young and pretty and you crawled here like a good penitent. You got faith in the old ways, which is more than I can say for the rest of your family. More important than any of that, you’ve been wronged. Drink what’s inside that bottle and I’d bet the whiskers on my chin the good lady will help you. Wait a little while and see.”

“But what about my brothers and the other posse?” Rosa had flinched at the memory of their faces, missing them already. “Won’t they catch up before I do?”

Another flash of teeth, brown as saddle leather. “What about them? The good townspeople didn’t give a whit about all those penniless wenches vanishing until you found their bodies, and I doubt they care too almighty much even now. You just start riding west and follow the sign as best you can, little girl. Let revenge be your compass, and don’t worry about folks who couldn’t find sand in the desert.”

Dreams begin skittering through her head each night like mice beneath tall grass, plump with omens and signs.

She’s standing in the parlor of her elderly fiddle teacher, Mrs. Wull, still dressed in her travel-stained poncho and boots. There’s a stiff horsehair sofa in the middle of the room, a piano in the corner, and several oil paintings hanging from the walls, exactly like the waking world. The heads of the stern-faced men and women in the portraits have been replaced with those of sly-eyed foxes. Rosa notices this, but the detail lands like a pebble in a dry well, quickly forgotten as her thoughts swim on to other pressing matters. How did she get here? Would it be polite to sit on the sofa when she’s covered in sweat and sand and horse lather? If she licks the wallpaper, will anyone notice?

The taste of Mrs. Wull’s wallpaper has been a long-standing question in Rosa’s mind. It’s the vibrant red of prickly pear preserves, striped with veins of minty green. When she was small, she imagined it tasting like figs crossed with raspberries, sweet and sappy and juicy-tart all at the same time. Now that she’s older and supposedly wiser, she knows that wallpaper, no matter how colorful or tempting, is just wallpaper, dust-flavored and dry as a moth’s wing rasping across your disappointed tongue. Saint Nicholas isn’t real, true love is a lie, and the only thing that won’t let you down in the world is its ability to let you down. The past few weeks have been, if nothing else, something of a learning experience in that regard.

Rosa knows all of this, but it doesn’t stop the stubborn five-year-old part of her from wanting to try. Feeling a little ridiculous, she sidles over to a corner, extends the tip of her tongue, and gives the wallpaper a tentative swipe. She braces for the bitterness of boiled glue, the chemical tang of several generations of mothballs and kerosene smoke. She prepares for life’s bad taste in her mouth, inevitable as wrinkles or scorpions in the kitchen.

It tastes like figs crossed with raspberries, sweet and sappy and juicy-tart all at the same time.

The voice comes from the empty room behind her, a dry, honeycomb-and-bone thing like sugar skulls trying to speak. “See there? Life ain’t so bad sometimes—leastways not all the time. Don’t let him make you forget that, else he’s already won and we might as well just pack it up and go home.”

Rosa whirls with her hand already fluttering for her gun. She breathes a sigh of relief that’s half curse, half greeting when she realizes it’s just Gray Sister, seated primly on the sofa.

“Where the hell did you come from?” she says. That the fox can talk now doesn’t surprise her in the slightest; this is, after all, only a dream. “And where’d you get that horrible accent?”

“Where’d you get your dark skin? Where’d you come by the color of your hair?” Gray Sister scoffs down her muzzle, all toothy disdain and bristling fur. “Don’t ask stupid questions, darlin’. I know you got more brains sloshing around in your head than that. Now, where did I come from, that’s a pretty good one. I could tell you,” —and here the sneer slips into a rueful, foxy grin, like a bullet sliding into a chamber— “but I don’t particularly feel like talking about that right now. Let’s hunker down and have a pow-wow about you. About the future, if you get me.”

Now it’s Rosa’s turn to bridle. She eyes the vixen suspiciously. “What about the future?” she asks. “What about me?”

“I swear, there’s more of an echo in here than inside Cap’n Todd’s empty puddin’ head. Untwist your tail and stop puffing up, I’m not here to give you grief. We’re all behind you one hundred and ten percent, more than you probably cotton. Hell, if I die a second time on this little hunt I’ll consider it time well spent and rest easier in my grave, wherever that may end up being. Not like I was getting any sleep before.” She shakes her wedge-head irritatedly, like she’s dislodging a fly from her eartip. “Didn’t I say I wasn’t gonna go into all of that? Lord a-mercy. Anyway, what I came here to tell you is this, and you remember it like it’s written across the face of your fiddle. Once the hunt’s done and the skin’s tacked up to dry, move on with your life. Don’t let that carpetbagging piece of rat-bone fool you into believing livin’ ain’t worth it, ‘cause it is. Even with scalawags like him runnin’ through it it is, I tell you that true.”

“But—”

“Butts are for rifles and cigarillos, little sister. Love something. Doesn’t have to be another person. Could just be your own sweet self. But for goodness sakes, don’t let him take off with your joy between his teeth, else you might as well have died with all the rest of us in that crawlspace beneath the stairs.” The fox snaps her fangs together, snickety-snak. Rosa shudders at the noise, and the memory. “That’s all I came here to say, anyways. Some of the others are better at speeching, but I got elected to it. Hope they’re happy with the results.”

And the mystery of the vixens suddenly clicks together like the oiled machinery of a revolver inside Rosa’s head.

It all happened like the worst kind of fairy tale. Rosa can almost imagine some prairie hen of a mother telling it to her circle of wide-eyed daughters, a cautionary sermon on impropriety and the dangers that lie waiting around every corner for headstrong young girls:

Rosa’s sixteen and oh! my darlings, such beauty you’ve never seen. Curls thick as blacksnakes, eyes brown as a summer flood, and a dab hand at the fiddle that could charm a Mennonite into doing the Jarabe Tapatío. She’s the delight of her father’s eye and the worry of her mother’s heart, high-spirited, fractious, and stubborn as three mules standing end to end to end.

A rich man lives in this town. He wears a bright blue uniform with bright brass buttons, and his hair is bright, too, like a penny at the bottom of a spring. There’s money jingling in his pockets, a whistle like rubies on his lips, and a glint in his eye when he looks at Rosa that says he’ll have her on his knee before the next Fourth of July. And does Rosa mind, my dears? Does she turn up her nose at all his flattering and charming and carrying on, like she’s done with all the other farm boys who came a-courting? Good heavens, no! For this captain is an easterner, and that spells different, and different spells interesting. She follows him around like a cat expecting fish, and if his eyes are sly (so sly!) and his expression foxy-sharp (so sharp!) she pays no attention and gives it no thought. Love’s wicked sneaky that way, my darlings. Like blinders on the eyes, or having no eyes at all.

So here he is and here she is and never have you seen a better-matched pair, tight as ticks in a coyote’s armpit. They’re the talk of the town and the toast of the throng, admired by every second son and firstborn daughter in the county. The months march on, and, as often happens, talk of a wedding springs up. Rosa’s chomping at the bit to see where she’ll live—to see where they’ll live, he and she and their lives ivy-twined together but her Captain, sly and slick as a greased lizard, never takes her there. It’s away down the white road, he says, far too dusty a length to travel for a mere visit.

“How many rooms are there in your villa?” she asks. For our Rosa’s a curious girl, as curious as a cat with its paw under the door.

“As many as there are teeth in a fox’s jawbone,” says he. “You could dance on your pretty toes from one end to the other and back again, fiddling all the while, and never come across the same set of doors twice.”

“When can I see it?” she asks. For our Rosa’s an impatient girl, as impatient as first love and last rites.

“Why, when we’re married, of course,” says he. “You know as well as I do what people would say if you visited before then, don’t you?”

Rosa smiles too, but she’s not smiling inside, no no no. Propriety be damned, her heart says. I want what I want and I want it now.

All through the long weekdays of sewing and study she’s imagining her lover’s touch, until she’s near full to bursting with impatience. All through Sunday mass and Monday oration and Tuesday baking and Wednesday washing she’s thinking of his eyes, and lips, and hands, until she can barely focus on another blessed thing. The moon comes up one Thursday night big and round as a horsecrippler cactus, and Rosa’s had enough of prim and enough of proper. Out of bed she goes, dancing past creaky boards and sleeping siblings and the room where her parents lay a-snoring. Into the stables and out again like thread looping a needle, and now she’s pounding away down the white road and no one can stop her.

The wind blows fine white sand all over them and now they really are a ghost army, gritty and swift as dust devils as the sign gets fresher and the foothills loom. The vixens smell victory and begin to lope. Rosa senses it too and kicks Santiago into an out-and-out run, reins in one hand, the polished grip of her brother’s revolver warm in the other. She imagines the other girls riding beside her, bloody and vengeful. She whispers their names, lets them spring from her mouth like hunting animals.

Samantha.

Lettie.

The pretty Navajo girl with the long, long hair.

The one with the freckles nearest the door.

Essie from Buck’s Ridge, who died a free woman.

Ada, who died with her hands over her eyes.

There’s a crack, like the purple evening sky is hatching from some unfeasibly huge crow’s egg, and a little gout of sand spins upward to her right. She barely has time to register what’s going on—a gunshot a rifle someone’s shooting at us he is shooting at us—before the next bullet whines past her ear, so close the wind of it tugs at her hair. Rosa blesses the dusk, the shadows, and Lady Luck. She stands in her stirrups and screams a challenge across the plain, her voice a snarl of barbwire and rust.

“Is that the best you can do?” she howls. “Do you think I’m afraid of you, you miserable stinking lump of horse shit?” The tears are finally falling now, hot and angry. “We found you! Get out here and fight me face-to-face, coward! Either shoot straight or show your god-damned face!”

The silence unreels and stretches lariat-taut, Santiago’s hoofbeats drumming a tattoo across its surface. For long seconds no response comes. Rosa hunches closer to the horse’s neck, pressing her cheek against warm skin and lathered hair. She wants him to do it. She dares him to call her bluff, to finish what he started, to take her maidenhead with a bullet. Anger like ether fills her up and chases out what little fear is left, leaving her as hollow and light as gnawed rabbit bone. Let the lead fly. Let her skin rip like a rattlesnake’s shedding. There’s nothing inside to tear apart but air and a paper heart.

“Go on,” she whispers. “Do it. Do it and be damned.”

It comes like a knock at the door after a long illness. Gray Sister shrieks, tumbles into a clump of sage, and fades to smoke and twilight, still clinging desperately to her old shape.

Rosa feels the vixen go, a deep-down-in-her-bones tug that hurts worse than an entire pouch of bullets. She tries to scream, but it comes out a wordless gurgling whimper and the wind snatches it away as greedily as it did Gray Sister. Shots are peppering the earth like hail now, as fast as her unseen enemy can pull the trigger. Pirate falls by the wayside, biting at her fading flank. Sepia somersaults like a great unseen hand has grabbed hold of her scruff, already mist before she can hit the ground. Phantom and Frizzle and Patch die in rapid succession and buzzards with straight-razor beaks tussle at Rosa’s guts, each casualty another pull and twist. He’s severing parts of her she didn’t even know she possessed. Invisible connections are snapping, ragged as exposed nerve.

Captain Todd is sending her a gunpowder telegraph. I know how much this hurts, it says. There are worse things than dying, and I’m going to teach you all about them before I finally take your life.

Somehow she manages to stay a-saddle, clutching blindly at Santiago’s mane as they charge across the last of the desert and up the first foothill. The world recedes into a raw red haze of pain and noise. When she comes back to, there are only eight of the original twenty-four vixens left, a snarling half-ring beneath the pile of cliffside boulders where Captain Todd has gone to ground.

He’s scrawnier than she remembers, all gangly, boyish limbs and pale skin shrunken over bone. The pretty blue uniform he always took such pride in hangs off his shoulders in scarecrow tatters, toes peeking through ripped scraps of boot. Even his face is strange now, covered from chin to cheek in a forest of gingery hair. The Todd she knew kept his mustache trimmed and his boots glossed to a high sheen. This stinking, hairy creature clicking his empty revolvers at her foxes can’t be the same man, and yet she knows it has to be. There hangs the evidence from his belt, shriveled and grisly. There sits the memory in her mind’s eye, vivid as a vision of Hell.

“Rosa. The one that got away. I declare, this is a spot to bump into a soul, isn’t it?” He doffs his hat to her, polite to the bitter end. “I believe the last time we crossed paths I promised to kill you.”

Her voice is tight when she manages to reply, more controlled than she thought possible under the circumstances. “You’ve gotten pretty good at lying. Looks like that’s not gonna stop any time soon.” The hammer punctuates her words with a sharp click. “I loved you once, you know. Maybe I still do. Doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re a monster that needs to be put out of his misery, though. I’m sure those other girls loved you too, right up until you slit their throats.”

“Sanctimonious, aren’t we? Haven’t you ever heard that the memory of a thing is better to keep than the thing itself?”

“No, but I’m more than willing to find out if it’s true.”

He barks a laugh. “You and what’s left of your pack of ghost bitches, I presume? Whatever you paid your scrub witch was too much. All it takes is silver bullets and a little bit of aim to break that sort of sorce—”

The bullet catches him in the kneecap. His chuckle turns to a shriek, the sound tearing at Rosa like a swallowed fishhook. Down the slope he goes, cracking against boulders and slabs of stone, his momentum carrying him right into the jaws of the waiting vixens. They waste no time falling on him with their sharp, sharp teeth.

If I was brave and strong and honest, I’d have done that myself, she thinks as she turns her horse away. The noises from behind are horrific. But I’m not. God help me, I’m not.

When they’re finished, all that’s left of him is a scrap of blue cotton and a fox’s whisker.

Rosa doesn’t go home. The only thing that makes that village full of cowards “home” now is her family, and she cannot bring herself to face them after everything that’s happened. Not yet.

It’s not a bad way of living. Odd jobs and jackrabbits keep her clothed and fed, and the remaining vixens—for better or worse, no more come up after that night—provide company and much-needed cheer. Some mornings the sky is so blue she could drown in it, the wind smelling of sage and clean earth. These are the good days, the forgetting days, when she races Santiago against cloud shadows and clutches Gray Sister’s advice between her teeth like a stolen hen. Just as frequent are the bad turns, the nights when she dreams of the dead and wakes with the sound of Captain Todd’s final muffled screams still echoing in her ears.

She misses her brothers, blunt and teasing. She misses Gray Sister, curled like a tombstone at the edge of her bedroll. She misses having an unscarred heart. The way back to her old life is still somewhere out there, Rosa knows it must be, but no matter how many times she casts for the scent, she can never seem to find it.

Brooke Bolander is a chaos-sowing trickster girl of indeterminate employment, half-tornado, half-writer. Originally from the deepest, darkest regions of the southern US, she attended the University of Leicester from 2004 to 2007 studying History and Archaeology and is a graduate of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. She enjoys loud music, peaty scotch, drawings that move, and anything pumpkin-flavored you might happen to have on hand. Her short fiction has previously appeared in Reflection’s Edge.

The Mermaid and the Mortal Thing
Chris Willrich

It is rare to glimpse a mermaid, rarer still a whole pod building sandcastles.

The travelers on the road from Palmary to Amberhorn paused upon a sea-cliff, staring down at the peculiar sight. Lovely figures, the shades of emerald and coral and turquoise, splashed about a sandy hollow licked by the rising tide. They sang and gestured, and sand sculpted itself in deference to their voices, a tower for a trill, rising steps for a staccato scale, a battlement for a crescendo. Like songs in a medley, the sandcastles blended together in a riot of styles, turrets to minarets to onion domes, and what the pair of wayfarers could see filled an arc of fifty yards. More was hidden by the cliffs.

“Let’s go closer,” said the poet Gaunt, her eyes widening.

“Why not?” mused the thief Bone, his eyes narrowing. “I have lived too long.”

Still, before approaching the beach, he made sure his daggers were handy, and he stopped his ears with wax.

Between Palmary and Amberhorn ran a golden coast—not gold in the hard lucrative sense (Imago Bone had long since checked), but the soft spill of light upon dry grassland, tawny sandstone cliffs, and beaches of beer-colored sand. All this gold was pillowed by blue: a sky that looked rich enough to dive into, a sea that appeared crystalline enough to skate upon.

Despite all this metaphorical loot, the glorious landscape lay deserted. A lonely stone road, cracked remnant of Amberhorn’s imperial past, straggled its way amid boulders and hills and fissures. True desert, a limb of the mighty Sandboil, glowed yellow-white to the east. Offering little provender for humankind, this was a land for skirting . . . or for those who fed upon the skirters.

As if to underscore the thought, the next turn of the downward path brought Bone a glimpse—just beyond the mermaids and up the coast—of a pirate ship.

He put his hand upon Gaunt’s shoulder, and drew her back toward the shelter of a sandstone wall. He pointed out the vessel.

Taking a swig from his water skin (already he missed the cool of Palmary’s shadows), he watched her as she watched the craft. He would have preferred the sight of Persimmon Gaunt any day. Of pale, sturdy, Swanisle stock, she was sun-browned by months in southern lands and further marked by the rose-and-spider-web tattoo upon her cheek, hidden and revealed and hidden by the wind-dance of auburn hair. A poet who wrote of graves and grue, she’d been popular among the elite of Palmary of the Towers—popular enough to live in cobwebbed, dusty independence. She’d been happy, but had traded all that for stony campsites and foot-blisters and hardtack.

For him. That was a wonder to rival Plasmstones and Mobius Rings, and even the bejeweled steam-powered war-coffin of Skizlok the Vampire. (He, Bone, would know).

“Do you know,” Gaunt said, “what that ship represents?”

“I do,” Bone said, drawing himself to his full height, for some words require gravity. A lean scarecrow of a man with a tangle of dark hair lately turning sandy from the sun, he knew others assumed him a rakish twenty, a slumming dandy perhaps, who’d seen too little of life to grant it full seriousness. A second glance, however, might reveal scars from fire and blade, one for each side of his face, and then his ninety-year-old eyes—lit with the gaze of one who’d seen too much of life to grant it full seriousness.

“That,” he said, leaning close to Gaunt, “is the flag of the Four Skulls Society.”

“Oh,” she said, putting her lips to one plugged ear. “I was referring to the ship. It is a trireme, Bone, a beautiful example.”

They peeked again around the cliff’s side.

They were both right. The ship flew a triangular black banner like a flicking tongue of smoke, displaying faces lacking tongues themselves, being eyeless, white, and grinning. The skulls portrayed were of a human, a goblin, a delven, and an arkendrake (with its usual jewels and precious metals gleaming amid the white). The Four Skulls Society was egalitarian as regarded both crews and victims.

And likewise with ships. The craft below the flag was indeed an old trireme—a vanishing breed, a hundred-and-twenty feet from bow-to-stern, with big, painted, bloodshot eyes on the upswept prow, and an abundance of oars jabbing from the hull like the legs of some seagoing centipede. Such ships had once commanded the winding coasts of the Spiral Sea, and the pitch-dark waters of the Midnight Sea, and brightened the waves below splendid Amberhorn, which linked them both. Those had been the last days of the gods-who-walked, oft-forgotten in this era of cogs and dhows and knarrs. This ship was like an ancient grandfather, dreaming by daylight of long-ago journeys. Bone wondered how old it might be, how long it could last.

Bone whistled. “I’m almost tempted to steal it,” he mused, “though I’m no sailor. But, of more immediate concern, what’s happening to the true sailors?”

For indeed there were rough men and mutable goblins and translucent delven on deck, all staring at the lovely, singing architects a stone’s throw to the south. Indeed, it appeared they were doing nothing else. Bone tapped the plugs in his ears, offered Gaunt the remaining lump of wax.

She shook her head. “Legends agree, a mermaid’s voice afflicts only males.”

“Perhaps. But just who is leading us on here, Gaunt?”

Gaunt laughed, waved a hand. “I am not like the pirates, Imago Bone. I am my own person. I am a poet, and was once a bard. How can I resist experiencing their song?”

“My point,” Bone muttered, but he stowed the wax where he could fetch it at need. He sighed. “We’ll approach to within a dagger-cast of the construction,” he said, as if he expected obedience, “and then withdraw. You’ve survived one confrontation with magic —”

“Which freed you from a curse.”

“Which freed me from a curse, for which I thank you, and will trust to your good judgment.”

“Thank you, O Lord and Master,” she said, with a mix of laughter and warning that reminded Bone he was nothing of the kind.

He grinned. “Let’s be off.”

They descended to the beach, the poet taking little leaps down the rough pathway, the city-bred thief treading carefully, suspicious yet of natural formations. They advanced across the strand, sand-fleas scattering before their stride, the ocean roaring and hissing beside. They stared at the mounting marvel ahead.

The mermaids’ sand-construct rivaled vast human mansions, looming beyond a moat that surged and rippled unnaturally. At times, the architects themselves appeared around the bend, oblivious, it seemed, to their watchers. Laughing, they splashed fish-tails and shook manes of human hair (albeit the shades of kelp and lilypads, starfish and seaweed), touching and kissing the sides of their redoubt. Sometimes they combed each others’ tresses, and their hair flashed like the inspiration for all humanity’s flower-beds and gardens. Their bare breasts were like the prototypes for every city’s dome, their nipples the models for every tower.

Bone swallowed and shifted right, less to hide himself than to escape the sight. He was, despite appearances, an old man. His youthful body he owed to twin death-curses that had thwarted each other, trapping him in an ageless, circumscribed existence, till Gaunt had helped him escape. Curse or no, he’d drunk deep of life and knew his vices and weaknesses, had approached his sophrosyne, as they said in Amberhorn. Knowing himself, he could abide restraint. He could resist the sea-things’ charms, for a time. And yet, it would have been easier were his body not so absurdly young. There were times when his responses left him as flushed and baffled as any adolescent.

He preferred not to explain all this to Persimmon Gaunt. Their love was fresh and fragile, and he feared she’d dismiss him as an old satyr. Indeed, he feared many things. He was like a mouse dragged, blinking, into the light, for love of a cat.

The sweet voices of the mermaids called again, melting away his thoughts. This time, despite the wax, their words sang clear.

Die now,

Mortal things.

Taste the doom

That water brings.

The song was so lush, Bone thought, one could almost take the offer as a gift. Even Gaunt trembled at its beauty. But it was not directed at them.

“Stop!” rose a voice, and then another: “Please!”

Bone snapped his gaze here and there, but saw no one. Gaunt spoke into his ear. “The voices come from within the structure. The mermaids must be tormenting pirates within. We must do something.”

“Surely they can torment pirates without us.”

Gaunt glared, and now Bone regretted this rash excursion. He’d seen that look before, when she’d scolded angels of death. “Did you not hear the horror in those cries?” she demanded.

“I have earplugs. I miss the finer points —”

“Whatever they have done, surely they deserve better than slaughter.”

“I believe,” Bone said, “thieves of the sea are termed ‘enemies of humanity.’”

“Except by those who hire them,” Gaunt countered. “And are you not a thief?”

“Of the land! Very different.”

“Besides, these could be prisoners of the pirates. I’m sure I heard a woman’s voice.”

“There are female pirates —”

A man’s voice shouted, more clearly, “Slaughterdark’s blood! Kill me if you must, but spare her! I did not lead her astray, though I loved her from afar!”

And a woman’s: “I made my choice willingly! I will die for love!”

The chorus of liquid voices returned.

You broke our trust,

Became a mortal thing.

Let water fill your chest —

This the mermaids sing.

“Well, that settles it,” said Bone.

“Yes,” Gaunt said.

“Some fool mermaid’s opted to become human, breaking taboo.”

“Yes.”

“Obviously, this is an internal matter. Let’s leave them to it.”

Gaunt glared. “As I left you to your curse? As I recall, I risked death twice over to break it.”

Bone flushed. “I would have advised you not to.”

Gaunt shook her head—whether at Bone’s words or his whole existence, he was unsure. “I must do what I can,” she said. “Perhaps I can plead for the lovers. Do as you will, Imago Bone.” She advanced across the sand.

So ends a promising love affair, Bone thought. I confess, my nagging urge toward self-preservation makes me hard to endure. But endure I will, at least.

Gaunt strode toward the surf, where she might gain access to the sand-construct. Now, watching her every brave curve, Bone felt little temptation from the sultry killers of the sea. The sea itself surged and hissed, as though whispering old truths he was too stupid to understand: old. Stupid. Do as you will.

Bone spat and followed Gaunt. “Is this some test of my loyalty?” he called. “Dangle tempting creatures before me, see how I react? There are less hazardous ways, Gaunt. Exotic dance halls! Red-light districts . . .”

Yet the mermaids were now gone from the shore. Sea-foam surged into the moat around their structure, overflowing at times into a gateway flanked by sandy lighthouses ten feet tall, echoing those at Palmary and Archaeopolis. Within lay a scene that could tempt architects to madness. Bone beheld a fantasia of columned acropolises, soaring pagodas, many-bridged canals, ant-scaled hippodromes. It seemed that every great coastal city in the Spiral Sea, and many more besides, were represented. Most of the construction soared seven or eight feet high, guarding winding pathways: The sand-city also constituted a maze.

Gaunt stopped and turned. “You are here,” she said into his ear.

He shrugged. “Where else?”

At least if I die, he thought, as they stepped into the cityscape maze, I earned that much.

Tidewater lapped at their feet as they passed through the opening, following a channel that split in twain, curving beyond sight to right and left. The afternoon sun, though high still, cast plentiful shadows, and it was cool here in the shade of jumbled cities. Gaunt drifted back and let Bone try to navigate, for this was not his first professional essay of a labyrinth. He could not immediately sound the thing, however, and meanwhile the panicked voices of the pirate and the former mermaid edged toward hysteria.

“Have you no pity!” bellowed the pirate.

Man’s for devouring,

Not for loving.

We reflect

And misdirect.

They kiss their desire —

 and expire.

“I am no mere reflection and negation of man’s desire!” cried their contrary sister. “I will be myself. I will desire! The mortal thing I spied beyond the water, I will claim.”

Bone stopped. The voices and the architecture—some of which reminded him of the Palmary of his youth—left him reeling, as though teetering upon a lifetime of sand.

“Gaunt,” he said, drawing her close, “I’m not sure I’ll solve this in time. And breaking the walls will mire us.”

“Should we run?”

“Rarely a bad option. But I’m not suggesting it yet. You take the lead.”

“Me? I’m no thief.”

“You are a scholar, Persimmon,” Bone said, using her given name in a way that, by odd, unspoken agreement, he had rarely done. “There is something about this pattern of cities that nags . . . I’d thought it a whimsical tangle, but there is something . . . ”

“Yes . . .” she said, turning slowly. “The buildings hail from all five corners of the earth, but there’s a method . . . Age, Bone! Outside, I saw towers that rose only last year in Palmary and Swanisle. And some before us now have famously fallen. And so . . .” The rest of her musings were lost to his ears, as she led them in a new direction.

She was right. He should have guessed himself, for he’d seen nearly a century pass and had watched constructions come and go. He saw the tower of his first theft in Palmary, feeling a pang as for a lost friend. And then he spotted buildings from storybooks (the rare sort he consulted about forgotten treasures). There was the lost museum of Basilia beside that towering lighthouse, the Panoptes. There was Amberhorn’s Bridge of Old Remembrance, that once bound the Continent of a Thousand Peninsulas to the Continent of the Young Sun.

Gaunt led them past these and to the right, past the delven’s Mountbranch, that vast temple both grown and hewn; and past Junkenfen of the goblins with its fleet of marsh-bound ships; and volcanic Brightcairn, beloved of dragons. Beside these works of the subtle folk, humankind’s contemporaneous structures were squat things of thatch, wood, clay, and mud. Yet these, too, were portrayed.

Surrendering all direction to Gaunt, Bone felt as one who tumbles into the past, and it was as though old cares and guilts slipped away, whirling behind like agitated sea-birds, squawking at him to remember, remember, but growing more distant by turns. The sand-structures now displayed prehistory, when humans dwelled in tents or caves, save for the mysterious masters of the lost continent Nobeca, with its spires like shells.

As if retracing his own timeline, Bone, known as the Thief with Two Deaths, recalled how Gaunt had lately dubbed him Thief with One Life. And should this new existence on the road be brutal and short . . . still, it was a new beginning. He felt old and gnarled, yet scrubbed clean, like the grotesque and beautiful driftwood he’d scrambled over as a boy on the Contrariwise Coast.

He was grinning at the thought, as they burst suddenly upon the labyrinth’s heart. His smile quickly faded.

The size of a sitting room, the hollow’s walls resembled immense cliffs, complete with concavities, bulges, striations. Far stranger, these cliffs were encrusted with immense fossil monstrosities—spindly, spiky things like nightmares or fragments of nightmares, the whole assembly or disassembly rearing and creeping and twisting around the wayfarers like a hallucination. Bone’s eyes tried to reconstruct one lost horror, then another, each contradictory creature more bizarre and compelling than the last.

By contrast the execution scene was far more human.

Six mermaids splashed about their victims. Bone knew stories of these beings, having grown up beside the sea. He knew the prevailing wisdom, that mermaids were given form by sailors’ desires. Thus they commonly took the shapes of voluptuous young women, though sometimes a male version manifested, and more rarely an inanimate object: a chest of gold, a royal scepter, a shimmering ship.

These were female, with wavy tresses dangling over angular, pouty faces and breasts so buoyant as to belong rightly only in an adolescent’s (or an Imago Bone’s) fantasies. They crowded within a ring of water, fed by the channels flowing through the maze. They surrounded a man and a woman, both waist-deep in wet sand.

“Aha!” shouted the man. “At last, my crew . . . Oh.” He was bald, black, and bearded, hailing perhaps from the realm of Ma’at where pyramids flank the savannah, though he wore an Amberhornish tunic and cloak, secured with a glass pin resembling an eye framed in solar rays. Beneath his Eldshoren tricorne hat, his gaze looked resigned, but unbowed. (Admittedly, sealed in sand, he could not bow at all.)

“Welcome, whoever! Free us, and Captain Dawnglass of the Sea-Glare will reward you well!”

“Yes!” cried the woman, sand-brown, though with a green streak in her hair that betrayed her origins. She was stunning, yet her nakedness revealed features her sisters lacked: a mole beside the nose, freckles crowding her cheeks, a pimple beside one shoulder, hair beneath the armpits, the puffy eyes of sleeplessness, sweat. Her curves bore the slightest bit of droop. Beside the rebel mermaid, the others seemed cynically-painted, fever-dreamed, half-glimpsed. “Bring me to the Sea-Glare! I will win my love!”

“You heard the lady,” Captain Dawnglass said.

A trifle smug, thought Bone, for a condemned man.

“It seems you hold these two against their will,” Gaunt addressed the mermaids. “I insist you free them.”

Before Bone could add the appropriate amount of groveling and begging, the mermaids laughed and chorused:

Freedom is ruin,

And love’s a lie.

Late or soon,

All mortals die.

“Yes!” cried the rebel mermaid. “But, being deathless and loveless, my sisters, you know not the value of that ruin, this lie. I, Irilee the mortal, say this!”

“I, Dawnglass the-generous-to-his-friends, concur!” said the pirate.

“I, Bone the scared witless, think we are outnumbered,” muttered the thief. His earplugs misled him; he hadn’t meant to be heard, but Gaunt replied, “Three-to-one only. And they are unarmed.”

The mermaids giggled at that, spinning and splashing in their glee. They sang a melody without words.

Sand swallowed Gaunt and Bone’s legs to the knees. Ocean water surged into the chamber and crashed around them. They sank a little further. Nearby, Irilee and Dawnglass struggled upward for breath.

The water receded, or else hissed into the sand.

You face odds

Not one to three,

But like to all the droplets

Of the sea.

“Ah!” sighed Dawnglass. “There is that.”

Gaunt turned to Bone with a look of apology. Satisfying as it was, Bone could not abide seeing her at a loss.

“And yet,” he said, removing his earplugs (for he was well-caught) and feigning a cocky air, “this is not my first encounter with distributed elemental intelligences. Why, I recall the panic of the Greedcoins absorbing all the Palmarian treasury, and that stink over the Middenmind that terrorized Thumbbottom . . . ”

“Had you an inkling,” Gaunt snapped, “you might have spoken up.”

“In truth, I was uncertain. To think the very sea would rise against us!”

“Indeed,” said the pirate. “It offends a mariner’s pride. I, too, underestimated their power.”

“We are not the whole sea,” Irilee said. “We . . . they . . .  are like a sheen upon the water. They command seawater, and that which bears seawater, like this sand, which they have reshaped to mock all mortal achievement. Or your blood, which hearkens to their songs.”

“Then I was lured here,” Gaunt said, shaking her head.

“Sexual craving’s but one form of longing,” Irilee said, nodding. “My kin are most accustomed to luring men, but women too may respond to their voices, and not just those who desire their own sex.”

“Song is in your blood, Gaunt,” Bone said. “As is water, of course . . .”

Gaunt was watching him closely. He knew she could tell he was thinking. Perhaps she thought it a rare and wondrous event.

He began working free his water skin. He noted Gaunt reaching for hers. Meeting his gaze she intoned:

Ruins are buildings caressed by wind,

Skeletons friends whom time undressed,

Logs the trees that gravity loved,

And wrecks the ships that ocean kissed.

Which did nothing for Bone’s mood, but did cover the sounds of two water skins emptying into the sand. The mermaids giggled at the bleakness of Gaunt’s poem, splashing and applauding.

Bone felt a diminishing of the grip upon him. He nodded to Gaunt. He counted under his breath, One, Two, Three . . .

The pair scrambled free. Before the mermaids could sing, Bone threw his dagger. Gaunt threw her water skin.

His dagger hit true, and slid clean through a mermaid’s throat. She seemed disoriented, but otherwise unharmed.

Gaunt’s fresh water, however, caused her target to shriek and hiss and dissolve.

“Yes,” Bone muttered, “she is the smart one.” He dove for his original target, shaking his own water skin as he rolled through her. Her fish-tail scattered into droplets and the rest of her crashed, now seemingly as fragile as an ice-sculpture, down into the moat.

Captain Dawnglass was a quick one. He began spitting, slowly freeing his hands. After a moment of staring, Irilee did likewise.

Bone rushed to help them. “Irilee!” he gasped. “How do we fight?”

Irilee’s four remaining sisters tittered. Gaunt splashed one with the last of her water; there came a scream, and the chorus was reduced to three. Yet their laughter continued, and they began to sing. The moat frothed.

Irilee, digging furiously, said, “They draw their solidity from human longing. Stop wanting them, and they will weaken!”

Gaunt shouted, “You men! Focus on your lovers, not these temptresses!”

Captain Dawnglass paused in his exertions to kiss Irilee. She did not resist, but seemed to Bone not to encourage him overmuch. Not my problem, however, he thought. He stared at Gaunt, the poet who’d freed him to explore the world anew. Alas, the splashing faux-flesh of the mermaids kept drawing his gaze, and their siren call caught his ears.

“Shut your eyes!” Gaunt demanded, grabbing his wrist. “Stay near me. I will sing!” He obeyed.

The mermaids ceased whatever doom-song they’d intended, the better to scoff:

You will sing?

O mortal thing?

Gaunt did. (To the tune of a popular tavern song.)

O say, can you see

That peacock named Bone!

Who so gallantly steals

When the rich folk are not home!

Her voice was lusty, rich, a bit over-enthusiastic, a touch off-key, beer to the mermaids’ wine. He drank it in.

Behind him, Captain Dawnglass took up the slack:

Oh, what do you do with a drunken pirate,

What do you do with a drunken pirate,

What do you do with a drunken pirate,

Early in the morning?

Gaunt responded,

Leave ‘im with the tab and steal his trireme,

Leave ‘im with the tab and steal his trireme,

Leave ‘im with the tab and steal his trireme,

Early in the morning!

There was human laughter in the hollow of forgotten monsters. Dawnglass called out, “Lead on! We are free now, and coming!”

As Bone stumbled forward, he heard the mermaids’ chorus fragmenting.

“Simple mirth! Common love!”

“We cannot sustain ourselves on such things!”

“Come, sisters, for the Sea-Glare’s crew can yet empower us!”

And there sounded a rushing and roiling as the three corporeal mermaids flowed out of the hollow.

Bone dared open his eyes. The sea-beings were gone, save for the ones still dissolving into the little moat. “That sounds ominous.”

“They are right,” Irilee said, staring at Gaunt and Bone. “Yet you were right as well . . . your songs and your . . . lusts . . . dismayed them. For the desire that sustains them is a bitter, desperate thing. The desire that sustains you, I see, is very different. True companionship and good cheer torment them.”

“Follow my lead,” Gaunt told them all. This time Bone followed with no reservations.

When they reached the sea, the surf was a wild, thundering thing, pounding against the sand, and there were pirates abandoning ship to frolic with the three mermaids dancing in the waves. Gaunt and Irilee conferred.

“Avert your eyes, Bone and Dawnglass!” ordered Gaunt. “Stand in the water, backs to the sea. Irilee, help me with our weapon.”

As the men obeyed, water surging about their legs, the two women hastily constructed a sand-sculpture. Swift and sketchy though it was, it soon revealed itself as the shell of a trireme. And though Irilee appeared to have lost the power to sculpt with voice alone, still she retained her brethren’s knack for sand-craft, for the little Sea-Glare came alive with improbably clear details, mast, oars, eyes. She molded the little ship like an ardent lover.

Captain Dawnglass bellowed, “You men! Remember who you are! What your home is!” He sang,

Come all ye foul pirates that plunder the sea,

to me way hay, slow the hags down!

Cover your ears but sing ‘long with me!

Give me your time, and slow the hags down!

I’m a deep-water sailor from southern Ma’at,

to me way hay, slow the hags down!

I gave up my rivers for a three-cornered hat.

Give me your time, and slow the hags down!

Irilee sang,

I’m a mermaid turned mortal, and this do I dare,

to me way hay, and slow the hags down!

I’ll take ship aboard the mighty Sea-Glare!

Give me your time, and slow the hags down!

Gaunt sang,

I’m a funereal poet who spins tales of grief,

to me way hay, and slow the hags down!

And I’ve given my heart to an odd lanky thief!

Give me your time, and slow the hags down!

There was a pause.

I’m a thief not a pirate, and not good at this,

to me way hay, and slow the hags down!

So I’ll finish my song with a powerful

He strode out of the foam and bear-hugged Gaunt, kissed her deep.

There was a cheer from the Sea-Glare, and a chorus of :

Give me your time, and slow the hags down!

The mermaids’ song was shredded, and again their individual voices arose.

“Camaraderie!”

“Friendship!”

“Marriage!”

“Ugh!”

And then:

With pathetic good cheer,

You’ve defiled this spot.

We flee marriage’s stink —

this beach we now blot.

Bone dared turn, and saw the mermaids dissolve into hissing, multi-colored spray that danced like quicksilver on a slope, out toward the afternoon sun. In their wake, there rose a groaning wave, and it surged into the shore with the noise and scale of a herd of elephants.

“Oh —” Bone began.

The wave tore him from Gaunt and spun him like a rag in an overturned wash-bucket. At last the air and sunlight found him (it was none of his doing), and he wrapped his arm around a driftwood log, a spindly, old thing like a pale, tentacled beast. It floated, at least, and with its help, so did he.

He paddled to Gaunt and together they discovered Irilee and Dawnglass bobbing and blinking in the sun. Dawnglass’s hat was gone, and the sandy Sea-Glare was lost along with all the mermaids’ sculptures; but the true craft approached, and pirates hauled the foursome into the ship’s boat.

“Marriage . . .” Bone began, as he and Gaunt regained their balance.

She blinked at him. “How foolish! But if the idea repelled the mermaids, let us not be overloud yet about the truth.”

“You are wise, O wife. Ha ha!” He let certain, unexpected thoughts drop like sand scattered through water. Among them: Perhaps marriage is just mortality shared. But then, perhaps neither he nor Gaunt really cared to be mortal. He laughed again. Goblin rowers, glurping in excitement, brought pirates and wayfarers and mermaid to the trireme. Up close, Sea-Glare was a creaking, aging thing, its wood a rich array of colors, legacy of endless repairs. Bone recalled the old philosopher’s conundrum: If you replace all the wood of a vessel, is it the same craft? He wondered then, if you replace all the particulars of a man’s life, is he the same man? What, then, of self-knowledge?

It seemed the only answer available was for the man to board the ship that life offered. So he did.

“Comrades!” Dawnglass bellowed, once all the crew were recovered. “These are my guests! The wayfarers Gaunt and Bone shall have the best hammocks below. And the lovely Irilee . . . she shall share my cabin.” He kissed her hand, and looked up.

He frowned.

Irilee was gazing in rapture, but not at him.

She pulled away, skipped in wonder about the deck, at last embracing the mast. She reminded Bone oddly of the siren-lured mariner in the old tale, strapped to such a place with ears unplugged.

“Ah, Sea-Glare,” she said. “A wondrous name, for a wondrous craft. Long have I loved thee, mortal thing. As I have ever since I beheld thee above me, dancing upon the waves.”

As the pirates gaped, Gaunt said, “I see there are others who love triremes . . .”

Bone looked to Captain Dawnglass and saw a narrowing of the gaze and a murderous glint. There was a lonely passion in the corsair’s face, of a sort that might have sealed the mermaids’ triumph, had it only manifested sooner.

Bone put a hand upon the pirate’s shoulder. “Good Captain, you are hardly the first man to lose a would-be lover to . . . a good friend.”

Dawnglass turned to Bone, his face relaying muted dispatches from a war within his skull. “I can . . . hardly fault her taste,” he said at last, staring again at Irilee. Then he grinned through the pain, bellowing, “Man the oars! Weigh anchor! I would be rid of this place! We are off to the Contrariwise Coast and rich targets. I shall sleep below-decks for now, in honor of our new . . . navigator?”

Irilee beamed and nodded.

“Some pirates are wise,” Gaunt said.

Dawnglass snorted and waved her off. As he strode to his duties, he said under his breath, “Ah well; who knows, perhaps one day Sea-Glare will consent to share . . .”

To Bone, Gaunt added, “Some thieves are wise as well. I’ll listen better to your warnings, Bone.”

“Of course,” Bone said, embracing Gaunt. “We are married.”

“Mm.”

As seamen rushed to their tasks, Bone and Gaunt leaned against the railing near the ship’s glaring eyes, and against each other. The once-mermaid scrambled up the mast. As the sun baked him to a briny dryness, Bone thought anew how lovers dragged people out of their worlds, hauled them somewhere bigger and scarier and brighter, like ship-rats brought blinking into the sun. Though he wondered idly if Irilee, so passionate and so human, would look up one evening and fall in love with a star. Sophrosyne to you, he thought, taking Gaunt’s hand upon the ancient rail, if so.

The band of mortal things, borne by a mortal thing, chased the falling sun.

© 2008 by Chris Willrich.

Originally published in Flashing Swords.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Chris Willrich lives with his family in the otherworldly environs of Silicon Valley, where he works as a children’s librarian. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Black Gate, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Flashing Swords, and The Mythic Circle. You can find him irregularly on his blog at Goblins in the Library (chriswillrich.blogspot.com) and on Twitter @WillrichChris.

The Gravedigger of Konstan Spring
Genevieve Valentine

There was something more civilized about a town that could bury its dead, if they stayed dead, and so Folkvarder Gray put out the notice for a gravedigger.

John the gravedigger was the best in the Nyr Nord Territory. He dug them narrow and he dug them deep, and when he came to Konstan Spring he provided references from Nyr Odin, where he had been called in to exercise his craft after the second English War for the Territory.

Folkvarder Gray looked over the letters, and then he shook John’s hand and took the “Gravedigger Wanted” sign out of the window, and felt very satisfied.

The water in Konstan Spring was warm all year, and it ran clear and pure, and once you drank it all your cuts and aches and pains vanished from you as if they were caught up in the current.

The town was young (everything in that country was young) and did no great business. The land around the spring had to be worked to coax any crops from the dirt, and it was so far from the sea or the railroad or the Nations tribal gatherings that there was no profit in hotels or in trading.

The general store and the saloon, the chemist and the town lodge, the blacksmith and the whorehouse, tended to those who lived there; there was little other need. The folkvarder’s office, with its little jail cell, stayed empty. There was no trouble to be had; people only found Kostan Spring by accident, and often hurried through on their way to someplace greater.

All the same, some lonesome souls had found their way to Konstan Spring.

It was a town that suited painstaking people, and when the town gathered for meetings to decide if newcomers should be given the water, the votes were orderly, and there was hardly a raised voice in the lodge.

(Mrs. Domar was sometimes louder than most people cared for, but the town was loyal to its own—where else could someone go, who had tasted the water in Konstan Spring?—and no fuss was made about her.)

The only man to bring the water out of Konstan Spring had been Hosiah Frode, the old chemist. Two years back he had written “KONSTAN’S ALE—MIRACLE TONIC” on his wagon and taken three barrels, early one morning before Folkvarder Gray could stop him.

Everyone waited to see what would happen. No one said it, but they all worried—if the gunslingers and the gamblers and the ill-living folk got wind of Konstan’s Ale and came looking for the spring, the town might be overrun with greedy sorts, and they would never be rid of them.

It was a dark winter.

But Konstan Spring was a practical town, and even under the shadow of trouble, they all made do. Kit down at the whorehouse hired a few new girls all the way from Odal in case city men had finer tastes, and she taught Anni the blacksmith’s daughter how to cook sturdy food so she could work the kitchen when all the rich, sickly gentlemen came looking for the water.

But the water must not have been such good luck to Hosiah Frode, because he never came back, and no rush of travelers ever appeared.

Secretly, Folkvarder Gray suspected Frode had angered a higher power with his thieving, and been struck down by stronger hands than theirs—the water was a great gift, and Frode should have known better than to abuse it.

It was a shame, Gray thought; Frode was a liar and a thief, but he had been a fine chemist, and Gray respected a man who was able with his work.

Frode never returned.

By spring, the men in town had developed fine enough taste to call on the new whorehouse girls from Odal (Kit had chosen the very best), and Kit sent Anni the blacksmith’s daughter over to the chemist’s.

No one complained about the change; Anni had been a terrible cook.

When he came into town, John the gravedigger took the room above the chemist shop. Anni lived in back of the shop, so the upstairs had been sitting empty.

The best the room had to offer was the view of the fenced-in graveyard past the new-painted lodge.

The flat, empty ground had never been touched; as yet, no one who lived in Konstan Spring had died.

The room above the chemist was small and Anni was an indifferent hostess, but John didn’t move quarters. People figured he was sweet on Anni, or that the view of the graveyard was as close as a gravedigger could come to living above his store like an honest man.

No one minded his reasons. Anni needed the money. In Konstan Spring the chemist never did much business.

The first man John buried was Samuel Ness, who got himself on the losing end of a fight with his horse.

The grave appeared one shovel at a time, sharp-edged and deep as a well. There was no denying John was an artist. The priest thanked John for the grave even before he asked God to commend Samuel’s soul.

“Won’t work,” muttered Mrs. Domar.

Mrs. Domar was Samuel’s nearest neighbor. She had come to Konstan Spring already a widow; her husband had fallen ill on the road, and died in an Inuit town just twenty miles from the Spring. She persevered, but the stroke of bad luck had turned her into a pessimist.

Samuel had a young orchard at the edge of his property line, and Mrs. Domar knew that if there was a way Nature could work against her inheriting that little grove of apple trees, it would.

It was the usual funeral, except that the priest, after the service, suggested that John fill in a little of the ground before the body went inside it.

John obeyed. He wasn’t one to argue with the clergy.

Two days later, Samuel Ness wriggled his way out of the shallow grave and came home to his farm and his orchard.

“I knew it,” muttered Mrs. Domar as soon as she saw him coming.

John, if he was surprised, said nothing. He smoothed down the earth after the priest had taken back the headstone, and for a few nights, if you walked all the way from the outlying farms to the chemist’s, you could see John sitting at his window, looking out over the sparse graveyard as if deciding what to do.

Everyone worried. They’d feared a gravedigger would lose the will for it in Konstan Spring, and they worried that if he went out into the world there would be questions about his hardiness. They had been lucky with Frode, but luck gave out any time.

People suggested that the folkvarder meet with him and point out the hundred-year contract John had signed. They suggested the priest give him counsel. Some suggested Anni should. If he was sweet on her, her kind face would do some good.

Philip Prain, who minded the general store, was the brave one who finally asked John what his plans might be, now that everything was in the open and John knew that the water wasn’t just for one’s health.

John said, “Try harder, I reckon.” After a moment he asked, “We see a lot of travelers?”

Folkvarder Gray and Prain and Kit down at the whorehouse held a Town Council meeting to discuss the problem.

They spoke for a long time, and made up their minds on the subject. They planned to put it to a vote before the town, since the town was very strict about having a say, but none of them would object. John was a treasure they couldn’t lose, and there were bound to be some drifters coming by sooner or later.

In the normal way of things, strangers would have a drink at the saloon and a girl at the whorehouse and ride out the next day, but there was no record of travelers once they were this far into the wild; not everyone can be missed.

The first drifter came on horseback a few weeks later, before there had been a formal vote.

He ordered liquor all night, and went to bed with one of Kit’s girls, and fell asleep without ever having tasted the water from Konstan Spring.

He suffered a horrible attack in his sleep. Some nightmare had troubled him so that he’d twisted his neck up in his blankets and broken it.

Anni brought John the good news.

This time John had a little audience: Folkvarder Gray and Anni came, and Mrs. Domar, who wanted to see how to get that sharp edge in her own flowerbeds.

“You cut the ground so clean,” Anni said after a time. “Where’d you learn?”

“Started young,” he said. “Buried my ma and pa when I was twelve. Practice.”

Anni nodded, and after he was finished they walked home side by side.

She was a quiet sort of girl, and John kept to himself, but Konstan Spring began to lay wagers for the month they’d be married. Anni’s father, the old blacksmith, wanted it at once—the gravedigger got a hundred dollars a year. Samuel Ness thought it was too soon for a man to be sure he wanted a wife; he said no one should rightly marry until the spring, when the flowers were out.

Kit at the whorehouse swore they’d never get married, but everyone said it was only because John had never given her any business; she had sour grapes, that was all.

For the whole winter it went on that way. The town welcomed four men, each traveling alone, bound for New Freya or Odin’s Lake, and one as far south as Iroquois country. Each one had gotten lost in the dark cold, in the snow or the freezing rain, and found themselves outside the saloon in Konstan Spring.

Each one spent the night at the whorehouse—Kit insisted—and of course it was much better to have a hot mug of mead to burn off the frost of a long ride, so there was no occasion to drink the spring-water.

The next morning John got a knock on his door from the Gerder boy who worked at the post office, or Mary the redhead from the whorehouse, to let him know he had a job to be getting on with.

Four travelers was less than it should be, even in winter, and they all worried that a gravedigger of John’s skill would tire of having nothing to do. John, however, seemed happy to dig only one perfect grave a month for that whole winter; each one straight as a ruler, crisp edges, ground as smooth as God had ever made it.

People in Konstan Spring began to warm to him. For all they were patient, they were proud, and it was a comfort that the gravedigger of Konstan Spring knew the importance of a job done right.

Finn and Ivar Halfred were clerks who stumbled into Konstan Spring just before the thaw—the last spoils of winter for John the gravedigger.

They were from Portstown, Ivar told the Gerder boy, who took their horses. The Gerder boy didn’t have the sense to ask where they were going (he didn’t have the sense God gave an apple), so Gerder the father, who tended the saloon, asked instead.

Most of the people in Konstan Spring came out when strangers came into town. It was always interesting to see new people, no matter how briefly they’d be staying.

Anni and John sat at a little table in a corner, set apart from the crowd and noise of the saloon. At the other tables the wagers about their courtship went up and up and up, even in the midst of looking at the strangers; there was always a place for a friendly bet.

At last, old Gerder asked the brothers, “What brings you to Konstan Spring?”

By that time Ivar was already drunk, and he laughed loudly and said, “We were supposed to head south for Bruntofte, but we turned right instead of left!” which was an old joke that no one paid any mind. It was never hard to tell which of two brothers was the fool.

“Bruntofte isn’t very welcoming,” Gerder said. “Hope you boys plan to do some trade; they don’t like people showing up with empty hands. We all saw what happened to the English, before they got driven out.”

After a little pause, Finn sighed and said, “Haven’t thought that far ahead. We’re just looking to start over in a place that has enough room to be lonely in.”

You didn’t get as far as Konstan Spring unless you were putting something behind you, so no one was surprised to hear it. But the way he spoke must have struck Anni something awful, because she got up from her seat and took a place next to Finn at the bar.

She’d never been pretty (not compared to whorehouse girls from Odal), but the way she looked at him would have charmed a much less lonely man than Finn Halfred.

They talked until late, until everyone had gone home but Kit from the whorehouse, whose girls were working to bring Ivar back and lighten his pockets. They tried to hook Finn, too, but Anni put her hand on his arm, and the girls respected her claim.

Anni brought Finn home with her when she left that night, his arm linked with hers. The girls from the whorehouse thought it was a scandal, but Kit told them to mind their own business and tend to their customer.

Kit was no fool; she knew how slowly time moved in Konstan Spring, and a girl shouldn’t be a bad cook and an indifferent chemist year in and year out without anything else happening inside of her. Anni could have a night with a young clerk if she wanted. (It was the first thing Anni had managed well in a long time. Kit was glad to see something worthy from Anni at last.)

The next morning Anni brought Finn out on the little promenade. She told Kit in passing, “He got thirsty—I gave him some water.”

Kit told the town.

They held a meeting (in the lodge, safely away from Anni) to discuss what to tell Finn about his brother’s sad accident the night before.

Philip Prain said right off that it was a shame about the wagering pool, but Folkvarder Gray called them back to order; all things in their time, gambling had no place in the lodge. They had to decide what would happen now, with their gravedigger.

John was a steady man, but now they weren’t sure who would do for him but old Mrs. Domar, who was a widow and too old to be suitable.

“As if I would,” sniffed Mrs. Domar.

The only other girl in town was Gerder’s daughter Sue, who was only fourteen and couldn’t yet go courting. If she got a little older, then perhaps they could consider, but none of them had been in Konstan Spring long enough to really know if the young ever grew older, or if the grown slowly grew old.

(Konstan Spring hadn’t been an early settlement by the Longboaters. It hadn’t even been in the eyes of the railroad men. It was a town by accident, because the water was of value; a town because the people in it were slow to want change; a town because it was better to live among the same kind forever than to risk going into the wide new country full of strangers.)

The town was like the Ness orchard, whose little apple trees (always saplings and never older) bent their young branches nearly to snapping just to bear their fruit.

It would be the same with Sue, if they let her go courting too early.

Outside, John had turned his hand to his art for poor Ivar Halfred, and one shovelful of dirt after another bloomed from the ground as he worked.

Folkvarder Gray went himself to break the news.

He told Finn that Ivar had drunk himself to death, and his whorehouse girl hadn’t been able to wake him no matter what they did. Finn was sorely grieved, and Folkvarder Gray thought it was best to wait for some other day to explain about the water.

On his way out, the folkvarder tipped his hat to John, who was sharpening the edge of his shovel on a boulder that sat beside a wide grave, sharp-edged and deep as a well. John looked as quiet and calm as ever, but Folkvarder Gray had been disappointed in a woman himself, many years back, on his home shores, and he knew the look of a heartbroken man doing a chore just to keep his hands busy.

“No need for all this, John,” Folkvarder Gray said. “It’ll be weeks yet before the thaw opens the roads, and no knowing when the next one will come.”

Folkvarder Gray looked carefully into the thick dark of the grave. “A little steep, my boy,” he said after a moment. The warm damp rose up from the ground, sharp-smelling, and he stepped back. That was no smell for the living.

“It’s just for practice,” said John, turned the shovel on its edge, slid a slender finger along it until he began to bleed.

After the service on Sunday, Anni and Finn went out walking.

Inside the lodge, Samuel Ness started a new wager that they’d come back that same day and ask the priest to marry them. Mrs. Domar, who didn’t approve of such suggestions, went to the window and pretended to be deaf.

From the window Mrs. Domar could see Anni and Finn walking on the lawn behind the lodge, hand in hand toward the chemist’s, and John’s silhouette in the upper window, looking out toward the graveyard to admire his work.

“Finn will come sniffing around after a job,” said Philip Prain. “I could make use of him in the store maybe a month out of the year, but he’ll have to make his money some other way, and I don’t see much need for a clerk in Konstan Spring.”

“We have need for him if he does good work,” said Folkvarder Gray. “And who will be the chemist if he takes Anni out to some farm instead of staying in town? We can’t do without a chemist. It’s not civilized.”

“They’ll find some way to scrape by,” said Kit. “Young fools like that always do.”

“It’s no good,” said Mrs. Domar, watching John look over at the cemetery.

No one answered her; Mrs. Domar never saw good in anything.

The wager, sadly for Samuel, came to nothing.

That evening, Finn and Anni disappeared from Konstan Spring, and if Folkvarder Gray noticed that the chemist’s house was quiet, that the boulder in the yard was gone and the wide deep grave was smoothed over, he said nothing to John about it.

No town was run well without some sacrifices. Artists had their ways, and another chemist would be easier to come by than a gravedigger of so much patience and skill.

The question of Anni and Finn trapped in the grave made the folkvarder sorry for Anni’s sake, but it was what came sometimes of breaking a good man’s heart.

(Not everyone can be missed.)

It was for the best. Anni had never been a good chemist; Konstan Spring deserved better, he knew.

Samuel Ness paid Kit from the whorehouse two dollars, having been wrong about both Anni and John, and Anni and Finn.

Mrs. Domar didn’t approve of Kit, but she had never forgiven Samuel for taking back his orchard, and was happy to see him lose a little money.

Kit kept the money in an envelope, for a wedding present in case Anni should ever come home. (She knew Anni must; she wasn’t the type to disappear on her own.)

After a month of no word, Kit sent redheaded Mary from Odal over to the shop at the edge of the graveyard.

Mary knew a little about the chemist’s, and a little about coaxing the hearts of quiet men, and it would be best, Kit figured, to have the gravedigger of Konstan Spring soon settled with a pretty young wife.

Others did not quite agree; against Kit’s complaints, Folkvarder Gray put a CHEMIST WANTED sign in the window of his office, and sent young Gerder to town on horseback with another advertisement for the train station wall.

Folkvarder Gray was confident that sooner or later a wonderful chemist would come across the advertisement, when the time was right. The country was still rough and unknown, and brave artists were hard to come by, but he was prepared—he would take nothing but the best.

Konstan Spring could afford to wait, and Folkvarder Gray knew the importance of a job done right.

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, was recently published by Prime Books. Her short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from magazines such as Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod, and in many anthologies, including Armored, Under the Moons of Mars, Running with the Pack, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Federations, Teeth, and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, among others. Her story “Light on the Water” was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog at genevievevalentine.com.

Not Our Brother
Robert Silverberg

Halperin came into San Simón Zuluaga in late October, a couple of days before the fiesta of the local patron saint, when the men of the town would dance in masks. He wanted to see that. This part of Mexico was famous for its masks, grotesque and terrifying ones portraying devils and monsters and fiends. Halperin had been collecting them for three years. But masks on a wall are one thing, and masks on dancers in the town plaza quite another.

San Simón was a mountain town about halfway between Acapulco and Taxco. “Tourists don’t go there,” Guzmán López had told him. “The road is terrible and the only hotel is a Cucaracha Hilton—five rooms, straw mattresses.” Guzmán ran a gallery in Acapulco where Halperin had bought a great many masks. He was a suave, cosmopolitan man from Mexico City, with smooth dark skin and a bald head that gleamed as if it had been polished. “But they still do the Bat Dance there, the Lord of the Animals Dance. It is the only place left that performs it. This is from San Simón Zuluaga,” said Guzmán, and pointed to an intricate and astonishing mask in purple and yellow depicting a bat with outspread leathery wings that was at the same time somehow also a human skull and a jaguar. Halperin would have paid ten thousand pesos for it, but Guzmán was not interested in selling. “Go to San Simón,” he said. “You’ll see others like this.”

“For sale?”

Guzman laughed and crossed himself. “Don’t suggest it. In Rome, would you make an offer for the Pope’s robes? These masks are sacred.”

“I want one. How did you get this one?”

“Sometimes favors are done. But not for strangers. Perhaps I’ll be able to work something out for you.”

“You’ll be there, then?”

“I go every year for the Bat Dance,” said Guzmán. “It’s important to me. To touch the real Mexico, the old Mexico. I am too much a Spaniard, not enough an Aztec; so I go back and drink from the source. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” Halperin said. “Yes.”

“You want to see the true Mexico?”

“Do they still slice out hearts with an obsidian dagger?”

Guzmán said, chuckling, “If they do, they don’t tell me about it. But they know the old gods there. You should go. You would learn much. You might even experience interesting dangers.”

“Danger doesn’t interest me a whole lot,” said Halperin.

“Mexico interests you. If you wish to swallow Mexico, you must swallow some danger with it, like the salt with the tequila. If you want sunlight, you must have a little darkness. You should go to San Simón.” Guzmán’s eyes sparkled. “No one will harm you. They are very polite there. Stay away from demons and you will be fine. You should go.”

Halperin arranged to keep his hotel room in Acapulco and rented a car with four-wheel drive. He invited Guzmán to ride with him, but the dealer was leaving for San Simón that afternoon, with stops en route to pick up artifacts at Chacalapa and Hueycantenango. Halperin could not go that soon. “I will reserve a room for you at the hotel,” Guzmán promised, and drew a precise road map for him.

The road was rugged and winding and barely paved, and turned into a chaotic dirt-and-gravel track beyond Chichihualco. The last four kilometers were studded with boulders like the bed of a mountain stream. Halperin drove most of the way in first gear, gripping the wheel desperately, taking every jolt and jounce in his spine and kidneys. To come out of the pink-and-manicured Disneyland of plush Acapulco into this primitive wilderness was to make a journey five hundred years back in time. But the air up here was fresh and cool and clean, and the jungle was lush from recent rains, and now and then Halperin saw a mysterious little town half-buried in the heavy greenery: dogs barked, naked children ran out and waved, leathery old Nahua folk peered gravely at him and called incomprehensible greetings. Once he heard a tremendous thump against his undercarriage and was sure he had ripped out his oil pan on a rock, but when he peered below everything seemed to be intact. Two kilometers later, he veered into a giant rut and thought he had cracked an axle, but he had not. He hunched down over the wheel, aching, tense, and imagined that splendid bat mask, or its twin, spotlighted against a stark white wall in his study. Would Guzmán be able to get him one? Probably. His talk of the difficulties involved was just a way of hyping the price. But even if Halperin came back empty-handed from San Simón, it would be reward enough simply to have witnessed the dance, that bizarre, alien rite of a lost pagan civilization. There was more to collecting Mexican masks, he knew, than simply acquiring objects for the wall.

In late afternoon he entered the town just as he was beginning to think he had misread Guzmán’s map. To his surprise it was quite imposing, the largest village he had seen since turning off the main highway—a great bare plaza ringed by stone benches, marketplace on one side, vast heavy-walled old church on the other, giant gnarled trees, chickens, dogs, children about everywhere, and houses of crumbling adobe spreading up the slope of a gray flat-faced mountain to the right and down into the dense darkness of a barranca thick with ferns and elephant-ears to the left. For the last hundred meters into town an impenetrable living palisade of cactus lined the road on both sides, unbranched spiny green columns that had been planted one flush against the next. Bougainvillea in many shades of red and purple and orange cascaded like gaudy draperies over walls and rooftops.

Halperin saw a few old Volkswagens and an ancient ramshackle bus parked on the far side of the plaza and pulled his car up beside them. Everyone stared at him as he got out. Well, why not? He was big news here, maybe the first stranger in six months. But the pressure of those scores of dark amphibian eyes unnerved him. These people were all Indians, Nahuas, untouched in any important way not only by the twentieth century but by the nineteenth, the eighteenth, all the centuries back to Moctezuma. They had nice Christian names like Santiago and Francisco and Jesús, and they went obligingly to the iglesia for mass whenever they thought they should, and they knew about cars and transistor radios and Coca-Cola. But all that was on the surface. They were still Aztecs at heart, Halperin thought. Time-travelers. As alien as Martians.

He shrugged off his discomfort. Here he was the Martian, dropping in from a distant planet for a quick visit. Let them stare: he deserved it. They meant no harm. Halperin walked toward them and said, “Por favor, donde está el hotel del pueblo?”

Blank faces. “El hotel?” he asked, wandering around the plaza. “Por favor. Donde?” No one answered. That irritated him. Sure, Nahuatl was their language, but it was inconceivable that Spanish would be unknown here. Even in the most remote towns someone spoke Spanish. “Por favor!” he said, exasperated. They melted back at his approach as though he were ablaze. Halperin peered into dark cluttered shops. “Habla usted Español?” he asked again and again, and met only silence. He was at the edge of the marketplace, looking into a chaos of fruit stands, tacos stands, piles of brilliant serapes and flimsy sandals and stacked sombreros, and booths where vendors were selling the toys of next week’s Day of the Dead holiday, candy skeletons and green banners emblazoned with grinning red skulls. “Por favor?” he said loudly, feeling very foolish.

A woman in jodhpurs and an Eisenhower jacket materialized suddenly in front of him and said in English, “They don’t mean to be rude. They’re just very shy with strangers.”

Halperin was taken aback. He realized that he had begun to think of himself as an intrepid explorer, making his way with difficulty through a mysterious primitive land. In an instant she had snatched all that from him, both the intrepidity and the difficulties.

She was about thirty, with close-cut dark hair and bright, alert eyes, attractive, obviously American. He struggled to hide the sense of letdown her advent had created in him and said, “I’ve been trying to find the hotel.”

“Just off the plaza, three blocks behind the market. Let’s go to your car and I’ll ride over there with you.”

“I’m from San Francisco,” he said. “Tom Halperin.”

“That’s such a pretty city. I love San Francisco.”

“And you?”

“Miami,” she said. “Ellen Chambers.” She seemed to be measuring him with her eyes. He noticed that she was carrying a couple of Day of the Dead trinkets—a crudely carved wooden skeleton with big eyeglasses, and a rubber snake with a gleaming human skull of white plastic, like a cue-ball, for a head. As they reached his car she said, “You came here alone?”

Halperin nodded. “Did you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Come down from Taxco. How did you find this place?”

“Antiquities dealer in Acapulco told me about it. Antonio Guzmán López. I collect Mexican masks.”

“Ah.”

“But I’ve never actually seen one of the dances.”

“They do an unusual one here,” she said as he drove down a street of high, ragged, mud-colored walls, patched and plastered, that looked a thousand years old. “Lord of the Animals, it’s called. Died out everywhere else. Pre-Hispanic shamanistic rite, invoking protective deities, fertility spirits.”

“Guzmán told me a little about it. Not much. Are you an anthropologist?”

“Strictly amateur. Turn left here.” There was a little street, an open wrought-iron gateway, a driveway of large white gravel. Set back a considerable distance was a squat, dispiriting hovel of a hotel, one story, roof of chipped red tiles in which weeds were growing. Not even the ubiquitous bougainvillea and the great clay urns overflowing with dazzling geraniums diminished its ugliness. Cucaracha Hilton indeed, Halperin thought dourly. She said, “This is the place. You can park on the side.”

The parking lot was empty. “Are you and I the only guests?” he asked.

“So it seems.”

“Guzmán was supposed to be here. Smooth-looking man, bald shiny head, dresses like a financier.”

“I haven’t seen him,” she said. “Maybe his car broke down.”

They got out, and a slouching fourteen-year-old mozo came to get Halperin’s luggage. He indicated his single bag and followed Ellen into the hotel. She moved in a sleek, graceful way that kindled in him the idea that she and he might get something going in this forlorn place. But as soon as the notion arose, he felt it fizzling: she was friendly, she was good-looking, but she radiated an offputting vibe, a noli-me-tangere sort of thing, that was unmistakable and made any approach from him inappropriate. Too bad. Halperin liked the company of women and fell easily and uncomplicatedly into liaisons with them wherever he traveled, but this one puzzled him. Was she a lesbian? Usually he could tell, but he had no reading on her except that she meant him to keep his distance. At least for the time being.

The hotel was grim, a string of lopsided rooms arranged around a weedy courtyard that served as a sort of lobby. Some hens and a rooster were marching about, and a startling green iguana, enormous, like a miniature dinosaur, was sleeping on a branch of a huge yellow-flowered hibiscus just to the left of the entrance. Everything was falling apart in the usual haphazard tropical way. Nobody seemed to be in charge. The mozo put Halperin’s suitcase down in front of a room on the far side of the courtyard and went away without a word. “You’ve got the one next to mine,” Ellen said. “That’s the dining room over there and the cantina next to it. There’s a shower out in back and a latrine a little further into the jungle.”

“Wonderful.”

“The food isn’t bad. You know enough to watch out for the water. There are bugs but no mosquitoes.”

“How long have you been here?” Halperin asked.

“Centuries,” she said. “I’ll see you in an hour and we’ll have dinner, okay?”

His room was a whitewashed irregular box, smelling faintly of disinfectant, that contained a lumpy narrow bed, a sink, a massive mahogany chest of drawers that could have come over with the Spaniards, and an ornate candlestick. The slatted door did not lock and the tile-rimmed window that gave him an unsettling view of thick jungle close outside was without glass, an open hole in the wall. But there was a breathtaking mask mounted above the bed, an armadillo-faced man with a great gaping mouth, and next to the chest of drawers was a weatherbeaten but extraordinary helmet mask, a long-nosed man with an owl for one ear and a coyote for another, and over the bed was a double mask, owl and pig, that was finer than anything he had seen in any museum. Halperin felt such a rush of possessive zeal that he began to sweat. The sour acrid scent of it filled the room. Could he buy these masks? From whom? The dull-eyed mozo? He had done all his collecting through galleries; he had no idea how to go about acquiring masks from natives. He remembered Guzmán’s warning about not trying to buy from them. But these masks must no longer be sacred if they were mere hotel decorations. Suppose, he thought, I just take that owl-pig when I check out, and leave three thousand pesos on the sink. That must be a fortune here. Five thousand, maybe. Could they find me? Would there be trouble when I was leaving the country? Probably. He put the idea out of his mind. He was a collector, not a thief. But these masks were gorgeous.

He unpacked and found his way outside to the shower—a cubicle of braided ropes, a creaking pipe, yellowish tepid water—and then he put on clean clothes and knocked at Ellen’s door. She was ready for dinner. “How do you like your room?” she asked.

“The masks make up for any little shortcomings. Do they have them in every room?”

“They have them all over,” she said.

He peered past her shoulder into her room, which was oddly bare, no luggage or discarded clothes lying around, and saw two masks on the wall, not as fine as his but fine enough. But she did not invite him to take a close look, and closed the door behind her. She led him to the dining room. Night had fallen some time ago, and the jungle was alive with sounds, chirpings and rachetings and low thunking booms and something that sounded the way the laughter of a jaguar might sound. The dining room, oblong and lit by candles, had three tables and more masks on the wall, a devil face with a lizard for a nose, a crudely carved mermaid, and a garish tiger-hunter mask. He wandered around studying them in awe, and said to her, “These aren’t local. They’ve been collected from all over Guerrero.”

“Maybe your friend Guzmán sold them to the owner,” she suggested. “Do you own many?”

“Dozens. I could bore you with them for hours. Do you know San Francisco at all? I’ve got a big old three-story Victorian in Noe Valley and there are masks in every room. I’ve collected all sorts of primitive art, but once I discovered Mexican masks they pushed everything else aside, even the Northwest Indian stuff. You collect too, don’t you?”

“Not really. I’m not an acquirer. Of things, at any rate. I travel, I look, I learn, I move on. What do you do when you aren’t collecting things?”

“Real estate,” he said. “I buy and sell houses. And you?”

“Nothing worth talking about,” she said.

The mozo appeared, silently set their table, brought them, unbidden, a bottle of red wine. Then a tureen of albóndigas soup, and afterward tortillas, tacos, a decent turkey molé. Without a word, without a change of expression.

“Is that kid the whole staff?” Halperin asked.

“His sister is the chambermaid. I guess his mother is the cook. The patrón is Filiberto, the father, but he’s busy getting the fiesta set up. He’s one of the important dancers. You’ll meet him. Shall we get more wine?”

“I’ve had plenty,” he said.

They went for a stroll after dinner, skirting the jungle’s edge and wandering through a dilapidated residential area. He heard music and handclapping coming from the plaza but felt too tired to see what was happening there. In the darkness of the tropical night he might easily have reached for Ellen and drawn her against him, but he was too tired for that, too, and she was still managing to be amiable, courteous, but distant. She was a mystery to him. Moneyed, obviously. Divorced, widowed young, gay, what? He did not precisely mistrust her, but nothing about her seemed quite to connect with anything else.

About nine-thirty he went back to his room, toppled down on the ghastly bed, and dropped at once into a deep sleep that carried him well past dawn. When he woke, the hotel was deserted except for the boy. “Cómo se llama?” Halperin asked, and got an odd smouldering look, probably for mocking a mere mozo by employing the formal construction. “Elustesio,” the boy muttered. Had Elustesio seen the Norteamericano señorita? Elustesio hadn’t seen anyone. He brought Halperin some fruit and cold tortillas for breakfast and disappeared. Afterward Halperin set out on a slow stroll into town.

Though it was early, the plaza and surrounding marketplace were already crowded. Again Halperin got the visiting-Martian treatment from the townsfolk—fishy stares, surreptitious whispers, the occasional shy and tentative grin. He did not see Ellen. Alone among these people once more, he felt awkward, intrusive, vulnerable; yet he preferred that, he realized, to the curiously unsettling companionship of the Florida woman.

The shops now seemed to be stocking little except Day of the Dead merchandise, charming and playful artifacts that Halperin found irresistible. He had long been attracted to the imagery of brave defiance of death that this Mexican version of Halloween, so powerful in the inner life of the country, called forth. Halperin bought a yellow papier-mâché skull with brilliant flower-eyes and huge teeth, an elegant little guitar-playing skeleton and a bag of grisly, morbid marzipan candies. He stared at the loaves of bread decorated with skulls and saints in a bakery window. He smiled at a row of sugar coffins with nimble skeletons clambering out of them. There was some extraordinary lacquer work on sale too, trays and gourds decorated with gleaming red-and-black patterns. By mid-morning he had bought so much that carrying it was a problem, and he returned to the hotel to drop off his purchases.

A blue Toyota van was parked next to his car and Guzmán, looking just as dapper in khakis as he always did in his charcoal gray suits, was rearranging a mound of bundles in it. “Are you enjoying yourself?” he called to Halperin.

“Very much. I thought I’d find you in town when I got here yesterday.”

“I came and went again, to Tlacotepec, and I returned. I have bought good things for the gallery.” He nodded toward Halperin’s armload of toy skulls and skeletons. “I see you are buying too. Good. Mexico needs your help.”

“I’d rather buy one of the masks that’s hanging in my room,” Halperin said. “Have you seen it? Pig and owl, and carved like—”

“Patience. We will get masks for you. But think of this trip as an experience, not as a collecting expedition, and you will be happier. Acquisitions will happen of their own accord if you don’t try to force them, and if you enjoy the favor of amo tokinwan while you are here.”

Halperin was staring at some straw-wrapped wooden statuettes in the back of the van. “Amo tokinwan? Who’s that?”

“The Lords of the Animals,” said Guzmán. “The protectors of the village. Perhaps protectors is not quite the right word, for protectors are benevolent, and amo tokinwan often are not. Quite dangerous sometimes, indeed.”

Halperin could not decide how serious Guzmán was. “How so?”

“Sometimes at fiesta time they enter the village and mingle. They look like anyone else and attract no special attention, and they have a way of making the villagers think that they belong here. Can you imagine that, seeing a stranger and believing you have known him all your life? Beyond doubt they are magical.”

“And they are what? Guardians of the village?”

“In a sense. They bring the rain; they ward off the lightning; they guard the crops. But sometimes they do harm. No one can predict their whims. And so the dancing, to propitiate them. Beyond doubt they are magical. Beyond doubt they are something very other. Amo tokinwan.”

“What does that mean?” Halperin asked.

“In Nahuatl it means, ‘Not our brother,’ of different substance. Alien. Supernatural. I think I have met them, do you know? You stand in the plaza watching the dancers, and there is a little old woman at your elbow or a boy or a pregnant woman wearing a fine rebozo, and everything seems all right, but you get a little too close and you feel the chill coming from them, as though they are statues of ice. So you back away and try to think good thoughts.” Guzmán laughed. “Mexico! You think I am civilized because I have a Rolex on my wrist? Even I am not civilized, my friend. If you are wise you will not be too civilized while you are here, either. They are not our brother, and they do harm. I told you you will see the real Mexico here, eh?”

“I have a hard time believing in spirits,” Halperin said. “Good ones and evil ones alike.”

“These are both at once. But perhaps they will not bother you.” Guzmán slammed shut the door of the van. “In town they are getting ready to unlock the masks and dust them and arrange them for the fiesta. Would you like to be there when that is done? The mayordomo is my friend. He will admit you.”

“I’d like that very much. When?”

“After lunch.” Guzmán touched his hand lightly to Halperin’s wrist. “One word, first. Control your desire to collect. Where we go today is not a gallery.”

The masks of San Simón were kept in a locked storeroom of the municipal building. Unlocking them turned out to be a solemn and formal occasion. All the town’s officials were there, Guzmán whispered: the alcalde, the five alguaciles, the regidores, and Don Luis Gutierrez, the mayordomo, an immense mustachioed man whose responsibility it was to maintain the masks from year to year, to rehearse the dancers and to stage the fiesta. There was much bowing and embracing. Most of the conversation was in Nahuatl, which Halperin did not understand at all, and he was able to follow very little of the quick, idiosyncratic Spanish they spoke either, though he heard Guzmán introduce him as an important Norteamericano scholar and tried thereafter to look important and scholarly. Don Luis produced an enormous old-fashioned key, thrust it with a flourish into the door and led the way down a narrow, musty corridor to a large white-walled storeroom with a ceiling of heavy black beams. Masks were stacked everywhere, on the floor, on shelves, in cupboards. The place was a museum. Halperin, who could claim a certain legitimate scholarly expertise by now in this field, recognized many of the masks as elements in familiar dances of the region, the ghastly faces of the Diablo Macho Dance, the heavy-bearded elongated Dance of the Moors and Christians masks, the ferocious cat-faces of the Tigre Dance. But there were many that were new and astounding to him, the Bat Dance masks, terrifying bat-winged heads that all were minglings of bat characters and other animals, bat-fish, bat-coyote, bat-owl, bat-squirrel, and some that were unidentifiable except for the weird outspread rubbery wings, bats hybridized with creatures of another world, perhaps. One by one the masks were lifted, blown clean of dust, admired, passed around, though not to Halperin. He trembled with amazement at the power and beauty of these bizarre wooden effigies. Don Luis drew a bottle of mescal from a niche and handed it to the alcalde, who took a swig and passed it on; the bottle came in time to Halperin, and without a thought for the caterpillar coiled in the bottom of the bottle he gulped the fiery liquor. Things were less formal now. The high officials of the town were laughing, shuffling about in clumsy little dance steps, picking up gourd rattles from the shelves and shaking them. They called out in Nahuatl, all of it lost on Halperin, though the words amo tokinwan at one point suddenly stood out in an unintelligible sentence, and someone shook rattles with curious vehemence. Halperin stared at the masks but did not dare go close to them or try to touch them. This is not a gallery, he reminded himself. Even when things got so uninhibited that Don Luis and a couple of the others put masks on and began to lurch about the room in a weird lumbering polka, Halperin remained tense and controlled. The mescal bottle came to him again. He drank, and this time his discipline eased; he allowed himself to pick up a wondrous bat mask, phallic and with great staring eyes. The carving was far finer than on the superb one he had seen at Guzmán’s gallery. He ran his fingers lovingly over the gleaming wood, the delicately outlined ribbed wings. Guzmán said, “In some villages the Bat Dance was a Christmas dance, the animals paying homage to little Jesus. But here it is a fertility rite, and therefore the bat is phallic. You would like that mask, no?” He grinned broadly. “So would I, my friend. But it will never leave San Simón.”

Just as the ceremony appeared to be getting rowdy, it came to an end: the laughter ceased, the mescal bottle went back to its niche, the officials grew solemn again and started to file out. Halperin, in schoolboy Spanish, thanked Don Luis for permitting him to attend, thanked the alcalde, thanked the alguaciles and the regidores. He felt flushed and excited as he left the building. The cache of masks mercilessly stirred his acquisitive lust. That they were unattainable made them all the more desirable, of course. It was as though the storeroom were a gallery in which the smallest trifle cost a million dollars.

Halperin caught sight of Ellen Chambers on the far side of the plaza, sitting outside a small café. He waved to her and she acknowledged it with a smile.

Guzmán said, “Your traveling companion?”

“No. She’s a tourist down from Taxco. I met her yesterday.”

“I did not know any other Americans were here for the fiesta. It surprises me.” He was frowning. “Sometimes they come, but very rarely. I thought you would be the only extranjero here this year.”

“It’s all right,” said Halperin. “We gringos get lonely for our own sort sometimes. Come on over and I’ll introduce you.”

Guzmán shook his head. “Another time. I have business to attend to. Commend me to your charming friend and offer my regrets.”

He walked away. Halperin shrugged and crossed the plaza to Ellen, who beckoned him to the seat opposite her. He signaled the waiter. “Two margaritas,” he said.

She smiled. “Thank you, no.”

“All right. One.”

“Have you been busy today?” she asked.

“Seeing masks. I salivate for some of the things they have in this town. I find myself actually thinking of stealing some if they won’t sell to me. That’s shocking. I’ve never stolen anything in my life. I’ve always paid my own way.”

“This would be a bad place to begin, then.”

“I know that. They’d put the curse of the mummy on me, or the black hand, or God knows what. The sign of Moctezuma. I’m not serious about stealing masks. But I do want them. Some of them.”

“I can understand that,” she said. “But I’m less interested in the masks than in what they represent. The magic character, the transformative power. When they put the masks on, they become the otherworldly beings they represent. That fascinates me. That the mask dissolves the boundary between our world and theirs.”

“Theirs?”

“The invisible world. The world the shaman knows, the world of the were-jaguars and were-bats. A carved and painted piece of wood becomes a gateway into that world and brings the benefits of the supernatural. That’s why the masks are so marvelous, you know. It isn’t just an aesthetic thing.”

“You actually believe what you’ve just said?” Halperin asked.

“Oh, yes. Yes, definitely.”

He chose not to press the point. People believed all sorts of things, pyramid power, yoghurt as a cure for cancer, making your plants grow by playing Bach to them. That was all right with him. Just now he found her warmer, more accessible, than she had been before, and he had no wish to offend her. As they strolled back to the hotel, he asked her to have dinner with him, imagining hopefully that that might lead somewhere tonight, but she said she would not be eating at the hotel this evening. That puzzled him—where else around here could she get dinner, and with whom?—but of course he did not probe.

He dined with Guzmán. The distant sound of music could be heard, shrill, alien. “They are rehearsing for the fiesta,” Guzmán explained. The hotel cook outdid herself, preparing some local freshwater flatfish in a startlingly delicate sauce that would have produced applause in Paris. Filiberto, the patrón, came into the dining room and greeted Guzmán with a bone-crushing abrazo. Guzmán introduced Halperin once again as an important Norteamericano scholar. Filiberto, tall and very dark-skinned, with cheekbones like blades, showered Halperin with effusive courtesies.

“I have been admiring the masks that decorate the hotel,” Halperin said, and waited to be invited to buy whichever one took his fancy, but Filiberto merely offered a dignified bow of thanks. Praising individual ones, the owl-pig, the lizard-nose, also got nowhere. Filiberto presented Guzmán with a chilled bottle of a superb white wine from Michoacan, crisp and deliciously metallic on the tongue; he spoke briefly with Guzmán in Nahuatl; then, saying he was required at the rehearsal, he excused himself. The music grew more intense.

Halperin said, “Is it possible to see the rehearsal after dinner?”

“Better to wait for the actual performance,” said Guzmán.

Halperin slept poorly that night. He listened for the sound of Ellen Chambers entering the room next door, but either he was asleep when she came in or she was out all night.

And now finally the fiesta was at hand. Halperin spent the day watching the preparations: the stringing of colored electric lights around the plaza, the mounting of huge papier-mâché images of monsters and gods and curious spindly-legged clowns, the closing down of the shops and the clearing away of the tables that displayed their merchandise. All day long the town grew more crowded. No doubt people were filtering in from the outlying districts, the isolated jungle farms, the little remote settlements on the crest of the sierra. Through most of the day he saw nothing of Guzmán or Ellen, but that was all right. He was quite accustomed now to being here, and the locals seemed to take him equally for granted. He drank a good deal of mescal at one cantina or another around the plaza and varied it with the occasional bottle of the excellent local beer. As the afternoon waned, the crowds in the plaza grew ever thicker and more boisterous, but nothing particular seemed to be happening, and Halperin wondered whether to go back to the hotel for dinner. He had another mescal instead. Suddenly the fiesta lights were switched on, gaudy, glaring, reds and yellows and greens, turning everything into a psychedelic arena, and then at last Halperin heard music, the skreeing bagpipey sound of bamboo flutes, the thump of drums, the whispery, dry rattle of tambourines, the harsh punctuation of little clay whistles. Into the plaza came ten or fifteen boys, leaping, dancing cartwheels, forming impromptu human pyramids that promptly collapsed, to general laughter. They wore no masks. Halperin, disappointed and puzzled, looked around as though to find an explanation and discovered Guzmán, suave and elegant in charcoal gray, almost at his elbow. “No masks?” he said. “Shouldn’t they be masked?”

“This is only the beginning,” said Guzmán.

Yes, just the overture. The boys cavorted until they lost all discipline and went pell-mell across the plaza and out of sight. Then a little old man, also unmasked, tugged three prancing white goats caparisoned with elaborate paper decorations into the center of the plaza and made them cavort, too. Two stilt-walkers fought a mock duel. Three trumpeters played a hideous discordant fanfare and got such cheers that they played it again and again. Guzmán was among those who cheered. Halperin, who had not eaten, was suddenly captured by the aroma from a stand across the way where an old woman was grilling tacos on a brazier and a tin griddle. He headed toward her, but paused on the way for a tequila at an improvised cantina someone had set up on the streetcorner, using a big wooden box as the bar. He saw Ellen Chambers in the crowd on the far side of the plaza and waved, but she did not appear to see him, and when he looked again he could not find her.

The music grew wilder and now, at last, the first masked dancers appeared. A chill ran through him at the sight of the nightmare figures marching up the main avenue, bat-faced ones, skull-faced ones, grinning devils, horned creatures, owls, jaguars. Some of the masks were two or three feet high and turned their wearers into malproportioned dwarfs. They advanced slowly, pausing often to backtrack, circling one another, kicking their legs high, madly waving their arms. Halperin, sweating, alert, aroused, realized that the dancers must have been drinking heavily, for their movements were jerky, ragged, convulsive. As they came toward the plaza he saw that they were herding four figures in white robes and pale human-faced masks before them, and were chanting something repetitively in Nahuatl. He caught that phrase again, amo tokinwan. Not our brother.

To Guzmán he said, “What are they saying?”

“The prayer against the amo tokinwan. To protect the fiesta, in case any of the Lords of the Animals actually are in the plaza tonight.”

Those around Halperin had taken up the chant now.

“Tell me what it means,” Halperin said.

Guzmán said, chanting the translation in a rhythm that matched the voices around them: “They eat us! They are—not our brother. They are worms, wild beasts. Yes!”

Halperin looked at him strangely. “‘They eat us?’” he said. “Cannibal gods?”

“Not literally. Devourers of souls.”

“And these are the gods of these people?”

“No, not gods. Supernatural beings. They lived here before there were people, and they naturally retain control over everything important here. But not gods as Christians understand gods. Look, here come the bats!”

They eat us, Halperin thought, shivering in the warm humid night. A new phalanx of dancers was arriving now, half a dozen bat-masked ones. He thought he recognized the long legs of Filiberto in their midst. Darkness had come and the dangling lights cast an eerier, more brilliant glow. Halperin decided he wanted another tequila, a mescal, a cold cerveza, whatever he could find quickest. Not our brother. He excused himself vaguely to Guzmán and started through the crowd. They are worms, wild beasts. They were still chanting it. The words meant nothing to him, except amo tokinwan, but from the spacing, the punctuation, he knew what they were saying. They eat us. The crowd had become something fluid now, oozing freely from place to place; the distinction between dancers and audience was hard to discern. Not our brother. Halperin found one of the little curbside cantinas and asked for mescal. The proprietor splashed some in a paper cup and would not take his pesos. A gulp and Halperin felt warm again. He tried to return to Guzmán but no longer saw him in the surging, frenzied mob. The music was louder. Halperin began to dance—it was easier than walking—and found himself face to face with one of the bat-dancers, a short man whose elegant mask showed a bat upside down, in its resting position, ribbed wings folded like black shrouds. Halperin and the dancer, pushed close together in the press, fell into an inadvertent pas de deux. “I wish I could buy that mask,” Halperin said. “What do you want for it? Five thousand pesos? Ten thousand? Habla usted Español? No? Come to the hotel with the mask tomorrow. You follow? Venga mañana.” There was no reply. Halperin was not even certain he had spoken the words aloud.

He danced his way back across the plaza. Midway he felt a hand catch his wrist. Ellen Chambers. Her khaki blouse was open almost to the waist and she had nothing beneath it. Her skin gleamed with sweat, as if it had been oiled. Her eyes were wide and rigid. She leaned close to him and said, “Dance! Everybody dances! Where’s your mask?”

“He wouldn’t sell it to me. I offered him ten thousand pesos, but he wouldn’t—”

“Wear a different one,” she said. “Any mask you like. How do you like mine?”

“Your mask?” He was baffled. She wore no mask.

“Come! Dance!” She moved wildly. Her breasts were practically bare and now and then a nipple flashed. Halperin knew that that was wrong, that the villagers were cautious about nudity and a gringa especially should not be exhibiting herself. Drunkenly he reached for her blouse, hoping to button one or two of the buttons, and to his chagrin his hand grazed one of her breasts. She laughed and pushed herself against him. For an instant she was glued to him from knees to chest, with his hand wedged stupidly between their bodies. Then he pulled back, confused. An avenue seemed to have opened around them. He started to walk stumblingly to some quieter part of the plaza, but she caught his wrist again and grinned a tiger-grin, all incisors and tongue. “Come on!” she said harshly.

He let her lead him. Past the tacos stands, past the cantinas, past a little brawl of drunken boys, past the church, on whose steps the dancer in the phallic bat mask was performing, juggling pale green fruits and now and then batting one out into the night with the phallus that jutted from his chin. Then they were on one of the side streets, blind crumbling walls hemming them on both sides and cold moonlight the only illumination. Two blocks, three, his heart pounding, his lungs protesting. Into an ungated courtyard of what looked like an abandoned house, shattered tumbledown heaps of masonry everywhere and a vining night-blooming cactus growing over everything like a tangle of terrible green snakes. The cactus was in bloom and its vast white trumpetlike flowers emitted a sickly sweet perfume, overpoweringly intense. He wanted to gag and throw up, but Ellen gave him no time, for she was embracing him, pressing herself fiercely against him, forcing him back against a pile of shattered adobe bricks. In the strange moonlight her skin glistened and then seemed to become transparent, so that he could see the cage of her ribs, the flat long plate of her breastbone, the throbbing purplish heart behind it. She was all teeth and bones, a Day of the Dead totem come to life. He did not understand and he could not resist. He was without will. Her hands roamed him, so cold they burned his skin, sending up puffs of steam as her icy fingers caressed him. Something was flowing from him to her, his warmth, his essence, his vitality, and that was all right. The mescal and the beer and the tequila and the thick musky fragrance of the night-blooming cereus washed through his soul and left it tranquil. From far away came the raw dissonant music, the flutes and drums, and the laughter, the shouts, the chants. They eat us. Her breath was smoke in his face. They are worms, wild beasts. As they embraced one another, he imagined that she was insubstantial, a column of mist, and he began to feel misty himself, growing thinner and less solid as his life-force flowed toward her. Now for the first time he was seized by anguish and fright. As he felt himself being pulled from his body, his soul rushing forth and out and out and out, helpless, drawn, his drugged calm gave way to panic. They are—not our brother. He struggled, but it was useless. He was going out swiftly, the essence of him quitting his body as though she were reeling it in on a line. Bats fluttered above him, their faces streaked with painted patterns, yellow and green and brilliant ultramarine. The sky was a curtain of fiery bougainvillea. He was losing the struggle. He was too weak to resist or even to care. He could no longer hear himself breathe. He drifted freely, floating in the air, borne on the wings of the bats.

Then there was confusion, turmoil, struggle. Halperin heard voices speaking sharply in Spanish and in Nahuatl, but the words were incomprehensible to him. He rolled over on his side and drew his knees to his chest and lay shivering with his cheek against the warm wet soil. Someone was shaking him. A voice said in English, “Come back. Wake up. She is not here.”

Halperin blinked and looked up. Guzmán was crouched above him, pale, stunned-looking, his teeth chattering. His eyes were wide and tensely fixed.

“Yes,” Guzmán said. “Come back to us. Here. Sit up, let me help you.”

The gallery-owner’s arm was around his shoulders. Halperin was weak and trembling, and he realized Guzmán was trembling too. Halperin saw figures in the background—Filiberto from the hotel and his son Elustesio, the mayordomo Don Luis, the alcalde, one of the alguaciles.

“Ellen?” he said uncertainly.

“She is gone. It is gone. We have driven it away.”

“It?”

“Amo tokinwan. Devouring your spirit.”

“No,” Halperin muttered. He stood up, still shaky, his knees buckling. Don Luis offered him a flask; Halperin shook it away, then changed his mind, reached for it, took a deep pull. Brandy. He walked four or five steps, getting his strength back. The reek of the cactus-flowers was nauseating. He saw the bare ribs again, the pulsating heart, the sharp white teeth. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t anything like that. I had too much to drink—maybe ate something that disagreed with me—the music, the scent of the flowers—”

“We saw,” Guzmán said. His face was bloodless. “We were just in time. You would have been dead.”

“She was from Miami—she said she knew San Francisco—”

“These days they take any form they like. The woman from Miami was here two years ago, for the fiesta. She vanished in the night, Don Luis says. And now she has come back. Perhaps next year there will be one who looks like you and talks like you and sniffs around studying the masks like you, and we will know it is not you, and we will keep watch. Eh? You should come back to the hotel now. You need to rest.”

Halperin walked between them down the walled streets. The fiesta was still in full swing, masked figures capering everywhere, but Guzmán and Don Luis and Filiberto guided him around the plaza and toward the hotel. He thought about the woman from Miami, and remembered that she had had no car and there had been no luggage in her room. They eat us. Such things are impossible, he told himself. They are worms, wild beasts. And next year would there be a diabolical counterfeit Halperin haunting the fiesta? They are—not our brother. He did not understand.

Guzmán said, “I promised you you would see the real Mexico. I did not think you would see as much of it as this.”

Halperin insisted on inspecting her hotel room. It was empty and looked as if it had not been occupied for months. He stretched out on his bed fully clothed, but he did not particularly want to be left alone in the darkness, and so Guzmán and Filiberto and the others took turns sitting up with him through the night while the sounds of the fiesta filled the air. Dawn brought a dazzling sunrise. Halperin and Guzmán stepped out into the courtyard. The world was still.

“I think I’ll leave here now,” Halperin said.

“Yes. That would be wise. I will stay another day, I think.”

Filiberto appeared, carrying the owl-pig mask from Halperin’s room. “This is for you,” he said. “Because that you were troubled here, that you will think kindly of us. Please take it as our gift.”

Halperin was touched by that. He made a little speech of gratitude and put the mask in his car.

Guzmán said, “Are you well enough to drive?”

“I think so. I’ll be all right once I leave here.” He shook hands with everyone. His fingers were quivering. At a very careful speed he drove away from the hotel, through the plaza, where sleeping figures lay sprawled like discarded dolls, and mounds of paper streamers and other trash were banked high against the curb. At an even more careful speed he negotiated the cactus-walled road out of town. When he was about a kilometer from San Simón Zuluaga he glanced to his right and saw Ellen Chambers sitting next to him in the car. If he had been traveling faster, he would have lost control of the wheel. But after the first blinding moment of terror came a rush of annoyance and anger. “No,” he said. “You don’t belong in here. Get the hell out of here. Leave me alone.” She laughed lightly. Halperin felt like sobbing. Swiftly and unhesitatingly he seized Filiberto’s owl-pig mask, which lay on the seat beside him, and scaled it with a flip of his wrist past her nose and out the open car window. Then he clung tightly to the wheel and stared forward. When he could bring himself to look to the right again, she was gone. He braked to a halt and rolled up the window and locked the car door.

It took him all day to reach Acapulco. He went to bed immediately, without eating, and slept until late the following afternoon. Then he phoned the Aeromexico office.

Two days later he was home in San Francisco. The first thing he did was call a Sacramento Street dealer and arrange for the sale of all his masks. Now he collects Japanese netsuke, Hopi kachina dolls, and Navaho rugs. He buys only through galleries and does not travel much any more.

© 1982 by Agberg, Ltd.

Originally published in Twilight Zone Magazine.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Robert Silverberg—four-time Hugo Award-winner, five-time winner of the Nebula Award, SFWA Grand Master, SF Hall of Fame honoree—is the author of nearly five hundred short stories, nearly one hundred-and-fifty novels, and is the editor of in the neighborhood of one hundred anthologies. Among his most famous works are Lord Valentine’s Castle, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. Learn more at www.majipoor.com.

War 3.01
Keith Brooke

Kevin O’Farrell was in town when the war broke out. He was in town when the war ended. It was that quick.

Friday night was going to be just how Friday nights usually were. A few pints of Guinness, although it’s never as good as it is back home in Donaghmede. A kebab from the Istanbul, heavy on the chilli sauce. Maybe one or two JDs at the Talbot to finish. It was pretty much a sure thing he’d end up scuttered and wake up some time Saturday with a head-splitting, sandpaper-throated hangover. That was the plan, as far as planning went. It was Friday night, after all, and he’d just been paid two days ago.

Town was more relaxed than it had been for months. People were out again, allowing themselves to get back to some kind of normal. The latest round of bioterror threats had put a damper on that for a time, but now they’d faded away without anything much new to be scared of. Time for a few drinks, some food, people’s guards starting to drop at last. It was almost a party atmosphere on the streets and it was as if Kevin could feel the weight lifting. He hadn’t realised how oppressive it had all been, how much it had affected everything.

The downside was that the squaddies were out too. That always added an extra dimension for a young Irish migrant worker in a garrison town. Weedy, shorter than average, Kevin O’Farrell was easy game for skinhead soldiers pushing him about—“for the craic,” as they would say. That kind of shit’s okay as long as everyone’s having a laugh, right?

He headed up Queen Street, fists in his hoody’s kangaroo-pouch pocket, sticking to the far side of the road from the squaddies’ pub, The Union. The chip shop next to the pub spamyelled him, sent taste-centre endorphins kicking down to his belly making him hungry when he was not. Special deals for our regulars Kevin. He Xed it.

The Union burned amber on his meSphere, a threatening glow layered over the real by his enhanced-reality lenses. It was a squaddie pub and it knew from his meSphere profile that he was a Mick. There was an app for that. There always was. Fuck ‘em all and back, eh?

There were three of the gobshites outside, sucking on cigarettes held in meaty-clawed hands. Pressed dark blue jeans, heavy black boots with a mean shine, white polo shirts, tattoos of union flags and barbed wire. StreetThreat flagged the situation as 8: squaddies, booze, a vulnerable ethnic who’s fair game because he’s young and male.

Kevin kept his head down.

HeadKutz spamyelled his meSphere: half-price weekday haircuts, and, for a moment before he Xed that too, his vision was overlaid with head and shoulders of how he might look with a buzz, a flick, a sweeparound, rather than the shaggy urchin mop he had now. Even as he blocked HeadKutz, he had to smile at the real-time wizardry that had taken CCTV stills of him and realityShopped him almost beyond recognition.

Bad move, that. Walking past a squaddie pub, smiling.

Just as Kevin had layers of apps in his ‘sphere feeding his enhanced perception of the world all around, so too did they. They’d be standing there with their lagers and their cigarettes and their testosterone, and they’d see Kevin: flagged up as a Mick, coming here and taking English jobs. And smiling about it.

They weren’t all like that, of course, and Kevin was smart enough to know as much: he’d never make the mistake of lumping them all together the way some of them did to everyone else. But the ones that did . . . their realities were enhanced, their meSpheres knew what they liked and what they believed and they filtered out the irrelevant noise. Everything was enhanced, and that included prejudices.

Kevin knew how it worked. He knew all about the fuzzy quantum mathematics that helped meSphere apps anticipate the illogical logic of human thought. Just because someone likes A and they also like B, it doesn’t mean they like A and B together. The brain doesn’t follow that kind of logic. Except when it does. Search engine developers had known for years that algorithms based on quantum logic could uncover meanings and patterns in data far more efficiently than classical algorithms. Quantum reasoning was a far better model for how the brain worked out those hidden meanings than any other approach. Apply these algorithms to the meSphere and you got a reality enhanced with prompts and ads and buddy-links you could almost have chosen for yourself, only better.

And so those three squaddies—with their fags and their beer and their apps that picked out Kevin and said he was the kind of scruffy gobshite that was bringing this country down—turned as one, like programmed automata. One raised a fist with a ciggie sticking out between first and second finger, another started to make some kind of gesture that involved a finger and the side of his head and lowering forward like a caveman.

Kevin kept walking.

He wanted to run, but if he did and they were serious he knew they would catch him easily.

He locced Ziggy and Emily and Matt via the meSphere. The three of them were in the Lion’s Head on High Street. A couple of minutes’ walk if he could just keep going and the gimps at The Union would forget about him. He pinged his friends, let them know he was on his way.

He risked a glance across and was accosted by HeadKutz again, something in his profile flagging him as a prime target for a cut-price haircut. Maybe he should. No reason why a backroom search-logic geek had to look like one.

But the three gobshites . . .

Two were staring at each other, and the other one of them peered up as if he could see the stars through the glare of the street lights and it was the first time he’d ever seen them.

And there was nothing.

The Union wasn’t amber, flagged as no-go. StreetThreat didn’t hang 8s over the three thugs. It was gone. All of it was gone.

That was when the war started. And that was when it ended.

The meSphere kicked back in with a pixelated staccato of screen-flicker. It stablised, and then a message flashed up, a semi-transparent pop-up overlaying everything.

There was a war, it read. You lost. Life will go on as normal, but with less extravagance and with the utmost respect for those who believe. We will not relent in pursuing the enemy. We control the meSphere. We won. In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. We are the Brethren of the Jihad. We are your humble servants.

Kevin’s head pinged with messages and alerts. Friends and family loccing him.

Ziggy: You get that bro? What the fuck? It for real ya think?

Sandeep, uber geek on the search-illogic team: Hey Kev. Dig the profiles! They bucket-testing the shit outta this war.

Even his kid brother Eoin, back in Dublin: They shitting us or what? We just lost World War fricking Three?

“Stand down? What do they mean, stand down?” grunted one of the squaddies, the one with a ginger buzz-cut and cartoon-square features. “We’s not even fucking stood up.”

Kevin forgot himself, and stood there staring at the three.

One of the other squaddies shrugged. “How we supposed to know?” he said. “We only got orders, init?”

They saw Kevin staring, but somehow they didn’t look threatening any more. They looked confused, diminished. “You know what’s happening, do you?” Kevin asked.

Ginger buzz-cut looked across at him, then let loose with a stream of violent abuse.

Kevin backed off, and hurried away.

All around him, the meSphere stuttered its overlay. Restaurants spamyelled him, then fell quiet. His headspace was quiet and then there was an abrupt flurry of pings and messages. Then quiet again.

Another pop-up appeared, empty, then vanished.

He felt dizzy, disoriented.

He had to stop, and lean against a wall. It felt like there was a war in his head, even though he knew that the war had happened. It had started, it had finished. It was all over, lost.

And still, his head was bombarded with spamyells and visual static. Noise that meant nothing, or might have meant everything if only he could understand. His head kept reeling and he felt sick.

He concentrated on breathing. A simple thing, yet so hard.

Breathing.

He messaged Emily and Ziggy, and Ziggy sent back, Hey bro. Ya getting the news?

He blinked up a feed, but it was sporadic, frequently interrupted and washed over with random noise. What he could pick up was being doctored, realityShopped like those HeadKutz photos. The BBC stream had a new overlay in a language he didn’t recognise. It used Latin characters but not in a way he was used to. Indonesian, Phillipino . . . he wasn’t sure.

The government had resigned. Heads of the military and security services had been detained, automatically locked in their offices. Software agents of the Brethren of the Jihad had taken control of the nation’s military, power, financial and other systems, maintaining stability in this time of crisis. In his closing speech, the former Prime Minister spoke of his gratitude that at last someone had taken responsibility for tackling the moral decline of the nation and that they could all look forward to a time of spiritual maturity and respect.

It was a coup, but the powers of the land seemed almost grateful.

Jesus, but I never thought World War Three would go like this, Kevin messaged everyone in a mass reply-all. It’s like the PM were waiting for it.

He reached High Street and saw that people were in the road, looking dazed and confused. The Exchange flashed that it was closed until licensing laws had been reviewed. The Shackleton too.

Farther down, there was a crowd outside the Lion’s Head. Quick messages revealed that Ziggy, Emily, Matt and Lola were there. All turfed out.

Waiting for it? messaged Ziggy. Blown to pieces more like. I don’t call that waiting for it . . .

Kevin found his friends, gave gang shakes and hugs. Ziggy, all dreadlocks and shell beads, said, “What you saying, they were asking for it, bro?”

Kevin didn’t know what to say. He’d checked the feeds again as he worked his way along the crowded High Street. Asking for it: such a meek and humble handing over of power. “I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me: What’s happened?”

“It’s in the feeds, bro. The bombs, the snatch squads. Swift an’ clinical is what they saying. A show of force so we know just how beaten we are. Didn’t you check the feeds?”

Kevin shrugged, said nothing. He remembered the point, the moment when the meSphere faltered and then righted itself and then the message came through.

There was a war. You lost.

The kind of military takeover Ziggy described would never happen so swiftly. The war was in the wires. It had taken place in cyberspace, started and finished in milliseconds. A takeover of all the systems that ran the country.

Ziggy grabbed Kevin’s arm, getting antsy, lairy from the drink and the adrenaline. “Hey bro,” he demanded. “Don’t just go ignoring me. This is big shit. What’s happening?”

Kevin put a hand on his friend’s wrist, calming him. “I don’t know,” he said. There was something nagging away in a corner of his mind. “Just give me a mo’ though, would you? That’d be grand.”

Sandeep! Sandeep Patel, the second generation Indian from the East Midlands who liked to call Kevin a “bloody foreigner” and had made him more welcome at SphereIllogic than anyone else, back when he’d started there last year. His message earlier . . . Kevin flipped it back up: Hey Kev. Dig the profiles! They bucket-testing the shit outta this war.

Bucket-testing. A/B testing. Where a web feed showed some users a variant of a page so the owners could measure the outcomes, how many more clicked to buy; or where some passersby would get a spamyell from a shop or restaurant with a different wording, different tone. Real-time testing with subtle variations. Amazon and Google did it all the time, way back in the when of things.

And now . . . Kevin looked around at all the confused, defeated faces.

How many different versions had people been fed so that the so-called Brethren of the Jihad could modify their campaign depending on user-segment responses? How many variants were there of that BBC feed, videoShopped in real-time by some semi-AI in order to model and shape and defeat a nation’s head-space? How much was even true, and how much just a piece of misinformation carefully engineered to steer the collective illogical logic of the population?

Kevin grabbed Ziggy by the arms and his dreadlocked friend fell quiet, mid-rant.

“It’s not over,” said Kevin. “Do you see? It’s not over at all. It’s still happening. All around us. Everything: one big bucket test. We haven’t lost, Ziggy. We only lose if we believe we’ve lost.”

Ziggy shook himself free. “Bro’ you gone mad in the head. It’s all over the feeds.”

Kevin turned to Emily and Matt, but they just looked dazed, lost. In their heads they’d lost and there was no getting through.

Kevin started to run. Run until his breath came ragged and his lungs burned and his legs were like jelly.

He turned back down Queen Street, heading for the Union, the squaddies. He didn’t know what he was going to do, what he could find to say to them, to convince them, but he had to get through. Had to try to persuade them that they were only beaten because they thought they were and that they might just still have a chance if they’d listen instead of just beating the crap out of the ranting gobshite of a Mick who was about to burst into their bar and start haranguing them.

Keith Brooke’s first novel, Keepers of the Peace, appeared in 1990, since then he has published six more adult novels, six collections, and over sixty short stories. His novel Genetopia was published by Pyr in February 2006 and was their first title to receive a starred review in Publishers Weekly; The Accord, published by Solaris in 2009, received another starred PW review and was optioned for film. His latest novel, The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie, came out from Newcon Press in April 2010. His next novel is alt.human, due from Solaris in 2012. Writing as Nick Gifford, his teen fiction is published by Puffin, with one novel also optioned for the movies by Andy Serkis and Jonathan Cavendish’s Caveman Films. He writes reviews for The Guardian, teaches creative writing at the University of Essex, and lives with his partner Debbie in Wivenhoe, Essex.

Dark Sanctuary
Gregory Benford

The laser beam hit me smack in the face.

I twisted away. My helmet buzzed and went dark as its sunshade overloaded. Get inside the ship. I yanked on a strut and tumbled into the yawning, fluorescent-lit airlock.

In the asteroid belt you either have fast reflexes or you’re a statistic. I slammed into the airlock bulkhead and stopped dead, waiting to see where the laser beam would hit next. My suit sensors were all burned out, my straps were singed. The pressure patches on knees and elbows had brown bubbles in them. They had blistered and boiled away. Another second or two and I’d have been sucking vac.

I took all this in while I watched for reflections from the next laser strike. Only it didn’t come. Whoever had shot at me either thought Sniffer was disabled, or else they had a balky laser. Either way, I had to start dodging.

I moved fast, working my way forward through a connecting tube to the bridge—a fancy name for a closet-sized cockpit. I revved up Sniffer’s fusion drive and felt the tug as she started spitting hot plasma out her rear tubes. I made the side jets stutter, too, putting out little bursts of plasma. That made Sniffer dart around, just enough to make hitting her tough.

I punched in for a damage report. Some aft sensors burned out, a loading arm melted down, other minor stuff. The laser bolt must have caught us for just a few seconds.

A bolt from who? Where? I checked radar. Nothing.

I reached up to scratch my nose, thinking, and I realized my helmet and skinsuit were still sealed, vac-worthy. I decided to keep them on, just in case. I usually wear light coveralls inside Sniffer; the skinsuit is for vac work. It occurred to me that if I hadn’t been outside, fixing a hydraulic loader, I wouldn’t have known anybody shot at us at all, until my next routine check.

Which didn’t make sense. Prospectors shoot at you if you’re jumping a claim. They don’t zap you once and then fade—they finish the job. I was pretty safe now; Sniffer’s strutting mode was fast and choppy, jerking me around in my captain’s couch. But as my hands hovered over the control console, they started trembling. I couldn’t make them stop. My fingers were shaking so badly I didn’t dare punch in instructions. Delayed reaction, my analytical mind told me.

I was scared. Prospecting by yourself is risky enough without the bad luck of running into somebody else’s claim. All at once I wished I wasn’t such a loner. I forced myself to think.

By all rights, Sniffer should’ve been a drifting hulk by now—sensors blinded, punched full of holes, engines blown. Belt prospectors play for all the marbles.

Philosophically, I’m with the jackrabbits—run, dodge, hop, but don’t fight. I have some surprises for anybody who tries to outrun me, too. Better than trading laser bolts with rockrats at thousand-kilometer range, any day.

But this one worried me. No other ships on radar, nothing but that one bolt. It didn’t fit.

I punched in a quick computer program. The maintenance computer had logged the time when the aft sensors scorched out. Also, I could tell which way I was facing when the bolt hit me. Those two facts could give me a fix on the source. I let Sniffer’s ballistic routine chew on that for a minute and, waiting, looked out the side port. The sun was a fierce white dot in an inky sea. A few rocks twinkled in the distance as they tumbled. Until we were hit, we’d been on a zero-gee coast, outbound from Ceres—the biggest rock there is—for some prospecting. The best-paying commodity in the Belt right now was methane ice, and I knew a likely place. Sniffer—the ugly, segmented tube with strap-on fuel pods that I call home—was still over eight hundred thousand kilometers from the asteroid I wanted to check.

Five years back I had been out with a rockhound bunch, looking for asteroids with rich cadmium deposits. That was in the days when everybody thought cadmium was going to be the wonder fuel for ion rockets. We found the cadmium, all right, and made a bundle. While I was out on my own, taking samples from rocks, I saw this gray, ice-covered asteroid about a hundred klicks away. My ship auto-eye picked it up from the bright sunglint. Sensors said it was carbon dioxide ice with some water mixed in. Probably a comet hit the rock millions of years ago, and some of it stuck. I filed its orbit parameters away for a time—like now—when the market got thirsty. Right now the big cylinder worlds orbiting Earth needed water, CO2, methane, and other goodies. That happens every time the cylinder boys build a new tin can and need to form an ecosystem inside. Rock and ore they can get from Earth’s moon. For water they have to come to us, the Belters. It’s cheaper in energy to boost ice into the slow pipeline orbits in from the Belt to Earth—much cheaper than it is to haul water up from Earth’s deep gravity well. Cheaper, that is, if the rockrats flying vac out here can find any.

The screen rippled green. It drew a cone for me, Sniffer at apex. Inside that cone was whoever had tried to wing me. I popped my helmet and gave in to the sensuality of scratching my nose. If they scorched me again, I’d have to button up while my own ship’s air tried to suck me away—but stopping the itch was worth it.

Inside the cone was somebody who wanted me dead. My mouth was dry. My hands were still shaking. They wanted to punch in course corrections that would take me away from that cone, fast.

Or was I assuming too much? Oresniffers use radio for communication—it radiates in all directions, it’s cheap, and it’s not delicate. But suppose some rocker lost his radio, and had to use his cutting laser to signal? I knew he had to be over ten thousand kilometers away—that’s radar range. By jittering around, Sniffer was making it impossible for him to send us a distress signal. And if there’s one code rockrats will honor, it’s answering a call for help.

So call me stupid. I took the risk. I put Sniffer back on a smooth orbit—and nothing happened.

You’ve got to be curious to be a skyjock, in both senses of the word. So color me curious. I stared at that green cone and ate some tangy squeeze-tube soup and got even more curious. I used the radar to rummage through the nearby rocks, looking for metal that might be a ship. I checked some orbits. The Belt hasn’t got dust in it, to speak of. The dust got sucked into Jupiter long ago. The rocks—“planetesimals” a scientist told me I should call them, but they’re just rocks to me—can be pretty fair-sized. I looked around, and I found one that was heading into the mathematical cone my number-cruncher dealt me.

Sniffer took five hours to rendezvous with it—a big black hunk, a klick wide and absolutely worthless. I moored Sniffer to it with automatic moly bolts. They made hollow bangs—whap, whap—as they plowed in.

Curious, yes. Stupid, no. The disabled skyjock was just a theory. Laser bolts are real. I wanted some camouflage. My companion asteroid had enough traces of metal in it to keep standard radar from seeing Sniffer’s outline. Moored snug to the asteroid’s face, I’d be hard to pick out. The asteroid would take me coasting through the middle of that cone. If I kept radio silence, I’d be pretty safe.

So I waited. And slept. And fixed the aft sensors. And waited.

Prospectors are hermits. You watch your instruments, you tinker with your plasma drive, you play 3D flexcop—an addictive game; it ought to be illegal—and you worry. You work out in the zero-gee gym, you calculate how to break even when you finally can sell your fresh ore to the Hansen Corporation, you wonder if you’ll have to kick ass to get your haul in pipeline orbit for Earthside—and you have to like it when the nearest conversationalist is the Social/Talkback subroutine in the shipboard. Me, I like it. Curious, as I said.

It came up out of the background noise on the radar scope. In fact, I thought it was noise. The thing came and went, fluttered, grew and shrank. It gave a funny radar profile—but so did some of the new ships the corporations flew. My rock was passing about two hundred klicks from the thing and the odd profile made me cautious. I went into the observation bubble to have a squint with the opticals.

The asteroid I’d pinned Sniffer to had a slow, lazy spin. We rotated out of the shadow just as I got my reflex-opter telescope on-line. Stars spun slowly across a jet-black sky. The sun carved sharp shadows into the rock face. My target drifted up from the horizon, a funny yellow-white dot. The telescope whirred and it leaped into focus.

I sat there, not breathing. A long tube, turning. Towers jutted out at odd places—twisted columns, with curved faces and sudden jagged struts. A fretwork of blue. Patches of strange, moving yellow. A jumble of complex structures. It was a cylinder, decorated almost beyond recognition. I checked the ranging figures, shook my head, checked again. The inboard computer overlaid a perspective grid on the image, to convince me. I sat very still. The cylinder was pointing nearly away from me, so radar had reported a cross section much smaller than its real size. The thing was seven goddamn kilometers long.

I stared at that strange, monstrous thing, and thought, and suddenly I didn’t want to be around there anymore. I took three quick shots with the telescope on inventory mode. That would tell me composition, albedo, the rest of the litany. Then I shut it down and scrambled back into the bridge. My hands were trembling again.

I hesitated about what to do, but they decided for me. On our next revolution, as soon as the automatic opticals got a fix, there were two blips. I punched in for a radar Doppler and it came back bad: The smaller dot was closing on us, fast.

The moly bolts came free with a bang. I took Sniffer up and out, backing away from the asteroid to keep it between me and the blip that was coming for us. I stepped us up to max gee. My mouth was dry and I had to check every computer input twice.

I ran. There wasn’t much else to do. The blip was coming at me at better than a tenth of a gee—incredible acceleration. In the Belt there is plenty of time for moving around, and a chronic lack of fuel—so we use high-efficiency drives and take energy-cheap orbits. The blip wasn’t bothering with that. Somehow he had picked Sniffer out and decided we were worth a lot of fuel to reach, and reach in a hurry. For some reason they didn’t use a laser bolt. It would have been a simple shot at this range. But maybe they didn’t want to chance my shooting at the big ship this close, so they put their money on driving me off.

But then, why chase me so fast? It didn’t add up.

By the time I was a few hundred klicks away from the asteroid it was too small to be a useful shield. The blip appeared around its edge. I don’t carry weapons, but I do have a few tricks. I built a custom-designed pulse mode into Sniffer’s fusion drive, back before she was commissioned. When the blip appeared I started staging the engines. The core of the motor is a hot ball of plasma, burning heavy water—deuterium—and spitting it, plus vaporized rock, out the back tubes. Feeding in the right amount of deuterium is crucial. There are a dozen overlapping safeguards on the system, but if you know how—I punched in the command. My drive pulsed, suddenly rich in deuterium. On top of that came a dose of pulverized rock. The rock damps the runaway reaction. On top of that, all in a microsecond, came a shot of cesium. It mixed and heated and zap—out the back, moving fast, went a hot cloud of spitting, snarling plasma. The cesium ionizes easily and makes a perfect shield against radar. You can fire a laser through it, sure—but how do you find your target?

The cesium pulse gave me a kick in the butt. I looked back. A blue-white cloud was spreading out behind Sniffer, blocking any detection.

I ran like that for one hour, then two. The blip showed up again. It had shifted sideways, to get a look around the cesium cloud—an expensive maneuver. Apparently they had a lot of fuel in reserve.

I threw another cloud. It punched a blue-white fist in the blackness. They were making better gee than I could; it was going to be a matter of who could hold out. So I tried another trick. I moved into the radar shadow of an asteroid that was nearby, and moving at a speed I could manage. Maybe the blip would miss me when it came out from behind the cloud. It was a gamble, but worth it in fuel.

In three hours I had my answer. The blip homed in on me. How? I thought. Who’s got a radar that can pinpoint that well?

I fired a white-hot cesium cloud. We accelerated away, making tracks. I was getting worried. Sniffer was groaning with the strain. I hadn’t allowed myself to think about what I’d seen, but now it looked like I was in for a long haul. The fusion motor rumbled and murmured to itself and I was alone, more alone than I’d felt for a long time, with nothing to do but watch the screen and think.

Belters aren’t scientists. They’re gamblers, idealists, thieves, crazies, malcontents. Most of us are from the cylinder worlds orbiting Earth. Once you’ve grown up in space, moving on means moving out, not going back to Earth. Nobody wants to be a ground-pounder. So Belters are the new cutting edge of mankind, pushing out, finding new resources.

The common theory is that life in general must be like that. Over the last century the scientists have looked for radio signals from other civilizations out among the stars, and come up with zero results. But we think life isn’t all that unusual in the universe. So the question comes up: If there are aliens, and they’re like us, why haven’t they spread out among the stars? How come they didn’t overrun Earth before we even evolved? If they moved at even one percent the speed of light, they’d have spread across the whole damn galaxy in a few million years.

Some people think that argument is right. They take it a little further, too—the aliens haven’t visited our solar system, so check your premise again. Maybe there aren’t any aliens like us. Oh, sure, intelligent fish, maybe, or something we can’t imagine. But there are no radio-builders, no star-voyagers. The best proof of this is that they haven’t come calling.

I’d never thought about that line of reasoning much, because that’s the conventional wisdom now; it’s stuff you learn when you’re a snot-nosed kid. We stopped listening for radio signals a long time ago, back around 2030 or so. But now that I thought about it—

Already, men were living in space habitats. If mankind ever cast off into the abyss between the stars, which way would they go? In a dinky rocket? No, they’d go in comfort, in stable communities. They’d rig up a cylinder world with a fusion drive, or something like it, and set course for the nearest star, knowing they’d take generations to get there.

A century or two in space would make them into very different people. When they reached a star, where would they go? Down to the planets? Sure—for exploration, maybe. But to live? Nobody who grew up in fractional gee, with the freedom the cylinder world gives you, would want to be a ground-pounder. They wouldn’t even know how.

The aliens wouldn’t be much different. They’d be spacefarers, able to live in vac and tap solar power. They’d need raw materials, sure. But the cheapest way to get mass isn’t to go down and drag it up from the planets. No, the easy way is in the asteroids—otherwise, Belters would never make a buck. So if the aliens came to our solar system a long time ago, they’d probably continue to live in space colonies. Sure, they’d study the planets some. But they’d live where they were comfortable.

I thought this through, slowly. In the long waits while I dodged from rock to rock there was plenty of time. I didn’t like the conclusion, but it fit the facts. That huge seven-kilometer cylinder back there wasn’t man-made. I’d known that, deep in my guts, the moment I saw it. Nobody could build a thing like that out there and keep it quiet. The cylinder gave off no radio, but ships navigating that much mass into place would have to. Somebody would have picked it up.

So now I knew what was after me. It didn’t help much.

I decided to hide behind one rock heading sunward at a fair clip. I needed sleep and I didn’t want to keep up my fusion burn—they’re too easy to detect. Better to lie low for a while.

I stayed there for five hours, dozing. When I woke up I couldn’t see the blip. Maybe they’d broken off the chase. I was ragged and there was sand in my eyes. I wasn’t going to admit to myself that I was really scared this time. Belters and lasers I could take, sure. But this was too much for me.

I ate breakfast and freed Sniffer from the asteroid I’d moored us to. My throat was raw, my nerves jumpy. I edged us out from the rock and looked around. Nothing. I turned up the fusion drive. Sniffer creaked and groaned. The deck plates rattled. There was a hot, gun-metal smell. I had been in my skinsuit the whole time and I didn’t smell all that good either. I pulled away from our shelter and boosted.

It came out of nowhere.

One minute the scope was clean and the next—a big one, moving fast, straight at us. It couldn’t have been hiding—there was no rock around to screen it. Which meant they could deflect radar waves, at least for a few minutes. They could be invisible.

The thing came looming out of the darkness. It was yellow and blue, bright and obvious. I turned in my couch to see it. My hands were punching in a last-ditch maneuver on the board. I squinted at the thing and a funny feeling ran through me, a chill. It was old. There were big meteor pits all over the yellow-blue skin. The surface itself glowed, like rock with a ghostly fire inside. I could see no ports, no locks, no antennae.

It was swelling in the sky, getting close.

I hit the emergency board, all buttons. I had laid out good money for one special surprise, if some prospector overtook me and decided he needed an extra ship. The side pods held fission-burn rockets, powerful things. They fired one time only and cost like hell. But worth it.

The gee slammed me back into the couch. A roar rattled the ship. We hauled ass out of there. I saw the thing behind fade away in the exhaust flames. The high-boost fuel puts out incredibly hot gas. Some of it caught the yellow-blue thing. The front end of the ship scorched. I smiled grimly and cut in the whole system. The gee thrust went up. I felt the bridge swimming around me, a sour smell of burning—then I was out, the world slipping away, the blackness folding in.

When I came to, I was floating. The boosters yawned empty, spent. Sniffer coasted at an incredibly high speed. And the yellow-blue thing was gone.

Maybe they’d been damaged. Maybe they just plain ran out of fuel; everybody has limitations, even things that can span the stars.

I stretched out and let the hard knots of tension begin to unwind. Time enough later to compute a new orbit. For the moment it simply felt great to be alone and alive.

“Ceres Monitor here, on 560 megahertz. Calling on standby mode for orecraft Sniffer. Request micro-burst of confirmation on your hail frequency, Sniffer. We have a high-yield reading on optical from your coordinates. Request confirmation of fission burn. Repeat, this is Ceres Monitor—”

I clicked it off. The Belt is huge, but the high-burn torch I’d turned loose back there was orders of magnitude more luminous than an ordinary fusion jet. That was one reason I carried them—they doubled as a signal flare, visible millions of klicks away. By some chance somebody had seen mine and relayed the coordinates to Ceres.

All through the chase I hadn’t called Ceres. It would have been of no use—there were no craft within range to be of help. And Belters are loners—my instinct was always to keep troubles to myself. There’s nothing worse than listening to a Belter whining over the radio.

But now—I switched the radio back on and reached for the mike to hail Ceres. Then I stopped.

The yellow-blue craft had never fired at me. Sniffer would have been easy to cripple at that range. An angry prospector would’ve done it without thinking twice.

Something prevented them. Some code, some moral sense that ruled out firing on a fleeing craft, no matter how much they wanted to stop it.

A moral code of an ancient society. They had come here and settled, soaking up energy from our sun, mining the asteroids, getting ices from comets. A peaceful existence. They were used to a sleepy Earth, inhabited by life-forms not worth the effort of constant study. Probably they didn’t care much about planets anymore. They didn’t keep detailed track of what was happening. Suddenly, in the last century or so—a very short interval from the point of view of a galactic-scale society—the animals down on the blue-white world started acting up. Emitting radio, exploding nuclear weapons, flying spacecraft. These ancient beings found an exponentially growing technology on their doorstep.

I tried to imagine what they thought of us. We were young, we were crude. Undoubtedly the cylinder beings could have destroyed us. They could nudge a middle-sized asteroid into a collision orbit with Earth, and watch the storm wrack engulf humanity. Simple. But they hadn’t done it. That moral sense again?

Something like that, yes. Give it a name and it becomes a human quality—which is in itself a deception. These things were alien. But their behavior had to make some sort of sense, had to have a reason.

I floated, frowning. Putting all this together was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with only half the pieces, but still—something told me I was right. It fit.

A serene, long-lived, cosmic civilization might be worried by our blind rush outward. They were used to vast time scales; we had come on the stage in the wink of an eye. Maybe this speed left the cylinder beings undecided, hesitant. That would explain why they didn’t contact us. Just the reverse, in fact—they were hiding. Otherwise—

It suddenly hit me. They didn’t use radio because it broadcasts at a wide angle. Only lasers can keep a tight beam over great distances. That was what zapped me—not a weapon, a communications channel.

Which meant there had to be more than one cylinder world in the Belt. They kept quiet by using only beamed communications.

That implied something further, too. We hadn’t heard any radio signals from other civilizations, either—because they were using lasers. They didn’t want to be detected by other, younger societies.

Why? Were the aliens in our own Belt debating whether to help us or crush us? Or something in between?

In the meantime, the Belt was a natural hideout. They liked their privacy. They must be worried now, with humans exploring the Belt. I might be the first human to stumble upon them, but I wouldn’t be the last.

“Ceres Monitor calling to—”

I hesitated. They were old, older than we could imagine. They could have been in this solar system longer than man—stable, peaceful, inheritors of a vast history. They were moral enough not to fire at me, even though they knew it meant they would be discovered.

They needed time. They had a tough decision to face. If they were rushed into it they might make the wrong one.

“Orecraft Sniffer requested to—”

I was a Belter; I valued my hermit existence, too. I thumbed on the mike.

“Ceres, this is Sniffer. Rosemary Jokopi, sole officer. I verify that I used a fission burn, but only as a part of routine mining exploration. No cause for alarm. Nothing else to report. Transmission ends.”

When I hung up the mike, my hands weren’t shaking anymore.

Gregory Benford has published over thirty books, mostly novels, of which nearly all remain in print, some after a quarter of a century. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. A winner of the United Nations Medal for Literature, he is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. A fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, he continues his research in both astrophysics and plasma physics.

Craters
Kristine Kathryn Rusch

What they don’t tell you when you sign up is that the work takes a certain amount of trust. The driver, head covered by a half-assed turban, smiles a little too much, and when he yes-ma’ams you and no-ma’ams you, you can be lulled into thinking he actually works for you.

Then he opens the side door of his rusted jeep and nods at the dirt-covered seat. You don’t even hesitate as you slide in, backpack filled with water bottles and purifying pills, vitamins and six-days dry rations.

You sit in that jeep, and you’re grateful, because you never allow yourself to think that he could be one of them, taking you to some roadside bunker, getting paid an advance cut of the ransom they anticipate. Or worse, getting paid to leave you there so that they can all take turns until you’re bleeding and catatonic and don’t care when they put the fifty-year-old pistol to your head.

You can’t think about the risks, not as you’re getting in that jeep, or letting some so-called civilian lead you down sunlight streets that have seen war for centuries almost non-stop.

You trust, because if you don’t you can’t do your job.

You trust, and hope you get away from this place before your luck runs out.

I still have luck. I know it because today we pull into the camp. This camp’s just like all the others I’ve seen in my twenty-year career. The ass-end of nowhere, damn near unbearable heat. Barbed wire, older than God, fences in everything, and at the front, soldiers with some kind of high tech rifle, some sort of programmable thing I don’t understand.

My driver pulls into a long line of oil-burning cars, their engines only partly modified to hydrogen. The air stinks of gasoline, a smell I associate with my childhood, not with now.

We sit in the heat. Sweat pours down my face. I nurse the bottle of water I brought from the Green Zone—a misnomer we’ve applied to the American base in every “war” since Iraq. The Green Zone doesn’t have a lick of green in it. It just has buildings that are theoretically protected from bombs and suicide attacks.

Finally, we pull up to the checkpoint. I clutch my bag against my lap, even though the canvas is heavy and hot.

My driver knows the soldiers. “Reporter lady,” he tells them in English. The English is for my benefit, to prove once again that he is my friend. I haven’t let him know that I know parts (the dirty parts mostly) of two dozen languages. “Very famous. She blog, she do vid, you see her on CNN, no?”

The soldiers lean in. They have young faces covered in sand and mud and three-day old beards. The same faces I’ve been seeing for years—skin an indeterminate color, thanks to the sun and the dirt, eyes black or brown or covered with shades, expressions flat—the youth visible only in the body shape, the lack of wrinkles and sunlines, the left-over curiosity undimmed by too much death over too much time.

I lean forward so they can see my face. They don’t recognize me. CNN pays me, just like the New York Times News Service, just like the Voice of the European Union. But none of them broadcast or replicate my image.

The woman everyone thinks of as me is a hired face, whose features get digitized over mine before anything goes out into public. Too many murdered journalists. Too many famous targets.

The military brass, they know to scan my wrist, send the code into the Reporter Registry, and get the retinal download that they can double-check against my eye. But foot soldiers, here on crap duty, they don’t know for nothing.

So they eyeball me, expecting a pretty face—all the studio hires are skinny and gorgeous—and instead, getting my shoe-leather skin, my dishwater blond going on steel gray hair, and my seen-too-much eyes. They take in the sweat and the khakis and the pinkie jacks that look like plastic fingernails.

I wait.

They don’t even confer. The guy in charge waves the jeep forward, figuring, I guess, that I clean up startlingly well. Before I can say anything, the jeep roars through the barbed wire into a wide flat street filled with people

Most cultures call them refugees, but I think of them as the dregs—unwanted and unlucky, thrown from country to country, or locked away in undesirable land, waiting for a bit of charity, a change of political fortune, waiting for an understanding that will never, ever come.

The smell hits you first: raw sewage combined with vomit and dysentery. Then the bugs, bugs like you’ve never seen, moving in swarms, sensing fresh meat.

After your first time with those swarms, you slather illegal bug spray on your arms, not caring that developed countries banned DDT as a poison/nerve toxin long ago. Anything to keep those creatures off you, anything to keep yourself alive.

You get out of your jeep, and immediately, the children who aren’t dying surround you. They don’t want sweets—what a quaint old idea that is—they want to know what kind of tech you have, what’s buried in your skin, what you carry under your eyes, what you record from that hollow under your chin. You give them short answers, wrong answers, answers you’ll regret in the quiet of your hotel room days later, after you know you’ve made it out to report once more. You remember them, wonder how they’ll do, hope that they won’t become the ones you see farther into the camp, sprawled outside thin government-issue tents, those bug-swarms covering their faces, their stomachs distended, their limbs pieces of scrap so thin that they don’t even look like useful sticks.

Then you set the memories—the knowledge—aside. You’re good at setting things aside. That’s a skill you acquire in this job, if you didn’t already have it when you came in. The I’ll-think-about-it-later skill, a promise to the self that is never fulfilled.

Because if you do think about it later, you get overwhelmed. You figure out pretty damn quickly that if you do think about all the things you’ve seen—all the broken bodies, all the dying children—you’ll break, and if you break you won’t be able to work, and if you can’t work, you can no longer be.

After a while, work is all that’s left to you. Between the misplaced trust and the sights no human should have to bear, you stand, reporting, because you believe someone will care, someone stronger will Do Something.

Even though, deep down, you know, there is no one stronger, and nothing ever gets done.

5:15 Upload: Suicide Squadron Part I by Martha Trumante

General Amanda Pedersen tells the story as if it happened two days ago instead of twenty years ago. She’s sitting in one of the many cafeterias in the Louvre, this one just beneath the glass pyramid where the tourists enter. She’s an American soldier on leave, spending a week with her student boyfriend at the Sorbonne. He has classes. She’s seeing the sights.

She’s just resting her feet, propping them up—American-style—on the plastic chair across from her. From her vantage, she can’t see the first round of security in the pyramid itself, but she can see the second set of metal detectors, the ones installed after the simultaneous attacks of ‘19 that leveled half the Prado in Madrid and the Tate in London.

She likes watching security systems—that’s what got her to enlist in the first place, guaranteeing a sense of security in an insecure world—and she likes watching people go through them.

The little boy and his mother are alone on the escalator coming down. They reach the security desk, the woman opening her palm to reveal the number embedded under the skin, her son—maybe four, maybe five—bouncing with excitement beside her.

A guard approaches him, says something, and the boy extends his arms—European, clearly, used to high levels of security. The guard runs his wand up the boy’s legs, over his crotch, in front of his chest—

And the world collapses.

That’s how she describes it. The world collapses. The air smells of blood and smoke and falling plaster. Her skin is covered in dust and goo and she has to pull some kind of stone off her legs. Miraculously, they’re not broken, but as the day progresses, part of her wishes they were, so she wouldn’t be carrying dead through the ruins of the Roman area, up the back stairs, and into the thin Paris sunlight.

She can’t go to the rebuilt pyramid, even now, nor to the Touleries Garden or even look at the Seine without thinking of that little boy, the smile on his face as he bounces, anticipating a day in the museum, a day with his mother, a day without cares, like five-year-olds are supposed to have.

Were supposed to have.

Before everything changed.

The driver has left me. He will be back in two days, he says, waiting for me near the checkpoint, but I do not believe him. My trust only goes so far, and I will not pay him in advance for the privilege of ferrying me out of this place. So he will forget, or die, or think I have forgotten, or died, whatever eases his conscience if a shred of his conscience still remains.

I walk deep into the camp, my pack slung over my shoulder. My easy walk, my relatively clean clothing, and my pack mark me as a newcomer, as someone who doesn’t belong.

The heat is oppressive. There’s no place out of the sun except the tents the Red Cross and its relative out here, the Red Crescent, have put up. People sit outside those tents, some clutching babies, other supervising children who dig in the dirt.

Rivulets of mud run across the path. Judging by the flies and the smell, the mud isn’t made by water. It’s overflowing sewage, or maybe it’s urine from the lack of a good latrine system or maybe it’s blood.

There’s a lot of blood here.

I do no filming, record no images. The Western world has seen these places before, countless times. When I was a child, late-night television had infomercials featuring cheerful men who walked through such places with a single well-dressed child, selling some religious charity that purported to help people.

Charities don’t help people here. They merely stem the tide, stop the preventable deaths, keep the worst diseases at bay. But they don’t find real homes for these people, don’t do job training, don’t offer language lessons, and more importantly, don’t settle the political crises or the wars that cause the problems in the first place.

The aide worker has a harder job than I do, because the aide worker—the real aide worker—goes from country to country from camp to camp from crisis to crisis, knowing that for each life saved a thousand more will be lost.

I prefer my work, focused as it can be.

I have been on this assignment for six months now. Writing side pieces. Blogging about the bigger events. Uploading pieces that give no hint of my actual purpose.

My editors fear it will make me a target.

I know that I already am.

Whoever called these places camps had a gift for euphemism. These are villages, small towns with a complete and evolved social system.

You learn that early, in your first camp, when you ask the wrong person the wrong question. Yes, violence is common here—it’s common in any human enclave—but it is also a means of crowd control.

Usually you have nothing to do with the extended social system. Usually you speak to the camp leaders—not the official leaders, assigned by the occupying power (whoever that may be), but the de facto leaders, the ones who ask for extra water, who discipline the teenagers who steal hydrogen from truck tanks, who kill the occasional criminal (as an example, always as an example).

You speak to these leaders, and then you leave, returning to the dumpy hotel in the dumpy (and often bombed-out) city, and lie on the shallow mattress behind the thin wooden door, and thank whatever god you know that you have a job, that your employer pays the maximum amount to ensure your safety, that you are not the people you visited that afternoon.

But sometimes, you must venture deep into the enclave, negotiate the social strata without any kind of assistance. You guess which tents are the tents of the privileged (the ones up front, nearest the food?), which tents are the tents of the hopelessly impoverished (in the middle, where the mud runs deep and the smells overwhelm?), and which tents belong to the outcasts, the ones no one speaks to, the ones that make you unclean when you speak to them.

Never assume they’re the tents farthest away from the entrance. Never assume they’re the ones nearest the collapsing latrines.

Never assume.

Watch, instead. Watch to see which areas the adults avoid, which parts the parents grab their children away from in complete and utter panic.

Watch.

It is the only way you’ll survive.

The people I have come to see live in a row near the back of the medical tent. The medical tent has open sides to welcome easy cases, and a smaller, air-conditioned tent farther inside the main one for difficult cases. There is no marking on the main tent—no garish red cross or scythe-like red crescent. No initials for Doctors Without Borders, no flag from some sympathetic and neutral country.

Just a medical tent, which leads me to believe this camp is so unimportant that only representatives from the various charitable organizations come here. Only a few people even know how bad things are here, are willing to see what I can see.

Even though I will not report it.

I’m here for this group within the camp, an enclave within the enclave. I must visit them and leave. I have, maybe, eight hours here—seven hours of talk, and one hour to get away.

I’m aware that when I’m through, I may not be able to find a ride close to the camp. I must trust again or I must walk.

Neither is a good option.

The tents in this enclave are surprisingly clean. I suspect these people take what they need and no one argues with them. No children lay outside the flaps covered in bugs. No children have distended stomachs or too thin limbs.

But the parents have that hollow-eyed look. The one that comes when the illusions are gone, the one that comes to people who have decided their god has either asked too much of them or has abandoned them.

I stand outside the tent, my questions suddenly gone. I haven’t felt real fear for twenty years. It takes a moment to recognize it.

Once I go inside one of these tents, I cannot go back. My interest—my story—gets revealed.

Once revealed, I am through here. I cannot stay in this camp, in this country, in this region. I might even have to go stateside—some place I haven’t been in years—and even then I might not be safe.

When I came here, I was hoping to speak a truth.

Now I’m not even sure I can.

6:15 Upload: Suicide Squadron Part 2 by Martha Trumante

Two other devastating explosions occurred in Paris that day: 150 people died as the elevator going up the Eiffel Tower exploded; and another twenty died when a bomb went off in one of the spires near the top of Notre Dame Cathedral.

France went into an unofficial panic. The country had just updated all its security systems in all public buildings. The systems, required by the European Union, were state-of-the-art. No explosives could get into any building undetected—or so the creators of the various systems claimed.

Armand de Monteverde had supervised the tests. He is a systems analyst and security expert with fifteen years experience in the most volatile areas—Iraq, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. The United States hired him to establish security at its borders with Mexico and Canada, as well as oversea security at the various harbors along the East, West, and Gulf Coasts.

He consulted with the French, went in as a spoiler—someone who tried to break the system—and declared the new process temporarily flawless.

“Why temporarily?” some British tabloid reporter asked him.

“Because,” Monteverde said, “systems can always be beat.”

But not usually so quickly, and not without detection. What bothered Monteverde as he poured over the data from all three Paris explosions was that he couldn’t find, even then, the holes in the system.

He couldn’t find who had brought the explosives in, how they’d been set off, or even what type they were.

No one else had those answers either, and they should have.

Until the Paris bombings, explosives left traces—some kind of fingerprints or signature. Until the Paris bombings, explosives were easy to understand.

I slip into the third tent to my left. It’s cool inside, not just from the lack of sun, but also because some tiny computerized system runs air-conditioning out of mesh covering the canvas. It’s a rich person’s tent, installed at great expense.

The tent has furniture, which surprises me. Chairs, blanket-covered beds, two small tables, for meals. A woman, sitting cross-legged on a rug near the back, wears western clothing—a thin black blouse and black pants—her black hair cut in a stylish wedge. An eleven-year-old boy, clearly her son, sits beside her. He glances at me, his eyes dark and empty, then goes back to staring straight ahead.

I know he has no internal downloads. The camp doesn’t allow any kind of net coverage, even if he has the personal chips. There’s some kind of blocking technology that surrounds everything including the medical tent. International agreements allow medical facilities to have net links at all times, but these camps often exist outside an established international perimeter. Even though it straddles the borders of three separate countries, it is in none or all of them, depending on which international law the people in charge of the camp are trying to avoid.

I introduce myself. The woman gives me the look of disbelief that the soldiers should have given me. I slid her my plastic i.d., since we have no systems to log onto here.

She stares at it, then turns it over, sees the hologram of the woman who plays me on the vids, and sighs.

“They warned me,” she says, and I do not ask who they are. They are the people who arranged our meeting, the ones who use dozens of intermediaries, and who probably, even now, believe they are using me for some nefarious purpose. “They warned me you would not be what I expect.”

A shiver runs through me. Even though I am impersonated on purpose so that the “bad guys,” as our president calls them, do not know who I am, someone out there does. Maybe many someones. Maybe many someones connected to the “bad guys.”

We go through preliminaries, she and I. I sit across from her, slightly out of range of her child’s empty eyes. She offers tea, which I take but do not intend to drink. The cup is small and dainty, trimmed with gold. She has not yet had to trade it for a meal.

Then she slides a chip to me. I press it. A smiling man wearing a western business suit, his head uncovered, his hair as stylishly cut as the woman’s is, grins at me. He holds the hand of a young girl, maybe five, who is the image of her mother. The girl laughs, one of those floaty childish laughs that some people never outgrow. The sound fills the tent, and the boy, sitting across from me, flinches.

“That’s her?” I ask.

“Them,” she says. “He died too.”

I made it a point to know the case. There are so many cases that sometimes the details are irrelevant to all except the people involved. He had just parked his car outside a café in Cairo. He had told his wife he was taking his daughter to a special class—and indeed, an English-language class for the children of businessmen who had dealings with the West, was meeting just a block away.

He opened his door and the car exploded, killing him, his daughter, and three people on the sidewalk. If they had made it to class as was the plan, over fifty children would have died.

“She’s so beautiful,” I say. Hard to believe, even now, that a child like that can carry a bomb inside her. Hard to believe she exists only to kill others, at a specified place, at her own designated time.

I have promised myself I will not ask the standard question—how can you do this? How can you do this to your own child?

Instead, I say, “Did you know?”

“None of us knew.” Her gaze meets mine. It is fierce, defiant. She has answered this question a hundred times, and her answer has never varied. Like so many survivors, she cannot believe her husband doomed his own child.

But I have promised myself I will get the real story, the story no one else has told. I want to know what it’s like to be part of a society where children are tools, not people to be loved. I want to know how these people believe so much in a cause—any cause—that it is worth not only their own lives, but their child’s as well.

So I must take her initial answers at face value. Perhaps I will challenge them later, but for now, I will see where they lead.

“If neither you nor your husband knew,” I say.

“My son didn’t know either.” Just as fierce. Maybe fiercer. She puts her hand on her son’s head. He closes his eyes, but doesn’t acknowledge her in any other way.

“If none of you knew,” I say, trying hard not to let my disbelief into my voice, “then how did this happen?”

“Like it always does,” she snaps. “They put the chips in at the hospital. On the day she was born.”

The job is strange. It cannot be work because you cannot leave at the end of the day. It becomes part of you and you become part of it. That’s why you and your colleagues label it a calling, put it on par with other religions, other callings that deal with ethics.

You sit across from murderers and ask, what made you decide to kill? as if that’s a valid question. You sit across from mass murderers and ask, what is it about your political philosophy that makes your methods so attractive to others? as if you care about the answer.

You think: We need to know, as if knowing’s enough to make the problem go away. As if you did the right thing when you were granted the only meeting ever with some charismatic leader—this generation’s Vlad the Impaler or Hitler or Osama Bin Laden—and interviewed him as if he were a reasonable person. As if you did the right thing when you failed to grab a guard’s old-fashioned pistol, and blow the charismatic leader away.

Later you discuss ethics as if they are an important concept.

You say: Your job prevents you from judging other people.

You say: Other reporters could not get interviews if we take such lethal sides.

You do not say: I lacked the courage to die for my beliefs.

And that is the bottom line. Behind the talk of ethics and jobs and callings lies a simple truth.

You can look. You can see.

But you cannot feel.

If you feel, you will see that your calling is simply a job, a dirty often disgusting one at that, and you realize there were times when you should have acted. When you could have saved one life or a dozen or maybe even a hundred, but you chose not to.

You chose not to—you say—for the greater good.

7:15 Upload: Suicide Squadron Part 3 by Martha Trumante

Investigations always seem to hinge on luck. The Paris investigations are no different.

Three months into sorting the Louvre wreckage, the authorities find a chip, its information largely undamaged. Curiously, its technology was five years old, a detail that stumped the investigators more than anything else.

But not General Pedersen.

“I was watching the news that day,” she says. “I don’t know why. It’s not something I normally do. I usually scan the relevant feeds. But that day, I was watching, and it hit me. I had seen the bomb come into the museum. I’d seen him laugh and rock back and forth and smile in anticipation. I’d thought he was looking forward to his day when really, he was looking forward to his death.”

At first, other security experts would not listen to Pedersen. In a world where suicide bombers had become commonplace—when child suicide bombers packed with explosives were part of the norm—no one could believe that a child could have had a chip implanted years before with enough high density explosives to destroy an entire building.

People could not plan ahead that far, the common wisdom went. People could not be that cruel.

But they were. That was the new truth—or maybe it was an old truth.

They were.

She shows me the documents the hospital had her sign. She shows me the diagrams, the little marking some doctor made on a chart of a newborn baby, showing where the chips would be—“chips that will enable her to live in the modern world,” the doctors told her.

She shows me computer downloads, bank accounts her husband set up in her daughter’s name, the college enrollment forms—required for a wealthy child of age four to get into some of Cairo’s best private schools—the plans she and her husband had for her daughter’s future, her son’s future, their future.

The authorities, she tells me, believe her husband created all these accounts and family documents to protect her, to prove that she and her son had nothing to do with the family’s patriotic explosion.

Only he is not political, she tells me. He never was, and no one believes her.

They believe her enough to send her here instead of killing her as so many other families have been killed in the past. They don’t even try or imprison her. They just disown her, her and her son, make them people without a country, refugees in a world filled with refugees.

She can afford this tent on this sandy piece of land. She pays for the space closest to the medical tent. She hoped that someone would befriend her, that the medical personnel—the aide workers—would help her and her unjustly accused son.

Instead, they shun her like everyone else does. They shun her for failing to protect her daughter. They shun her for failing to participate in her husband’s crime. They shun her for being naïve, for forcing the so-called patriots to ignore her husband and daughter’s martyrdom, for failing to die with her family.

They shun her because they cannot understand her.

Or because they do not want to.

8:15 Upload: Suicide Squadron Part 4 by Martha Trumante

Experts spend their entire career studying this new bombing phenomenon. Some experts who specialized in suicide bombing have moved to this new area of research.

One, Miguel Franq, wanted to know how three families decided to murder their five year-olds in well-known Paris landmarks on the same day. Initially, he believed he would find a link that would lead him to a terror cell.

When he did not find the link, he worked with some of the scientists to see if the bomb-chips were set to activate on a certain day, then detonate when they were hit with X-rays, laser beams, or sonar equipment—all three being the main items used in security scans.

The intact chip revealed nothing like that. Only a detonator that was set to go off on a particular time on a particular day.

After much research, many hours of survivor interviews, and that inevitable lucky break, Franq found the link. Someone had sent the families free tickets to each site. That all three children did not end up at the same tourist attraction is another matter of luck, although what kind of luck no one can say.

Would it have been better to lose more of the Louvre? Or the Eiffel Tower? Or Notre Dame?

Would it have been better to lose one monument instead of damage three? Would more lives have been saved? Lost? Would more people have noticed? Or would less?

I speak to all the parents in this part of the enclave. All of them survivors—some male, some female—of a once-intact family. All of them claiming to be non-political, claiming they did not know—nor did their spouse—that their child was programmed to die.

I ask for proof. They give me similar documents. They give me bank accounts. But, tellingly—at least to me—the names of the hospitals vary, the names of the doctors vary.

“It is the nursing staff,” one man says to me.

“It is an out-patient procedure,” says another woman.

“Anyone could do it,” says a second man. “Even you.”

The rules of journalism have tightened in the past forty years. The scandals of fifty years ago, the tales of made-up sources, or badly researched material or political bias—true or not—nearly destroyed the profession.

When you were hired, you were reminded of those past scandals, told that any story with less than three verifiable sources (sources that have proof of their claims, sources that can be reinterviewed by the fact-checker—no listening to vids [which can be manipulated], no scanning of notes), any story with less than three will not be run. Any such stories appearing in blogs or personal writings will be considered the same as a published or viewed newspiece.

Hire an editor for your own work, you’re told. You will be watched.

We’re all watched.

So you become an observer and a detective, a recorder of your facts and a disbeliever in someone else’s. You need to verify and if you cannot, you risk losing your job.

You risk damaging the profession.

You risk losing your calling—because you might believe.

Finally, they take me to the person I had hoped to see. They take me into the medical tent to see a six-year-old girl.

She has her own air-conditioned section. It has a hospital bed, a holo-vid player (nothing new; only old downloads), several comfortable chairs, and a table covered with playing cards. Someone is teaching her poker, the international game.

An aide worker accompanies me. He whispers, “No one outside the family visits her. We’re not supposed to say she’s here.”

Until now, she has existed primarily as a rumor.

You know, right, of the little girl? The one who lived?

Permanently blind, she is  . . .

They pay her millions of Euros just to remain quiet . . .

She lives in a palace in Switzerland . . .

 . . . in Baghdad . . .

 . . . in Singapore . . .

She lives in a corner of a medical tent in a refugee camp. Her face is crisscrossed with scars and the shiny tissue of a dozen different plastic surgeries. She has only one arm. You don’t realize until you come close, that half her torso is a kind of clear plastic, one designed for the medical interns to monitor the fake parts inside her, the miracles that keep her alive.

As I say hello, her eyes move toward me. She can see, then. She says hello in return, her accent upper-class British with a touch of India in it. She looks wary.

I don’t blame her.

No parent watches over her. Her mother committed suicide—the real kind, the kind that’s personal, and lonely, and takes no one else with it—when she heard the news. The blast killed her father.

She was an only child.

I sit next to her, on her right side so that I don’t have to see that clear torso, the workings of her rebuilt interior, that missing—and soon-to-be-replaced—arm.

She is being rebuilt as if she were a machine. Someone is paying for this, real money that keeps this medical tent, and hence the people in the camp, alive.

Someone who, no matter how hard I investigate, manages to remain anonymous.

“Do you know who I am?” I ask.

“Reporter-lady,” she says, just like my driver, which makes me nervous. I will not stay here two days. I will leave tonight, maybe even on foot. There are too many connections, too many people who know what I’m doing. Not enough ways to make me safe.

“That’s right,” I say. “Reporter-lady. Can I talk to you about your accident?”

She makes a face, but half of her skin does not move. “Not an accident,” she says. “I sploded.”

The words, said so flatly, as if it is a fact of life. And, if I think about it, it is. A fact of her life.

A fact of all the lives I’ve touched here today. Every single one of them knew someone who became a bomb.

“Do you know why you exploded?” I ask.

She nods, runs her remaining hand over her stomach. “Someone put something in me.”

So flat. Like a child discussing rape.

“Did your Daddy know about this?” I ask. Her father took her to an open-air market that day almost one year ago.

She shakes her head. Those bright, inquisitive eyes have moved away from me. Despite the flat tone, she hates talking about this. Or maybe hates talking about her father, the man who decided she was going to be a weapon.

“What did he say when he took you to the market?” I ask.

“Mommy wasn’t feeling so good,” she says. “We had to get her some medicine and a flower.”

“Nothing else?” I ask.

She shrugs.

“Nothing about going to a better place?” I don’t know what euphemism to use. I don’t know enough about her or her past, being unable to research much of it. I don’t know if she was raised Christian or Muslim or Jewish, since that open-air market catered to all three. I don’t even know what nationality she is, something these camps like to keep as quiet as they can.

“No,” she says.

“He didn’t hug you extra hard? Tell you he loved you? Act strange in any way?”

“No,” she says.

“Did your mom?”

“No!”

“Did they ever tell you that you were special?” I ask.

She looks at me again. A frown creases her brow, creating a line between the scars. “Yes.”

My heart starts to pound. “What did they say?”

She shrugs.

“It’s all right to tell me,” I say.

She bites her lower lip. This is a question she clearly hasn’t been asked much. “Special,” she says, “because I’m the only one.”

“The only one what?” I ask.

“The only one they ever wanted.” Her voice shakes. “Everyone else, they have two, three, four.”

I blink for a moment, trying to find the context.

She sees my confusion. Color runs up her cheeks, and I wonder if I’ve made her angry.

That fear returns—that odd sensation. Afraid twice in one day, after years without it. Afraid, of a damaged six-year-old girl.

“My daddy said I was so perfect, they only wanted me. Only me.” Her voice rises, and she squeezes something in her hand.

The aide worker appears at the door. He looks sadly at me. I stand. My time is up.

As I walk out, he says, “She was an only child, in a culture that frowns on it. Her parents were trying to make her feel good about that.”

“Is that what you think?” I ask.

“You’re not the first she’s told that to,” he says. “Investigators, officials, everyone tries to find the two, three, and four others. You people never seem to remember that she’s a lonely little girl, in a lot of pain, who can’t understand why everyone thinks she’s evil.”

I look over my shoulder at her. Her lower lip trembles, but her eyes are dry.

I want to go back, ask her different questions, but the aide worker doesn’t let me.

I am done here. I had hoped I would find my proof. Instead, I found a child whose parents told her she was special—because she was an only child? Or because they had planted a time-release bomb-chip in her?

Or both?

9:15 Upload: Suicide Squadron Part 5 by Martha Trumante

The Paris bombings were the first and last time more than one child detonated in the same city on the same day. Ever since, these explosions have occurred at all times of the day, at hundreds of locations across the globe, at thousands of targets—some large, like the Eiffel Tower, and some small, like a deceptively normal home in a tiny suburban neighborhood.

The small bombings lend credence to the rumors that have plagued this weapon from the beginning: that these children and their parents are innocent victims of fanatics who have wormed their way into the medical establishment, that the true bombers aren’t suicidal at all. Instead they are nurses, doctors, interns, who piggyback the detonator chip onto a relatively normal chipping procedure—giving a child an identity chip, for example, or the standard parental notification chip that must now be inserted into every newborn—a procedure that’s a law in more than 120 countries.

Hospitals insist that medical personal are screened. Each chip brought into the building is scanned for foreign technology. Each chip has its own identification number so that it can be traced to its source.

None of the chips found at the thousands of bomb sites since the Paris bombings have had hospital identification. Yet the rumors persist.

Perhaps it is wishful thinking on the part of all involved. How much easier it is to blame a nameless faceless person hidden in the impersonal medical system than a parent who knowingly pays someone to place a bomb inside a child—a bomb that will not go off in days or even weeks, but years later, after that parent spends time feeding, clothing, and raising that child.

Bonding with that child.

Treating her as if she’s normal.

Treating her as if she’s loved.

One of the soldiers gives you a ride back to the Green Zone. You lean your head against the back of his modern, hydrogen powered, air-conditioned behemoth—too big to even call a truck—and close your eyes.

The little girl has shaken you. Some stories do that—some interviews do that—and the key is to hold onto your professionalism, to remember what you can prove.

But in that space between wakefulness and sleep, you find yourself thinking that you live your life in three distinct ways: You have your everyday experiences, which are so different from most people’s. How many people travel from war zone to war zone, from danger spot to danger spot, running toward the crisis instead of away from it? Such behavior is now second nature to you. You think of it only at odd moments, like this one, when you should be asleep.

You also live through your articles, your “live” reports, your blogs. People who see/read/hear those things believe they know the real you. They believe they have walked with you into the valley of the shadow of death, and they believe that they, like you, have survived some kind of evil.

Really, however, you live inside your head, in the things you’re afraid to write down, afraid to record, afraid to even feel. You lied when you implied that fear hasn’t been in your life in decades. Fear is in your every movement. But you speak truth when you say you haven’t felt fear.

You haven’t felt anything in a long, long time.

That’s the most important thing they fail to tell you when you sign up for this job. Not that it could kill you or that you might even want it to kill you.

But that you can look at a little girl who has lost everything—her health, her family, her belief that someone once loved her—and you think she does not measure up to the rumor. She isn’t the story that will save you, the news that will make you even more famous than you already are.

She doesn’t even merit a mention in your long piece on suicide squads because she doesn’t change anything. She is, to you, another body—another item—another fact in a lifetime of useless facts.

She is not a child, any more than you are a woman.

She is a weapon, and you are a reporter.

And that’s all you’ll ever be.

© 2007 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Originally published in Future Weapons of War.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Hugo-award winning author Kristine Kathryn Rusch publishes fiction in many genres under many names. Her novels have appeared in 15 countries, and her short stories have appeared in many year’s best collections. Once upon a time, she edited The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, as well as Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, but she gave all that up for writing. Over the next three years, WMG Publishing will put her entire backlist into print, including all of her short stories (in electronic form). For more information on her work, go to www.kristinekathrynrusch.com.

Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil
Carrie Vaughn

Here it was, lying on a bed of stone, inert. Such an innocuous artifact, one that would go unnoticed on any machinist’s workbench. A coil of copper wire wrapped around a steel cylinder just a few inches long, inset with an otherworldly crystal that seemed to glow faintly green with its own light, like a distant aurora. Truly otherworldly, as it happened.

Harry had searched for the object for more than a year, scouring ancient manuscripts, picking apart the threads of unlikely stories, tracking down reliable eyewitness accounts and separating them from fabrications, deciding which myths had a seed of fact within them and which were pure folly. Finally, she planned the expedition and arranged her disappearance from polite society for a month or more to embark on said expedition—leading to the moment that would make all the effort worthwhile. Or confirm that she had wasted her time utterly.

It would seem, she was pleased to note, that she hadn’t.

The Aetherian craft that crashed in Surrey in 1869—her entire lifetime, twenty-five years ago now—was not the first such visitor to this world, some hypothesized. This artifact proved that they were right, that another Aetherian being had arrived a thousand years before and left this mechanism behind. A spare part to the Aetherians, but worshipped as a trinket of the gods in this obscure corner of Iceland ever since.

Some would say the Cult of Egil was not far wrong, to take the artifact as a holy talisman. Harry couldn’t be bothered with the theology of the matter. She needed it for more mundane purposes. This was a piece of Aetherian technology that no one else in the world possessed. Britain had brought Aetherian wonders to the rest of humanity; by rights, it should have this as well, before anyone else. If she could convey it back home successfully.

Carefully, with gloved hands, she removed the object from its stone niche, where it had rested for centuries deep underground, inside the dormant volcano where the mysterious Icelandic cult that guarded it made its home. It hardly weighed anything. Surely the tingling she felt from it was her mind playing tricks. Merely the anticipation of finally having it in her possession. Nerves, that was all.

The artifact was hers. She set it safely inside the padded metal box she’d brought to transport it in, and slipped the box back inside her canvas rucksack, which she slung over her shoulder. Taking a moment to prepare for the next stage of the journey, she arranged herself and her tools. She wore a leather vest over a shirt, khaki trousers, and thick workboots. Along with her rucksack she wore a belt with several pouches, containing a rock hammer, lockpicks, compass, hand lantern, and a holster with her pistol. Everything was in place. Now, to get out before they ever realized she’d been here.

The Cult of Egil’s Temple of Sky Fire was located in an ancient lava tube, a twisting set of caves carved into the very earth by rivers of molten lava and searing gas. The air still smelled of sulfur, the reek of distant, burning stone. Heat rose up through the black rock, evidence that the fires that had once flowed through here still lingered beneath the crust. The tunnels had merged into a large cavern; oblique shafts had been dug to the surface to let in faint glimmers of arctic light. Polished squares of silver reflected the sunlight, directing the rays to strike a mural above the altar: a mosaic of bone and shell, in the shape of some inhuman god—an Aetherian pilot, Harry knew, with its plates of bone and curling tentacles.

The niche was one of dozens ringing the cavern and its altar, all containing carved stone figurines, polished jewels, elaborate gold ornaments. This niche didn’t seem any larger than the others, or have any significance of placement. Surely no one would miss this artifact, which must have seemed incomprehensible to them.

Just then, the shouting of a crowd, like the roaring of a wave, echoed from the main tunnel of the cavern complex. Well, then. She’d lingered too long. A dozen tunnels led out of the cavern; the only one she’d identified for certain was the one she came in through. Her exit, if she wished to avoid the wrath of the angry cultists, would have to be via a different route. She turned to the tunnel that sloped upward out of the chamber—to the surface of the mountain and not its depths, she hoped—and ran.

She wasn’t stealing, not really; she had so much more use for the object than these northern heathens possibly could. But clearly they would not understand her reasoning; a hundred voices raised in fury, shouting rolling curses in an ancient tongue, followed her. Harry didn’t dare stop, but risked a glance over her shoulder.

These men, this horde—descendants of a lost tribe of Vikings trapped under the Icelandic volcano—had degenerated to a level of barbarity that would have shocked even their own bloodthirsty ancestors. The first of the cultists appeared in the cavern just in time to see which way she’d gone. A caricature of an ancient Scandinavian warrior, the hide-draped brute wore a crude helmet, and carried a chipped stone spear. His hair and beard shrouded his face in a filthy mask. His fellows swarmed behind him, ant-like, one barbarian form almost indistinguishable from the next. Their blond and red heads of hair were unwashed, matted beyond rescue, but the cultists cared nothing for such civilized matters. Their only concern was the temple to their hideous alien god, and the artifacts they had made in worship of it, in imitation of the one they’d found, that had fallen from the sky.

Of course Harry ran for her life—and for the artifact in her pouch, which had damned well better be worth it. Marlowe had better be waiting for her, as they’d planned, as he’d promised. She had no reason to expect he would fail her; he hadn’t yet, not in all the years she’d known him. He wouldn’t now.

She ran in darkness, for a time, when the tunnel curved away from the silver glow of the cavern. Hoping she didn’t run smack into a wall, she had to fumble for the hand lantern in her belt pouch as she ran; she didn’t dare slow down to fish for it properly. Her vision swam, searching out the way in front of her, following the wall by the sound of her breath echoing off of it. Finally, her hand found the lantern, and she pressed the switch to activate its green Aetherian glow. By this light she could see only a few feet before her, but it was enough.

A hundred leather-clad footsteps pounded on the stone behind her.

Up ahead, a spot of sunlight shone—the tunnel entrance. Escape—or rescue, rather. The light ahead expanded, and the stink of sulfur in the basalt tunnel gave way to a touch of icy arctic air. When the tunnel opened, Harry skidded to a stop, balanced at the edge of a cliff that dropped away a thousand feet to a rocky, blasted landscape below.

Marlowe wasn’t there.

The mountain had dozens of caves, places where the volcanic heat steamed forth. Marlowe would be keeping watch on them all, searching for her. She still had time. An hour before he gave her up as lost. Shoving her lantern back in its pouch, she reached into another one for a flare, struck the flint on the fuel, pointed it to the sky, and launched the charge. A fiery missile, sparking green, arced upward, trailing thick black smoke behind it. If that didn’t work . . .

Before her was a long fall on hard rocks. Behind her, the cultists. She inched to the edge of the drop, keeping a hand on the tunnel wall for balance. If she had to, she’d jump. Slow her fall down the rocky slope as much as she could, and maybe Marlowe could pick up the pieces of her broken body. Or find and rescue the artifact, if there weren’t enough pieces of her to collect. The flare’s smoke hung in the air, a trail leading back to her—while it lasted.

She drew her Aetherian pistol from its holster, though it hardly mattered—the gun’s charge would only last long enough to stop a handful of the cultists. The fiery glow of torches preceded their assault. She prepared to slide over the edge.

Suddenly, the flare’s trail of smoke dissipated, scattered by a blast of wind that pressed Harry to the wall. Arm over her face, she chanced a look—and saw the airship drop down the side of the mountain, to the tunnel entrance. Its curved bladder and sleek gondola blocked the sun and threw a shadow over her.

Stone-filled bags fell from the gondola—ballast dropping, slowing the ship’s descent. Marlowe had timed this very close indeed.

The Aetherian engine in the back of the airship whined, throwing off green-tinted sparks behind it. When the gondola came alongside the mouth of the tunnel, the door to the cabin was wide open, and there was Marlowe, just like he was supposed to be. The pilot was obscured, made larger and more terrifying by the greatcoat and leather-padded goggles masking his features. He held his rifle at the ready.

Harry clutched her satchel, her pistol in her right hand, and didn’t look back, leaping from the cliff’s edge to the airship cabin. Marlowe stepped in behind her, slammed shut the door, and lunged to the airship’s controls. A Viking spear thunked against the gondola’s side. Out the window, Harry saw the horde reach the edge of the cliff—in fact, two of the fellows fell over, pushed by their enthusiastic brethren rushing too fast behind. Good riddance.

The airship sank a few more feet, then stopped, and with another bag of ballast gone, rose up again. The guidance propeller spun faster, and the ship jumped forward, wind whipping across the bladder above them. The ship raced away from the tunnel, along the slope of the shattered volcano, and soon the cultists’ berserker shouting faded against the sound of wind and rumbling engine.

They’d done it.

Marlowe turned another set of levers and the sound changed, drive motors coming online, whirring, moving the craft laterally. The mountain, its black crags and broken clefts, slid past, like a painting on a roller. In moments, the ship turned to the coast of Iceland, and open sky lay before them.

Settling her breathing, Harry took in lungfuls of cool clean air, letting its touch calm her. She slouched against the plush seat at the side of the cabin.

Marlowe turned in his pilot’s chair to face her, pulling the goggles down to hang around his neck. In his early thirties, he was weathered in a way that spoke of experience rather than hardship, his brown hair unkempt and his cheeks covered with stubble because he simply didn’t have time to bother rather than because he was sloppy. His clothing was simple, practical. His eyes shone, and his smile was playful. Butterflies fluttered in her stomach.

“If you’d misjudged the ballast you dropped by a pound, you’d have lost me,” she said, scowling.

“But I didn’t. You knew I wouldn’t,” he said.

“Bloody hell,” she sighed.

The motor droned, sending vibration through the cabin. The rattling soothed her.

“You got it,” he said, a declaration of fact rather than a question of her ability.

“Do you even have to ask?”

“I never doubted. May I see?”

Moving to the co-pilot’s chair, she retrieved the box from her satchel and rested it on her lap. Marlowe leaned forward, watching as she revealed the artifact. She smiled—he clutched his hands together in an effort to keep from grabbing the thing from her. She presented the cylinder to him cupped in her hands, and admired his flat, astonished expression. He sighed a quiet breath and picked it up.

“I’m not sure I even know what it is,” he said, holding it up to the cockpit window, turning it this way and that in the light. “Part of a generation coil, perhaps, or an amplification rod.”

“But it’s Aetherian. The stories were true.”

“Yes,” he murmured. “It most certainly is, and they were.”

The possibilities presented by this new artifact clearly entranced Marlowe, but Harry was taken by a larger question: The Aetherians had visited Earth before. Perhaps often, even. There might even be artifacts—new pieces to the Aetherian puzzle—scattered all over the world. No one had even known to look for them.

“Where do you suppose they found it? The cultists?” she said.

“The stories say they found it frozen in ice that had drifted from the north.”

“But there had to be another ship—another crash, even. Where is the rest of it?”

“It might be a tool left behind. Perhaps they didn’t crash at all.”

She stared out the window to a sun-bleached sky. “It rather begs the question, doesn’t it? This proves they’ve traveled here more than once. What do we do if the Aetherians ever come back?”

Marlowe looked up from the coil, and she met his gaze. Neither of them had an answer. In the twilight shadow of the volcano, the crystal gave off a faint glow.

“All this time, and the power source is still active. Weak, but active,” he said. He produced a jeweler’s loupe from an inside vest pocket and tucked it over his eye. “Usual switching circuitry here—we saw this sort of thing in all the shipboard systems of the Surrey crash. Used to route power. I wonder . . . Harry, my toolkit is under the bench, if you wouldn’t mind—”

“Are you sure this is wise? Shouldn’t you wait until you’re in your laboratory?”

“This will only take a moment.”

A little digging in the bench cupboard revealed the kit, a slim aluminum case containing the tools for manipulation of finer mechanisms. He chose a wire probe from the collection. When he tapped it against the alien cylinder, his hands were steady as a surgeon’s.

The device emitted a hissing noise—gas released under pressure.

“What was that?” Harry asked.

Marlow tapped the cylinder again, and the hissing stopped. Bringing the artifact close to his face, he sniffed.

“Smell that,” he said, offering it to her.

She hated to get too close to the coil, but she didn’t have to, to identify the reek. “It’s methane.”

“Some kind of gas exchange, I’d wager,” Marlowe said. “God, I really need to take this apart . . .”

“We’ll know more, once we’re back in London.”

“Oh. About that.” He handed the device back to her. “We may have a bit of a problem getting home.”

“Good of you to mention it,” she said, smirking, wrapping the coil again and securing it safely in the box. “What kind of a problem?”

“The Germans have established a blockade.”

She harrumphed. “We knew that was coming. We’ll simply avoid the Channel and approach from the north.”

“Ah, no. Not just the Channel.” She raised a brow, and he continued. “They’ve blockaded the entire British Isles.”

A bit of a problem, indeed.

The battle had been raging for a week—naturally, the Queen and the Empire could not let a blockade of the home country stand. Marlowe had spent the time, while Harry had been infiltrating the volcanic tunnels in Iceland, hiding the Kestrel in valleys and ravines, going aloft at intervals to intercept wireless transmissions to try and get some kind of news.

They were too far away yet to see signs of fighting. Knowing the respective strength of each of the forces, though, Harry was certain she and Marlowe wouldn’t be able to avoid the battle for long. They weren’t at all equipped for it—the Kestrel was a courier ship, built for speed and agility. She had no armor and little in the way of weapons. Perhaps they’d do better to find a safe port and wait out the blockade.

Except they had to get the coil to Prince George, and to Marlowe’s laboratory. The artifact could change everything. She thought through a multitude of plans—land elsewhere, make their way home by some other route. Make for the Americas and rendezvous with a more capable warship. Or did they dare attempt to run the blockade? She knew what Marlowe would say.

“So, do we go above or below the fray?” she asked.

“Above. They’ve got surface ships on the water.”

“Right, then.”

She went to the safe in the back, a square of thick steel tucked over the driveshaft, put her satchel containing the artifact inside, locked it tight, and tied the key to a cord around her neck. Even if the ship didn’t make it through, no one would be able to gain access to the box without destroying its contents. Not without her.

“What can I do to help?” she asked.

“Don’t jostle the boat,” he said. “Or if you’d like you can pour us some brandy.” He glanced over his shoulder and quirked a grin.

“I’m your maid, then?” she said.

“I stashed the bottle in the cupboard under the seat there.” He nodded to the bench by the hatch.

The bench seat was hinged, revealing the promised cupboard, packed tightly with boxes, slots, canvas bags, blankets and fur coats for high altitudes, provisions for an extended journey, and her own package of supplies. Good. In a slot that looked as if it had been specially made to enclose it, she found the bottle of brandy and a pair of glass tumblers.

She joined him at the front of the cabin. The dashboard had enough of a ledge for her to set the tumblers on it and pour. After, she tucked the bottle in a pouch on the wall to keep it from sliding or falling. Marlowe took the glass before she could hand it to him.

“Cheers,” he said, and they clinked glasses.

The liquid went down smoothly and warmed her blood in an instant. Marlowe always kept the good stuff on hand.

Before them, through the thick glass at the front of the cabin, the ocean extended. This had become the simplest part of the journey. Marlowe’s piloting would manage the ocean winds and unpredictable weather. She had no idea what awaited them once they reached home. Harry squinted, searching for the haze of gunsmoke and fires.

Best to drink up while they could.

“How high are we going to have to get to avoid it, then?”

He frowned. “They’ve got rockets that reach higher than anything that flies. We’ll do what we can, but it probably won’t be high enough.”

“Rockets? How?”

“They stole them, in the time-honored fashion,” he said.

She slumped in the chair. Had the entire journey been wasted? “It’s all been for nothing,” she murmured.

“If that were true, I wouldn’t have bothered coming for you.” He gave her that smile again. And it was true. She imagined herself waiting at the cave entrance, the horde of cultists coming up behind her. Having to jump . . .

She drained the brandy and poured herself another glass.

“That bad?”

“I hate this,” she said.

“Amen,” he murmured.

The sun set, and the air grew cold. Below them, the ocean was the color of pewter and seemed still, frozen, like a painting. No moon shone.

Harry slept for an hour or so, then offered to watch over the ship while Marlowe slept. That he didn’t hesitate to take the offer, she took as a great compliment. He stretched out on the bench in the back of the cabin, rolled a blanket around him, and instantly fell asleep in the way only long-time soldiers could manage. He snored, softly, the noise like just another exhaust or gear on the airship. If she told him he snored, he wouldn’t have believed her.

They’d reach Ireland by dawn. Then, Marlowe would ascend as high as the Kestrel was able. Breathable air would fail before the engines did, yet they had to climb high enough to avoid the blockade and not draw attention from scouts; they had to skirt that boundary without crossing it and blacking out.

She wouldn’t have to touch the controls unless something went wrong—the winds changed, or they were attacked. She watched pressure gauges, altitude monitors, and compass readings. Their course remained steady; she had to add a little gas to the bladders to maintain altitude. Marlowe had left his goggles hanging on a hook above the window.

The cabin was dark except for a dim lamp near the control board, the faint glow of the engine in back, and a tea light for warmth near the cage where a pair of carrier pigeons slept. Too much light—a fire in the stove, for example—would make them a target. And it was only going to get colder, this high up, at night.

Once the sky darkened, the first signs of battle became visible. On the eastern horizon, tracers arced, distant shooting stars, orange, yellow, green. Fireballs rose up from unseen explosions and dissipated into raining sparks. At the moment, the scene was a remote tableau, an unreal moving picture. She could imagine the hint of pyrotechnics was a harmless show put on for her benefit. Except for all the thousands of people dying underneath it.

Dim lamplight turned the cabin ghostly, flat, unreal. She wrapped the blanket more tightly around her. For the moment, she could believe she drifted between worlds, and oddly enough the sensation came as a relief. In this suspended place, she could breathe easy, let down her guard, and pretend that all was well.

At dawn, Marlowe’s snoring stopped, and soon after he shifted, the blanket rustling as he pushed it away, the cabin shivering with his movements. He pulled a pair of heavy fur coats from the storage cupboard and brought them to the front.

“How are we doing, then?” he asked.

“Steady as she goes, captain.” She smiled at his crazily ruffled hair.

He gazed out the cabin’s front window. The sky had grown hazy with the smoke of battle. A particularly large explosion bronzed his face for a moment, even at this distance. That would have been one of the larger airships going down, hit by a rocket maybe, all its gas and munitions igniting. Debris fell after the initial fireball, flaming bits of fabric and metal plunging to earth, like diving birds.

He said. “God, would you look at that. I wonder if that was one of ours or one of theirs?”

“We’ve no way of knowing, and nothing we could do to help even if we knew.” She tried to sound offhand about it, but only managed bitter.

Marlowe put his hand on her arm, where it rested on the edge of the pilot’s chair. Warm, comforting, an anchor. They both looked at it there. The impropriety of it seemed very distant, and she imagined everything she might do—touch his cheek, turn his face toward her, kiss him—and her brother and grandmother would be none the wiser.

He quickly pulled his hand away—but not before she could catch it, squeeze it, then let it go. Just a moment of contact, gloved hand to gloved hand. It would have to be enough. They had more important things to think about.

“We’ve got to get over this before the scouts see us,” he said.

She moved out of the way so he could take over the pilot’s seat. They bundled up in the coats. He pulled back a pair of levers, the engines buzzed, and the cabin tipped back, pressing them into their seats. The Kestrel climbed, and climbed.

The battle climbed with them. It wasn’t just rockets reaching this height; airships climbed with them, exchanging broadsides. Harry was already panting for breath, using her whole chest to suck in too little air. She couldn’t imagine fighting like this. But they were headed for the thick of it.

“I thought coming in from the north would avoid most of this mess,” Marlowe said, the words punctuated with gulps for air.

“What must it be like on the Channel?”

He pointed. “See there, at two o’clock. Is it coming closer?”

The triple-motored airship wasn’t just coming closer, it was set to intercept them. “We can’t let them stop us, even if it’s one of ours.”

“Especially if it’s one of ours,” he said, giving half a grin.

“Do I dare hoist a signal flag?” she said.

“Give it a moment. Let’s see if we can outrun ‘em.”

“Bloody hell.”

Marlowe started throwing levers, and the motor’s humming changed in pitch. The ship rose, and the horizon tilted as they changed course.

Their ship was small and fast, but their opponent was an interceptor, all lift and motor and guns, specifically designed to stop ships like this one.

“It’s one of theirs,” she said. “Look at the flag.”

When the sun hit it directly, the red field with the black eagle painted on the bladder was clear. Marlowe would crash the ship rather than let them be boarded now. Though they’d most likely get blown from the sky before it came to that. They couldn’t risk letting the Germans take possession of the coil.

“You said all we have is a pair of rifles?” she said.

“I would never lie to you about my weaponry, Harry,” he said, eyebrow arched. And why exactly did she want to laugh at a time like this?

She grabbed Marlowe’s goggles and put them on, adjusting the strap. Then she found the rifle and checked that its charge was full. “Where’s the harness?”

“Hanging across from the door, there.”

She found the gear and hooked the leather straps over her shoulders and around her chest, checking the buckles three times. The straps and hardware were all well-oiled and in excellent repair—but of course they were, this was Marlowe’s ship, after all. One end of the line hooked to the front of the harness. The rest of it she hung coiled around her forearm while she opened to the door to cabin.

Wind tore at her. She hadn’t buttoned the coat all the way, and the collar flapped around her neck, sending a freezing draft across her skin, but that didn’t matter. The other end of the line hooked to the track ringing the outside of the cabin. Normally, the track and harness were used as a safety measure for mechanics making repairs. But she’d always thought it looked like fun.

She gripped the rifle, and jumped.

The line caught, and she swung out as the harness caught, dug into her shoulders and ribs, and arched her toward the cabin’s side. Sticking her feet out, she landed and ran until the line came up against the first bracket. Leaning forward, she had a view across the nose of the Kestrel. Bracing, she held the rifle steady to her shoulder, aimed along the barrel and waited for Marlowe to swing the ship around and give her a shot. She wished she’d thought of tying her hair back first; it whipped behind her, catching on the line.

Her best chance would be to rip a shot through the enemy ship’s air bladders. Even if she didn’t start an explosion that destroyed the airship, it would lose lift and maneuverability, giving Marlowe time to get them out of this. The Kestrel’s motor droned, increasing in pitch, and the craft lurched upward, the nose tipping down, as if the whole thing had been caught in an updraft. Harry shifted her feet to keep her balance.

There it was, the Kaiser’s black eagle staring at her with contempt, or so it seemed. Cannons mounted on the base of the cabin swung around. They were still too far away for Harry to bother firing at them. But soon.

An explosive scream cut through the air, and in spite of herself Harry flinched back. When she looked, she saw the long trail of black smoke, but never saw what made it. The trail led to the enemy airship, which transformed into a fireball a moment later. The heat of it washed over her, and she ducked, clinging to her line, pulling herself close to the cabin for shelter. The Kestrel rocked with the shockwave, but Marlowe increased altitude yet again and got them above the worst of it. Breathing was very difficult now; blackness flashed at the edges of her vision. It was all wind and no air up here.

Below her, gas from the German ship ignited in blue flames that quickly faded to yellow and dispersed, munitions vanishing in bursts of orange fire; the ship disintegrated and fell, pieces trailing arcs of smoke and sparks. Bodies fell. Harry saw one man, still alive, limbs flailing as he tumbled through air. She imagined she could hear his screams, but of course could hear nothing over the roar of the wind.

There was only the one fortuitous rocket, sent to destroy their enemy. She might never learn if that had been by chance or design.

Marlowe waved at her through the front window, his expression showing concern. He was too sensible to actually yell at her to come back inside. Clutching both her safety line and the rifle, she didn’t have a free hand to wave back. Carefully, she braced against the harness, freeing herself to signal back at him. He pressed his lips and nodded. He moved a lever. The nose tipped down, beginning a descent. She made herself stay still and focus on breathing, imagining she could tell that the air grew thicker. The goggles brought her eyesight to a narrow focus, and she sought to see beyond the edges of her vision.

The horizon was a distant smudge; the gray haze made it impossible to see where ground ended and sky began. She could imagine seeing the curve of the Earth from here. When she looked up, the sky became like night, shifting from pale blue to a deep indigo, then darker still, to the black of twilight. And beyond that, stars.

If man were ever to travel to the upper reaches, past the atmosphere and into Aetherian spaces, they had a serious problem to solve: They had to learn to bring their air with them. Or they had to learn to stop breathing. There was some debate about which alternative the Aetherians had used. Finding a solution for these reckless airship pilots venturing forth, as far as they could until they couldn’t breathe at all, that was the key to all. If only . . .

Marlowe knocked on the window this time, and she brought herself back.

Sliding the line along its track, she walked along the cabin hull to the door and tried to pretend that her legs weren’t shaking. Marlowe was waiting for her. Handing the rifle to him, she swung inside, unhooking herself from the track. When he shut the door, she finally breathed easy again.

“You all right?”

“I didn’t even get a chance to fire,” she said, pulling the goggles off, handing them back to him. Her legs were still trembling, and she lowered herself to the bench.

“Never mind that we’d never have gotten close enough before they blew us out of the air.”

“Oh, yes, indeed. You’ll have to find out who I ought to send a bottle of wine to for that rocket.”

“A bottle of wine? Seems this would be worth at least your first born.”

“I’m afraid my first born, should such a person ever exist, is already promised to my grandmother and brother.”

“Ah. Of course.”

She fumbled with the buckles, and Marlowe managed to pretend not to notice, but still helped, coiling the rope and pulling the harness off her shoulders once she’d finally managed to unfasten it. She sighed and rolled her shoulders—they were going to be very sore for a couple of days, and she’d probably have bruising around her ribs. Not anywhere that anyone would be likely to notice, so they didn’t matter at all.

“I think I could use another finger of your brandy, Marlowe.”

He was already reaching for the bottle.

They had managed to circumvent the worst of the blockade, and reached the shores of Scotland. There, they put up their flags and lit the cabin lights, to prevent any misunderstandings. In friendly territory now, Marlowe felt comfortable using the wireless. He posed as a standard military courier ship that had been damaged in fighting and was seeking the safety of a mooring in Liverpool. He used the coded phrase that would, in fact, get them permission to continue on to London.

Harry’s preferred choice of communication was more primitive, but less prone to eavesdropping than the wireless. This would go straight where she wanted it, and there was little chance someone could intercept She wrote a note on a strip of paper, using her and her brother’s code, rolled it tightly, and put it in the tiny canister that she then fit to the leg of one of the pigeons. She held the cooing creature gently to her chest, smoothing its feathers and whispering comforts to it, before throwing it out the open portal window, into the bright sun. Its white wings flashed as the bird dipped around the ship, then seemed to vanish as it raced on.

Harry went back to the front of the cabin, where Marlowe sat.

She sighed. “I don’t think I’m ready to be back just yet.”

“I could turn us around, head toward the battle,” he said.

“Do you really think that piece of metal will help us end the war?”

“Strange, isn’t it? So much hope in that little thing. But I do think it’s worth it.”

Not strange at all. Little things had often changed the world. Whatever it was worth, this was better than sitting at Marlborough House, waiting for something to happen.

They reached the Thames and followed it to the mooring station outside Windsor.

“Well then,” she sighed. “I suppose I ought to make myself presentable.”

“I’m sorry I haven’t got anything like a decent room for you—”

“Nonsense. We’ll make do.”

He blushed, pointedly turning away.

She retrieved her luggage from the bench. From it, she unfolded her proper lady’s attire and all its attendant architecture. She ought to have a good wash before putting it on, but there was no chance of that. She would have to make do. She stripped the old rugged shirt and trousers she’d been in for the last week and donned the crisp linen shift, smoothing out the wrinkles as best she could. She’d had the corset made with fasteners in front for just such occasions as this. Her sisters would be scandalized, to see her dressing herself. In front of a soldier, even. She had her back to Marlowe; he could have been sneaking glances at her all this time. Of course, the worse scandal was that she rather hoped he was.

Then came the gown, which she’d managed to pack well enough to prevent the worst of the wrinkles. The fasteners in back, however, presented some difficulty. She could feel the hook and eye at the back of her neck, but no matter how she contorted herself, couldn’t get them to catch.

She turned to the pilot’s chair. “Marlowe—”

He sprang to his feet, as if he’d been watching. Waiting for her to ask.

At her back, he fumbled with the tiny hooks, the tips of his fingers brushing along the bare skin of her neck. Closing her eyes, she reveled in the warm flush his touch inspired. The breath of his sigh tickled her skin. If she took a step back, she would be leaning against him, and she was very tempted.

If only they could only stand like this for the rest of the hour. The rest of the war . . .

He moved away, but only after smoothing away a lock of her hair. Back at his seat, he clasped his hands together and gazed at her with a look of blank innocence.

They both practiced that look.

“Thank you,” she said. He nodded.

She continued with buttons, hooks, earrings, necklace, arranging them all properly. Next she used the little tray of cosmetics with the tiny fold-out mirror. After some powder, some color on her lips and cheeks, and a few pins in her hair, she’d be able to pass in the most respectable society without comment. She saw the gown, with its corset, ribbing, and petticoats, as armor.

“All right, I’m finished. How do I look?” She gave her skirt a last brush.

He said simply. “Your Highness. Princess Maud returns.”

She ducked her gaze. She wasn’t ready for Princess Maud to return.

“It’s amazing how you do that,” he continued, when she didn’t speak. “You’re a chameleon.”

“I think you are the only one who sees my true form.”

His smile flashed, and fled. “Sometimes I’m not sure I’ve seen it yet.”

Marlowe steered them to an upper landing platform at the air port. He followed the signals of the tower controller, sending back his reply with the lantern at the window.

“I’ll get the line,” she said, intending to throw out the mooring lines to the deckhands.

“You’d better not,” he said, nodding at her current dress. “Why don’t you gather your things?”

She unlocked the safe and retrieved the prize, which she put in the valise that had hidden her gown, burying it in her dirty clothes. She tucked her pistol in a pocket in the side, and remembered to keep that side of the bag closest to her. Not that she expected to encounter any trouble here; rather, it was habit.

Marlowe and the deckhands got the ship anchored perfectly well without her, of course. But she felt useless, standing there, stiff as a statue in this clothing.

Out the window, she could see the street leading toward the village and castle, and the carriage drawn by a pair of large bay horses parked there. The carriage door would have her brother’s crest painted on it. The royal crest belonging to the Crown Prince. He’d gotten her message, then, and made it as easy as possible to bring the box straight to him.

Anchored and still against the tugging of the bladder above it, the ship felt like a rock instead of a bird. As soon as the door to the cabin opened, she’d have to leave. She and Marlowe stood together, regarding one another. She never knew what to say in these moments, when their missions ended. Whatever she said felt awkward and artificial, and as soon as he was gone she’d think of everything she should have said.

“You’ll come to the Royal Academy? To be on hand when they examine the artifact?” she asked.

“I hope to. But I suspect the general will send me and the Kestrel to Plymouth, to assist in the defense.”

That hadn’t been part of the original plan. The war had crept far too close to home shores; she preferred to forget.

“But I will see you again, soon?”

“As soon as possible, I should think,” he said.

They shook hands, as if they were familiar colleagues and not . . . she couldn’t decide exactly what they were. There was no civilized name for it. As she made her way down the steps from the platform to the street and Prince George’s carriage, she could feel Marlowe watching her, and was glad of it.

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series. Kitty’s Big Trouble, the ninth book, was released summer 2011, and the tenth will be released summer 2012. She has also written for young adults (Voices of Dragons, Steel) and two stand-alone fantasy novels, Discord’s Apple and After the Golden Age. Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, and was nominated for a Hugo award in 2011. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Learn more at carrievaughn.com.

Author Spotlight: Lucius Shepard
Gina Guadagnino

“Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?” has such a unique voice, particularly for a science fiction novella; what inspired your choice to make Maceo a self-proclaimed redneck?

These were people I grew up with in Florida. Most people don’t think of Florida as a redneck state, but once you get away from the coasts there is a heavy concentration of rednecks and Florida crackers and such, and they generally drift toward the coasts and toward Orlando, because that’s where the money is. Maceo is a Florida cracker as opposed to a redneck, the difference being defined this way: If you tell a redneck he’s stupid, he’s liable to get angry, but if you tell a Florida cracker he’s stupid, chances are he’ll have a swig of beer and say, “Yeah? So what?”

The backdrop of this novella is Central Florida and the Space Coast. As a writer, what were you able to accomplish by setting a story with flying saucers there as opposed to, say, Roswell?

The reason’s pretty basic. I’m familiar with the area and felt I could write about it with an authenticity of detail. And, too, Florida used to have the highest incidence of UFO sightings in the US, and there still are quite a few sightings today, though they occur mostly along the Gulf, rather than along the stretch of coast between Daytona and Vero Beach. State Highway 44, which traversed the state between Cocoa and Tampa, was a hotbed of sightings and guys in high school used to take dates down there to watch the sky. It was a rare night when you didn’t see something odd.

Ava tells Maceo three different versions of her background, and only one of them is remotely “plausible” in a real-world sense. As readers of science fiction, however, we look for the truth in her stranger and more outlandish stories. How do you guide the reader toward the “truth” in a novella where the main character never finds it?

Ambiguity is an important part of this story, and I wasn’t concerned with a reader coming to any particular conclusion about it. The story works, I think, whether one considers it a weird mainstream story or a science fiction story. I wanted to tell Maceo’s story against a backdrop that might be considered science fiction, rather like the movie Monsters, a film in which the love story was set in the foreground of the narrative and the science fiction was used as background . . . at least mostly.

Personally I consider “Hands Up!” science fiction and in order to push the reader in that direction without making it the focus of the story, which would be the narrative strategy of a typical science fiction story; you have to be very deft in the way you layer information, trying to influence the reader yet maintaining the ambiguity. Your exposition has to be subtle, without big lumps, and it generally requires a good bit of rewriting in order to get the balances right.

Variations on the theme of sexuality (vitality, desire, control, orientation, promiscuity, fidelity, jealousy) are woven throughout the novella. Sex drives the plot in many ways as well, working both as the thread that ties the characters together and the motive that drives them apart. How does Ava’s sexuality tie into her otherworldliness?

I envision Ava as a sex tourist, like some guy who takes his holiday in Phu Ket, but possibly on an interstellar scale. What Maceo has stumbled into is the last leg of her sex tour through this little ol’ galactic backwater of ours. Of course, her bi-sexuality falls within human norms, but in context with all the other strangeness in the story, it was my hope that readers would come to that conclusion, or reach a conclusion that was proximate to that one.

Maceo muses frequently throughout his narration of the novella about the class he was born into, and about his place in society. How do you feel that science fiction and fantasy allow you to explore these themes of class inequality as a writer?

I don’t have that kind of view of a story. I usually have a character in mind, I work out the voice, and as I’m doing that, the story comes together. It’s sort of an intuitive way to work, as opposed to having a plan, and I make a lot of false starts—but I’m never thinking about themes and how the genre will enable me to do this or that. I have a character in my head and if I’m lucky he or she begins to take on a life of their own and make moves and say things that I wouldn’t have predicted. That said, I imagine that coercing the reader into viewing these characters in a science fictional light has the effect of an amplifier—it compels one to perceive these relatively normal characters to be passing strange and exotic. Which, in fact, they are. People are basically incomprehensible. It’s only when we don’t really look at people, when we take them for granted, that they appear normal.

Anyway, I’ve always been fascinated with this kind of guy, a canny redneck, a guy trapped by the limitations of his culture who is really intelligent, but can’t act upon his intelligence. So I hoped by putting him in a science fiction story, making him a tad more articulate than the average, I could show people there was perhaps more to him than met the eye.

Where is your writing taking you these days? What are you working on next?

I’m working on a short novel set in Tibet, a science fantasy, and a post-apocalyptic novel of sorts. After that, I’d like to do a big adventure novel with fantasy elements.

Gina Guadagnino compensates for being extremely short by cultivating her expansive vocabulary. She is overly-impressed by her education and the number of books in her personal library. A fiction writer and a blogger, she earns her living in social media, and still can’t believe that someone actually pays her to muck about on Facebook all day. Gina lives in exile in Florida with her husband, his rapier wit, and their precocious child.

Author Spotlight: Brooke Bolander
Theodore Quester

Your story for Lightspeed, “Her Words Like Hunting Vixens Spring,” has quite a lyrical title—what came first, the title or the story? What was the inspiration?

My deep, dark secret: I began and finished this piece without a title, gave it an absolutely horrible placeholder during Clarion (don’t ask; bad enough eighteen other people in the world know), and pulled the final product out of my keister about three days before submitting to Fantasy. I’m not quite sure where it came from, but I do know I listened to a lot of Australian band The Dirty Three while pounding this out—their songs have titles like “Some Summers They Drop Like Flies” and “I Knew It Would Come To This,” really evocative stuff that tells a story by itself—so I’m reasonably sure that post-rock sensibility and rhythm seeped into my brain a bit. The idea for the short itself was a lot more cut-and-dry. It came from an illuminated manuscript my friend and fellow writer Alex D. MacFarlane found, which featured, among other things, a medieval lady with a fox scrambling out of her mouth. We came to the conclusion that she was either playing the poor thing like a bagpipe or horking it up, and either way there were stories screaming to be told there.

This is how my writing process usually goes. Some writers sit down with flow charts and whiteboards and map their stories out to the final detail before they begin; others strap themselves to a snippet of idea, light the fuse, and hope they land somewhere arable. I definitely fall into the latter category more often than I’d care to admit.

Your story first impressed me with its distinctive voice—very lyrical, at times tall tales / folkloric and bigger than life . . . Any major influences? Does this style come naturally to you, or is it something you aim for as you revise?

My influences are the usual suspects: Neil Gaiman for his storytelling chops, Peter S. Beagle for his musical prose and amazing character voices—The Innkeeper’s Song has something like seven different first-person narrators and all of them are distinct entities, it’s incredible—and Cat Valente, who showed me that lush, descriptive lyricism is not something to be ashamed of. This is naturally how I’ve always written, but early on I was a little afraid to just be myself, lest I wander into the Valley of the Shadow of Purple Prose (cross yourself and spit over your shoulder when you speak of it). Several people mentioned that Valente had a similar style, I picked up The Orphan’s Tales, and lo and behold, another writer was doing it and doing it well, with grace and skill intact. So yeah, I owe her an eternal debt for teaching me to let my lyricism flag fly. The Devil is in the details, and everybody knows the Devil is the most interesting guy at the party.

That said, I also have a huge love for minimalist storytelling. You can convey so much with a few well-chosen details. Look at the opening twenty minutes of WALL-E, the island scenes in Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion, or the sparse, windswept landscape of Team ICO’s video games. There’s a lot to be said for letting the reader fill in the gaps themselves. A good storyteller knows what to say, and just as importantly, what not to say.

You create a strong sense of place—the southwest and its border, with a dash of frontier wild wild west. How did you get such a good feel for the region? Are you a native of the southwest?

I spent my childhood in rural East Texas, around the border of Louisiana. When folks think of Texas, they think of a setting a lot like the one I’ve written about in this story, but East Texas is more aligned with the Deep South in both climate and culture, all magnolias and deep forests and stifling humidity. I took my inspiration here from several trips through New Mexico, which is, in some stretches at least, one of the most isolated, desolate places in the US. Highway 104 between Tucumcari and Las Vegas (not the one in Nevada) makes the surface of Mars look like your gran’s kitchen at Christmastime.

Without revealing any spoilers, your story also features quite a lot of action, lots of plot twists and turns. Did you have the story planned out beforehand? Know your ending?

I sort of knew where I was headed, in that it was a Bluebeard revenge story, and I also knew that Rosa had to be the one to pull the proverbial trigger. Otherwise I was flying by the seat of my trousers. The ending gave me fits for ages and I still don’t know if I’m entirely pleased with it, but I think it ends honestly and seems to work for most people. I’m at peace with it, anyway.

You are a recent graduate of Clarion UCSD. How does the workshop inform your writing? Is it difficult to produce after going through such an intense program?

I think the biggest lesson I learned at Clarion was that I’m the absolute worst judge of my own work. I’ve got the self-esteem of a mopey fifteen-year old; nothing I do is ever good enough. Having twenty-three talented writers slap me in the head with bricks every time I groused and moaned about what a talentless fraud I was was something of a wakeup call. In each of my personal conferences with the instructors I would ask what I was doing wrong, and each time the instructor in question would cock his or her head and say, “Uh . . . are you actually submitting anything?” Oops.

It sounds like such a simple thing, but when you are utterly convinced that your output is devoid of merit, having people whose opinions you respect reassure you that yes, you’re doing okay and yes, you are Real Writer is sort of a big deal. Living and working in a bubble with a group who completely believe in each other’s talents for six weeks is an amazing experience, and you carry it with you when the bubble finally bursts and you’re forcibly ejected back into the real world. And if you don’t remember, and don’t keep producing? They will come after you with sharp, pointy objects and make you remember. You don’t want Kij Johnson hunting you down with a morning star, believe me.

Clarion is completely deserving of all the legend that surrounds it. I highly recommend applying if you’ve been on the fence and are ready to get serious about things. It’s a crucible, and it’s not for everyone, but when it works it’s like roping the whirlwind.

I understand you attended this year’s World Fantasy Con and read an excerpt of your story. Can you comment on the experience?

Terrifying. I never read my stories aloud while I’m writing them. I hate the sound of my own voice and find it acutely embarrassing, like my thoughts are being pulled out through my nose and hung up naked for all the world to see. A mental gibbet, if you will. It’s an intensely personal thing that leaves me feeling pretty vulnerable, but readings are part and parcel of being an author so I figured I’d better learn sooner than later. And it worked out pretty okay! I wasn’t at all pleased with how I did, but then, like I said, I rarely am. I’ll keep striving to get better at it. If you come to one of my readings in the meantime, though, please be patient with me. I’m a work in progress in many ways.

My personal reading heroine is Wendy Wagner, one of the most amazing storytellers I’ve ever sat in on. When you go to one of her readings, you get a goddamned performance.

What are you working on right now? Anything else you’d like us to know about?

I’ve got several pieces circulating on the market right now that I intensely hope you will all get a look at very soon, a website (www.brookebolander.com) that I update on a fairly regular basis, and a novel idea I’ve been nursing for a few years now about a griffin that eats stories to survive. Don’t we all, though?

Theodore Quester spent three years after college in Europe and now speaks seven languages; he spends his days teaching two of them to high school students. He is obsessed with all things coffee—roasting, grinding, pulling espresso—and with food, especially organic and locally grown. He earned his geek street credentials decades ago, publishing an article in 2600 magazine as a young teenager, then writing reviews for SF Eye and interning at Omni magazine. In his spare time, he swims, bikes, runs, and reads a little bit of everything; when inspired, he writes fiction, mostly for children and young adults.

Author Spotlight: Chris Willrich
Jennifer Konieczny

What inspired the Bone and Gaunt series and “The Mermaid and the Mortal Thing”?

Several years ago my wife gave me good writing advice—stop trying so hard to outguess editors and write something you’d enjoy reading, whether or not you think it can sell. Surprisingly that turned out to be sword and sorcery. At the time I’d been noticing a thread of influence leading from Lord Dunsany through H.P. Lovecraft and on to Fritz Leiber, and I wanted to write adventure stories that captured that particular vibe.

“The Mermaid and the Mortal Thing” is of course indebted to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” It’s also inspired by all those amazing constructions you can see in sand castle competitions. A long time ago I’d had the idea of a mermaid building such sand castles, and it would have turned out she was a fan of human architecture. For some reason that old idea came up when I was thinking about Gaunt and Bone, and the combination clicked.

Where do the events of “The Mermaid and the Mortal Thing” fall in the chronology of the Gaunt and Bone stories? When in the series did you write it?

In the chronology it’s the second Gaunt and Bone story, right after “The Thief with Two Deaths” (F&SF, June 2000), but in order of writing it’s the sixth.

Could you share the process of writing a short story series? What’s the easiest part of returning to familiar characters? What’s the hardest?

I’ve tried not to plan too far ahead, and instead let things develop organically. I’ve even resisted making a map, even though I love fantasy maps. I’d also like each story to have its own flavor, and to be an enjoyable experience even if you know nothing beforehand about the series.

The easiest thing about writing the series is the “want ad” factor. If you’ve got characters who can reasonably get involved in lots of crazy adventures, there’s this wonderful moment when you introduce them to a new scenario and see if they want the job. You can practically hear them sizing up the situation and exchanging grim jokes about their odds of survival.

The hardest part is trimming the series of baggage. If I want readers to be able to come to the series cold, to pick it up at any point, then I can’t overcomplicate the overall storyline. Gaunt and Bone’s larger goals have to be fairly simply stated. Get rid of a magic book. Get away from trouble for a while. Start a family, but find a way to stay safe while doing so. Luckily, as a couple with an evolving relationship, they also have this built-in story arc that’s easy to relate to.

Faced with Bone and Gaunt’s choice, would you have saved the mermaids’ victims or hesitated? Do you relate more to Bone or Gaunt?

Oh, I’m definitely with Bone on that one. I’m a little in awe of people who behave heroically. It’s hard to say which character I relate to most overall, though. They’ve gotten so familiar now it’s easy to slip behind either one’s eyes.

“Bone recalled the old philosopher’s conundrum: If you replace all the wood of a vessel, is it the same craft? If you replace all the particulars of a man’s life, is he the same man? What, then, of self-knowledge? It seemed the only answer available was for the man to board the ship that life offered.” Is Bone’s conclusion yours or do you have different answers for the questions?

I didn’t want to present an absolute answer—I doubt there is one—but I’m basically with Bone here and his practical response. I want to believe there’s a divine, irreducible spark of selfhood in each of us, but given how mutable thought and memory can be, and how circumstances can change our perspective, sometimes it seems a very sputtery spark indeed. So I think in that sense our actions define us. We may always be in flux mentally, but our choices have concrete consequences that for better or worse can’t be undone. So Bone defines himself, in a small but real way, by beginning a new stage of his journey with Gaunt.

What’s next for you?

Right now I’m working on a story, set in Gaunt and Bone’s world, about a black cat who genuinely causes bad luck, and how she deals with this power. I’m sketching more Gaunt and Bone pieces, and also working on a sequel to my space opera “Sails the Morne,” (Asimov’s, June 2009.)

Jennifer Konieczny studied English and History at Villanova University and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She currently resides in Philadelphia and enjoys volunteering as a slush reader, author interviewer, and editorial assistant at Lightspeed Magazine, and inflicting her medieval-studies self on her students.

Author Spotlight: Genevieve Valentine
Wendy Wagner

With the magical spring and the struggle to keep the spring’s secret, “The Gravedigger of Konstan Spring” reminded me greatly of Tuck Everlasting. Did you read that book as a kid?

Nope. But there definitely is an homage of sorts in this story, drawn from the feel-good Westerns I saw as a kid, where it seemed as if there had to be something dark under the surface of all this getting along, and in which someone is always treated horribly, often for laughs (and, according to everyone else, justly). In Konstan Spring, the thing that keeps the peace is knowing you have the best person for each job, no matter what that really means.

You do a wonderful job capturing the endless speculation of small town life. Do you have any experience in small towns?

As an army brat, I have more experience passing through them than living in them, but I’ve spent enough time in some of them to recognize the familiar patterns of annoyance and tolerance in whatever places are small enough where those patterns are still potent. The same patterns play out in larger cities, except that the more people in the city, the longer you can avoid them. (There’s some kind of breaking point there, too, though, since every time you walk somewhere in New York you will run into three people you know, and we’re right back to the small-town cycles.)

The setting of this story is fascinating—I wasn’t quite sure if it was a magical town in a real-world setting or a slightly alternate version of the world. Also, there was a delicious Norse-Wild West hybrid flavor. Could you tell us a little about the worldbuilding in this piece?

Norse-Wild West it is indeed; in addition to the small-town decay going on in the Spring, I wanted to highlight how a town can often lock out the world around it, if its concerns are all of itself. The world around them is a significantly different North America, in which the early Scandinavian settlers maintained peace with the First Nations, and settled accordingly, in smaller numbers and farther apart. This insulates Konstan Spring even more, both geographically and thematically, to have a new world out there that they care nothing for.

There are so many different kinds of stories about immortality, from vampires to gods, from the cursed to people, like those in Konstan Spring, who have drunk from the fountain of youth. What’s your favorite kind of immortality?

None of them. I think immortality is a supremely creepy thing to actually have to deal with, and as someone who freaks out every time someone changes my email interface, I am guessing I am not particularly suited to endless years of adapting to circumstance.

We all know you love movies. If someone made this piece into a film, who would you want to direct it? Any actors you’d envision in any of the roles?

The Coen brothers really know how to make a landscape and characters work together, and have this beautiful language of isolation they always bring to their work, and I would love to see what they could do with this story (or, let’s face it, with any other story).

Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece or about any upcoming works?

In addition to the novel I’m working on, I have some short stories slated to come out next year, like “A Game of Mars” in Under the Moons of Mars, “The Segment” in After, and “The Dancing Master” in Willful Impropriety. And this alternative North America was a lot of fun to think about, and I would actually love to explore it a little more, someday—hopefully with more open-minded people than the folk of Konstan Spring.

Wendy N. Wagner’s short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and the anthologies The Way of the Wizard and Armored (forthcoming). Her first novel, Dark Depths, is due Summer 2012 from Dagan Books. Ms. Wagner lives in Portland, Oregon, and blogs at www.inkpunks.com.

Author Spotlight: Robert Silverberg
John Nakamura Remy

Even after thirty years, “Not Our Brother” continues to be a powerful and relevant work. What led you to write this story?

I was experimenting with writing horror/fantasy stories as a change of pace from science fiction. And I had just come back from a trip to Mexico.

The masks, the jungle village setting, the dramatic transformation of Ellen Chambers, and even the mundane things Halperin comes into contact with are richly described. What sources did you draw on to inject such lush detail into this story?

As I said, I had just come back from Mexico. (Though nothing like the events of the story had happened to me down there!) I have collected Mexican masks myself and the house is full of them. Some of the ones I describe in the story are hanging on my own walls.

The instant that Halperin breaks the taboo against trying to buy the masks, Ellen Chambers ensnares him. To me, it almost seems Edenic—in the paradisiacal garden of the gods, there is a prohibition, a temptation, a transgression, and a fall. How do you feel about such parallels? Were they intentionally written into the story?

Probably not intentionally. For me a story has its own logic, and I let things unfold without consciously trying to impose a substructure (or superstructure) of myth on it. Of course, if I do things the right way, the mythic parallels will turn out to be there anyway.

Halperin begins the story a confident explorer, eager to experience life, and ends it a broken man. Is there a cautionary tale here about how we should approach the world?

Again, it’s the logic of the story. Obviously we all begin our lives eager to experience life, and end up dead, but I don’t think that that’s a very profound point. A story is about a transformation: this was Halperin’s.

I found myself making comparisons to Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway as I read “Not Our Brother.” Are they influences on your writing? What are your favorite and most influential authors and works outside of SF?

Conrad is a big influence in my writing—not his style or technique, but his sense of the moral forces governing our lives—and I have acknowledged that many times by giving my characters and even my stories names out of his work. I’ve studied Hemingway closely too, and from him I learned not to spell things out too heavy-handedly, but he has not been a major influence otherwise. Other writers I’ve paid close attention to include Graham Greene, Robert Stone, and John Updike. And the Greek tragedians.

Do you ever pick up one of your older works and find that you’re surprised or amazed by it? Is there any piece from your body of work so far that you’re particularly proud of?

I always read some older work of mine and wonder how I thought of it and got it done. Always. As for pieces I’m particularly proud of, I’d cite the novellas first—“Sailing to Byzantium,” “Born with the Dead,” “Hawksbill Station,” “We Are For the Dark,” and a few others. Among the novels, Son of Man, Dying Inside, Book of Skulls.

Your cumulative output is extraordinary. It’s difficult for me to imagine anyone writing in the sustained manner that you have at times. Where do you turn for ideas and inspiration, especially in your most productive periods?

They come out of thin air. It’s not a process I want to look at very closely. It just happens, and I’m grateful for that.

As a SFWA Grand Master, you have a unique perspective on the progress of SF through the years. What opportunities do SF writers have in this decade that they did not have in others? What potential pitfalls do you think they should avoid?

I really haven’t been keeping up with the current state of affairs. I’m doing very little writing these days and pay almost no attention to the current state of the market.

What are you working on now?

See the previous reply. I’ve had a 55-year career and written an enormous number of books and stories. These days I’m just kicking back and taking it easy, reading, traveling widely, working in my garden. I have no immediate plans for new work, though of course that could change at any moment.

John Nakamura Remy is a graduate of the Clarion West 2010 workshop. He has fiction published in the Rigor Amortis and Broken Time Blues anthologies, a graphic novel collaboration with Galen Dara released in the Mormons & Monsters anthology, and has a story forthcoming in the Pseudopod horror podcast. John blogs with the Inkpunks, the Functional Nerds and at mindonfire.com. He lives in Southern California with his two Dalek-loving children and partner and fellow SF-writer Tracie Welser.

Author Spotlight: Keith Brooke
Andrew Liptak

Hi Keith, thanks for taking a couple of moments to talk with us about your story, “War 3.01.” First off, how did this story come to be?

In my day job I’m closely involved with uses of social media at my local university, looking at how we can make use of it, how to avoid abuses and so on. “War 3.01” (and the earlier related story, “likeMe,” which appeared in the international science journal Nature in 2010) came from that work. I wanted to extrapolate current social media and try to create a convincing snapshot of how it might change how we live in the not-too-distant future. I’m planning to write more stories in this setting, all of them short pieces, with the ultimate goal of producing a kind of mosaic view of this future scenario. Such a fragmented approach to storytelling and worldbuilding seems appropriate to me for a project like this.

We’re living in a time when computers, apps and interconnected social networks have become increasing involved in our everyday lives; how pervasive do you believe augmented reality will be?

It’s very hard to say, of course, but to take a parallel: Even ten years ago, just how pervasive did we think the internet would be? And now it’s in everything. I was at a huge food exhibition at the weekend, wandering around the stalls, going to demonstrations, talking to the producers. Everyone was giving out Twitter and Facebook information, I was scanning QR codes at the stalls, or if they didn’t have that, simply taking photos on my phone so I could Google their websites on the journey home. The internet is everywhere. Now imagine that kind of exhibition where your reality is overlaid with virtual feeds, and then remember that everyone’s out to get something so those feeds won’t just be augmenting your reality with what you want to know, but also with legitimate adverts, spammed ads (looking at a meat stall and . . . “Want some Viagra with that?”), marketers trying to friend you and hook you by any means they can use.

You pose a scenario of a war that’s won in seconds, where the winner succeeds by convincing everyone that they’ve won, rather than by force: How do you see military and political forces taking advantage of a networked population?

I see the traditional military and political establishment struggling to keep up, sometimes playing leapfrog but more usually falling at least one step behind. Right now we invest vast sums in cyber-defence and combat and who are we up against? Small, unfunded groups . . . radical digital-natives with passion and commitment. It’s these militants who could have the biggest impact: Just as one terrorist splinter-group with a black-market nuke could cause devastation, so too could the same group if they can recruit a few angry young hackers and virus-writers. It always costs far more to defend against this kind of thing than to perpetrate it, particularly when it’s established thinking versus can-do radicals.

How do you think that the past decade of international conflict has affected the rise of social media and how we interpret the news and each other?

They go hand in hand, don’t they? Terrorism is as much a media war as a physical one, as we saw with all the Osama tapes as they were drip-fed into the news networks. War and politics is all about winning over the people, and social media offers a powerful way to do this: when a message goes viral it can be fast, a meme that suddenly everyone recognises. But it’s a hard beast to tame: For all the marketers who talk about getting their message to go viral, the vast majority of memes that take off in this way are spontaneous and unpredictable, not engineered by the ‘professionals’ at all. One positive impact is that social media offers a mass of different news channels: it’s clearly played a key role in what’s happened in the Middle East over the last year, and it’s provided a vital alternative view of the Occupy movement recently, too.

Do you see a difference in attitudes between the US and the UK (in reference to the above question)?

Being based in the UK, that’s a hard one for me to answer, really. My gut instinct would be to say ‘no’, though. The way the Occupy movement has used social media seems to have been similar in both countries, for instance: when the conventional news channels appear to offer a very filtered, establishment view of events, social media allowed people on the ground to report and post videos and photographs offering an alternative view, and that happened everywhere. The big challenge for us is to filter and understand all the different versions: while the conventional news channels offer their own blinkered view, so too do the protestors, caught up in their passion and constrained by their own very selective experience of events.

You touch on immigration issues in “War 3.01”: Do you think the controversy fueled by nationalism is going to change as we live in an increasingly networked world?

I think we’ll be pulled in lots of directions. The internet and social media have had a huge impact in establishing a global perspective; no matter how much a country might try to control these media, it’s never going to work—the people will tweet. But at the same time we’re in the early part of a century that will see massive resource issues as fossil fuels dwindle and population growth and climate change put pressure on food production, fresh water supplies, disease control and more. These pressures are bound to trigger a lot of knee-jerk nationalism and territorialism. It’s hard to see how we’re going to avoid a whole host of large-scale conflicts in the years to come . . .

How important are popup blockers and personal security going to be in a augmented reality world?

We’re going to need ways to control how we interact with an augmented world or it will be unusable. The internet has spawned all kinds of scams, traps and irritants and we’ve developed ways to block them, or to filter them so that we only see the ones that might be useful, and this will be true as the augmented view spreads beyond the purely online. I don’t want to walk down the high street and have every shop spamming me with ads and special offers, but it’ll be really cool to have tools that tell me there’s a restaurant two streets away that’s just like the one I love back in my home town, or that the bookshop has a special deal on my favourite author. So yes, we’ll develop tools that will offer us those kinds of filters so that augmented reality works. And the spammers will find ways to circumvent the filters (“Special offer Viagra!!!!”) and we’ll have to upgrade our filters, and then . . .

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Tor.com, SF Signal and Blastr, and can be found over at http://andrewliptak.wordpress.com and at @AndrewLiptak on twitter.

Author Spotlight: Gregory Benford
Robyn Lupo

Not every story begins with a shot to the face. Can you tell us how this story came about for you?

I like narrative hooks, and starting with action is a grabber. It’s also how the central problem comes to the protagonist. I could’ve opened with a description of how dull asteroid prospecting was, but . . . who wants to read that?

This story deals with where we, as humans, make our home. Can you tell us more about this idea?

I wrote this story in 1979, when the whole Fermi question was a hot topic and we’d come to realize that the O’Neill colony ideas of that era implied that people might well live in space indefinitely. I just put the two together.

It doesn’t seem like a big stretch to say that the narrator appears to identify more with the aliens she encounters than other humans. What is it in Rosemary that allows her to relate to the aliens so well?

She’s alienated from most human society. Loners in the Belt are far apart and take risks. Living indefinitely in space is a way of life. In this way the aliens aren’t so alien.

How do you balance off writing and your academic life? What’s a writing day look like for you?

I write for fun, always have. I fit it in around my research interests and time I spend working with the company I founded, Genescient. SF emerges from my scientific interests, so my life self-reinforces.

I try to write in the mornings, when I’m smarter (we all are, and get more stupid through the day). Sometimes I take months away from writing, which builds a narrative pressure and makes writing fluid when I do return to it. It’s a fun life.

Do you have anything upcoming that you’d like to let our readers know about?

I’ve started revisiting some of my novels and getting them back from their original publishers. In 2011, I reissued in a new edition my longest novel, about cryonics as I’ve known it, Chiller. It’s updated and available in trade paperback and e-editions.

Next year, Larry Niven and I will publish the first of two volumes of a long novel, The Bowl of Heaven. It’s about what I call a Big Smart Object—a starship the size of a solar system, with all the physics worked out. But who would build such a thing . . .

Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.

Author Spotlight: Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Erin Stocks

What was most unsettling for me about “Craters” was that even though it was written several years ago and its key plot points lie in the near future, there’s a very real and present-day element to the threat at hand. Where did the inspiration for this story come from?

Joe Haldeman asked me to write a story for an anthology he was putting together called Future Weapons of War. I got to the time I had allotted for writing the story and freaked out. Science fiction is sometimes a blueprint for people to invent technology and in no way did I want to come up with a “cool” weapon that someone would invent. So I just took trends in the news—trends that go back to the earliest days of human history—and came up with this story.

The main character consciously determines not to feel any emotion. She calls it the only way to get by, and yet, she must consistently talk herself out of feeling. Is this particular story finally getting to her in a way previous ones haven’t?

Yes. This story disturbs her and violates her sense of right and wrong. Journalists should be observers, not people who judge, and she’s judging here.

She acknowledges that nothing will get done, nothing will change, despite her work. Why do you think she continues, then, knowing that’s likely the case?

The war correspondents I know—and I know a lot of them, since I used to be a journalist—are the most idealistic/cynical people in the world. They’ve seen everything, more than everything actually, and they still believe if the information gets out there, someone will listen and make things change. It’s a weird dynamic, but I’m glad it happens. Because I do think people listen. I also think the real war correspondents, the ones who go into the dangerous places often without backup or weaponry, are the most courageous people I know.

The narrator and her other colleagues “. . . label it a calling, put it on par with other religions, other callings that deal with ethics.” With that in mind and considering her views on emotion, it seems like an effort to rationalize what they see: the blood, the suffering, the death. Is that a coping mechanism, you think?

It is a coping mechanism and one, again, based on the reporters I know. And on me, way back when. You can be desensitized by what you see, so you have to fight that. You can feel helpless when confronted with all of the world’s monstrosity, and you have to fight that. By seeing it as a calling, a religion, you know you’re not alone in the fight, and that you might eventually stem the tide.

The idea of a world where children are tools is horrifying. Why do you think it comes down to that, for those who have instigated such a zealous and uncompromising route?

To terrorists and people deep in a war or a crisis situation, other people are not real to them. Gangs use little children to run drugs. In Vietnam, the Viet Cong occasionally strapped bombs to toddlers. I can go on. Thanks to my own journalism background and my interest in history, I know lots of horrible, terrible things like that. And what it comes down to is that some people do not see others as human, even children. Those others are tools to fight a war, win a cause, deliver a good. It’s that simple, and that horrifying.

The similarities between the child who survived and our narrator are clear: the extraordinary solitude they both clearly feel, and the degree to which they must trust people in order to survive. Was that an intentional choice when you wrote the story?

I wish I could say I was smart enough to make intentional choices when I write. But the choices actually come from my subconscious as the story is developing. I remember finishing this story. I actually went, “Ewww.” Then I told my husband and first reader, Dean Wesley Smith, that I couldn’t mail this story. It was too icky. Dean made me give him a copy. He says when I say something is “icky,” it’s worth reading. So I trust him on these things. It has certainly proven the case with “Craters,” which, on my own, I would never have mailed.

Do you think this encounter with the child had any lasting effect upon the narrator? Even if the child gave her new information, would she allow herself to change at all?

Oh, yes. I think this encounter had a huge effect on the narrator. That’s why she’s writing the personal stuff. As for her changing . . . I doubt she’ll change beyond her realization. She can’t. If she does change too much, she can’t do her work.

Lightspeed Assistant Editor Erin Stocks’s fiction can be found in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth, Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Colored Lens. Follow her on Twitter @erinstocks.

Author Spotlight: Carrie Vaughn
Erin Stocks

Your new story for Lightspeed, “Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil,” features two characters that you’ve written about before, most recently in your story for John Joseph Adams’s upcoming anthology, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination. What is it about Harry and Marlowe that keeps bringing you back?

Lots of reasons. They’re fun. I like the buddy-adventure format. They’re my excuse to write steampunk-type stories. I like having a ready-made setting and characters I can use to tell certain kinds of stories—such as neo-Victorian pulp adventure. Now that I’ve written a couple of stories using them as a catalyst, I want to write a couple that are about them specifically: where they came from, how they met, and so forth. That’s the thing about these kinds of characters, they really expand.

Harry is a plucky protagonist, determined to get what she wants and do what she wants, and nobody can tell her otherwise. Did anybody or anything in particular inspire her character?

She was inspired by a type rather than anyone specific. I’ve had a character like her in mind for a very long time—a woman who bucks tradition to go have adventures. I’ve read a lot of Victorian adventure stories, and I really wanted to see that kind of story but with a woman adventurer. It’s been done before (Agatha Heterodyne is an example that comes to mind), and there were actually quite a few real-life Victorian women who went adventuring. Harry is my take on the trope.

After the rousing escape and rescue by gondola, the reader is suddenly propelled into a steampunk world. What appeals to you about steampunk, and incorporating science fictional elements into it? Is it tricky to balance the fantastic against science fiction in a steampunk world?

Like a lot of people I’m attracted by the aesthetics of steampunk. It appeals to the anglophile and costumer in me. Also, big unlikely machines, ray guns, and all kinds of weirdness. What’s not to like? I agree with the idea that steampunk is more fantastical and less science fiction. Just as urban fantasy asks “what if vampires and werewolves were real?” steampunk asks, “what if some of the scientific ideas that were being investigated a century or so ago, that turned out to be inaccurate, were real?” It can be liberating, exploring some of those ideas. That said, I want the stories to seem as plausible as possible. We know exactly how dirigibles work, so I can’t diverge from that. On the other hand, my alternate history starts with the crash of an alien spacecraft in Surrey, and I can do just about anything with the reverse-engineered technology that comes out of that. Making it as plausible as I can involves the same effort as writing anything speculative—I have to establish my rules and stay consistent.

Why do you think Harry & Marlowe are holding themselves back from being together?

Because Harry is Princess Maud, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and Marlowe is a commoner. It’s really that simple. They’re a product of their place and time, and it’s going to take a little more effort to get them past that class boundary.

What does Harry get out of running away as she does, seeking this sort of adventure? Given her easy camaraderie with Marlowe, one has the feeling this is not the first time they’ve done this.

It’s not, and one of the stories I want to write is how they came to be partners in these spy-thriller escapades. My Harry diverges pretty radically from the historical Princess Maud, but the real Maud really was called Harry by her family when she was young—she was apparently quite a tomboy. I took that nugget and ran with it—once she got the opportunity to do something more than be a polite ornament, she grabbed it and ran. In the world of my stories, I imagine her brother, the Crown Prince (in my history, their father, Edward, died before Victoria and never became King), finds it useful having a secret agent very close to him whom he can trust utterly. And whom no one suspects.

Will we ever find out what the Aetherian talisman does? A next installment to this story, perhaps?

Who knows? I think the next story may go back in time rather than forward, to tell how Harry and Marlowe met, but the stories so far have been about Aetherian technology, and the next step that Marlowe is particularly eager to take—traveling into space. Maybe the talisman will be the key to that.

Lightspeed Assistant Editor Erin Stocks’s fiction can be found in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth, Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Colored Lens. Follow her on Twitter @erinstocks.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in March, in Lightspeed . . .

We’ll have original science fiction by new writer Kali Wallace (“The Day They Came”) and Steven Utley (“Test”), plus SF reprints by award-winning authors Mary Rosenblum (“My She”) and Kathleen Ann Goonan (“Electric Rains”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by S. L. Gilbow (“Alarms”) and David Barr Kirtley (“Beauty”), and fantasy reprints by bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler (“Halfway People”) and the legendary Gene Wolfe (“The Legend of XI Cygnus”).

All that plus our artist showcase and our usual assortment of author spotlights, and feature interviews with Ian McDonald and R. A. Salvatore. And our ebook-exclusive novella will be “Cleopatra Brimstone” by Elizabeth Hand.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed. Thanks for reading!