Lightspeed Magazine

Issue 22, March 2012

Table of Contents

Editorial, March 2012 by John Joseph Adams

“Cleopatra Brimstone”—Elizabeth Hand (ebook-exclusive novella)

The Games—Ted Kosmatka (novel excerpt)

Interview: R. A. Salvatore

Interview: Ian McDonald

Artist Gallery: Ed Basa

Artist Spotlight: Ed Basa

“The Day They Came”—Kali Wallace (SF)

“My She”—Mary Rosenblum (SF)

“Electric Rains”—Kathleen Ann Goonan (SF)

“Test”—Steven Utley (SF)

“Alarms”—S. L. Gilbow (fantasy)

“The Legend of XI Cygnus”—Gene Wolfe (fantasy)

“Beauty”—David Barr Kirtley (fantasy)

“Halfway People”—Karen Joy Fowler (fantasy)

Author Spotlight: Elizabeth Hand (ebook-exclusive)

Author Spotlight: Kali Wallace

Author Spotlight: Mary Rosenblum

Author Spotlight: Kathleen Ann Goonan

Author Spotlight: Steven Utley

Author Spotlight: S. L. Gilbow

Author Spotlight: David Barr Kirtley

Author Spotlight: Karen Joy Fowler

Coming Attractions

© 2012, Lightspeed Magazine
Cover Art and artist gallery images by Ed Basa.
Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial, March 2012
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue twenty-two of Lightspeed!

This month, our ebook-exclusive novella is “Cleopatra Brimstone” by Elizabeth Hand. Then we have original science fiction by new writer Kali Wallace (“The Day They Came”) and Steven Utley (“Test”), and SF reprints by award-winning authors Mary Rosenblum (“My She”) and Kathleen Ann Goonan (“Electric Rains”).

We also 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, our usual assortment of author spotlights, and feature interviews with R. A. Salvatore and Ian McDonald.

You’ll also notice a new addition this month: We’re featuring an excerpt in this issue from a forthcoming novel: The Games by Ted Kosmatka. Long-time readers of Lightspeed will remember Ted from his story “In-Fall” (December 2010). Here at Lightspeed we’re excited about his debut novel, so we wanted to bring you this early look at the first fifty pages. Whether or not these novel excerpts become a regular feature remains to be seen, but meanwhile we hope you enjoy this one.

We’ve also got some good news to report: Lightspeed has three stories on this year’s Nebula Awards ballot! “The Old Equations” by Jake Kerr is up for best novelette, and “Her Husband’s Hands” by Adam-Troy Castro and “Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son” by Tom Crosshill are both up for best short story. Additionally, “Her Husband’s Hands” is also up for the Bram Stoker Award for best short story. So we’d like to send a big congratulations out to Adam-Troy, Jake, and Tom, and to all of the other nominees.

Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for Timeless, the latest installment in steampunk-wunderkind Gail Carriger’s bestselling Parasol Protectorate series. 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 remember, there are several ways you can sign up to be notified of new Lightspeed content:

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Speaking of our content, if you’d like to help other connoisseurs of quality literature like yourself discover Lightspeed, posting reader reviews on sites like Amazon.com and BN.com can help a lot, as positive reviews and/or a high star-rating is a significant contributing factor to readers trying out something new. Reviews of individual issues are, of course, much appreciated, and if you’re a subscriber, please also consider posting a review on the magazine’s subscription page (at Amazon or Weightless Books).

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading!

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and 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 (Baen, April 2012), Epic (Tachyon, Fall 2012), and The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination (Tor, 2013). John is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Cleopatra Brimstone
Elizabeth Hand

Her earliest memory was of wings. Luminous red and blue, yellow and green and orange; a black so rich it appeared liquid, edible. They moved above her and the sunlight made them glow as though they were themselves made of light, fragments of another, brighter world falling to earth about her crib. Her tiny hands stretched upwards to grasp them but could not: They were too elusive, too radiant, too much of the air.

Could they ever have been real?

For years she thought she must have dreamed them. But one afternoon when she was ten, she went into the attic, searching for old clothes to wear to a Halloween party. In a corner beneath a cobwebbed window she found a box of her baby things. Yellow-stained bibs and tiny fuzzy jumpers blued from bleaching, a much-nibbled stuffed dog that she had no memory of whatsoever.

And at the very bottom of the carton, something else. Wings flattened and twisted out of shape, wires bent and strings frayed: a mobile. Six plastic butterflies, colors faded and their wings giving off a musty smell, no longer eidolons of Eden but crude representations of monarch, zebra swallowtail, red admiral, sulphur, an unnaturally elongated hairskipper and Agrias narcissus. Except for the narcissus, all were common New World species that any child might see in a suburban garden. They hung limply from their wires, antennae long since broken off; when she touched one wing it felt cold and stiff as metal.

The afternoon had been overcast, tending to rain. But as she held the mobile to the window, a shaft of sun broke through the darkness to ignite the plastic wings, blood-red, ivy-green, the pure burning yellow of an August field. In that instant it was as though her entire being was burned away, skin hair lips fingers all ash; and nothing remained but the butterflies and her awareness of them, orange and black fluid filling her mouth, the edges of her eyes scored by wings.

As a girl she had always worn glasses. A mild childhood astigmatism worsened when she was thirteen: She started bumping into things, and found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the entomological textbooks and journals that she read voraciously. Growing pains, her mother thought; but after two months, Jane’s clumsiness and concomitant headaches became so severe that her mother admitted that this was perhaps something more serious, and took her to the family physician.

“Jane’s fine,” Dr. Gordon announced after peering into her ears and eyes. “She needs to see the ophthalmologist, that’s all. Sometimes our eyes change when we hit puberty.” He gave her mother the name of an eye doctor nearby.

Her mother was relieved, and so was Jane—she had overhead her parents talking the night before her appointment, and the words CAT scan and brain tumor figured in their hushed conversation. Actually, Jane had been more concerned about another odd physical manifestation, one which no one but herself seemed to have noticed. She had started menstruating several months earlier: nothing unusual in that. Everything she had read about it mentioned the usual things—mood swings, growth spurts, acne, pubic hair.

But nothing was said about eyebrows. Jane first noticed something strange about hers when she got her period for the second time. She had retreated to the bathtub, where she spent a good half-hour reading an article in Nature about Oriental Ladybug swarms. When she finished the article, she got out of the tub, dressed and brushed her teeth, then spent a minute frowning at the mirror.

Something was different about her face. She turned sideways, squinting. Had her chin broken out? No; but something had changed. Her hair color? Her teeth? She leaned over the sink until she was almost nose-to-nose with her reflection.

That was when she saw that her eyebrows had undergone a growth spurt of their own. At the inner edge of each eyebrow, above the bridge of her nose, three hairs had grown remarkably long. They furled back towards her temple, entwined in a sort of loose braid. She had not noticed them sooner because she seldom looked in a mirror, and also because the odd hairs did not arch above the eyebrows, but instead blended in with them, the way a bittersweet vine twines around a branch. Still, they seemed bizarre enough that she wanted no one, not even her parents, to notice. She found her mother’s eyebrow tweezers, neatly plucked the six hairs and flushed them down the toilet. They did not grow back.

At the optometrist’s, Jane opted for heavy tortoiseshell frames rather than contacts. The optometrist, and her mother, thought she was crazy, but it was a very deliberate choice. Jane was not one of those homely B movie adolescent girls, driven to Science as a last resort. She had always been a tomboy, skinny as a rail, with long slanted violet-blue eyes; a small rosy mouth; long, straight black hair that ran like oil between her fingers; skin so pale it had the periwinkle shimmer of skim milk.

When she hit puberty, all of these conspired to beauty. And Jane hated it. Hated the attention, hated being looked at, hated that other girls hated her. She was quiet, not shy but impatient to focus on her schoolwork, and this was mistaken for arrogance by her peers. All through high school she had few friends. She learned early the perils of befriending boys, even earnest boys who professed an interest in genetic mutations and intricate computer simulations of hive activity. Jane could trust them not to touch her, but she couldn’t trust them not to fall in love. As a result of having none of the usual distractions of high school—sex, social life, mindless employment—she received an Intel/Westinghouse Science Scholarship for a computer-generated schematic of possible mutations in a small population of viceroy butterflies exposed to genetically engineered crops. She graduated in her junior year, took her scholarship money, and ran.

She had been accepted at Stanford and MIT, but chose to attend a small, highly prestigious women’s college in a big city several hundred miles away. Her parents were apprehensive about her being on her own at the tender age of seventeen, but the college, with its elegant, cloister-like buildings and lushly wooded grounds, put them at ease. That, and the dean’s assurances that the neighborhood was completely safe, as long as students were sensible about not walking alone at night. Thus mollified, and at Jane’s urging—she was desperate to move away from home—her father signed a very large check for the first semester’s tuition. That September she started school.

She studied entomology, spending her first year examining the genitalia of male and female Scarce Wormwood Shark Moths, a species found on the Siberian steppes. Her hours in the zoology lab were rapturous, hunched over a microscope with a pair of tweezers so minute they were themselves like some delicate portion of her specimen’s physiognomy. She would remove the butterflies’ genitalia, tiny and geometrically precise as diatoms, and dip them first into glycerine, which acted as a preservative, and next into a mixture of water and alcohol. Then she observed them under the microscope. Her glasses interfered with this work—they bumped into the microscope’s viewing lens—and so she switched to wearing contact lenses. In retrospect, she thought that this was probably a mistake.

At Argus College she still had no close friends, but neither was she the solitary creature she had been at home. She respected her fellow students, and grew to appreciate the company of women. She could go for days at a time seeing no men besides her professors or the commuters driving past the school’s wrought-iron gates.

And she was not the school’s only beauty. Argus College specialized in young women like Jane: elegant, diffident girls who studied the burial customs of Mongol women or the mating habits of rare antipodean birds; girls who composed concertos for violin and gamelan orchestra, or wrote computer programs that charted the progress of potentially dangerous celestial objects through the Oort Cloud. Within this educational greenhouse, Jane was not so much orchid as sturdy milkweed blossom. She thrived.

Her first three years at Argus passed in a bright-winged blur with her butterflies. Summers were given to museum internships, where she spent months cleaning and mounting specimens in solitary delight. In her senior year, Jane received permission to design her own thesis project, involving her beloved Shark Moths. She was given a corner in a dusty anteroom off the Zoology Lab, and there she set up her microscope and laptop. There was no window in her corner, indeed there was no window in the anteroom at all, though the adjoining lab was pleasantly old-fashioned, with high arched windows set between Victorian cabinetry displaying Lepidoptera, neon-carapaced beetles, unusual tree fungi and (she found these slightly tragic) numerous exotic finches, their brilliant plumage dimmed to dusty hues. Since she often worked late into the night, she requested and received her own set of keys. Most evenings she could be found beneath the glare of the small halogen lamp, entering data into her computer, scanning images of genetic mutations involving female Shark Moths exposed to dioxin, corresponding with other researchers in Melbourne and Kyoto, Siberia and London.

The rape occurred around ten o’clock one Friday night in early March. She had locked the door to her office, leaving her laptop behind, and started to walk to the subway station a few blocks away.

It was a cold clear night, the yellow glow of the crime lights giving dead grass and leafless trees an eerie autumn shimmer. She hurried across the campus, seeing no one, then hesitated at Seventh Street. It was a longer walk, but safer, if she went down Seventh Street and then over to Michigan Avenue. The shortcut was much quicker, but Argus authorities and the local police discouraged students from taking it after dark. Jane stood for a moment, looking across the road to where the desolate park lay; then, staring resolutely straight ahead and walking briskly, she crossed Seventh and took the shortcut.

A crumbling sidewalk passed through a weedy expanse of vacant lot, strewn with broken bottles and the spindly forms of half a dozen dusty-limbed oak trees. Where the grass ended, a narrow road skirted a block of abandoned row houses, intermittently lit by crime lights. Most of the lights had been vandalized, and one had been knocked down in a car accident—the car’s fender was still there, twisted around the lamppost. Jane picked her way carefully among shards of shattered glass, reached the sidewalk in front of the boarded-up houses and began to walk more quickly, towards the brightly lit Michigan Avenue intersection where the subway waited.

She never saw him. He was there, she knew that; knew he had a face, and clothing; but afterwards she could recall none of it. Not the feel of him, not his smell; only the knife he held—awkwardly, she realized later, she probably could have wrested it from him—and the few words he spoke to her. He said nothing at first, just grabbed her and pulled her into an alley between the row houses, his fingers covering her mouth, the heel of his hand pressing against her windpipe so that she gagged. He pushed her onto the dead leaves and wads of matted windblown newspaper, yanked her pants down, ripped open her jacket and then tore her shirt open. She heard one of the buttons strike brick and roll away. She thought desperately of what she had read once, in a Rape Awareness brochure: not to struggle, not to fight, not to do anything that might cause her attacker to kill her.

Jane did not fight. Instead, she divided into three parts. One part knelt nearby and prayed the way she had done as a child, not intently but automatically, trying to get through the strings of words as quickly as possible. The second part submitted blindly and silently to the man in the alley. And the third hovered above the other two, her hands wafting slowly up and down to keep her aloft as she watched.

“Try to get away,” the man whispered. She could not see him or feel him though his hands were there. “Try to get away.”

She remembered that she ought not to struggle, but from the noise she made and the way he tugged at her, she realized that was what aroused him. She did not want to anger him; she made a small sound deep in her throat and tried to push him from her chest. Almost immediately he groaned, and seconds later rolled off her. Only his hand lingered for a moment upon her cheek. Then he stumbled to his feet—she could hear him fumbling with his zipper—and fled.

The praying girl and the girl in the air also disappeared then. Only Jane was left, yanking her ruined clothes around her as she lurched from the alley and began to run, screaming and staggering back and forth across the road, towards the subway.

The police came, an ambulance. She was taken first to the police station and then to the City General Hospital, a hellish place, starkly lit, with endless underground corridors that led into darkened rooms where solitary figures lay on narrow beds like gurneys. Her pubic hair was combed and stray hairs placed into sterile envelopes; semen samples were taken, and she was advised to be tested for HIV and other diseases. She spent the entire night in the hospital, waiting and undergoing various examinations. She refused to give the police or hospital staff her parents’ phone number, or anyone else’s. Just before dawn they finally released her, with an envelope full of brochures from the local rape crisis center, New Hope for Women, Planned Parenthood, and a business card from the police detective who was overseeing her case. The detective drove her to her apartment in his squad car; when he stopped in front of her building, she was suddenly terrified that he would know where she lived, that he would come back, that he had been her assailant.

But, of course, he had not been. He walked her to the door and waited for her to go inside. “Call your parents,” he said right before he left.

“I will.”

She pulled aside the bamboo window shade, watching until the squad car pulled away. Then she threw out the brochures she’d received, flung off her clothes, and stuffed them into the trash. She showered and changed, packed a bag full of clothes and another of books. Then she called a cab. When it arrived, she directed it to the Argus campus, where she retrieved her laptop and her research on Tiger Moths, then had the cab bring her to Union Station.

She bought a train ticket home. Only after she arrived and told her parents what had happened did she finally start to cry. Even then, she could not remember what the man had looked like.

She lived at home for three months. Her parents insisted that she get psychiatric counseling and join a therapy group for rape survivors. She did so, reluctantly, but stopped attending after three weeks. The rape was something that had happened to her, but it was over.

“It was fifteen minutes out of my life,” she said once at group. “That’s all. It’s not the rest of my life.”

This didn’t go over very well. Other women thought she was in denial; the therapist thought Jane would suffer later if she did not confront her fears now.

“But I’m not afraid,” said Jane.

“Why not?” demanded a woman whose eyebrows had fallen out.

Because lightning doesn’t strike twice, Jane thought grimly, but she said nothing. That was the last time she attended group.

That night her father had a phone call. He took the phone and sat at the dining table, listening; after a moment stood and walked into his study, giving a quick backward glance at his daughter before closing the door behind him. Jane felt as though her chest had suddenly frozen: but after some minutes she heard her father’s laugh. He was not, after all, talking to the police detective. When after half an hour he returned, he gave Jane another quick look, more thoughtful this time.

“That was Andrew.” Andrew was a doctor friend of his, an Englishman. “He and Fred are going to Provence for three months. They were wondering if you might want to housesit for them.”

“In London?” Jane’s mother shook her head. “I don’t think—”

“I said we’d think about it.”

“I’ll think about it,” Jane corrected him. She stared at both her parents, absently ran a finger along one eyebrow. “Just let me think about it.”

And she went to bed.

She went to London. She already had a passport, from visiting Andrew with her parents when she was in high school. Before she left, there were countless arguments with her mother and father, and phone calls back and forth to Andrew. He assured them that the flat was secure, there was a very nice reliable older woman who lived upstairs, that it would be a good idea for Jane to get out on her own again.

“So you don’t get gun-shy,” he said to her one night on the phone. He was a doctor, after all: a homeopath not an allopath, which Jane found reassuring. “It’s important for you to get on with your life. You won’t be able to get a real job here as a visitor, but I’ll see what I can do.”

It was on the plane to Heathrow that she made a discovery. She had splashed water onto her face, and was beginning to comb her hair when she blinked and stared into the mirror.

Above her eyebrows, the long hairs had grown back. They followed the contours of her brow, sweeping back towards her temples; still entwined, still difficult to make out unless she drew her face close to her reflection and tilted her head just so. Tentatively she touched one braided strand. It was stiff yet oddly pliant; but as she ran her finger along its length a sudden surge flowed through her. Not an electrical shock: more like the thrill of pain when a dentist’s drill touches a nerve, or an elbow rams against a stone. She gasped; but immediately the pain was gone. Instead there was a thrumming behind her forehead, a spreading warmth that trickled into her throat like sweet syrup. She opened her mouth, her gasp turning into an uncontrollable yawn, the yawn into a spike of such profound physical ecstasy that she grabbed the edge of the sink and thrust forward, striking her head against the mirror. She was dimly aware of someone knocking at the lavatory door as she clutched the sink and, shuddering, climaxed.

“Hello?” someone called softly. “Hello, is this occupied?”

“Right out,” Jane gasped. She caught her breath, still trembling; ran a hand across her face, her fingers halting before they could touch the hairs above her eyebrows. There was the faintest tingling, a temblor of sensation that faded as she grabbed her cosmetic bag, pulled the door open and stumbled back into the cabin.

Andrew and Fred lived in an old Georgian row house just north of Camden Town, overlooking the Regent’s Canal. Their flat occupied the first floor and basement; there was a hexagonal solarium out back, with glass walls and heated stone floor, and beyond that a stepped terrace leading down to the canal. The bedroom had an old wooden four-poster piled high with duvets and down pillows, and French doors that also opened onto the terrace. Andrew showed her how to operate the elaborate sliding security doors that unfolded from the walls, and gave her the keys to the barred window guards.

“You’re completely safe here,” he said, smiling. “Tomorrow we’ll introduce you to Kendra upstairs, and show you how to get around. Camden market’s just up that way, and that way—”

He stepped out onto the terrace, pointing to where the canal coiled and disappeared beneath an arched stone bridge, “—that way’s the Regent’s Park Zoo. I’ve given you a membership—”

“Oh! Thank you!” Jane looked around delighted. “This is wonderful.”

“It is.” Andrew put an arm around her and drew her close. “You’re going to have a wonderful time, Jane. I thought you’d like the zoo—there’s a new exhibit there, ‘The World Within’ or words to that effect—it’s about insects. I thought perhaps you might want to volunteer there—they have an active docent program, and you’re so knowledgeable about that sort of thing.”

“Sure. It sounds great—really great.” She grinned and smoothed her hair back from her face, the wind sending up the rank scent of stagnant water from the canal, the sweetly poisonous smell of hawthorn blossom. As she stood gazing down past the potted geraniums and Fred’s rosemary trees, the hairs upon her brow trembled, and she laughed out loud, giddily, with anticipation.

Fred and Andrew left two days later. It was enough time for Jane to get over her jet lag and begin to get barely acclimated to the city, and to its smell. London had an acrid scent: damp ashes, the softer underlying fetor of rot that oozed from ancient bricks and stone buildings, the thick vegetative smell of the canal, sharpened with urine and spilled beer. So many thousands of people descended on Camden Town on the weekend that the tube station was restricted to incoming passengers, and the canal path became almost impassable. Even late on a weeknight she could hear voices from the other side of the canal, harsh London voices echoing beneath the bridges or shouting to be heard above the din of the Northern Line trains passing overhead.

Those first days Jane did not venture far from the flat. She unpacked her clothes, which did not take much time, and then unpacked her collecting box, which did. The sturdy wooden case had come through the overseas flight and customs seemingly unscathed, but Jane found herself holding her breath as she undid the metal hinges, afraid of what she’d find inside.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. Relief, not chagrin: Nothing had been damaged. The small glass vials of ethyl alcohol and gel shellac were intact, as were the pillboxes where she kept the tiny #2 pins she used for mounting. Fighting her own eagerness, she carefully removed packets of stiff archival paper, a block of styrofoam covered with pinholes; two bottles of clear Maybelline nail polish and a small container of Elmer’s Glue; more pillboxes, empty, and empty gelatine capsules for very small specimens; and last of all a small glass-fronted display box, framed in mahogany and holding her most precious specimen: a hybrid Celerio harmuthi Kordesch, the male crossbreed of a Spurge and an Elephant Hawkmoth. As long as the first joint of her thumb, it had the hawkmoth’s typically streamlined wings but exquisitely delicate coloring, fuchsia bands shading to a soft rich brown, its thorax thick and seemingly feathered. Only a handful of these hybrid moths had ever existed, bred by the Prague entomologist Jan Pokorny in 1961; a few years afterward, both the Spurge Hawkmoth and the Elephant Hawkmoth had become extinct.

Jane had found this one for sale on the Internet three months ago. It was a former museum specimen and cost a fortune; she had a few bad nights, worrying whether it had actually been a legal purchase. Now she held the display box in her cupped palms and gazed at it raptly. Behind her eyes she felt a prickle, like sleep or unshed tears; then a slow thrumming warmth crept from her brows, spreading to her temples, down her neck and through her breasts, spreading like a stain. She swallowed, leaned back against the sofa and let the display box rest back within the larger case; slid first one hand then the other beneath her sweater and began to stroke her nipples. When some time later she came, it was with stabbing force and a thunderous sensation above her eyes, as though she had struck her forehead against the floor.

She had not: Gasping, she pushed the hair from her face, zipped her jeans and reflexively leaned forward, to make certain the hawkmoth in its glass box was safe.

Over the following days she made a few brief forays to the newsagent and greengrocer, trying to eke out the supplies Fred and Andrew had left in the kitchen. She sat in the solarium, her bare feet warm against the heated stone floor, and drank chamomile tea or claret, staring down to where the ceaseless stream of people passed along the canal path, and watching the narrow boats as they plied their way slowly between Camden Lock and Little Venice, two miles to the west in Paddington. By the following Wednesday she felt brave enough, and bored enough, to leave her refuge and visit the zoo.

It was a short walk along the canal, dodging bicyclists who jingled their bells impatiently when she forgot to stay on the proper side of the path. She passed beneath several arching bridges, their undersides pleated with slime and moss. Drunks sprawled against the stones and stared at her blearily or challengingly by turns; well-dressed couples walked dogs, and there were excited knots of children, tugging their parents on to the zoo.

Fred had walked here with Jane, to show her the way. But it all looked unfamiliar now. She kept a few strides behind a family, her head down, trying not to look as though she was following them, and felt a pulse of relief when they reached a twisting stair with an arrowed sign at its top.

REGENT’S PARK ZOO

There was an old, old church across the street, its yellow stone walls overgrown with ivy; and down and around the corner a long stretch of hedges with high iron walls fronting them, and at last a huge set of gates, crammed with children and vendors selling balloons and banners and London guidebooks. Jane lifted her head and walked quickly past the family that had led her here, showed her membership card at the entrance, and went inside.

She wasted no time on the seals or tigers or monkeys, but went straight to the newly renovated structure where a multicolored banner flapped in the late-morning breeze.

AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE:

SECRETS OF THE INSECT WORLD

Inside, crowds of schoolchildren and harassed-looking adults formed a ragged queue that trailed through a brightly lit corridor, its walls covered with huge glossy color photos and computer-enhanced images of hissing cockroaches, hellgrammites, morpho butterflies, death-watch beetles, polyphemous moths. Jane dutifully joined the queue, but when the corridor opened into a vast sun-lit atrium she strode off on her own, leaving the children and teachers to gape at monarchs in butterfly cages and an interactive display of honeybees dancing. Instead she found a relatively quiet display at the far end of the exhibition space, a floor-to-ceiling cylinder of transparent net, perhaps six feet in diameter. Inside, buckthorn bushes and blooming hawthorn vied for sunlight with a slender beech sapling, and dozens of butterflies flitted upwards through the new yellow leaves, or sat with wings outstretched upon the beech tree. They were a type of Pieridae, the butterflies known as whites; though these were not white at all. The females had creamy yellow-green wings, very pale, their wingspans perhaps an inch and a half. The males were the same size; when they were at rest their flattened wings were a dull, rather sulphurous color. But when the males lit into the air their wings revealed vivid, spectral yellow undersides. Jane caught her breath in delight, her neck prickling with that same atavistic joy she’d felt as a child in the attic.

“Wow,” she breathed, and pressed up against the netting. It felt like wings against her face, soft, webbed; but as she stared at the insects inside her brow began to ache as with migraine. She shoved her glasses onto her nose, closed her eyes and drew a long breath; then took a step away from the cage. After a minute she opened her eyes. The headache had diminished to a dull throb; when she hesitantly touched one eyebrow, she could feel the entwined hairs there, stiff as wire. They were vibrating, but at her touch the vibrations like the headache dulled. She stared at the floor, the tiles sticky with contraband juice and gum; then looked up once again at the cage. There was a display sign off to one side; she walked over to it, slowly, and read:

CLEOPATRA BRIMSTONE

Gonepteryx rhamni cleopatra

This popular and subtly colored species has a range which extends throughout the Northern Hemisphere, with the exception of Arctic regions and several remote islands. In Europe, the brimstone is a harbinger of spring, often emerging from its winter hibernation under dead leaves to revel in the countryside while there is still snow upon the ground.

“I must ask you please not to touch the cages.”

Jane turned to see a man, perhaps fifty, standing a few feet away. A net was jammed under his arm; in his hand he held a clear plastic jar with several butterflies at the bottom, apparently dead.

“Oh. Sorry,” said Jane. The man edged past her. He set his jar on the floor, opened a small door at the base of the cylindrical cage, and deftly angled the net inside. Butterflies lifted in a yellow-green blur from leaves and branches; the man swept the net carefully across the bottom of the cage, then withdrew it. Three dead butterflies, like scraps of colored paper, drifted from the net into the open jar.

“Housecleaning,” he said, and once more thrust his arm into the cage. He was slender and wiry, not much taller than she was, his face hawkish and burnt brown from the sun, his thick straight hair iron-streaked and pulled back into a long braid. He wore black jeans and a dark-blue hooded jersey, with an ID badge clipped to the collar.

“You work here,” said Jane. The man glanced at her, his arm still in the cage; she could see him sizing her up. After a moment he glanced away again. A few minutes later he emptied the net for the last time, closed the cage and the jar, and stepped over to a waste bin, pulling bits of dead leaves from the net and dropping them into the container.

“I’m one of the curatorial staff. You American?”

Jane nodded. “Yeah. Actually, I—I wanted to see about volunteering here.”

“Lifewatch desk at the main entrance.” The man cocked his head towards the door. “They can get you signed up and registered, see what’s available.”

“No—I mean, I want to volunteer here. With the insects—”

“Butterfly collector, are you?” The man smiled, his tone mocking. He had hazel eyes, deep-set; his thin mouth made the smile seem perhaps more cruel than intended. “We get a lot of those.”

Jane flushed. “No. I am not a collector,” she said coldly, adjusting her glasses. “I’m doing a thesis on dioxin genital mutation in Cucullia artemisia.” She didn’t add that it was an undergraduate thesis. “I’ve been doing independent research for seven years now.” She hesitated, thinking of her Intel scholarship, and added, “I’ve received several grants for my work.”

The man regarded her appraisingly. “Are you studying here, then?”

“Yes,” she lied again. “At Oxford. I’m on sabbatical right now. But I live near here, and so I thought I might—”

She shrugged, opening her hands, looked over at him and smiled tentatively. “Make myself useful?”

The man waited a moment, nodded. “Well. Do you have a few minutes now? I’ve got to do something with these, but if you want you can come with me and wait, and then we can see what we can do. Maybe circumvent some paperwork.”

He turned and started across the room. He had a graceful, bouncing gait, like a gymnast or circus acrobat: impatient with the ground beneath him. “Shouldn’t take long,” he called over his shoulder as Jane hurried to catch up.

She followed him through a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY, into the exhibit laboratory, a reassuringly familiar place with its display cases and smells of shellac and camphor, acetone and ethyl alcohol. There were more cages here, but smaller ones, sheltering live specimens—pupating butterflies and moths, stick insects, leaf insects, dung beetles. The man dropped his net onto a desk, took the jar to a long table against one wall, blindingly lit by long fluorescent tubes. There were scores of bottles here, some empty, others filled with paper and tiny inert figures.

“Have a seat,” said the man, gesturing at two folding chairs. He settled into one, grabbed an empty jar and a roll of absorbent paper.

“I’m David Bierce. So where’re you staying? Camden Town?”

“Jane Kendall. Yes—”

“The High Street?”

Jane sat in the other chair, pulling it a few inches away from him. The questions made her uneasy, but she only nodded, lying again, and said, “Closer, actually. Off Gloucester Road. With friends.”

“Mm.” Bierce tore off a piece of absorbent paper, leaned across to a stainless steel sink and dampened the paper. Then he dropped it into the empty jar. He paused, turned to her and gestured at the table, smiling. “Care to join in?”

Jane shrugged. “Sure—”

She pulled her chair closer, found another empty jar and did as Bierce had, dampening a piece of paper towel and dropping it inside. Then she took the jar containing the dead brimstones and carefully shook one onto the counter. It was a female, its coloring more muted than the males’; she scooped it up very gently, careful not to disturb the scales like dull green glitter upon its wings, dropped it into the jar and replaced the top.

“Very nice.” Bierce nodded, raising his eyebrows. “You seem to know what you’re doing. Work with other insects? Soft-bodied ones?”

“Sometimes. Mostly moths, though. And butterflies.”

“Right.” He inclined his head to a recessed shelf. “How would you label that, then? Go ahead.”

On the shelf she found a notepad and a case of Rapidograph pens. She began to write, conscious of Bierce staring at her. “We usually just put all this into the computer, of course, and print it out,” he said. “I just want to see the benefits of an American education in the sciences.”

Jane fought the urge to look at him. Instead she wrote out the information, making her printing as tiny as possible.

Gonepteryx rhamni cleopatra

UNITED KINGDOM: LONDON

Regent’s Park Zoo

Lat/Long unknown

21.IV.2001

D. Bierce

Net/caged specimen

She handed it to Bierce. “I don’t know the proper coordinates for London.”

Bierce scrutinized the paper. “It’s actually the Royal Zoological Park,” he said. He looked at her, then smiled. “But you’ll do.”

“Great!” She grinned, the first time she’d really felt happy since arriving here. “When do you want me to start?”

“How about Monday?”

Jane hesitated: This was only Friday. “I could come in
tomorrow—”

“I don’t work on the weekend, and you’ll need to be trained. Also they have to process the paperwork. Right—”

He stood and went to a desk, pulling open drawers until he found a clipboard holding sheaves of triplicate forms. “Here. Fill all this out, leave it with me and I’ll pass it on to Carolyn—she’s the head volunteer coordinator. They usually want to interview you, but I’ll tell them we’ve done all that already.”

“What time should I come in Monday?”

“Come at nine. Everything opens at ten, that way you’ll avoid the crowds. Use the staff entrance, someone there will have an ID waiting for you to pick up when you sign in—”

She nodded and began filling out the forms.

“All right then.” David Bierce leaned against the desk and again fixed her with that sly, almost taunting gaze. “Know how to find your way home?”

Jane lifted her chin defiantly. “Yes.”

“Enjoying London? Going to go out tonight and do Camden Town with all the yobs?”

“Maybe. I haven’t been out much yet.”

“Mm. Beautiful American girl, they’ll eat you alive. Just kidding.” He straightened, started across the room towards the door. “I’ll see you Monday then.”

He held the door for her. “You really should check out the clubs. You’re too young not to see the city by night.” He smiled, the fluorescent light slanting sideways into his hazel eyes and making them suddenly glow icy blue. “Bye then.”

“Bye,” said Jane, and hurried quickly from the lab towards home.

That night, for the first time, she went out. She told herself she would have gone anyway, no matter what Bierce had said. She had no idea where the clubs were; Andrew had pointed out the Electric Ballroom to her, right across from the tube station, but he’d also warned her that was where the tourists flocked on weekends.

“They do a disco thing on Saturday nights—Saturday Night Fever, everyone gets all done up in vintage clothes. Quite a fashion show,” he’d said, smiling and shaking his head.

Jane had no interest in that. She ate a quick supper, vindaloo from the take-away down the street from the flat, then dressed. She hadn’t brought a huge number of clothes—at home she’d never bothered much with clothes at all, making do with thrift-shop finds and whatever her mother gave her for Christmas. But now she found herself sitting on the edge of the four-poster, staring with pursed lips at the sparse contents of two bureau drawers. Finally she pulled out a pair of black corduroy jeans and a black turtleneck and pulled on her sneakers. She removed her glasses, for the first time in weeks inserted her contact lenses. Then she shrugged into her old, navy peacoat and left.

It was after ten o’clock. On the canal path, throngs of people stood, drinking from pints of canned lager. She made her way through them, ignoring catcalls and whispered invitations, stepping to avoid where kids lay making out against the brick wall that ran alongside the path, or pissing in the bushes. The bridge over the canal at Camden Lock was clogged with several dozen kids in mohawks or varicolored hair, shouting at each other above the din of a boom box and swigging from bottles of Spanish champagne.

A boy with a champagne bottle leered, lunging at her.

“‘Ere, sweetheart, ‘ep youseff—”

Jane ducked, and he careered against the ledge, his arm striking brick and the bottle shattering in a starburst of black and gold.

“Fucking cunt!” he shrieked after her. “Fucking bloody cunt!”

People glanced at her, but Jane kept her head down, making a quick turn into the vast cobbled courtyard of Camden Market. The place had a desolate air: The vendors would not arrive until early next morning, and now only stray cats and bits of windblown trash moved in the shadows. In the surrounding buildings people spilled out onto balconies, drinking and calling back and forth, their voices hollow and their long shadows twisting across the ill-lit central courtyard. Jane hurried to the far end, but there found only brick walls, closed-up shop doors, and a young woman huddled within the folds of a filthy sleeping bag.

“Couldya—couldya—” the woman murmured.

Jane turned and followed the wall until she found a door leading into a short passage. She entered it, hoping she was going in the direction of Camden High Street. She felt like Alice trying to find her way through the garden in Wonderland: Arched doorways led not into the street but headshops and blindingly lit piercing parlors, open for business; other doors opened onto enclosed courtyards, dark, smelling of piss and marijuana. Finally from the corner of her eye she glimpsed what looked like the end of the passage, headlights piercing through the gloom like landing lights. Doggedly she made her way towards them.

“Ay watchowt watchowt,” someone yelled as she emerged from the passage onto the sidewalk, and ran the last few steps to the curb.

She was on the High Street—rather, in that block or two of curving no-man’s-land where it turned into Chalk Farm Road. The sidewalks were still crowded, but everyone was heading towards Camden Lock and not away from it. Jane waited for the light to change and raced across the street, to where a cobblestoned alley snaked off between a shop selling leather underwear and another advertising “Fine French Country Furniture.”

For several minutes she stood there. She watched the crowds heading toward Camden Town, the steady stream of minicabs and taxis and buses heading up Chalk Farm Road toward Hampstead. Overhead, dull orange clouds moved across a night sky the color of charred wood; there was the steady low thunder of jets circling after takeoff at Heathrow. At last she tugged her collar up around her neck, letting her hair fall in loose waves down her back, shoved her hands into her coat pockets and turned to walk purposefully down the alley.

Before her the cobblestone path turned sharply to the right. She couldn’t see what was beyond, but she could hear voices: a girl laughing, a man’s sibilant retort. A moment later the alley spilled out onto a cul-de-sac. A couple stood a few yards away, before a doorway with a small copper awning above it. The young woman glanced sideways at Jane, quickly looked away again. A silhouette filled the doorway; the young man pulled out a wallet. His hand disappeared within the silhouette, re-emerged, and the couple walked inside. Jane waited until the shadowy figure withdrew. She looked over her shoulder, then approached the building.

There was a heavy metal door, black, with graffiti scratched into it and pale blurred spots where painted graffiti had been effaced. The door was set back several feet into a brick recess; there was a grilled metal slot at the top that could be slid back, so that one could peer out into the courtyard. To the right of the door, on the brick wall within the recess, was a small brass plaque with a single word on it.

HIVE

There was no doorbell or any other way to signal that you wanted to enter. Jane stood, wondering what was inside; feeling a small tingling unease that was less fear than the knowledge that even if she were to confront the figure who’d let that other couple inside, she herself would certainly be turned away.

With a skreek of metal on stone the door suddenly shot open. Jane looked up, into the sharp, raggedly handsome face of a tall, still youngish man with very short blond hair, a line of gleaming gold beads like drops of sweat piercing the edge of his left jaw.

“Good evening,” he said, glancing past her to the alley. He wore a black sleeveless T-shirt with a small golden bee embroidered upon the breast. His bare arms were muscular, striated with long sweeping scars: black, red, white. “Are you waiting for Hannah?”

“No.” Quickly Jane pulled out a handful of five-pound notes. “Just me tonight.”

“That’ll be twenty then.” The man held his hand out, still gazing at the alley; when Jane slipped the notes to him he looked down and flashed her a vulpine smile. “Enjoy yourself.” She darted past him into the building.

Abruptly it was as though some darker night had fallen. Thunderously so, since the enfolding blackness was slashed with music so loud it was itself like light: Jane hesitated, closing her eyes, and white flashes streaked across her eyelids like sleet, pulsing in time to the music. She opened her eyes, giving them a chance to adjust to the darkness, and tried to get a sense of where she was. A few feet away a blurry grayish lozenge sharpened into the window of a coat-check room. Jane walked past it, towards the source of the music. Immediately the floor slanted steeply beneath her feet. She steadied herself with one hand against the wall, following the incline until it opened onto a cavernous dance floor.

She gazed inside, disappointed. It looked like any other club, crowded, strobe-lit, turquoise smoke and silver glitter coiling between hundreds of whirling bodies clad in candy pink, sky blue, neon red, rainslicker yellow. Baby colors, Jane thought. There was a boy who was almost naked, except for shorts, a transparent water bottle strapped to his chest and long tubes snaking into his mouth. Another boy had hair the color of lime Jell-O, his face corrugated with glitter and sweat; he swayed near the edge of the dance floor, turned to stare at Jane and then beamed, beckoning her to join him.

Jane gave him a quick smile, shaking her head; when the boy opened his arms to her in mock pleading she shouted “No!”

But she continued to smile, though she felt as though her head would crack like an egg from the throbbing music. Shoving her hands into her pockets she skirted the dance floor, pushed her way to the bar and bought a drink, something pink with no ice in a plastic cup. It smelled like Gatorade and lighter fluid. She gulped it down, then carried the cup held before her like a torch as she continued on her circuit of the room. There was nothing else of interest; just long queues for the lavatories and another bar, numerous doors and stairwells where kids clustered, drinking and smoking. Now and then beeps and whistles like birdsong or insect cries came through the stuttering electronic din, whoops and trilling laughter from the dancers. But mostly they moved in near-silence, eyes rolled ceiling-ward, bodies exploding into Catherine wheels of flesh and plastic and nylon, but all without a word.

It gave Jane a headache—a real headache, the back of her skull bruised, tender to the touch. She dropped her plastic cup and started looking for a way out. She could see past the dance floor to where she had entered, but it seemed as though another hundred people had arrived in the few minutes since then: Kids were standing six-deep at both bars, and the action on the floor had spread, amoeba-like, towards the corridors angling back up towards the street.

“Sorry—”

A fat woman in an Arsenal jersey jostled her as she hurried by, leaving a smear of oily sweat on Jane’s wrist. Jane grimaced and wiped her hand on the bottom of her coat. She gave one last look at the dance floor, but nothing had changed within the intricate lattice of dancers and smoke, braids of glow-lights and spotlit faces surging up and down, up and down, while more dancers fought their way to the center.

“Shit.” She turned and strode off, heading to where the huge room curved off into relative emptiness. Here, scores of tables were scattered, some overturned, others stacked against the wall. A few people sat, talking; a girl lay curled on the floor, her head pillowed on a Barbie knapsack. Jane crossed to the wall, and found first a door that led to a bare brick wall, then a second door that held a broom closet. The next was dark red, metal, official-looking: the kind of door that Jane associated with school fire drills.

A fire door. It would lead outside, or into a hall that would lead there. Without hesitating she pushed it open and entered. A short corridor lit by EXIT signs stretched ahead of her, with another door at the end. She hurried towards it, already reaching reflexively for the keys to the flat, pushed the door-bar and stepped inside.

For an instant she thought she had somehow stumbled into a hospital emergency room. There was the glitter of halogen light on steel, distorted reflections thrown back at her from curved glass surfaces; the abrasive odor of isopropyl alcohol and the fainter tinny scent of blood, like metal in the mouth.

And bodies: everywhere, bodies, splayed on gurneys or suspended from gleaming metal hooks, laced with black electrical cord and pinned upright onto smooth rubber mats. She stared open-mouthed, neither appalled nor frightened but fascinated by the conundrum before her: How did that hand fit there, and whose leg was that? She inched backward, pressing herself against the door and trying to stay in the shadows—just inches ahead of her ribbons of luminous bluish light streamed from lamps hung high overhead. The chiaroscuro of pallid bodies and black furniture, shiny with sweat and here and there red-streaked, or brown; the mere sight of so many bodies, real bodies—flesh spilling over the edge of tabletops, too much hair or none at all, eyes squeezed shut in ecstasy or terror and mouths open to reveal stained teeth, pale gums—the sheer fluidity of it all enthralled her. She felt as she had, once, pulling aside a rotted log to disclose the ant’s nest beneath, masses of minute fleeing bodies, soldiers carrying eggs and larvae in their jaws, tunnels spiraling into the center of another world. Her brow tingled, warmth flushed her from brow to breast . . .

Another world, that’s what she had found then; and discovered again now.

“Out.”

Jane sucked her breath in sharply. Fingers dug into her shoulder, yanked her back through the metal door so roughly that she cut her wrist against it.

“No lurkers, what the fuck—”

A man flung her against the wall. She gasped, turned to run but he grabbed her shoulder again. “Christ, a fucking girl.”

He sounded angry but relieved. She looked up: a huge man, more fat than muscle. He wore very tight leather briefs and the same black sleeveless shirt with a golden bee embroidered upon it. “How the hell’d you get in like that?” he demanded, cocking a thumb at her.

She shook her head, then realized he meant her clothes. “I was just trying to find my way out.”

“Well you found your way in. In like fucking Flynn.” He laughed: He had gold-capped teeth, and gold wires threading the tip of his tongue. “You want to join the party, you know the rules. No exceptions.”

Before she could reply he turned and was gone, the door thudding softly behind him. She waited, heart pounding, then reached and pushed the bar on the door.

Locked. She was out, not in; she was nowhere at all. For a long time she stood there, trying to hear anything from the other side of the door, waiting to see if anyone would come back looking for her. At last she turned, and began to find her way home.

Next morning she woke early, to the sound of delivery trucks in the street and children on the canal path, laughing and squabbling on their way to the zoo. She sat up with a pang, remembering David Bierce and her volunteer job; then recalled this was Saturday not Monday.

“Wow,” she said aloud. The extra days seemed like a gift.

For a few minutes she lay in Fred and Andrew’s great four-poster, staring abstractedly at where she had rested her mounted specimens atop the wainscoting—the hybrid hawkmoth; a beautiful Honduran owl butterfly, Caligo atreus; a mourning cloak she had caught and mounted herself years ago. She thought of the club last night, mentally retracing her steps to the hidden back room; thought of the man who had thrown her out, the interplay of light and shadow upon the bodies pinned to mats and tables. She had slept in her clothes; now she rolled out of bed and pulled her sneakers on, forgoing breakfast but stuffing her pocket with ten- and twenty-pound notes before she left.

It was a clear cool morning, with a high pale-blue sky and the young leaves of nettles and hawthorn still glistening with dew. Someone had thrown a shopping cart from the nearby Sainsbury’s into the canal; it edged sideways up out of the shallow water, like a frozen shipwreck. A boy stood a few yards down from it, fishing, an absent, placid expression on his face.

She crossed over the bridge to the canal path and headed for the High Street. With every step she took the day grew older, noisier, trains rattling on the bridge behind her and voices harsh as gulls rising from the other side of the brick wall that separated the canal path from the street.

At Camden Lock she had to fight her way through the market. There were tens of thousands of tourists, swarming from the maze of shops to pick their way between scores of vendors selling old and new clothes, bootleg CDs, cheap silver jewelry, kilims, feather boas, handcuffs, cellphones, mass-produced furniture and puppets from Indonesia, Morocco, Guyana, Wales. The fug of burning incense and cheap candles choked her; she hurried to where a young woman was turning samosas in a vat of sputtering oil, and dug into her pocket for a handful of change, standing so that the smells of hot grease and scorched chickpea batter cancelled out patchouli and Caribbean Nights.

“Two, please,” Jane shouted.

She ate and almost immediately felt better, then walked a few steps to where a spike-haired girl sat behind a table covered with cheap clothes made of ripstock fabric in Jell-O shades.

“Everything five pounds,” the girl announced. She stood, smiling helpfully as Jane began to sort through pairs of hugely baggy pants. They were cross-seamed with velcro and deep zippered pockets. Jane held up a pair, frowning as the legs billowed, lavender and green, in the wind.

“It’s so you can make them into shorts,” the girl explained. She stepped around the table and took the pants from Jane, deftly tugging at the legs so that they detached. “See? Or a skirt.” The girl replaced the pants, picked up another pair, screaming orange with black trim, and a matching windbreaker. “This color would look nice on you.”

“Okay.” Jane paid for them, waited for the girl to put the clothes in a plastic bag. “Thanks.”

“Bye now.”

She went out into High Street. Shopkeepers stood guard over the tables spilling out from their storefronts, heaped with leather clothes and souvenir T-shirts: MIND THE GAP, LONDON UNDERGROUND, shirts emblazoned with the Cat in the Hat toking on a cheroot. THE CAT IN THE HAT SMOKES BLACK. Every three or four feet someone had set up a boom box, deafening sound-bites of salsa, techno, “The Hustle,” Bob Marley, “Anarchy in the UK,” Radiohead. On the corner of Inverness and High Street a few punks squatted in a doorway, looking over the postcards they’d bought. A sign in the smoked-glass window said ALL HAIRCUTS TEN POUNDS, MEN WOMEN CHILDREN.

“Sorry,” one of the punks said, as Jane stepped over them and into the shop.

The barber was sitting in an old-fashioned chair, his back to her, reading the Sun. At the sound of her footsteps he turned, smiling automatically. “Can I help you?”

“Yes please. I’d like my hair cut. All of it.”

He nodded, gesturing to the chair. “Please.”

Jane had thought she might have to convince him that she was serious. She had beautiful hair, well below her shoulders—the kind of hair people would kill for, she’d been hearing that her whole life. But the barber just hummed and chopped it off, the snick snick of his shears interspersed with kindly questions about whether she was enjoying her visit and his account of a vacation to Disney World ten years earlier.

“Dear, do we want it shaved or buzz-cut?”

In the mirror a huge-eyed creature gazed at Jane, like a tarsier or one of the owlish caligo moths. She stared at it, entranced, then nodded.

“Shaved. Please.”

When he was finished she got out of the chair, dazed, and ran her hand across her scalp. It was smooth and cool as an apple. There were a few tiny nicks that stung beneath her fingers. She paid the barber, tipping him two pounds. He smiled and held the door open for her.

“Now when you want a touchup, you come see us, dear. Only five pounds for a touchup.”

She went next to find new shoes. There were more shoe shops in Camden Town than she had ever seen anywhere in her life; she checked out four of them on one block before deciding on a discounted pair of twenty-hole black Doc Martens. They were no longer fashionable, but they had blunted steel caps on the toes. She bought them, giving the salesgirl her old sneakers to toss into the waste bin. When she went back onto the street it was like walking in wet cement—the shoes were so heavy, the leather so stiff that she ducked back into the shoe shop and bought a pair of heavy wool socks and put them on. She returned outside, hesitating on the front step before crossing the street and heading in the direction of Chalk Farm Road. There was a shop here that Fred had shown her before he left.

“Now, that’s where you get your fetish gear, Jane,” he said, pointing to a shop window painted matte black. THE PLACE, it said in red letters, with two linked circles beneath. Fred had grinned and rapped his knuckles against the glass as they walked by. “I’ve never been in, you’ll have to tell me what it’s like.” They’d both laughed at the thought.

Now Jane walked slowly, the wind chill against her bare skull. When she could make out the shop, sun glinting off the crimson letters and a sad-eyed dog tied to a post out front, she began to hurry, her new boots making a hollow thump as she pushed through the door.

There was a security gate inside, a thin, sallow young man with dreadlocks nodding at her silently as she approached.

“You’ll have to check that.” He pointed at the bag with her new clothes in it. She handed it to him, reading the warning posted behind the counter.

SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE BEATEN,

FLAYED, SPANKED, BIRCHED, BLED

AND THEN PROSECUTED

TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW

The shop was well lit. It smelled strongly of new leather and coconut oil and pine-scented disinfectant. She seemed to be the only customer this early in the day, although she counted seven employees, manning cash registers, unpacking cartons, watching to make sure she didn’t try to nick anything. A CD of dance music played, and the phone rang constantly.

She spent a good half hour just walking through the place, impressed by the range of merchandise. Electrified wands to deliver shocks, things like meat cleavers made of stainless steel with rubber tips. Velcro dog collars, Velcro hoods, black rubber balls and balls in neon shades, a mat embedded with three-inch spikes that could be conveniently rolled up and came with its own lightweight carrying case. As she wandered about, more customers arrived, some of them greeting the clerks by name, others furtive, making a quick circuit of the shelves before darting outside again. At last Jane knew what she wanted. A set of wristcuffs and one of anklecuffs, both of very heavy black leather with stainless steel hardware; four adjustable nylon leashes, also black, with clips on either end that could be fastened to cuffs or looped around a post; a few spare S-clips.

“That it?”

Jane nodded, and the register clerk began scanning her purchases. She felt almost guilty, buying so few things, not taking advantage of the vast Meccano glory of all those shelves full of gleaming, somber contrivances.

“There you go.” He handed her the receipt, then inclined his head at her. “Nice touch, that—”

He pointed at her eyebrows. Jane drew her hand up, felt the long pliant hairs uncoiling like baby ferns. “Thanks,” she murmured. She retrieved her bag and went home to wait for evening.

It was nearly midnight when she left the flat. She had slept for most of the afternoon, a deep but restless sleep, with anxious dreams of flight, falling, her hands encased in metal gloves, a shadowy figure crouching above her. She woke in the dark, heart pounding, terrified for a moment that she had slept all the way through till Sunday night.

But of course she had not. She showered, then dressed in a tight, low-cut black shirt and pulled on her new nylon pants and heavy boots. She seldom wore makeup, but tonight after putting in her contacts she carefully outlined her eyes with black, then chose a very pale lavender lipstick. She surveyed herself in the mirror critically. With her white skin, huge violet eyes and hairless skull, she resembled one of the Balinese puppets for sale in the market—beautiful but vacant, faintly ominous. She grabbed her keys and money, pulled on her windbreaker, and headed out.

When she reached the alley that led to the club, she entered it, walked about halfway, and stopped. After glancing back and forth to make sure no one was coming, she detached the legs from her nylon pants, stuffing them into a pocket, then adjusted the Velcro tabs so that the pants became a very short orange and black skirt. Her long legs were sheathed in black tights. She bent to tighten the laces on her metal-toed boots and hurried to the club entrance.

Tonight there was a line of people waiting to get in. Jane took her place, fastidiously avoiding looking at any of the others. They waited for thirty minutes, Jane shivering in her thin nylon windbreaker, before the door opened and the same gaunt blond man appeared to take their money. Jane felt her heart beat faster when it was her turn, wondering if he would recognize her. But he only scanned the courtyard, and, when the last of them darted inside, closed the door with a booming clang.

Inside all was as it had been, only far more crowded. Jane bought a drink, orange squash, no alcohol. It was horribly sweet, with a bitter, curdled aftertaste. Still, it had cost two pounds: She drank it all. She had just started on her way down to the dance floor when someone came up from behind to tap her shoulder, shouting into her ear.

“Wanna?”

It was a tall, broad-shouldered boy a few years older than she was, perhaps twenty-four, with a lean ruddy face, loose shoulder-length blond hair streaked green, and deep-set, very dark blue eyes. He swayed dreamily, gazing at the dance floor and hardly looking at her at all.

“Sure,” Jane shouted back. He looped an arm around her shoulder, pulling her with him; his striped V-necked shirt smelled of talc and sweat. They danced for a long time, Jane moving with calculated abandon, the boy heaving and leaping as though a dog was biting at his shins.

“You’re beautiful,” he shouted. There was an almost imperceptible instant of silence as the DJ changed tracks. “What’s your name?”

“Cleopatra Brimstone.”

The shattering music grew deafening once more. The boy grinned. “Well, Cleopatra. Want something to drink?”

Jane nodded in time with the beat, so fast her head spun. He took her hand and she raced to keep up with him, threading their way toward the bar.

“Actually,” she yelled, pausing so that he stopped short and bumped up against her. “I think I’d rather go outside. Want to come?”

He stared at her, half-smiling, and shrugged. “Aw right. Let me get a drink first—”

They went outside. In the alley the wind sent eddies of dead leaves and newspaper flying up into their faces. Jane laughed, and pressed herself against the boy’s side. He grinned down at her, finished his drink, and tossed the can aside, then put his arm around her. “Do you want to go get a drink, then?” he asked.

They stumbled out onto the sidewalk, turned and began walking. People filled the High Street, lines snaking out from the entrances of pubs and restaurants. A blue glow surrounded the streetlights, and clouds of small white moths beat themselves against the globes; vapor and banners of grey smoke hung above the punks blocking the sidewalk by Camden Lock. Jane and the boy dipped down into the street. He pointed to a pub occupying the corner a few blocks up, a large old green-painted building with baskets of flowers hanging beneath its windows and a large sign swinging back and forth in the wind: THE END OF THE WORLD. “In there, then?”

Jane shook her head. “I live right here, by the canal. We could go to my place if you want. We could have a few drinks there.”

The boy glanced down at her. “Aw right,” he said—very quickly, so she wouldn’t change her mind. “That’d be aw right.”

It was quieter on the back street leading to the flat. An old drunk huddled in a doorway, cadging change; Jane looked away from him and got out her keys while the boy stood restlessly, giving the drunk a belligerent look.

“Here we are,” she announced, pushing the door open. “Home again, home again.”

“Nice place.” The boy followed her, gazing around admiringly. “You live here alone?”

“Yup.” After she spoke Jane had a flash of unease, admitting that. But the boy only ambled into the kitchen, running a hand along the antique French farmhouse cupboard and nodding.

“You’re American, right? Studying here?”

“Uh huh. What would you like to drink? Brandy?”

He made a face, then laughed. “Aw right! You got expensive taste. Goes with the name, I’d guess.” Jane looked puzzled, and he went on, “Cleopatra—fancy name for a girl.”

“Fancier for a boy,” Jane retorted, and he laughed again.

She got the brandy, stood in the living room unlacing her boots. “Why don’t we go in there?” she said, gesturing towards the bedroom. “It’s kind of cold out here.”

The boy ran a hand across his head, his blond hair streaming through his fingers. “Yeah, aw right.” He looked around. “Um, that the toilet there?” Jane nodded. “Right back, then . . .”

She went into the bedroom, set the brandy and two glasses on a night table and took off her windbreaker. On another table, several tall candles, creamy white and thick as her wrist, were set into ornate brass holders. She lit these—the room filled with the sweet scent of beeswax—and sat on the floor, leaning against the bed. A few minutes later the toilet flushed and the boy reappeared. His hands and face were damp, redder than they had been. He smiled and sank onto the floor beside her. Jane handed him a glass of brandy.

“Cheers,” he said, and drank it all in one gulp.

“Cheers,” said Jane. She took a sip from hers, then refilled his glass. He drank again, more slowly this time. The candles threw a soft yellow haze over the four-poster bed with its green velvet duvet, the mounds of pillows, forest-green, crimson, saffron yellow. They sat without speaking for several minutes. Then the boy set his glass on the floor. He turned to face Jane, extending one arm around her shoulder and drawing his face near hers.

“Well then,” he said.

His mouth tasted acrid, nicotine and cheap gin beneath the blunter taste of brandy. His hand sliding under her shirt was cold; Jane felt goose pimples rising across her breast, her nipple shrinking beneath his touch. He pressed against her, his cock already hard, and reached down to unzip his jeans.

“Wait,” Jane murmured. “Let’s get on the bed . . .”

She slid from his grasp and onto the bed, crawling to the heaps of pillows and feeling beneath one until she found what she had placed there earlier. “Let’s have a little fun first.”

“This is fun,” the boy said, a bit plaintively. But he slung himself onto the bed beside her, pulling off his shoes and letting them fall to the floor with a thud. “What you got there?”

Smiling, Jane turned and held up the wrist cuffs. The boy looked at them, then at her, grinning. “Oh ho. Been in the back room, then—”

Jane arched her shoulders and unbuttoned her shirt. He reached for one of the cuffs, but she shook her head. “No. Not me, yet.”

“Ladies first.”

“Gentleman’s pleasure.”

The boy’s grin widened. “Won’t argue with that.”

She took his hand and pulled him, gently, to the middle of the bed. “Lie on your back,” she whispered.

He did, watching as she removed first his shirt and then his jeans and underwear. His cock lay nudged against his thigh, not quite hard; when she brushed her fingers against it he moaned softly, took her hand and tried to press it against him.

“No,” she whispered. “Not yet. Give me your hand.”

She placed the cuffs around each wrist, and his ankles, fastened the nylon leash to each one, and then began tying the bonds around each bedpost. It took longer than she had expected; it was difficult to get the bonds taut enough that the boy could not move. He lay there watchfully, his eyes glimmering in the candlelight as he craned his head to stare at her, his breath shallow, quickening.

“There.” She sat back upon her haunches, staring at him. His cock was hard now, the hair on his chest and groin tawny in the half-light. He gazed back at her, his tongue pale as he licked his lips. “Try to get away,” she whispered.

He moved slightly, his arms and legs a white X against a deep green field. “Can’t,” he said hoarsely.

She pulled her shirt off, then her nylon skirt. She had nothing on beneath. She leaned forward, letting her fingers trail from the cleft in his throat to his chest, cupping her palm atop his nipple and then sliding her hand down to his thigh. The flesh was warm, the little hairs soft and moist. Her own breath quickened; sudden heat flooded her, a honeyed liquid in her mouth. Above her brow the long hairs stiffened and furled straight out to either side: when she lifted her head to the candlelight she could see them from the corner of her eyes, twin barbs black and glistening like wire.

“You’re so sexy.” The boy’s voice was hoarse. “God, you’re—”

She placed her hand over his mouth. “Try to get away,” she said, commandingly this time. “Try to get away.”

His torso writhed, the duvet bunching up around him in dark folds. She raked her fingernails down his chest and he cried out, moaning: “Fuck me, God, fuck me . . .”

“Try to get away.”

She stroked his cock, her fingers barely grazing its swollen head. With a moan he came, struggling helplessly to thrust his groin towards her. At the same moment Jane gasped, a fiery rush arrowing down from her brow to her breasts, her cunt. She rocked forward, crying out, her head brushing against the boy’s side as she sprawled back across the bed. For a minute she lay there, the room around her seeming to pulse and swirl into myriad crystalline shapes, each bearing within it the same line of candles, the long curve of the boy’s thigh swelling up into the hollow of his hip. She drew breath shakily, the flush of heat fading from her brow; then pushed herself up until she was sitting beside him. His eyes were shut. A thread of saliva traced the furrow between mouth and chin. Without thinking she drew her face down to his, and kissed his cheek.

Immediately he began to grow smaller. Jane reared back, smacking into one of the bedposts, and stared at the figure in front of her, shaking her head.

“No,” she whispered. “No, no.”

He was shrinking: so fast it was like watching water dissolve into dry sand. Man-size, child-size, large dog, small. His eyes flew open and for a fraction of a second stared horrified into her own. His hands and feet slipped like mercury from his bonds, wriggling until they met his torso and were absorbed into it. Jane’s fingers kneaded the duvet; six inches away the boy was no larger than her hand, then smaller, smaller still. She blinked, for a heart-shredding instant thought he had disappeared completely.

Then she saw something crawling between folds of velvet. The length of her middle finger, its thorax black, yellow-striped, its lower wings elongated into frilled arabesques like those of a festoon, deep yellow, charcoal black, with indigo eye spots, its upper wings a chiaroscuro of black and white stripes.

Bhutanitis lidderdalii. A native of the eastern Himalayas, rarely glimpsed: It lived among the crowns of trees in mountain valleys, its caterpillars feeding on lianas. Jane held her breath, watching as its wings beat feebly. Without warning it lifted into the air. Jane cried out, falling onto her knees as she sprawled across the bed, cupping it quickly but carefully between her hands.

“Beautiful, beautiful,” she crooned. She stepped from the bed, not daring to pause and examine it, and hurried into the kitchen. In the cupboard she found an empty jar, set it down and gingerly angled the lid from it, holding one hand with the butterfly against her breast. She swore, feeling its wings fluttering against her fingers, then quickly brought her hand to the jar’s mouth, dropped the butterfly inside and screwed the lid back in place. It fluttered helplessly inside; she could see where the scales had already been scraped from its wing. Still swearing she ran back into the bedroom, putting the lights on and dragging her collection box from under the bed. She grabbed a vial of ethyl alcohol, went back into the kitchen and tore a bit of paper towel from the rack. She opened the vial, poured a few drops of ethyl alcohol onto the paper, opened the jar, and gently tilted it onto its side. She slipped the paper inside, very slowly tipping the jar upright once more, until the paper had settled on the bottom, the butterfly on top of it. Its wings beat frantically for a few moments, then stopped. Its proboscis uncoiled, finer than a hair. Slowly Jane drew her own hand to her brow and ran it along the length of the antennae there. She sat there staring at it until the sun leaked through the wooden shutters in the kitchen window. The butterfly did not move again.

The next day passed in a metallic gray haze, the only color the black and saturated yellow of the lidderdalii’s wings, burned upon Jane’s eyes as though she had looked into the sun. When she finally roused herself, she felt a spasm of panic at the sight of the boy’s clothes on the bedroom floor.

“Shit.” She ran her hand across her head, was momentarily startled to recall she had no hair. “Now what?”

She stood there for a few minutes, thinking, then gathered the clothes—striped V-neck sweater, jeans, socks, jockey shorts, Timberlake knockoff shoes—and dumped them into a plastic Sainsbury’s bag. There was a wallet in the jeans pocket. She opened it, gazed impassively at a driver’s license—KENNETH REED, WOLVERHAMPTON—and a few five-pound notes. She pocketed the money, took the license into the bathroom and burned it, letting the ashes drop into the toilet. Then she went outside.

It was early Sunday morning, no one about except for a young mother pushing a baby in a stroller. In the neighboring doorway the same drunk old man sprawled, surrounded by empty bottles and rubbish. He stared blearily up at Jane as she approached.

“Here,” she said. She bent and dropped the five-pound notes into his scabby hand.

“God bless you, darlin’.” He coughed, his eyes focusing on neither Jane nor the notes. “God bless you.”

She turned and walked briskly back toward the canal path. There were few waste bins in Camden Town, and so each day trash accumulated in rank heaps along the path, beneath streetlights, in vacant alleys. Street cleaners and sweeping machines then daily cleared it all away again: like elves, Jane thought. As she walked along the canal path she dropped the shoes in one pile of rubbish, tossed the sweater alongside a single high-heeled shoe in the market, stuffed the underwear and socks into a collapsing cardboard box filled with rotting lettuce, and left the jeans beside a stack of papers outside an unopened newsagent’s shop. The wallet she tied into the Sainsbury’s bag and dropped into an overflowing trash bag outside of Boots. Then she retraced her steps, stopping in front of a shop window filled with tatty polyester lingerie in large sizes and boldly artificial-looking wigs: pink afros, platinum blond falls, black-and-white Cruella De Vil tresses.

The door was propped open; Schubert lieder played softly on 32. Jane stuck her head in and looked around, saw a beefy man behind the register, cashing out. He had orange lipstick smeared around his mouth and delicate silver fish hanging from his ears.

“We’re not open yet. Eleven on Sunday,” he said without looking up.

“I’m just looking.” Jane sidled over to a glass shelf where four wigs sat on styrofoam heads. One had very glossy black hair in a chin-length flapper bob. Jane tried it on, eyeing herself in a grimy mirror. “How much is this one?”

“Fifteen. But we’re not—”

“Here. Thanks!” Jane stuck a twenty-pound note on the counter and ran from the shop. When she reached the corner she slowed, pirouetted to catch her reflection in a shop window. She stared at herself, grinning, then walked the rest of the way home, exhilarated and faintly dizzy.

Monday morning she went to the zoo to begin her volunteer work. She had mounted the Bhutanitis lidderdalii on a piece of styrofoam with a piece of paper on it, to keep the butterfly’s legs from becoming embedded in the styrofoam. She’d softened it first, putting it into a jar with damp paper, removed it and placed it on the mounting platform, neatly spearing its thorax—a little to the right—with a #2 pin. She propped it carefully on the wainscoting beside the hawkmoth, and left.

She arrived and found her ID badge waiting for her at the staff entrance. It was a clear morning, warmer than it had been for a week; the long hairs on her brow vibrated as though they were wires that had been plucked. Beneath the wig her shaved head felt hot and moist, the first new hairs starting to prickle across her scalp. Her nose itched where her glasses pressed against it. Jane walked, smiling, past the gibbons howling in their habitat and the pygmy hippos floating calmly in their pool, their eyes shut, green bubbles breaking around them like little fish. In front of the Insect Zoo a uniformed woman was unloading sacks of meal from a golf cart.

“Morning,” Jane called cheerfully, and went inside.

She found David Bierce standing in front of a temperature gauge beside a glass cage holding the hissing cockroaches.

“Something happened last night, the damn things got too cold.” He glanced over, handed her a clipboard and began to remove the top of the gauge. “I called Operations but they’re at their fucking morning meeting. Fucking computers—”

He stuck his hand inside the control box and flicked angrily at the gauge. “You know anything about computers?”

“Not this kind.” Jane brought her face up to the cage’s glass front. Inside were half a dozen glossy roaches, five inches long and the color of pale maple syrup. They lay, unmoving, near a glass petri dish filled with what looked like damp brown sugar. “Are they dead?”

“Those things? They’re fucking immortal. You could stamp on one and it wouldn’t die. Believe me, I’ve done it.” He continued to fiddle with the gauge, finally sighed and replaced the lid. “Well, let’s let the boys over in Ops handle it. Come on, I’ll get you started.”

He gave her a brief tour of the lab, opening drawers full of dissecting instruments, mounting platforms, pins; showed her where the food for the various insects was kept in a series of small refrigerators. Sugar syrup, cornstarch, plastic containers full of smaller insects, grubs and mealworms, tiny gray beetles. “Mostly we just keep on top of replacing the ones that die,” David explained. “That, and making sure the plants don’t develop the wrong kind of fungus. Nature takes her course and we just goose her along when she needs it. School groups are here constantly, but the docents handle that. You’re more than welcome to talk to them, if that’s the sort of thing you want to do.”

He turned from where he’d been washing empty jars at a small sink, dried his hands, and walked over to sit on top of a desk. “It’s not terribly glamorous work here.” He reached down for a Styrofoam cup of coffee and sipped from it, gazing at her coolly. “We’re none of us working on our PhDs anymore.”

Jane shrugged. “That’s all right.”

“It’s not even all that interesting. I mean, it can be very repetitive. Tedious.”

“I don’t mind.” A sudden pang of anxiety made Jane’s voice break. She could feel her face growing hot, and quickly looked away. “Really,” she said sullenly.

“Suit yourself. Coffee’s over there; you’ll probably have to clean yourself a cup, though.” He cocked his head, staring at her curiously, then said, “Did you do something different with your hair?”

She nodded once, brushing the edge of her bangs with a finger. “Yeah.”

“Nice. Very Louise Brooks.” He hopped from the desk and crossed to a computer set up in the corner. “You can use my computer if you need to, I’ll give you the password later.”

Jane nodded, her flush fading into relief. “How many people work here?”

“Actually, we’re short-staffed here right now—no money for hiring and our grant’s run out. It’s pretty much just me, and whoever Carolyn sends over from the docents. Sweet little bluehairs mostly, they don’t much like bugs. So it’s providential you turned up, Jane.”

He said her name mockingly, gave her a crooked grin. “You said you have experience mounting? Well, I try to save as many of the dead specimens as I can, and when there’s any slow days, which there never are, I mount them and use them for the workshops I do with the schools that come in. What would be nice would be if we had enough specimens that I could give some to the teachers, to take back to their classrooms. We have a nice website and we might be able to work up some interactive programs. No schools are scheduled today, Monday’s usually slow here. So if you could work on some of those—” He gestured to where several dozen cardboard boxes and glass jars were strewn across a countertop. “—that would be really brilliant,” he ended, and turned to his computer screen.

She spent the morning mounting insects. Few were interesting or unusual: a number of brown hairstreaks, some Camberwell Beauties, three hissing cockroaches, several brimstones. But there was a single Acherontia atropos, the Death’s head hawkmoth, the pattern of gray and brown and pale yellow scales on the back of its thorax forming the image of a human skull. Its proboscis was unfurled, the twin points sharp enough to pierce a finger: Jane touched it gingerly, wincing delightedly as a pinprick of blood appeared on her fingertip.

“You bring lunch?”

She looked away from the bright magnifying light she’d been using and blinked in surprise. “Lunch?”

David Bierce laughed. “Enjoying yourself? Well, that’s good, makes the day go faster. Yes, lunch!” He rubbed his hands together, the harsh light making him look gnomelike, his sharp features malevolent and leering. “They have some decent fish and chips at the stall over by the cats. Come on, I’ll treat you. Your first day.”

They sat at a picnic table beside the food booth and ate. David pulled a bottle of ale from his knapsack and shared it with Jane. Overhead, scattered clouds like smoke moved swiftly southwards. An Indian woman with three small boys sat at another table, the boys tossing fries at seagulls that swept down, shrieking, and made the smallest boy wail.

“Rain later,” David said, staring at the sky. “Too bad.” He sprinkled vinegar on his fried haddock and looked at Jane. “So did you go out over the weekend?”

She stared at the table and smiled. “Yeah, I did. It was fun.”

“Where’d you go? The Electric Ballroom?”

“God, no. This other place.” She glanced at his hand resting on the table beside her. He had long fingers, the knuckles slightly enlarged; but the back of his hand was smooth, the same soft brown as the Acherontia’s wingtips. Her brows prickled, warmth trickling from them like water. When she lifted her head she could smell him, some kind of musky soap, salt; the bittersweet ale on his breath.

“Yeah? Where? I haven’t been out in months, I’d be lost in Camden Town these days.”

“I dunno. The Hive?”

She couldn’t imagine he would have heard of it—far too old. But he swiveled on the bench, his eyebrows arching with feigned shock. “You went to Hive? And they let you in?”

“Yes,” Jane stammered. “I mean, I didn’t know—it was just a dance club. I just—danced.”

“Did you.” David Bierce’s gaze sharpened, his hazel eyes catching the sun and sending back an icy emerald glitter. “Did you.”

She picked up the bottle of ale and began to peel the label from it. “Yes.”

“Have a boyfriend, then?”

She shook her head, rolled a fragment of label into a tiny pill. “No.”

“Stop that.” His hand closed over hers. He drew it away from the bottle, letting it rest against the table edge. She swallowed: He kept his hand on top of hers, pressing it against the metal edge until she felt her scored palm begin to ache. Her eyes closed: She could feel herself floating, and see a dozen feet below her own form, slender, the wig beetle-black upon her skull, her wrist like a bent stalk. Abruptly his hand slid away and beneath the table, brushing her leg as he stooped to retrieve his knapsack.

“Time to get back to work,” he said lightly, sliding from the bench and slinging his bag over his shoulder. The breeze lifted his long graying hair as he turned away. “I’ll see you back there.”

Overhead the gulls screamed and flapped, dropping bits of fried fish on the sidewalk. She stared at the table in front of her, the cardboard trays that held the remnants of lunch, and watched as a yellowjacket landed on a fleck of grease, its golden thorax swollen with moisture as it began to feed.

She did not return to Hive that night. Instead she wore a patchwork dress over her jeans and Doc Martens, stuffed the wig inside a drawer and headed to a small bar on Inverness Street. The fair day had turned to rain, black puddles like molten metal capturing the amber glow of traffic signals and streetlights.

There were only a handful of tables at Bar Ganza. Most of the customers stood on the sidewalk outside, drinking and shouting to be heard above the sound of wailing Spanish love songs. Jane fought her way inside, got a glass of red wine, and miraculously found an empty stool alongside the wall. She climbed onto it, wrapped her long legs around the pedestal, and sipped her wine.

“Hey. Nice hair.” A man in his early thirties, his own head shaven, sidled up to Jane’s stool. He held a cigarette, smoking it with quick, nervous gestures as he stared at her. He thrust his cigarette towards the ceiling, indicating a booming speaker. “You like the music?”

“Not particularly.”

“Hey, you’re American? Me too. Chicago. Good bud of mine, works for Citibank, he told me about this place. Food’s not bad. Tapas. Baby octopus. You like octopus?”

Jane’s eyes narrowed. The man wore expensive-looking corduroy trousers, a rumpled jacket of nubby charcoal-colored linen. “No,” she said, but didn’t turn away.

“Me neither. Like eating great big slimy bugs. Geoff Lanning—”

He stuck his hand out. She touched it, lightly, and smiled. “Nice to meet you, Geoff.”

For the next half hour or so she pretended to listen to him, nodding and smiling brilliantly whenever he looked up at her. The bar grew louder and more crowded, and people began eyeing Jane’s stool covetously.

“I think I’d better hand over this seat,” she announced, hopping down and elbowing her way to the door. “Before they eat me.”

Geoff Lanning hurried after her. “Hey, you want to get dinner? The Camden Brasserie’s just up here—”

“No thanks.” She hesitated on the curb, gazing demurely at her Doc Martens. “But would you like to come in for a drink?”

He was very impressed by her apartment. “Man, this place’d probably go for a half mil, easy! That’s three quarters of a million American.” He opened and closed cupboards, ran a hand lovingly across the slate sink. “Nice hardwood floors, high speed access—you never told me what you do.”

Jane laughed. “As little as possible. Here—”

She handed him a brandy snifter, let her finger trace the top part of his wrist. “You look like kind of an adventurous sort of guy.”

“Hey, big adventure, that’s me.” He lifted his glass to her. “What exactly did you have in mind? Big game hunting?”

“Mmm. Maybe.”

It was more of a struggle this time, not for Geoff Lanning but for Jane. He lay complacently in his bonds, his stocky torso wriggling obediently when Jane commanded. Her head ached from the cheap wine at Bar Ganza; the long hairs above her eyes lay sleek against her skull, and did not move at all until she closed her eyes, and, unbidden, the image of David Bierce’s hand covering hers appeared.

“Try to get away,” she whispered.

“Whoa, Nellie,” Geoff Lanning gasped.

“Try to get away,” she repeated, her voice hoarser.

“Oh.” The man whimpered softly. “Jesus Christ, what—oh my God, what—”

Quickly she bent and kissed his fingertips, saw where the leather cuff had bitten into his pudgy wrist. This time she was prepared when with a keening sound he began to twist upon the bed, his arms and legs shriveling and then coiling in upon themselves, his shaved head withdrawing into his tiny torso like a snail within its shell.

But she was not prepared for the creature that remained, its feathery antennae a trembling echo of her own, its extraordinarily elongated hind spurs nearly four inches long.

“Oh,” she gasped.

She didn’t dare touch it until it took to the air: the slender spurs fragile as icicles, scarlet, their saffron tips curling like Christmas ribbon, its large delicate wings saffron with slate-blue and scarlet eye-spots, and spanning nearly six inches. A Madagascan Moon Moth, one of the loveliest and rarest silk moths, and almost impossible to find as an intact specimen.

“What do I do with you, what do I do?” she crooned as it spread its wings and lifted from the bed. It flew in short sweeping arcs; she scrambled to blow out the candles before it could near them. She pulled on her kimono and left the lights off, closed the bedroom door and hurried into the kitchen, looking for a flashlight. She found nothing, but recalled Andrew telling her there was a large torch in the basement.

She hadn’t been down there since her initial tour of the flat. It was brightly lit, with long neat cabinets against both walls, a floor-to-ceiling wine rack filled with bottles of claret and vintage burgundy, compact washer and dryer, small refrigerator, buckets and brooms waiting for the cleaning lady’s weekly visit. She found the flashlight sitting on top of the refrigerator, a container of extra batteries beside it. She switched it on and off a few times, then glanced down at the refrigerator and absently opened it.

Seeing all that wine had made her think the little refrigerator might be filled with beer. Instead it held only a long plastic box, with a red lid and a red biohazard sticker on the side. Jane put the flashlight down and stooped, carefully removing the box and setting it on the floor. A label with Andrew’s neat architectural handwriting was on the top.

DR. ANDREW FILDERMAN

ST. MARTIN’S HOSPICE

“Huh,” she said, and opened it.

Inside there was a small red biohazard waste container, and scores of plastic bags filled with disposable hypodermics, ampules, and suppositories. All contained morphine at varying dosages. Jane stared, marveling, then opened one of the bags. She shook half a dozen morphine ampules into her palm, carefully reclosed the bag, put it back into the box, and returned the box to the refrigerator. Then she grabbed the flashlight and ran upstairs.

It took her a while to capture the moon moth. First she had to find a killing jar large enough, and then she had to very carefully lure it inside, so that its frail wing spurs wouldn’t be damaged. She did this by positioning the jar on its side and placing a gooseneck lamp directly behind it, so that the bare bulb shone through the glass. After about fifteen minutes, the moth landed on top of the jar, its tiny legs slipping as it struggled on the smooth curved surface. Another few minutes and it had crawled inside, nestled on the wad of tissues Jane had set there, moist with ethyl alcohol. She screwed the lid on tightly, left the jar on its side, and waited for it to die.

Over the next week she acquired three more specimens. Papilio demetrius, a Japanese swallowtail with elegant orange eyespots on a velvety black ground; a scarce copper, not scarce at all, really, but with lovely pumpkin-colored wings; and Graphium agamemnon, a Malaysian species with vivid green spots and chrome-yellow strips on its somber brown wings. She’d ventured away from Camden Town, capturing the swallowtail in a private room in an SM club in Islington and the Graphium agamemnon in a parked car behind a noisy pub in Crouch End. The scarce copper came from a vacant lot near the Tottenham Court Road tube station very late one night, where the wreckage of a chainlink fence stood in for her bedposts. She found the morphine to be useful, although she had to wait until immediately after the man ejaculated before pressing the ampule against his throat, aiming for the carotid artery. This way the butterflies emerged already sedated, and in minutes died with no damage to their wings. Leftover clothing was easily disposed of, but she had to be more careful with wallets, stuffing them deep within rubbish bins, when she could, or burying them in her own trash bags and then watching as the waste trucks came by on their rounds.

In South Kensington she discovered an entomological supply store. There she bought more mounting supplies, and inquired casually as to whether the owner might be interested in purchasing some specimens.

He shrugged. “Depends. What you got?”

“Well, right now I have only one Argema mittrei.” Jane adjusted her glasses and glanced around the shop. A lot of morphos, an Atlas moth: nothing too unusual. “But I might be getting another, in which case . . .”

“Moon moth, eh? How’d you come by that, I wonder?” The man raised his eyebrows, and Jane flushed. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn you in. Christ, I’d go out of business. Well, obviously I can’t display those in the shop, but if you want to part with one, let me know. I’m always scouting for my customers.”

She began volunteering three days a week at the insect zoo. One Wednesday, the night after she’d gotten a gorgeous Urania leilus, its wings sadly damaged by rain, she arrived to see David Bierce reading that morning’s Camden New Journal. He peered above the newspaper and frowned.

“You still going out alone at night?”

She froze, her mouth dry; turned and hurried over to the coffeemaker. “Why?” she said, fighting to keep her tone even.

“Because there’s an article about some of the clubs around here. Apparently a few people have gone missing.”

“Really?” Jane got her coffee, wiping up a spill with the side of her hand. “What happened?”

“Nobody knows. Two blokes reported gone, family frantic, sort of thing. Probably just runaways. Camden Town eats them alive, kids.” He handed the paper to Jane. “Although one of them was last seen near Highbury Fields, some sex club there.”

She scanned the article. There was no mention of any suspects. And no bodies had been found, although foul play was suspected. (“Ken would never have gone away without notifying us or his employer. . . .”)

Anyone with any information was urged to contact the police.

“I don’t go to sex clubs,” Jane said flatly. “Plus those are both guys.”

“Mmm.” David leaned back in his chair, regarding her coolly. “You’re the one hitting Hive your first weekend in London.”

“It’s a dance club!” Jane retorted. She laughed, rolled the newspaper into a tube, and batted him gently on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll be careful.”

David continued to stare at her, hazel eyes glittering. “Who says it’s you I’m worried about?”

She smiled, her mouth tight as she turned and began cleaning bottles in the sink.

It was a raw day, more late-November than mid-May. Only two school groups were scheduled; otherwise the usual stream of visitors was reduced to a handful of elderly women who shook their heads over the cockroaches and gave barely a glance to the butterflies before shuffling on to another building. David Bierce paced restlessly through the lab on his way to clean the cages and make more complaints to the Operations Division. Jane cleaned and mounted two stag beetles, their spiny legs pricking her fingertips as she tried to force the pins through their glossy chestnut-colored shells. Afterwards she busied herself with straightening the clutter of cabinets and drawers stuffed with requisition forms and microscopes, computer parts and dissection kits.

It was well past two when David reappeared, his anorak slick with rain, his hair tucked beneath the hood. “Come on,” he announced, standing impatiently by the open door. “Let’s go to lunch.”

Jane looked up from the computer where she’d been updating a specimen list. “I’m really not very hungry,” she said, giving him an apologetic smile. “You go ahead.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” David let the door slam shut as he crossed to her, his sneakers leaving wet smears on the tiled floor. “That can wait till tomorrow. Come on, there’s not a fucking thing here that needs doing.”

“But—” She gazed up at him. The hood slid from his head; his gray-streaked hair hung loose to his shoulders, and the sheen of rain on his sharp cheekbones made him look carved from oiled wood. “What if somebody comes?”

“A very nice docent named Mrs. Eleanor Feltwell is out there, even as we speak, in the unlikely event that we have a single visitor.”

He stooped so that his head was beside hers, scowling as he stared at the computer screen. A lock of his hair fell to brush against her neck. Beneath the wig her scalp burned, as though stung by tiny ants; she breathed in the warm acrid smell of his sweat and something else, a sharper scent, like crushed oak-mast or fresh-sawn wood. Above her brows the antennae suddenly quivered. Sweetness coated her tongue like burnt syrup. With a rush of panic she turned her head so he wouldn’t see her face.

“I—I should finish this—”

“Oh, just fuck it, Jane! It’s not like we’re paying you. Come on, now, there’s a good girl—”

He took her hand and pulled her to her feet, Jane still looking away. The bangs of her cheap wig scraped her forehead and she batted at them feebly. “Get your things. What, don’t you ever take days off in the States?”

“All right, all right.” She turned and gathered her black vinyl raincoat and knapsack, pulled on the coat and waited for him by the door. “Jeez, you must be hungry,” she said crossly.

“No. Just fucking bored out of my skull. Have you been to Ruby in the Dust? No? I’ll take you then, let’s go—”

The restaurant was down the High Street, a small, cheerfully claptrap place, dim in the gray afternoon, its small wooden tables scattered with abandoned newspapers and overflowing ashtrays. David Bierce ordered a steak and a pint. Jane had a small salad, nasturtium blossoms strewn across pale green lettuce, and a glass of red wine. She lacked an appetite lately, living on vitamin-enhanced, fruity bottled drinks from the health food store and baklava from a Greek bakery near the tube station.

“So.” David Bierce stabbed a piece of steak, peering at her sideways. “Don’t tell me you really haven’t been here before.”

“I haven’t!” Despite her unease at being with him, she laughed, and caught her reflection in the wall-length mirror. A thin plain young woman in shapeless Peruvian sweater and jeans, bad haircut and ugly glasses. Gazing at herself she felt suddenly stronger, invisible. She tilted her head and smiled at Bierce. “The food’s good.”

“So you don’t have someone taking you out to dinner every night? Cooking for you? I thought you American girls all had adoring men at your feet. Adoring slaves,” he added dryly. “Or slave girls, I suppose. If that’s your thing.”

“No.” She stared at her salad, shook her head demurely and took a sip of wine. It made her feel even more invulnerable. “No, I—”

“Boyfriend back home, right?” He finished his pint, flagged the waiter to order another, and turned back to Jane. “Well, that’s nice. That’s very nice—for him,” he added, and gave a short harsh laugh.

The waiter brought another pint, and more wine for Jane. “Oh really, I better—”

“Just drink it, Jane.” Under the table, she felt a sharp pressure on her foot. She wasn’t wearing her Doc Martens today but a pair of red plastic jellies. David Bierce had planted his heel firmly atop her toes; she sucked in her breath in shock and pain, the bones of her foot crackling as she tried to pull it from beneath him. Her antennae rippled, then stiffened, and heat burst like a seed inside her.

“Go ahead,” he said softly, pushing the wineglass towards her. “Just a sip, that’s right—”

She grabbed the glass, spilling wine on her sweater as she gulped at it. The vicious pressure on her foot subsided, but as the wine ran down her throat she could feel the heat thrusting her into the air, currents rushing beneath her as the girl at the table below set down her wineglass with trembling fingers.

“There.” David Bierce smiled, leaning forward to gently cup her hand between his. “Now this is better than working. Right, Jane?”

He walked her home along the canal path. Jane tried to dissuade him, but he’d had a third pint by then; it didn’t seem to make him drunk but coldly obdurate, and she finally gave in. The rain had turned to a fine drizzle, the canal’s usually murky water silvered and softly gleaming in the twilight. They passed few other people, and Jane found herself wishing someone else would appear, so that she’d have an excuse to move closer to David Bierce. He kept close to the canal itself, several feet from Jane; when the breeze lifted she could catch his oaky scent again, rising above the dank reek of stagnant water and decaying hawthorn blossom.

They crossed over the bridge to approach her flat by the street. At the front sidewalk Jane stopped, smiled shyly, and said, “Thanks. That was nice.”

David nodded. “Glad I finally got you out of your cage.” He lifted his head to gaze appraisingly at the row house. “Christ, this where you’re staying? You split the rent with someone?”

“No.” She hesitated: She couldn’t remember what she had told him about her living arrangements. But before she could blurt something out he stepped past her to the front door, peeking into the window and bobbing impatiently up and down.

“Mind if I have a look? Professional entomologists don’t often get the chance to see how the quality live.”

Jane hesitated, her stomach clenching; decided it would be safer to have him in, rather than continue to put him off.

“All right,” she said reluctantly, and opened the door.

“Mmmm. Nice, nice, very nice.” He swept around the living room, spinning on his heel and making a show of admiring the elaborate molding, the tribal rugs, the fireplace mantel with its thick ecclesiastical candles and ormolu mirror. “Goodness, all this for a wee thing like you? You’re a clever cat, landing on your feet here, Lady Jane.”

She blushed. He bounded past her on his way into the bedroom, touching her shoulder; she had to close her eyes as a fiery wave surged through her and her antennae trembled.

“Wow,” he exclaimed.

Slowly she followed him into the bedroom. He stood in front of the wall where her specimens were balanced in a neat line across the wainscoting. His eyes were wide, his mouth open in genuine astonishment.

“Are these yours?” he marveled, his gaze fixed on the butterflies. “You didn’t actually catch them—?”

She shrugged.

“These are incredible!” He picked up the Graphium agamemnon and tilted it to the pewter-colored light falling through the French doors. “Did you mount them, too?”

She nodded, crossing to stand beside him. “Yeah. You can tell, with that one—” She pointed at the Urania leilus in its oak-framed box. “It got rained on.”

David Bierce replaced the Graphium agamemnon and began to read the labels on the others.

Papilio demetrius

UNITED KINGDOM: LONDON

Highbury Fields, Islington

7.V.2001

J. Kendall

Loepa katinka

UNITED KINGDOM: LONDON

Finsbury Park

09.V.2001

J. Kendall

Argema mittrei

UNITED KINGDOM: LONDON

Camden Town

13.IV.2001

J. Kendall

He shook his head. “You screwed up, though—you wrote ‘London’ for all of them.” He turned to her, grinning wryly. “Can’t think of the last time I saw a moon moth in Camden Town.”

She forced a laugh. “Oh—right.”

“And, I mean, you can’t have actually caught them—”

He held up the Loepa katinka, a butter-yellow Emperor moth, its peacock’s-eyes russet and jet-black. “I haven’t seen any of these around lately. Not even in Finsbury.”

Jane made a little grimace of apology. “Yeah. I meant, that’s where I found them—where I bought them.”

“Mmmm.” He set the moth back on its ledge. “You’ll have to share your sources with me. I can never find things like these in North London.”

He turned and headed out of the bedroom. Jane hurriedly straightened the specimens, her hands shaking now as well, and followed him.

“Well, Lady Jane.” For the first time he looked at her without his usual mocking arrogance, his green-flecked eyes bemused, almost regretful. “I think we managed to salvage something from the day.”

He turned, gazing one last time at the flat’s glazed walls and highly waxed floors, the imported cabinetry and jewel-toned carpets. “I was going to say, when I walked you home, that you needed someone to take care of you. But it looks like you’ve managed that on your own.”

Jane stared at her feet. He took a step toward her, the fragrance of oak-mast and honey filling her nostrils, crushed acorns, new fern. She grew dizzy, her hand lifting to find him; but he only reached to graze her cheek with his finger.

“Night then, Jane,” he said softly, and walked back out into the misty evening.

When he was gone she raced to the windows and pulled all the velvet curtains, then tore the wig from her head and threw it onto the couch along with her glasses. Her heart was pounding, her face slick with sweat—from fear or rage or disappointment, she didn’t know. She yanked off her sweater and jeans, left them on the living room floor and stomped into the bathroom. She stood in the shower for twenty minutes, head upturned as the water sluiced the smells of bracken and leaf-mold from her skin.

Finally she got out. She dried herself, let the towel drop, and went into the kitchen. Abruptly she was famished. She tore open cupboards and drawers until she found a half-full jar of lavender honey from Provence. She opened it, the top spinning off into the sink, and frantically spooned honey into her mouth with her fingers. When she was finished she grabbed a jar of lemon curd and ate most of that, until she felt as though she might be sick. She stuck her head into the sink, letting water run from the faucet into her mouth, and at last walked, surfeited, into the bedroom.

She dressed, feeling warm and drowsy, almost dreamlike, pulling on red-and-yellow-striped stockings, her nylon skirt, a tight red T-shirt. No bra, no panties. She put in her contacts, then examined herself in the mirror. Her hair had begun to grow back, a scant velvety stubble, bluish in the dim light. She drew a sweeping black line across each eyelid, on a whim took the liner and extended the curve of each antenna until they touched her temples. She painted her lips black as well and went to find her black vinyl raincoat.

It was early when she went out, far too early for any of the clubs to be open. The rain had stopped, but a thick greasy fog covered everything, coating windshields and shop windows, making Jane’s face feel as though it were encased in a clammy shell. For hours she wandered Camden Town, huge violet eyes turning to stare back at the men who watched her, dismissing each of them. Once she thought she saw David Bierce coming out of Ruby in the Dust, but when she stopped to watch him cross the street it was not David but someone else. Much younger, his long dark hair in a thick braid, his feet clad in knee-high boots. He crossed the High Street, heading towards the tube station. Jane hesitated, then darted after him.

He went to the Electric Ballroom. Fifteen or so people stood out front, talking quietly. The man she’d followed joined the line, standing by himself. Jane waited across the street, until the door opened and the little crowd began to shuffle inside. After the long-haired young man had entered, she counted to one hundred, crossed the street, paid her cover, and went inside.

The club had three levels; she finally tracked him down on the uppermost one. Even on a rainy Wednesday night it was crowded, the sound system blaring Idris Mohammed and Jimmie Cliff. He was standing alone near the bar, drinking bottled water.

“Hi!” she shouted, swaying up to him with her best First Day of School Smile. “Want to dance?”

He was older than she’d thought—thirtyish, still not as old as Bierce. He stared at her, puzzled, then shrugged. “Sure.”

They danced, passing the water bottle between them. “What’s your name?” he shouted.

“Cleopatra Brimstone.”

“You’re kidding!” he yelled back. The song ended in a bleat of feedback, and they walked, panting, back to the bar.

“What, you know another Cleopatra?” Jane asked teasingly.

“No. It’s just a crazy name, that’s all.” He smiled. He was handsomer than David Bierce, his features softer, more rounded, his eyes dark brown, his manner a bit reticent. “I’m Thomas Raybourne. Tom.”

He bought another bottle of Pellegrino and one for Jane. She drank it quickly, trying to get his measure. When she finished she set the empty bottle on the floor and fanned herself with her hand.

“It’s hot in here.” Her throat hurt from shouting over the music. “I think I’m going to take a walk. Feel like coming?”

He hesitated, glancing around the club. “I was supposed to meet a friend here . . .” he began, frowning. “But—”

“Oh.” Disappointment filled her, spiking into desperation. “Well, that’s okay. I guess.”

“Oh, what the hell.” He smiled: He had nice eyes, a more stolid, reassuring gaze than Bierce. “I can always come back.”

Outside she turned right, in the direction of the canal. “I live pretty close by. Feel like coming in for a drink?”

He shrugged again. “I don’t drink, actually.”

“Something to eat then? It’s not far—just along the canal path a few blocks past Camden Lock—”

“Yeah, sure.”

They made desultory conversation. “You should be careful,” he said as they crossed the bridge. “Did you read about those people who’ve gone missing in Camden Town?”

Jane nodded but said nothing. She felt anxious and clumsy—as though she’d drunk too much, although she’d had nothing since the two glasses of wine with David Bierce. Her companion also seemed ill at ease; he kept glancing back, as though looking for someone on the canal path behind them.

“I should have tried to call,” he explained ruefully. “But I forgot to recharge my mobile.”

“You could call from my place.”

“No, that’s all right.”

She could tell from his tone that he was figuring how he could leave, gracefully, as soon as possible.

Inside the flat he settled on the couch, picked up a copy of Time Out and flipped through it, pretending to read. Jane went immediately into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of brandy. She downed it, poured a second one, and joined him on the couch.

“So.” She kicked off her Doc Martens, drew her stockinged foot slowly up his leg, from calf to thigh. “Where you from?”

He was passive, so passive she wondered if he would get aroused at all. But after a while they were lying on the couch, both their shirts on the floor, his pants unzipped and his cock stiff, pressing against her bare belly.

“Let’s go in there,” Jane whispered hoarsely. She took his hand and led him into the bedroom.

She only bothered lighting a single candle, before lying beside him on the bed. His eyes were half-closed, his breathing shallow. When she ran a fingernail around one nipple he made a small surprised sound, then quickly turned and pinned her to the bed.

“Wait! Slow down,” Jane said, and wriggled from beneath him. For the last week she’d left the bonds attached to the bedposts, hiding them beneath the covers when not in use. Now she grabbed one of the wristcuffs and pulled it free. Before he could see what she was doing it was around his wrist.

“Hey!”

She dove for the foot of the bed, his leg narrowly missing her as it thrashed against the covers. It was more difficult to get this in place, but she made a great show of giggling and stroking his thigh, which seemed to calm him. The other leg was next, and finally she leapt from the bed and darted to the headboard, slipping from his grasp when he tried to grab her shoulder.

“This is not consensual,” he said. She couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.

“What about this, then?” she murmured, sliding down between his legs and cupping his erect penis between her hands. “This seems to be enjoying itself.”

He groaned softly, shutting his eyes. “Try to get away,” she said. “Try to get away.”

He tried to lunge upward, his body arcing so violently that she drew back in alarm. The bonds held; he arched again, and again, but now she remained beside him, her hands on his cock, his breath coming faster and faster and her own breath keeping pace with it, her heart pounding and the tingling above her eyes almost unbearable.

“Try to get away,” she gasped. “Try to get away—”

When he came he cried out, his voice harsh, as though in pain, and Jane cried out as well, squeezing her eyes shut as spasms shook her from head to groin. Quickly her head dipped to kiss his chest; then she shuddered and drew back, watching.

His voice rose again, ended suddenly in a shrill wail, as his limbs knotted and shriveled like burning rope. She had a final glimpse of him, a homunculus sprouting too many legs. Then on the bed before her a perfectly formed Papilio krishna swallowtail crawled across the rumpled duvet, its wings twitching to display glittering green scales amidst spectral washes of violet and crimson and gold.

“Oh, you’re beautiful, beautiful,” she whispered.

From across the room echoed a sound: Soft, the rustle of her kimono falling from its hook as the door swung open. She snatched her hand from the butterfly and stared, through the door to the living room.

In her haste to get Thomas Raybourne inside she had forgotten to latch the front door. She scrambled to her feet, naked, staring wildly at the shadow looming in front of her, its features taking shape as it approached the candle, brown and black, light glinting across his face.

It was David Bierce. The scent of oak and bracken swelled, suffocating, fragrant, cut by the bitter odor of ethyl alcohol. He forced her gently onto the bed, heat piercing her breast and thighs, her antennae bursting out like flame from her brow and wings exploding everywhere around her as she struggled fruitlessly.

“Now. Try to get away,” he said.

© 2001 by Elizabeth Hand.

Originally published in Redshift, edited by Al Sarrantonio.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Elizabeth Hand is the author of eleven novels and three collections of short fiction. Available Dark, sequel to the Shirley Jackson Award-winning thriller Generation Loss, will be released on February 14. Radiant Days, a YA novel about a homeless young graffiti artist’s numinous encounter with Arthur Rimbaud in 1970’s Washington, D.C., will be out in April. Errantry, a collection of recent short fiction, will appear this autumn, as will a revised edition of her 1997 near-future post-apocalypse novel Glimmering. She divides her time between the coast of Maine and North London, and is at work on two new novels: Wylding Hall, a YA neo-gothic loosely inspired by Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, and the third Cass Neary thriller, Flash Burn. Her novella “Cleopatra Brimstone” has been optioned for a film.

The Games
Ted Kosmatka

Chapter One

Somewhere in the blackness a videophone rang. Through force of will, Silas brought the glowing face of the clock radio into focus: 3:07 a.m. His heart beat a little faster.

Is it ever good news at 3:07 a.m.?

He fumbled for the light near his bedside, sliding his hand up to the switch, wondering who could be calling this late. Suddenly, he knew—the lab. The light was nearly as blinding as the darkness, but by squinting he found the phone, being careful to hit the voice-only button.

“Hello,” he croaked.

“Dr. Williams?” The voice coming through the speaker was young and male. He didn’t recognize it.

“Yes,” Silas answered.

“Dr. Nelson had me call. You’ll want to come down to the compound.”

“What’s happened?” He sat up straighter in bed, swinging his feet to the carpet.

“The surrogate went into labor.”

“What? When?” It was still too soon. All the models had predicted a ten-month gestation.

“Two hours ago. The surrogate is in bad shape. They can’t delay it.” Silas tried to clear his head, think rationally. “The medical team?”

“The surgeons are being assembled now.”

Silas ran his fingers slowly through his mop of salt-and-pepper curls. He checked the pile of dirty clothes lying on the floor next to his bed and snagged a shirt that looked a little less wrinkled than its brethren. Above all else, he considered himself to be an adaptable man. “How long do I have?”

“Half-hour, maybe less.”

“Thanks, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” Silas clicked the phone off. For better or for worse, it had begun.

The night was cool for Southern California, and Silas drove with the windows down, enjoying the way the wind swirled around the cab of the Courser 617. The air was damp, tinged with a coming thunderstorm. Eagerness pressed him faster. He took the ramp to Highway 5 at seventy miles per hour, smiling at the way the car grabbed the curve. So many times as a youth he’d dreamed of owning a car such as this. Tonight his indulgence seemed prophetic; he needed every one of those Thoroughbreds galloping beneath the low, sleek hood.

As he merged onto the mostly empty interstate, he punched it, watching the speedometer climb to just over a hundred and five. The radio blared something he didn’t recognize—rhythmic and frenzied, almost primeval, it matched his mood perfectly. His anxiety built with his proximity to the lab.

Over the years he had become accustomed to the occasional midnight dash to the lab, but it had never been like this, with so many unknowns. A vision of Evan Chandler’s grossly jowled face entered his mind, and he felt a rush of anger. He couldn’t really blame Chandler. You couldn’t ask a snake not to be a snake. It was the members of the Olympic Commission who should have known better.

He switched lanes to avoid a mini-tram, his speed never dropping below ninety-five miles per hour. His dark eyes glanced into the rear-view, scouting for a patrol. The ticket itself wouldn’t bother him. He was exempt from any fine levied by local authorities while on his way to and from the lab, but the time it would cost to explain himself would be the real expense. All clear. He pushed the gas pedal to the floor. Minutes later, he hit his brakes, downshifted to third, and cut across two lanes to catch his exit. He was now out of the city proper and into the suburbs of San Bernardino.

Silas passed the brightly lit main entrance of Five Rings Laboratories without taking his foot off the gas. He didn’t have time for the main entrance, the winding drive. Instead, he veered left at the access road, whipping past the chain-link fence that crowded the gravel. At the corner, he spun the wheel and hooked another left, decelerating as he neared the rear gate. He flashed his badge to the armed guard, and the iron bars swung inward just in time to save his paint job.

The lab grounds were vast and parklike—a sprawling technological food web of small interconnected campuses, three- and four-story structures sharing space with stands of old growth. Glass and brick and trees. A semicircle of buildings crouched in conference around a small man-made pond.

He followed his headlights to a building at the west end of the complex and skidded to a stop in his assigned parking spot.

He was surprised to see Dr. Nelson standing there to greet him—a short, squat form cast in fluorescent lighting. “You were right. Twenty minutes exactly,” Dr. Nelson said.

Silas groaned as he extricated himself from the vehicle. “One of the advantages of owning a sports car,” he said, and stretched his stiff back as he got to his feet.

A nervous smile crept to the corner of Nelson’s mouth. “Yeah, well, I can see the disadvantage. Someone your size should really consider a bigger car.”

“You sound like my chiropractor.” Silas knew things weren’t going well upstairs; Nelson wasn’t one for quips. In fact, Silas couldn’t recall ever seeing the man smile. His stomach tightened a notch.

They made their way to the elevators, and Nelson pushed the button for the third floor.

“So where do things stand?” Silas asked.

“It’s anesthetized, and the surgical team should be ready any minute.”

“The vitals?”

“Not good. The old girl is worn out, just skin and bones. Even the caloric load we’ve been pushing hasn’t been enough. The fetus is doing okay, though. Still has a good, strong heartbeat. The sonogram shows it’s roughly the size of a full-term calf, so I don’t think there should be anything tricky about the surgery.”

“The surgery isn’t what I’m worried about.”

“Yeah, I know. We’re ready with an incubator just in case.”

Silas followed Nelson around a corner and down another long hallway. They stopped at a glass door, and Nelson slid his identification card into the console slot. There were a series of beeps, then a digitized, feminine voice: “Clearance accepted; you may enter.”

The view room was long, narrow, and crowded. It was an enclosed balcony that overhung a surgical suite, and most of the people were gazing into the chamber below through a row of windows that ran along the left wall.

At the far end of the packed room, a tall man with a shaggy mane of blond hair noticed them. “Come in, come in,” Benjamin said with a wave. At twenty-six, he was the youngest man working on the project. A prodigy funneled from the eastern cytology schools, he described himself as a man who knew his way around an oocyte. Silas had taken an instant liking to him when they’d met more than a year ago.

“You’re just in time for the fun,” Benjamin said. “I thought for sure they wouldn’t be able to drag you out of bed.”

“Three hours’ sleep is all any man needs in a thirty-six-hour period.” He grabbed Benjamin’s outstretched hand and gave it a firm shake. “What’s the status of our little friend?”

“As you can see”—Benjamin gestured toward the window—“things have progressed a little faster than we expected. The surrogate turned the corner from distressed to dying in the last hour, and it’s triggered contractions. As far as we can tell, it may still be a little early, but since you can’t sail a sinking ship”—Benjamin pulled a cigar from the inside pocket of his lab coat and held it out to Silas—“it looks like our little gladiator is going to have a birthday.”

Silas took the cigar, smiling against his best efforts. “Thanks.” He turned and stepped toward the glass. The cow was on its side on a large stainless-steel table, surrounded by a team of doctors and nurses. The surgeons huddled around their patient, only their eyes and foreheads visible above sterile masks.

“It should be anytime now,” Benjamin said.

Silas turned to face him. “Anything new on the sonogram visuals?” Benjamin shook his head and pushed his glasses up his long, thin nose. For the first time his face lost its optimistic glow. “We did another series, but we haven’t been able to glean any additional information.”

“And those structures we talked about?”

“Still can’t identify them. Not that people haven’t had a field day coming up with ideas.”

“I hate going into this blind.”

“Believe me, I know.” Benjamin’s voice soured. “But the Olympic Commission didn’t exactly leave you with a lot of room for maneuvering, did they? The fat bastard isn’t even a biologist, for Christ’s sake. If things go wrong, it won’t be on your head.”

“You really believe that?”

“No, I guess I don’t.”

“Then you’re wise beyond your years.”

“Still, one way or the other, Evan Chandler is going to have a lot of explaining to do.”

“I don’t think he’s that worried,” Silas said softly. “I don’t see him here, do you?”

The scientists stood crowded against the glass, transfixed by the scene unfolding beneath them. Inside the white stricture of lights, a scalpel blinked stainless steel. The cow lay motionless on its left side as it was opened from sternum to pelvis in one slow, smooth cut. Gloved hands insinuated themselves into its abdomen, gently separating layers of tissue, reaching deep. Silas felt his heart thumping in his chest. The hands disappeared entirely, then the arms up to the elbows. Assistants used huge curved tongs to stretch the incision wide.

The surgeon shifted his weight. His shoulder strained. Silas imagined the man’s teeth gritting with effort beneath the micropore mask as he rummaged around in the bovine’s innards. What did he feel? A final pull and it was over. The white-smocked physician slowly pulled a dark, dripping mass away as a nurse moved in to cut the umbilical cord. Faintly, a sporadic beeping in the background changed to a steady tone as the cow flatlined. The medical team ignored it, moving to focus their energies on the newborn.

The first surgeon put the bloody shape on the table under the lamps and began wiping it down with a sponge and warm water, while another doctor peeled away the dense layers of fibrous glop that still clung to it.

The surgeon’s voice sounded over the speakers in the view room from a microphone in his mask. “The fetus is dark . . . still covered by the embryonic sack . . . thick, fibrous texture; I’m tearing it away.”

Silas’s face was nearly pushed against the glass, trying to get a better look over the doctor’s shoulder. For a moment he caught a glimpse of the newborn, but then the medical team shifted around their patient and he could see nothing. The sound of the doctor’s breathing filled the view room.

“This . . . interesting . . . I’m not sure . . .” The doctor’s voice trailed off in the speakers.

Suddenly, a shrill cry split Silas’s ears, silencing the excited background chatter. The cry was strange, like nothing he’d ever heard before.

The doctors stepped back from the wailing newborn one by one, opening a gap, allowing Silas his first real glimpse.

His mouth dropped open.

Later that morning, the storm that had been threatening for hours finally moved in with all the subtlety of a shotgun blast. Thunder boomed across the expansive field of California mod-sod. Dr. Silas Williams watched from behind the window of his second story office, hands folded behind his back, drinking in the scene. The familiar ache in his bad ear had finally begun to ebb, becoming tolerable again. It always seemed to act up at the most inopportune times, and he hadn’t let himself take anything stronger than aspirin because of what he knew was coming. He’d need his edge today.

Outside his window, the few well-manicured windbreaks of oak, hickory, and alder that stood scattered across the vast green promenade seemed to sway and shake with anticipation. Their branches bowed in the gusts that swept in from the west. In the distance, he could see the road and the cars—their headlight beams turned on against the darkening mid-morning sky.

He’d always felt there was magic in these moments just before the rain, when the sky brooded and rumbled its promises. The last few moments before a hard rain seemed to exist outside of time. It was the eternal drama, old as nature. Old as life. A dull curtain of precipitation spread west to east across the landscape, instantly soaking the grass. For a moment, he clutched at the wispy borders of ancient half-memories of other storms on other continents, of tall savanna grass waving and genuflecting before the monsoon.

The first fat drop spattered the window. Then another, and a dozen, and the window ran like a river, smearing away the outside world. As the sky darkened further, and the scene beyond the window lost its form in the streaming rain, his reflection materialized in the glass before him. He considered the visage gazing intently back at him. A good enough face, if a little weatherworn. For the first time in a long time, on this day of birth and rain, his mind cast back to his childhood. To a face so like his own.

Silas remembered his father in flashes—long legs, a towering silhouette that tucked him in at night. Huge hands with long, rectangular palms. Masculine. Solidly there.

Then not.

Silas’s father was killed in a refinery fire when he was three, leaving behind only the faintest ghosts of memories for his son. Most of what Silas knew of his father came from his mother’s stories and pictures. But in many ways, it was the pictures that spoke most eloquently.

The family portrait that hung in his mother’s living room for decades showed a huge, broad-shouldered man with tight curls shorn low to the scalp. A gentle half-smile dimpled his left cheek. He was sitting next to Silas’s mother, holding hands, his dark brown complexion contrasting sharply against the warm New Orleans honey of her skin. He had the kind of face that some Americans would have described as exotic—both broad and angular, an unexpected bone structure that snagged the eye. Immense cheekbones, high and sharp, dominated the proportions of his face. Many times growing up, Silas had noticed people lingering in front of that picture, as though his father was a puzzle to figure out. What did they see in that dead man?

While in her twenties, Silas’s sister had leveraged their father’s bone structure and long limbs into a modeling career. It had paid for college when she chose to go against the tracking of her state sponsorship. A thing most young people couldn’t afford to do. Ashley was married now, and had a young son. She still had a year left on her primary nuptial contract, but they were a happy couple and already had plans to re-up lifelong at the first option. He envied them a little. What they had was so different from what he’d shared with Chloe all those years ago.

He remembered the arguments and the shouting, the slammed doors, the things said that couldn’t be taken back. But it was the silences that did the most damage. The interminable quiets that ate their evenings, growing longer over every passing month as they each came to terms with the fact that there was nothing really left to say.

Neither of them had wanted children, and eventually there had been nothing there to hold them together. Their careers became their partners. In the end, they had simply let their contract expire. They didn’t even talk about it. The third anniversary came and went without either of them filing for a continuance, and the next day, they just weren’t married anymore. A lot of marriages ended like that.

Still, on the evening she’d moved out, he’d felt crazy. He hadn’t wanted her to stay, but as he stood there, watching her walk through the door for what would be the last time, he felt . . . grief. Not for the loss of her but for the loss of what there should have been between them. The enormous emptiness of his life had almost overwhelmed him.

As always, his work had been his savior. Later that month, he won the Crick Award for his contribution to design in the Ursus theodorus project. He was only twenty-seven years old and suddenly found himself center stage in the biological revolution. The bear teddy had eventually become the fourth most popular pet in the United States, next in line after dogs, cats, and domestic foxes. That had been the start of it all.

A buzz on the intercom interrupted his thoughts.

Lightning flashed. Silas took a deep breath and watched sheets of rain cascade down the glass. He wasn’t looking forward to this. There was a mutual dislike between him and most of the members of the Olympic Commission, and this year things had come to a head over their decision to use Chandler’s design.

The buzz came again. “Yes,” he said.

“Dr. Williams, Mr. Baskov is here to see you,” his secretary said. Silas was surprised. “Send him in.” It was hardly an industry secret that Stephen Baskov represented more than just another faceless vote in the commission. His reputation was widely acknowledged and served him well in the shark-infested waters of the Olympic politico. Officially, he merely chaired the commission. Unofficially, he ruled.

“Hello and good morning, Dr. Williams,” Stephen Baskov said, switching his cane to his left hand and holding out his right.

Silas shook it, then gestured toward a chair. Baskov sank into the seat graciously, letting his feet stretch out in front of him. He was a broad man, with even, ruddy features. He wore his snow-white locks combed in such a way as to get the most economy from a diminished budget of hair. He looked to be about eighty years old, an affable old man—grandfatherly, almost—but Silas knew better. His simple appearance was in stark contrast to the reality of the man. Within his worn face, beneath his bushy white eyebrows, shone eyes like hard glacial ice.

“I hear you had quite an exciting time last night,” Baskov began. Silas eased back in his seat and propped his feet up on the big desk.

“Yes, it was an eye-opener.”

Baskov smiled, resting one grizzled hand on each knee. “My people tell me you’re responsible for the successful birth of another gladiator. Congratulations.”

“Thank you. I assume that’s not all you heard.”

“Why do you assume I heard something more?”

“Because if that was all your people told you, then you wouldn’t be here right now.”

“No, probably not.”

“Then what did bring you here? What can I do for you today?”

“The commission decided not to wait for your report. I’ve been sent to find out just what exactly we’re dealing with here. To be honest with you, the description we’ve been given is a little disconcerting.”

“Disconcerting? An interesting choice of words.”

“Oh, there were more words used than just that.”

“Such as?”

“Inexplicable,” Baskov said. “Disquieting. Disturbing.”

Silas nodded. “I’d say those fit pretty well.”

“None of those are words the commission likes to hear in association with its investment in this project.”

“Nor would I.”

“Is it healthy?”

“Vigorously,” Silas said.

“That’s a good sign.”

“For now.”

“Do you foresee any problems, any reason why it may not be able to compete?”

“All I do see are problems. As to whether or not it can compete, I have no idea. We’re going to have to get the blood results back before we can even speculate if it’s going to survive the week.”

“Why is that?”

“I can’t even begin to guess what sort of immunity haplotype it might have. A common cold might kill it.”

“A common cold? That’s rather unlikely, isn’t it?”

“Sir, I have no way of knowing whether it’s likely or not.”

“You’ve never had a problem with disease susceptibility before.”

“Exactly. I’ve also never had a problem accessing the template protocols.” Silas let a challenge slip through the cracks of his expression.

Baskov noticed it in an instant and turned the tables. “I sense a climate of animosity here,” he said, as a smile spread across the lower portion of his face. His voice rose a subtle, questioning octave. “Do you have a problem with me, Dr. Williams?”

The directness of the question took Silas aback. He toyed with the idea of meeting it head-on, but then decided to change tacks slightly. His job as program head was nearly as much a political appointment as it was a scientific one, and although he hated that aspect of the job, he’d learned a few things about diplomacy during his years in the position. Meeting something like the commission head-on was a good way to get a broken head.

“Let me ask you a question, Mr. Baskov,” Silas said. “I’ve overseen the Helix arm of Olympic Development for twelve years. In that time, how many gold medals has the United States brought home in the gladiator competition?”

“Three,” Baskov said. His brows furrowed. He wasn’t a man used to answering questions.

“Three; that’s right. Three games, three wins. They were my designs that brought home those medals. Designs, not just the cytological grunt work. Your commission fought against me this time. I want to know why.” That question had burned in his gut for all the months he’d watched the surrogate’s distended belly grow.

Baskov sighed. “This event is different from the others; I shouldn’t have to tell you that. There are factors involved that you aren’t aware of.”

“Make me aware, then.”

“Most of the other Olympic events haven’t changed much in the last hundred years. The marathon is still twenty-six miles, and will still be twenty-six miles when you and I are long dead. But the gladiator event is about change.”

“I thought it was about winning.”

“That above all. But it’s about showcasing a country’s technological advancement. We have to use the newest, best tools at our disposal. It’s not like the hundred-yard dash, where you take the fastest guy you happen to have, push him onto the track, and hope for the best.”

“I doubt Olympic running coaches would appreciate that oversimplification.”

“I doubt I give a damn what they would or wouldn’t appreciate. The gladiator event is more than a test of simple foot speed.”

“And it’s more than some VR sim,” Silas snapped back.

“Yes, it is. But that doesn’t change the fact that Chandler’s computer is capable of design specs that you can’t touch. There’s only one rule in this event: no human DNA. That’s it. That leaves a hell of a lot of room to play, and we weren’t taking advantage of it. Ours was a business decision, nothing more. Nothing less. It wasn’t meant as a reflection on you.”

“If it were a reflection on me, then I could understand it. But my designs have a history of success to back them up. We won. We’ve always won.”

“And the endorsements that go with it, I know. The commission is very thankful for that. You’re a huge part of why the United States has dominated the field. But it could have gone either way last time. You know that.”

Silas remained silent. He remembered the blood. He remembered the swing of guts in the sawdust. The U.S. gladiator had outlived its competitor by forty-seven seconds. The difference between gold and silver.

“I’m not sure that you fully appreciate the pressure that the program is under right now,” Baskov said. “We can’t afford to lose. While you’ve spent all your time sequestered away in your personal little laboratory retreat here, the rest of the program has had to exist in the real world. Or have you forgotten?”

“No.”

“I think you have. The gladiator event is a bloody business—that’s why it’s so popular and why it’s always under attack. The activists have a powerful lobby in Congress this time around, and they’re pushing for a new vote.”

“And they won’t get it.”

“No, they won’t. Not this time. But public opinion is an unpredictable thing. Success has buoyed it up till now, and the commission was informed that we must continue to be successful if the gladiator event is to remain part of the Olympics. We do not have any other option.”

Informed by whom? Silas wondered.

“This competition is not going to be as simple and straightforward as the last,” Baskov continued. “Our sources tell us that China’s contestant will be very formidable. Let’s just say that when we compared your designs to what we know we’ll be up against, your ideas came up lacking. You couldn’t have won with the codes you had in the scrollers.”

“How could you know—”

“You couldn’t have won,” Baskov interrupted. “Our decision wasn’t made lightly.”

Silas’s face drained of expression as he considered the man sitting before him. He wanted to grab him by the lapels, pull him off his feet, and shake him. He wanted to yell in his face, What have you done?

But he thought again of broken heads, and by slow degrees managed to put his anger in a place he could shut down. In controlled, clipped words, he said, “I understand. Perhaps I don’t have all the information, but I’m still program head. We still have problems that need to be dealt with.”

“I’ve heard. We’ve been aware of the problems. Your reports during the last several months didn’t fall on deaf ears.”

“Then why hasn’t the commission acted?”

“We just decided to wait and see what happened.”

“Would you like to see . . . what’s happened?”

“I was waiting for you to ask.”

They shuffled slowly down the narrow corridor, with Silas consciously shortening his strides to accommodate Baskov’s hobbling gait. He wondered at the anticipation the older man must be feeling. Hell, he was feeling it, too, and he’d already seen the organism, inspected it, held it. The newborn was the most beautifully perfect thing Silas had ever seen.

Baskov broke the silence between them as they turned a corner. “The commission is very troubled by the description we received. It isn’t really humanoid, is it?”

“Maybe. Not really.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“When you see it, you’ll understand.”

“And what about the hands?”

“What about them?”

“Does it really have . . . well, hands? I mean . . . it doesn’t have paws or hooves or something like the others?”

Silas suppressed the urge to laugh. Let the cocky old son of a bitch sweat a little. “I’d have to call them hands. They aren’t like ours, but they’re hands.” His bitter humor abated somewhat. “The similarities are mostly superficial, though.”

“Are you going to have trouble proving no human DNA was used in the design?”

Silas looked down at the old man. For a moment, he felt his temper rise again. He took a deep breath. With the competition less than a year away, it was a little late to be asking that question now. “Your guess is as good as mine at this point,” he said. “Chandler’s masterpiece didn’t provide us with any sort of explanation for the data in the scrollers, just raw code. I assumed that since you chose his design over mine, you would have some sort of idea what you were getting. You need to ask him. My reports are accurate, and if you read them, you—”

“We read them; we just weren’t sure if we could believe them.”

Silas mulled over several responses to the older man’s statement, but since most of them involved the end of his career and quite possibly his incarceration for battery, he decided to say nothing at all. For the first time, he considered the possibility that the head of the Olympic Commission might be utterly irrational in some aspects of his thinking. Power did that to men sometimes.

They stepped through a set of steel doors and followed the narrow hall around the corner. “I want to remind you that the sponsor dinner is still on for tomorrow night. I need you to be there,” Baskov said.

“I’ll send Dr. Nelson.”

“You’ll be there in person. We need to quell the rumors that have already begun to fly. Image is money in this business. The delegation will leave from the complex at six o’clock.”

Rumors?

They came to a second set of steel doors. A large yellow sign read:

ATTENTION

BADGED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT

Silas carded them through, and Baskov stopped short, blinking against the white brightness of the nursery. A stout, flame-haired man sat against a console near the far wall. There were no windows, but a large glass chamber boxed in the center of the room.

“How’s it doing?” Silas asked the redhead.

“Just fine,” Keith answered. “Been sleeping like a baby for an hour now. Come to show off your little creation?”

“Not mine,” Silas said. “This is Chandler’s handiwork.”

They peered in. The crib was large, and behind the chromed bars, a loosely swaddled shape twisted and bobbed within a cocoon of pink blankets.

“Looks like it’s awake now,” Silas said.

“Probably hungry again,” Keith replied. ”You wouldn’t believe how much it loves to eat.”

Silas checked the paper printout of the infant’s eating habits, then turned back to Baskov. “The chamber is a walk-in incubator. The system has autonomic control of everything from temperature to humidity to oxygen-sat levels.”

Baskov nodded, shifting his weight for a clearer view. “Want to get a closer look?” Silas asked.

“Of course.”

They donned sterile masks and gowns, and stretched latex gloves over their hands. “Just a temporary precaution,” Silas said.

“For us, or it?”

“It.”

Baskov nodded. “Why are we calling it an ‘it,’ anyway? It’s male, right?”

“No, female by the external genitalia. Or lack thereof.”

With a soft hiss, the door to the inner chamber opened and they stepped through. The air was warmer, wetter. Silas could feel the heat of the lights on the bridge of his nose above the mask. He bent and reached his hands through the bars and into the crib. Baskov hovered just to his side. The covers peeled back from the writhing form.

Silas heard a sudden intake of air near his shoulder. “My God” was all Baskov could manage.

The newborn was on its back, four stocky limbs pedaling the air. Once again, Silas struggled to wrap his mind around what he was seeing. There was nothing to compare it to, so his brain had to work from scratch, filling in all the pieces, seeing everything at once.

The newborn was hairless, and most of its skin was a deep, obsidian black, slightly reflective in the warm glare of the heat lamps, as though covered with a shiny coat of gloss. Only its hands and forearms were different. It was roughly the size of a three-year-old human toddler. Wide shoulders tapered into long, thick arms that now bunched and stretched toward the bars. Below the elbow, the skin color shifted to deep red. Its blood-colored hands clenched in the air, the needle tips of talons just beginning to erupt from the ends of the long, hooked fingers. The rear legs were raptor monstrosities, jointed in some complicated way, with splayed feet that corded with muscle and sinew just below the surface of its skin.

Two enormous gray eyes shone out of the brilliant blackness of its face and raked across the two men looking down. Silas could almost feel the weight of the alien gaze. The lower jaw was enormously wide and jutting, built for power. A grossly bossed cranial vault spread wide over the pulled-out face, capped by two soft semicircular flaps of ear cartilage.

It opened its mouth, mewling the same strange cry that Silas had heard the night before. Even the inside of its mouth was midnight black.

“This is beyond . . .” Baskov began.

“Yes, that’s a perfect way to describe it.”

Baskov began to reach a gloved hand toward the newborn but then apparently thought better of it. “This is beyond the reach of what I thought we were able to do,” he finished.

“It is. We cannot do this,” Silas said. The two men locked eyes.

“How?” Baskov asked.

“You’re asking the wrong guy, remember? I’m the builder, not the designer.”

“Does it seem to be put together well? Are those legs supposed to look like that?”

“Well, everything is symmetrical on the exterior, so that’s a good sign. But you haven’t seen the really interesting thing yet.” Silas leaned through the bars and grabbed the newborn under the upper arms. It struggled, but he was able to flip it over onto its stomach.

“What are those?” Baskov whispered.

“We’re not totally sure, but the X-ray data indicate they’re probably immature wing structures of some sort.”

“Wings? Are you telling me this thing has wings?” Silas shrugged his answer.

“They’re not functional, are they?”

“I don’t see how they could be. Flight is probably the single most difficult form of locomotion from a design standpoint, and this thing certainly doesn’t look like it was built along avian lines. The bones are huge, strong.”

“But why even try? There isn’t really room to fly in the arena.” Baskov bent closer. “And those big ears are a liability. The eyes, too.”

“Now you understand my frustration with your chosen designer. We need to talk to him.”

Baskov’s expression faded from wonder to irritation. “Chandler isn’t as easy to reach as he used to be.”

“Where is he?”

“Where isn’t the problem. He just isn’t easy to reach anymore.”

After walking Baskov back to the lobby, Silas returned to the nursery and sent Keith home for the night. He stood alone at the side of the crib, silently watching the baby breathe. It was a baby. Big as a newborn calf but just as underdeveloped and fragile as any human newborn. He extended a hand through the bars and stroked the infant’s back. It lay on its tummy, legs drawn up, bottom stuck in the air.

It’s beautiful.

But then, almost all life is beautiful at this stage. Pure innocence combined with complete selfishness. Its only function was to take from those around it so that it could live and grow, while remaining completely unaware of the effort involved in meeting its needs.

Silas closed his eyes and breathed in the smell of the creature. He felt himself relax a little. His sister hinted once that she thought he’d become a geneticist to create something that was a part of him. She was wrong. That was why people have children.

He wanted to create something better than himself. Better than any man could be. Something a little closer to perfect. But he had always failed. His creations were monsters compared to this. They were just animal Frankensteins that acted out impulses society wouldn’t allow men to indulge in.

But he’d come close once. Teddy. Ursus theodorus had been loving, gentle, and even intelligent, after a fashion. That last quality had cost the first prototype its life. It had been too intelligent. Some people got nervous. The board of directors had had its say, and late one evening, he’d been forced to place the little creature on a table and inject it with enough animal tranquilizer to stop its breathing. He’d stood back with ice in his gut while his creation died.

The next series of Teddys were dumber and better suited the board, but it wasn’t the same for Silas. He’d lost his stomach for pet manufacture. When the position at the Olympic Commission became available, he’d jumped at it. If he was going to watch his successes die, he would know to expect it from the outset. No more surprises.

But this was a surprise.

But not my surprise. Not my baby this time.

Chandler was deranged. There was no doubting that. And this was his creation. Silas fought back a surge of begrudging admiration for the man. In all Silas’s years as a geneticist, he’d never even come close to developing a creature like the one that lay before him now.

He shoved the feelings to the side, letting the anger take its place. Chandler knew nothing about genetics. He knew nothing about life. All he knew was computers. And his computer had been the true creator, after all.

This perfect little life form that lay snoring on the other side of the bars had been created by an organized composite of wires, chips, and screens. Somehow, all this beauty, all this perfection, had come from a machine.

Ted Kosmatka is the author of the novel The Games, as well as numerous short stories and novelettes. His work has appeared in Lightspeed, F&SF, Asimov’s, the anthology Seeds of Change, and has been reprinted in eight best-of-the-year anthologies, serialized over the radio, and translated into Hebrew, Chinese, Romanian, Russian, Polish, and Czech. He is a winner of the Asimov's Readers' Choice Award and has been a finalist for the Nebula Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Ted worked for most of the last decade in laboratories in Indiana but now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest, where he writes video games for a living.

Interview: R. A. Salvatore
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

R.A. Salvatore is the author of dozens of fantasy novels, most of them connected to the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. He created perhaps the most popular character in the history of Dungeons & Dragons, a dark elf named Drizzt Do’Urden. Salvatore’s novel Homeland describes Drizzt growing up as the only child with a conscience in an underground city where society is based on selfishness and cruelty. His most recent novel featuring Drizzt, which is out now, is called Neverwinter.

This interview first appeared on The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which currently airs on Wired.com and 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.

Can tell us about the big snowstorm that turned you into a writer?

When I was very young—I’m talking kindergarten, first grade—I used to read everything I could get my hands on, and I would write all the time. I had this wonderful collection of first-edition Peanuts books—Charles Schulz’s Peanuts characters. I loved Snoopy. I used to write Snoopy books. Then something very strange happened. As I went through school, school beat the love of reading and writing right out of me. It got so bad that by the time I graduated high school, the only reading and writing I was doing was what I needed to do to get the grades, and I actually started college as a math/computer science major.

And then my freshman year—so, 1977—for Christmas my sister gave me a [book]. I was looking for money; I was nineteen years old, I had a car that broke down every day, I just wanted some cash, but she gave me some books, in this little white slipcase, and I was pretty upset about it. I’m like, “What am I going to do with books?” And I just threw them aside. Two months later—I remember it was a Monday night, so February of ‘78, I went to bed, and we were supposed to get a little bit of snow, so like anybody in school at any grade level I was hoping school would get cancelled so I could have a day off. And I woke up the next morning and I looked down—I had this beautiful Mediterranean Blue 1969 Mercury Cougar with a black vinyl roof—and I looked down at where my car was parked, and my car was gone, and I freaked out, I thought my car was stolen. I went running downstairs screaming, “Somebody stole my car!” And then I realized that black spot I had seen wasn’t the driveway—it was the roof of the car. We had the great Blizzard of ‘78. We didn’t have school that day. We didn’t have school that week. We didn’t have roads that week. You could not legally leave your house. If you went out of your house on a snow mobile, you would be arrested. They wanted nobody out, because they couldn’t open the roads.

So here I was, nineteen years old, and I’m trapped in my mother’s house. Oh joy. But I wasn’t trapped. I found those books my sister had given me, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and I went to this place called Middle Earth with this hobbit called Bilbo Baggins, and it was amazing! And I remembered, I remembered what it felt like to love reading. And I remembered what it used to be like when I’d be huddled under the blankets with my Peanuts books back in the second grade, or whatever. And I kept thinking while I was reading that book: Why didn’t someone give me this book to read when I was in junior high school, instead of reading Silas Marner or Ethan Frome or Moby Dick. Oh god, you know? Those books had no relevance to me. Why didn’t somebody give me this book? And it changed my life. I went back to school, I changed my major to Communications, because all of my electives became literature courses. And within a year I was reading Shakespeare, and reading Chaucer and laughing at all the right places, and appreciating James Joyce. I was ready for that type of literature then. I wasn’t in the eighth or the ninth grade. So I fell in love with fantasy. And it really changed my life. And when I ran out of fantasy books a few years later, I wrote my own.

Could you tell us about that book, and how you ended up submitting it to TSR, and what happened?

I wrote the book between the fall of ‘82 and the spring of ‘83. I was working in a plastics factory, and my job, all day long, was standing on this little metal bench next to this big metal table, loading lumps of scrap plastic into a grinder. That was my job, really cerebral. Every twenty minutes you had to remember to change the barrel or you’d get flakes of plastic all over the floor. And I was dying. I was doing that, and I was working as a bouncer at night, and my girlfriend at the time, she knew I loved fantasy, she knew I was out of books to read and was threatening to write one. My girlfriend—now my wife of many years—said to me, “Why don’t you just write that book?” So I went to work each day, and I’d be working there, I would drift off into to this world I was creating in my head, and I would be thinking about what I wanted to write . . . and I then usually got flakes of plastic all over the floor because I’d forget to change the barrel. Then I’d go to work at night in the nightclubs. I’d come home at either one or two in the morning, and you’re too jacked up after working as a bouncer for a bunch of hours to go right to sleep so I’d light some candles, I’d put on Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk album, take out a spiral notebook—remember this was 1982, we didn’t have computers, and I couldn’t type anyway—and I’d just write. And I wrote a book called Echoes of the Fourth Magic. And after I got it done I didn’t intend to publish it or anything. I just wanted to have something to hand to my kids someday, if I had kids, or maybe my grandkids, and let them know, this is your grandfather. I didn’t want to just be another number who worked all his life and then just quietly faded away and died, you know? I wanted something to leave behind.

But I showed the book to a few friends, and they were really loving it, and they said, “You should get this published.” So I hired my sister to type it—because again, I couldn’t type. They didn’t teach that when I was in high school, unless you were going into the business field, like going to be a secretary or something. They didn’t teach you how to type because there were no personal computers. It was a different world. So I hired my sister to type it. I sent it out, and I got a bunch of really horrible rejection letters. I remember one said, “Dear Leonard.” But anyway, when people tell me no, I’m the kind of person who will die proving you wrong. I don’t like to be told no. I don’t like to be told I can’t do something. So I stayed with it. I started a new career, I was working in finance. I got married, the kids came along, but I kept writing, I kept at it. And in 1987 I had the book to the point where I thought it was publishable, I thought it was ready to go. So I went back to the library, and got out the Writer’s Market, and looked at all the different houses that were publishing fantasy. One of them was TSR. They were doing the Dragonlance novels at the time, the very successful Dragonlance novels. So I sent the book out to all these different houses, went to work, and went on my merry way. A couple of months later—that was in January of ‘87—a couple of months later I came home from work, and my wife said, “You got a phone call today from an editor at TSR.” And, you know, after the rejection letters, I’m like, “I got a phone call? An editor actually called?” And she said, “Yeah.” And so I thought about it for a minute, and I said, “Did he ask for Leonard?” And she said, “No, no, no. Her name is Mary Kirchoff, and she called from TSR. Call her back.” And that’s what led me in. Now Mary had read Echoes of the Fourth Magic. She couldn’t publish it, because they only had room for this new world they were creating, The Forgotten Realms, and Echoes would not adapt to that, but asked me to audition for the second Forgotten Realms novel, and I did, and that was The Crystal Shard.

So when you started writing the books about Drizzt, how much of the background about dark elf society already existed, and how much did you have to invent yourself?

I finished the Icewind Dale Trilogy, and we were going to go on to something completely different, but by that point TSR was getting tons of fan mail saying they wanted more about where this guy came from. So I got the call from Mary, and she said, “You know, instead of going off in a different direction, how about you do a prequel trilogy telling us where Drizzt came from?” So I went to work on coming up with the ideas for Homeland—for the Dark Elf Trilogy—and I had the old modules that followed the Giants series—Descent to the Depths of the Earth, Vault of the Drow, and Queen of the Demon Web Pits. And there were some references to drow in there, the snake-headed whips were in there, the matriarchal society was in there, but it really didn’t define them. It was just enough information for you to run a dungeon and torture your players with dark elves. And then I also had the Fiend Folio, which had a one-page entry on how to play drow—which had just come out the year before, I think.

And so I called back, and I said, “Okay, I’ve got these modules, I’ve got the Fiend Folio, that’s all the information I’ve got on drow. What else you got?” And they said, “Nothing.” I said, “What do you mean ‘nothing’?” They said, “That’s it.” I said, “Well, what do you want me to do?” They said, “You’ve got carte blanche. We want you to create the drow society in the Forgotten Realms, in this place you named Menzoberranzan, that you have no idea what it is.” And I said, “Okay, that’s cool, I guess.” And so I went away, and I’m trying to figure out how to come up with a society that could work, because societies have to work, there has to be a logical consistency to them that makes sense, so you can’t just have this group of like—you know, these wild and crazy dark elves who are murdering each other willy-nilly. That wouldn’t be a society, that would be a mass grave with one drow standing. So I had to come up with a society that would work. I went to the library, and I pulled out one of my favorite books of all time, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, and that’s where I came up with the super-structure, if you will, of Menzoberranzan, from the Five Families of New York.

One aspect of the dark elf society that I’ve always thought was really cool is when the Houses go to war against each other, they’ll be charged with a crime unless they can totally wipe out the House that they’re attacking. How did you come up with that idea?

Well, I kind of took The Godfather and put it in extreme mode, you know? They relish power, they crave power—the only reason for the dark elves to have a system of justice to exact punishment, since they’re all a bunch of murderers and thieves anyway, is if someone else can bring a complaint against them. Their entire justice system is a mockery. If it’s not based on the priestesses and what Lolth says, then it goes, unless someone is wronged and can prove it. So, if you kill all the rest of them, nobody can bring the complaint. If nobody can bring the complaint, it never happened. Just made sense to me.

A lot of people read books like Homeland when they were in middle school, and it’s easy to see a lot of parallels between middle school and Menzoberranzan, just in terms of being this entire culture based on cruelty. Is that something you were thinking of when you were writing the book, and is that something that kids have mentioned to you?

Oh, I get so many letters, and I meet so many kids—or, now, adults—who would tell me that they had no friends when they were in junior high or high school, and these books became their friends, and that’s why they could empathize so much with Drizzt, because he’s the classic outcast hero. And yeah, I think, looking back on it, it wasn’t a conscious thing, but—you know, when I was in junior high school, I had been one of the better athletes. When we had our neighborhood football games, I was always the quarterback, I was always the pitcher when we played baseball. But I didn’t grow. Everybody else did. And so by the time I got to ninth grade, I was like the smallest kid in my class, and I had this strange hereditary knee issue where something grew too fast in my knee and was causing incredible pain, so I was pretty much crippled. I was walking around with a cane half the time. And I was the smallest kid in the class. And I was brutalized. It was like so many kids go through, you know? I was the outcast. I had no confidence. Even though I was one of the better students—I mean, I was always one of the top students in my class, but that didn’t buy you any friends in school in 1970s America. Probably still doesn’t.

And the thing I had always fallen back on was my ability to play sports, and I couldn’t even do that anymore, and all these other kids were growing up and going through puberty, and here I was, like a little kid with a high voice, four-foot-eleven—or four-foot-nine, actually—and, you know, like a hundred and thirty pounds in the ninth grade, and I was brutalized quite a bit. Junior high ended in ninth grade, and high school started in the tenth grade, but because we were so crowded in my town, tenth grade was an afternoon session, so the only class up there would be the tenth grade class when I went to school the following year, and I remember over the summer I was terrified that I was going back to that, I was going to have to put up with it, and there weren’t going to be seniors around to protect me or anything. But over that summer I grew about eight inches and put on about forty-five pounds, started weight-lifting, started boxing, and stopped taking crap from anybody. I think that’s one of the reasons I became a bouncer, because most of the people you wind up having trouble with when you’re a bouncer are bullies, and I love nothing more than paying back bullies, if you know what I mean.

So, yeah, I mean, I’ve been there. I’ve been there, and I’ve felt it. And I’m always the person who roots for the underdog. I don’t understand cruelty. I don’t like it at all. I remember the only fight I got in at college, outside of work, I was leaving a basketball game once, and there was this cat on the sidewalk crying, and there were a bunch of guys just kicking it around. And I slid my car up next to them, threw open the door, and threw the cat in the car. And the guys started giving me some grief, and I jumped out of the car, and there were like ten of them, and I just looked at the biggest kid standing there, and I just busted his face wide open. And it was like, “Come on, there’s nine of you left, who’s first?” I was so enraged that any person could do that to a defenseless little animal, I didn’t care that I was about to die. But that’s who I am. And so when I hear that from kids—or from adults now who got through it—it just warms me. I don’t get how we allow that kind of insanity in middle school—particularly middle school, I think. I don’t get how we allow that kind of brutality. It’s ridiculous. So yeah, I guess it’s in there. You’re bringing a lot out of me. You’re bringing back bad memories, dude. Knock it off, change the subject. [Laughs]

In your volume of collected stories that came out last year, in your introduction to your story “Dark Mirror,” you talk a bit about racism in fantasy. What do you think about the way Dungeons & Dragons handles race, even just in terms of the “good” light-skinned elves versus the “evil” dark-skinned ones?

Well, I think one of the reasons why [drow elves] used to be called “black elves,” and then they stopped calling them black elves was because, you know, it hit kind of close to home in terms of racism that we see. And, you know, I’ve always noticed this paradox. I wrote “Dark Mirror” because I was confused about the paradox where—you know, racism is bad, we know that inherently. I mean, enlightened people could care less where someone’s born, the color of his or her skin, or anything like that, and yet in fantasy that’s embraced. Now, they’re different species, it’s not like orcs are just some other brand of human, right? So you can get away with that, but that’s always been the paradox that I’ve had to deal with right from the beginning of writing a dark elf who’s not a bad guy, right? And hinting that there might be other dark elves who aren’t bad guys, right? I mean, that gets difficult. And so I wrote that story to try to sort that out, and you notice at the end of the story that Drizzt is very confused? Yeah, that was me. I was still very confused about it because in fantasy, you embody evil in a race, and then you disembody it with your sword, and that’s also what mankind has done through the centuries, right? By dehumanizing the enemy so you don’t feel bad about killing them. But that’s just blatantly immoral when you get right down to it, and yet I love fantasy. So that’s the paradox I had to deal with.

When I’m writing my books, I’m not trying to give people the answers, I’m trying to get them to ask the questions. And judging from the response I’ve gotten to Drizzt in particular regarding racism, I think a lot of people are asking themselves good questions . . . and coming up with good answers.

So why don’t you tell us a little bit about the new book, Neverwinter.

Well, what’s basically happened is the Forgotten Realms has advanced a hundred years, and so being a Forgotten Realms writer, it was incumbent upon me to advance with it. And in doing so, a lot of the people around Drizzt weren’t going to make the journey with him over a hundred years, for one reason or another. And for most of his adult life—most of his life I’ve been writing about him, other than the book Homeland, where he came from—he’s been surrounded by friends of similar moral character, who would take an arrow for him just like he’d take an arrow for them. And now I’ve wiped the slate clean. I’ve left him in a very vulnerable place. He’s a bit confused, he’s disappointed, he’s just angry at the world for the unfairness of it all—that just when he thought he was finding peace, it all got upended. And so he’s very vulnerable, and now he meets up with a couple of folks—one in particular in Gauntlgrym who he finds attractive, intriguing, mysterious. And she’s a dirt bag. And we’ve all seen this with friends, either with friends who’ve fallen in with the wrong crowd in high school, or loved ones who fall in love with someone and you know this person’s really bad for them. And the question becomes, is Drizzt now—as he’s surrounded himself now with people whose moral compass points in a slightly different direction—are they going to drag him down into the gutter, or is he going to lift them up to his level? And I don’t know the answer to that.

You’ve also been working with 38 Studios. Could you tell us about that?

So five years ago I’m sitting at home and the phone rings, and I pick it up and the guy says, “Hey, can I talk to Bob Salvatore?” I said, “Speaking.” And he goes, “Ah man, I can’t believe I’m talking to you, you’re my favorite author, this is Curt Schilling.” I’m a Red Soxs fan, and this is “Bloody Sock Guy” calling me? So I didn’t believe him, and I swore at him and thought it was a prank, but then it really was him, and we spent about twenty minutes saying, “I can’t believe I’m talking to you.” And Curt told me he was getting ready to retire, and didn’t want to go sell used cars or insurance, and he wanted to do what he loved, and that was video games, so he’s starting a video game company, and he wanted me to come in and create the world of Amalur. Well, he didn’t call it that. He wanted me to create the world for his MMO video game, his World of Warcraft/Everquest-type game that he wanted to build.

And so I joined up with 38 Studios, at the very beginning. We found the place to put the offices, we started stealing really talented people from all the video game companies around the world, and we started building this MMO, and I created this world of Amalur, with the help of my old gaming group, and my wife and a friend of hers, we all got together and they were doing research for me as I built this ten-thousand-year skeletal history for this world. And I wanted to do really deep threads because I knew that all these artists and designers were going to be painting on this canvas we were creating. And the deeper the history, the more consistent and logical the history, the easier it was going to be for them to come in and do something that would stay consistent, so that the player could be immersed in the world. This was going on for a couple of years, and we ended up buying this company called Big Huge Games from Baltimore, this studio that was developing an RPG engine. And so we said, “Hey, you know, this world, this IP, will lend itself to our RPG.” And so we put our intellectual property, our IP, on their engine that they were building, and they came up with a game called Reckoning. And Reckoning comes out February of next year, and it’s a single-player role-playing game for the Xbox, the PS3, and the PC. It’s got killer combat. You’ll be on the edge of your seat during combat, which is something you haven’t seen in an RPG before. It’s got a great story. It’s an open-world RPG. The lead designer was Ken Rolston, the guy who did Morrowind and Oblivion. The art was directed by Todd McFarlane, the other guy that came in with me to join Curt in the studio. Just an amazing team. And I haven’t been able to talk about it for five years, because we went dark. We want the games to speak for themselves, so I can’t really say much, and I can’t wait until after this game comes out, because then I can blab all about it. I just think it’s going to raise the bar on the RPG genre in computer gaming.

And finally, are there any other new or upcoming projects you’d like to talk about?

The only other thing I’m working on—I’m almost done the Drizzt book for next year. I know what I want to title it, but I can’t say it because I’m sure that Wizards of the Coast will overrule me. So I’m almost done with that book, and I’m also working on the end of a five-book comic series for IDW, which is New Adventures of Drizzt, which I’m writing with my son Geno. So that’s been pretty cool. Geno and I did a trilogy together as well, a couple of years ago, for the Forgotten Realms—three Drizzt books called The Stone of Tymora. And now we got back together again and did a five-book comic series. So I’ve been keeping busy.

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 publisher and 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. He is a two-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a three-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include: Armored (Baen, April), Epic (Tachyon, Fall), and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (Tor Books, 2013). 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.

Interview: Ian McDonald
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Ian McDonald is the author of the 2011 Hugo Award-finalist The Dervish House and many other novels, including Hugo Award-nominees River of Gods and Brasyl, and the Philip K. Dick Award-winner King of Morning, Queen of Day. He won a Hugo in 2006 for his novelette, “The Djinn’s Wife,” and has won the Locus Award and four British Science Fiction Awards. His short fiction, much of which was recently collected in Cyberabad Days, has appeared in magazines such as Interzone and Asimov’s and in numerous anthologies. His most recent book, Planesrunner, is the first in a series of young adult adventures.

This interview first appeared in The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which currently airs on Wired.com and 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.

In recent years you’ve been writing these science fiction books set in countries like India, Turkey, and Brazil. How did you come to write those books, and what were some of your goals for them?

I’ve been interested in fiction in the developing world for quite some time. I live just outside Belfast, in Northern Ireland. It’s one of those places that’s kind of on the periphery of things. In many ways, it’s one of the least science fictional places in the world to grow up in. In another sense, it’s the perfect preparation for life in the twenty-first century—living through thirty years of civil, religious, and political violence is fairly good prep for the way I feel the twenty-first century is going to go. But it’s never really a terribly science fictional place. So in a sense, to write science fiction I’m always having to look somewhere outside my own country. I’ve written science fiction set in Northern Ireland, but I’ve found myself very much looking outside the country, and so if everywhere’s foreign, you might as well go somewhere interesting. I mean, the United States is as foreign to me as India or Turkey or Brazil is—we just speak a common language, and even that’s fairly tenuous. So that sense of not being at the center of things, of being very much on the periphery, it made me look for interesting places where the future is happening as well.

I started globalizing way back in the 1990s, with what’s known as the Chaga Saga—Evolution’s Shore, and Kirinya, and “Tendeleo’s Story,” the novella, which were all set in East Africa. And that got me thinking of other places where the future’s arriving that isn’t necessarily the West, and doesn’t subscribe to Western thinking or values. That got me thinking in a kind of—I was going to say a flash of revelation, but it was actually over a long boozy lunch with champagne, as you do, with my former editor John Jarrold, and we got talking about novels about India, because it’s the place for the great social novel. In a sense, a big fat social novel is a fantastic way to explore a science fictional future—you’re writing about an entire world, not just some technological change, but you’re writing about how that change works through an entire society at every level, from top to bottom. And we got talking about the great novels about India—A Suitable Boy, The God of Small Things, Midnight’s Children, all the big novels about India—and it kind of came to us that nobody had done the big science fiction novel set in India.

I tend to get the feeling that when Americans think about Asia, it’s always China/Korea/Japan, whereas on our side of the Atlantic we think of Asia, we think of South Asia—India/Pakistan/Bangladesh. And so in a sense it had never seemed to have really appeared on American science fiction radar, so I saw a gap in the market, which I fully exploited. And that got me thinking about other places, and other interesting burgeoning economies that are going to be major players in the coming century, and Brazil was interesting, and Turkey was interesting, because it’s the complete flip-side of colonialism. We tend to think it’s a white man’s thing, colonialism. Well, no it’s not. The Turks ran the Ottoman Empire for eight hundred years, and they have their own painful and complex—and ongoing—decolonization program, as much as the British Empire did. And that seemed to be an interesting kind of flip-side to a lot of the fairly obvious, glib stuff that’s being done at the moment—to actually move it to another colonial power, Turkey. And that’s quite a long answer, and I haven’t really touched on the science fictional themes yet.

Could you talk about some of those science fictional themes that you brought to some of those countries?

Yeah, so for River of Gods, it was artificial intelligence. I’d been reading quite a bit about AI. The way we seem to think about AI is, it’s going to be like us, it’s a little homunculus, a little miniature human being—a brain in a box—and it will think the way we think, and it will think the things we think—and this didn’t seem terribly convincing to me, because everything that makes us human is a response to the environment we live in, the social environment, the physical environment. Our intelligence has evolved in response to a fairly specific set of criteria and constraints. A disembodied brain in a box has none of those physical constraints. In a sense, it would be a copy of an intelligence rather than an intelligence in its own right. That started me thinking about, well, what are the differences between the way an artificial intelligence might work and a human intelligence might work? What are the different constraints, the different evolutionary factors? At the moment such computer intelligence as we have can only move if it’s carried around by human beings, in the form of a laptop, or if it copies itself to another platform, and then it can make endless copies of itself, whereas our intelligence is trapped in one place for one time, and the information degrades with time.

The more I got into this—I’d been thinking about India for quite some time—the more it seemed to in some ways reflect Hindu thinking, and the entire Hindu pantheon of small gods that build up into bigger gods that build up into even bigger gods, and then you come to the big three—the Trimurti, the Hindu Trinity—at the top, and likewise, how that cascades down as well. And that rather pleased me aesthetically, that I had a nice non-Western model for how artificial intelligence might work, that huge artificial intelligence might be composed of thousands of smaller sub ones, none of which were totally conscious that they were part of a bigger consciousness. And I wanted to draw a portrait of a society—rather than just do the classic science fiction way of exploring one idea, one novum—and play it out through different characters’ lives. I wanted to go widescreen, and top to bottom, and write that big Indian social model of the future.

For Brazil, I looked at quantum computing, and the many worlds theory—which I’ve come back to in the kid’s book. And then in Turkey, I wanted to think about nanotechnology, and the kind of nanotechnology we’re likely to get, rather than magical assemblers or Fabi replicators or things like that. While I was researching things that scale down and things that scale up, I came across an exhibition in the British Museum in London of religious writing, and they have this Sephardic Jewish “micrography,” it’s called—which is a big letter, a big Hebrew letter, and the body of the letter, that one letter, is made up of lots of smaller letters, and then the bodies of those smaller letters are made up from smaller letters yet, so it’s letters and writing all the way down. And that struck me as an interesting way to think about nanotechnology—to give it a slightly Turkish perspective, a Central Asian/Middle Eastern perspective on things, to think of it in terms of the big composed of the small, and the small building into the big.

So what kind of response have you gotten from readers in Turkey and India and Brazil?

Pretty good. If I get grumbles, they’re usually from Westerners. I mean, I’ve seen several nice reviews from India that say, “Not bad for a gora,” which is a foreigner or a white guy, and that I take as praise indeed, actually. Brazil I found much harder to get an angle on. I’m not sure it’s quite as successful. The simple reason is it’s much, much easier in many ways—more interesting—to write about quite a conservative society than to write about quite a free-going and liberal society. In conservative society, your characters have much more to work against and play against, and it’s actually much easier and much more fun to write. Now, the book’s sold in Turkey. I haven’t seen an edition of it yet, but we shall see. I think I managed to vaguely insult Ataturk, possibly, which is kind of one of the “sins against the Holy Spirit.” I haven’t had too much feedback on that yet.

You’ve spent most of your life living in Belfast. How has that environment shaped your outlook and your writing?

I think as I said earlier, it is a perfect preparation for life in the twenty-first century. We’re becoming one big Belfast out there. We’ve had our bags searched on planes, and intrusive body searches and frisking, we’ve had that for about thirty years, so we’re all well used to it. In fact, you used to get searched going into shops, a quick pat down as you went in, just to make sure you weren’t carrying incendiaries or anything bigger. You got so used to it that whenever you went to London, you’d go into a shop, and for a moment you think “oops,” and then catch yourself about to stand to be frisked by somebody, and then realize that people don’t do that here.

In the early days, when there were no-warning car bombs, it was scary. Everyone was a target then. There was an event called “Bloody Friday”—I think we’ve possibly had every bloody day of the bloody week now in Northern Ireland, as in “Bloody Sunday”—but there was a Bloody Friday, where the provisional IRA left a series of car bombs in a ring around central Belfast. My ex-wife and her mother were shopping in Belfast when the bombs went off, one after another, and they didn’t know where to go, because you didn’t know where the next bomb was going off, and she said it was one of the most terrifying things in her life. There were thousands of people trapped in the center of Belfast trying to get out, but not knowing when the next bomb would go off. The IRA fairly quickly wised up after that, because randomly terror-bombing civilians does not win hearts and minds, and certainly didn’t impress the funding bodies in the United States as well. I’ve said this before, and I’ve been questioned on it by a few people, but I firmly stand by it, that Northern Ireland is a great post-colonial issue. Ireland was Britain’s first—and probably last—colony, and certainly the end game of empire is being played out there.

Do you see that coming through in your writing in any way?

It skews the way I look at things. I’m interested in societies with internal conflict, like Northern Ireland. I’m interested in political/social/religious divides. Where you have two different societies, two different religions running up against each other, two different belief systems, you have tension, and where you have tension you have drama, and where you have drama you have a story. So I’m naturally drawn to the chaotic, let’s say.

On Wikipedia it says that you sold your first story to a local Belfast Magazine when you were twenty-two. What was the story, and what was the magazine?

The magazine was called Extro. It was a very glossy, very shiny local science fiction magazine run by a guy called Paul Campbell. And the story was called “The Island of the Dead.” It actually appears in my first-ever collection, Empire Dreams, which is going way, way back to about 1988 that came out. It was the first story I ever wrote. I sold it to him, and he paid me in cash in a bar in Belfast and shook my hand—if only all business was done like that—and I went out and bought a guitar with the money, which is the kind of thing you do at twenty-two.

Is there an active science fiction scene in Belfast?

We do have the biggest genre media event on the planet going on at the moment. They’re filming Game of Thrones in Northern Ireland. It’s just down the road from us in the old Paint Hall Studio, down at the Belfast docks. It’s right beside the dock where they built the Titanic, actually. It’s called the Paint Hall because they used to paint bits of ships in it, and a lot of the interior sets are all done in the Paint Hall. A lot of the exteriors are out and about around Northern Ireland. It’s quite fun playing spot the location, actually. Virtually everyone I know has been an extra in Game of Thrones as well.

Speaking of TV shows, could you tell us about how you worked on Sesame Street?

I was part of a production company, and the company I was with—it was kind of a new-start television production company—wanted to get into children’s television. A tender came in from Sesame Workshop. They wanted to do Sesame Street in Northern Ireland. Now, people usually fall about laughing when I say this, but it’s absolutely true. They’ve done productions of Sesame Street all over the world—I think there are 138 nations—to any place they feel needs a bit of the Sesame message. So it’s paternalism, but it’s paternalism with nice puppets. And of course you want to work with Sesame Workshop. So we devised a pitch, and we got the gig, and we got to design our own muppets, and we had them built with the Jim Henson Creature Workshop.

And there’s that thrilling moment you get when you go into the office, and there’s a big black box, about three-foot square, sitting in the middle of the floor, and you snap off the bands, take the lid off, and inside, under all the bubble wrap, there is your muppet. And of course the first thing you do is you have to put your hands on the thing and run around the office muppeting away at everyone. But the thing they don’t tell you, actually, is that after you’ve done a series of fairly intense, high-energy muppeteering, the inside of a muppet smells simply unbelievable. It’s like some evil mutant crab has crawled up inside it, covered itself in yoghurt, and then died and left itself to rot. That’s kind of what it smells like. It’s like a combination of really bad athlete’s foot and B.O. all together, just pure locker room. That is what the inside of a muppet smells like. So the next time you see Elmo pop up, just think what he must smell like inside, actually it must be really foul.

So your new book is a YA novel called Planesrunner. Can you tell us what that’s about?

Our hero Everett Singh’s dad gets kidnapped on the streets of London five days before Christmas, but he’s left Everett a little fail-safe device, which is an app on his iPad. He clicks it open, and out of it unfolds the “Infundibulum,” which is what Everett’s dad’s been working on as a quantum physicist exploring the many-worlds theory—always a hint in the character name. What he has discovered is the map of all the possible parallel universes. So far, only ten universes have got in contact with each other, using a device called a Heisenberg gate, more or less by hit and miss, but to have the map that allows you to travel anywhere, or open a gateway anywhere, in any of the billions and billions of possible parallel universes, is a pearl beyond price, and is the reason Everett’s dad had been kidnapped by the bad guys who want this information. So Everett, of course, goes on the run across parallel universes to try and get his dad back, and in the process he jumps to Earth Three, which is an earth that never had any oil. They had coal, and they discovered electricity late in the eighteenth century, so they had electricity and rudimentary electronics early in the nineteenth century, and he falls in with an airship crew—because it’s parallel worlds, you have to have airships—and adventure ensues.

How did you settle on the term “Infundibulum” for the world-traveling device?

It’s Kurt Vonnegut, isn’t it? The chronosynclastic infundibulum. It also gets a mention in John Crowley’s Little Big, where the structure of the world is “infundibular”—the further in you go, the bigger it gets. Technically, classically, infindubular means funnel-shaped, and I think I and John Crowley probably use it in the opposite sense to Kurt Vonnegut, in that the way we take it is, you start at the spout end and the further in you go, the bigger it gets, and it unfolds into many, many worlds. But certainly I like a good mouth-filling word.

You mentioned that a lot of the book takes place in this parallel London where oil was never used. Could you talk about how you got that idea, and how plausible you think that parallel world is?

I read a thing in New Scientist a couple of years back, and it was kind of “what-ifs in science,” and it was fascinating. There was the usual stuff, you know, Babbage and the calculating engine and all that—that’s okay. But there’s a fascinating one that . . . I think it was Cavendish, possibly—I’m terrible with names, I never remember names—but it might have been Cavendish, the English scientist, almost discovered the electric motor in the 1780s. If he’d done something different, he would have discovered the electric motor, and therefore also the electric generator. And instead of the dark satanic mills of the nineteenth century, it would all have run on electricity, and I find the idea of an electrically powered eighteenth century very, very cool indeed. So I thought, well, why not just take away the oil, so you don’t have any internal combustion engines. I wanted to have airships as well, because you have to have airships—parallel worlds, you have to have airships. I was trying to think, what’s a feasible world that would have airships? Well, one that didn’t have jet engines. Why wouldn’t they have jet engines? Because they don’t have any liquid fuel. Why don’t they have liquid fuel? Because they don’t have oil. And then, couple that with the whole idea of them discovering electrical power in the 1700s, and I suddenly had a world I really, really liked. And then extrapolating that into a present, you know, a 2011—in Earth 3, which is what this parallel world is—that seems convincing. There is another parallel world, Earth 2, which I refer to, which I’ll be coming back to later in the series, which is alternate geography, which is where Britain—not Ireland, Ireland’s fine—where Britain is an island lying just off the coast of Spain and Morocco. “Alberac,” it’s known as—a play on “Albion.” So it’s this very cool, high-tech Moorish London. I’m actually coming back to that because I like it a lot. It’s an extremely cool universe. I’ve got several others as well, but I can’t mention them, because it’s giving the game away! But there will be some very, very cool stuff indeed.

The book features a lot of invented slang. How did you go about inventing those words, and what are some of your favorites that you made up?

I didn’t invent it. I stole it wholesale. I’m a big fan of Polari. Polari is an old London secret gay language. Homosexuality was illegal until—I have a feeling it was the late sixties, early seventies, somebody can correct me on this—but it was fairly late in the day, and so to be gay was very, very much underground. People were prosecuted and sent to jail. Reputations were ruined. And like any underground culture, they invented their own language, and it wasn’t so much invented, it was borrowed—it was stolen as well, an honest bit of thievery. It was stolen from older subculture languages like Thieves’ Cant, bits of rhyming slang, bits of back slang—where you say a word backwards—bits of Romani, bits of Lingua Franca—which was the old Mediterranean trading language—bits of Fairground Cant as well, and it became Polari. It was pretty well known in England, actually, and it’s given lots and lots of words to contemporary English, like the word “naff,” meaning bad or trashy—you know, “That’s like a really naff hat”—is originally a Polari word.

And I’d been looking around for a slang. I didn’t want to use anything that was contemporary, because it’s going to sound rubbish in about three month’s time. And I didn’t want to make something up either, because it wouldn’t have the feel of a used language. I’d be making up words for the wrong things, or things just wouldn’t sit right or be used right, and then I remembered Polari, and thought, “Why not?” Why not have these guys use the old secret gay language, in a parallel universe? And I transposed it from Polari to “Palari,” which is a variant spelling of it, added a couple of new words from original Romani roots, and hey, presto, had a proper London subculture secret language. And if I can do my little bit to keep Polari alive in some form or another, I’d be very happy to do that.

Tarot cards feature prominently on the cover of the book, except they’re not the Tarot cards we’re familiar with. How did you go about developing your alternate Tarot deck?

Yeah, William Blake is the answer. I’m a huge fan of William Blake, as all right-thinking people should be, and there’s some fabulous artwork he did. It’s a series of small plates, each of them looks like a Tarot card, and each of them is absolutely unforgettable as soon as you see them. They’ve been copied umpteen times, and they’ve actually made their way into some people’s Tarot decks, and other fortune decks, role-playing decks. The most famous one is of a hand reaching out of a stormy sea, with the words “Help! Help!” written under it. Once you see that you never, ever forget that. And that got me thinking about building your own Tarot deck that’s specific to your own life and your own people, and the places you are, and the people that surround you.

You mentioned that the hero of the book, Everett Singh, is named after Hugh Everett, who created the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I read an article recently saying that Hugh Everett actually believed that the many-worlds interpretation implied immortality for everyone. I was just wondering if you’d ever heard of that, or if you had any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I’ve done a story on that. It’s the quantum immortality paradox, isn’t it, where you stand in a room facing a gun triggered by a quantum event, and the quantum event happens, the gun either fires or it doesn’t. If I remember rightly, because you can’t perceive your own death, therefore you must always remain in that universe where the gun doesn’t fire, and therefore, because you can’t perceive your own death, you must always end up in the universe that’s most favorable to you, the universe where you never die. So, no bad accident will ever happen to you, no fatal disease will ever happen to you, because you must always be in the universe where you never die. Eventually, you will get to the point where they will invent immortality for you, and you will continue living on, as well. The problem with that for me, appealing as it seems, is that it banishes everyone. It’s like the complete solipsistic masturbation fantasy, and everyone ends up in their own private universe that works just for them, that’s only perfect for them, and in a sense no one else and nothing else is real, they’re all just quantum echoes of other quantum states.

You said you wrote a story using that idea?

Yeah, it was in Pete Crowther’s Postscripts. It was my one and only Brasyl spinoff story. “A Ghost Samba,” it was called. It’s about a guy who goes in search of an unfinished album by a musician who died, and I play around with that quantum immortality idea.

And finally, do you want to talk about what you’re working on now, what you have coming up?

Yeah, Everness Book 2 is delivered. Lou is reading it. John Picacio is working on the cover. Not sure when we’ll have it scheduled for, but it’ll be sometime this year, because we want to get them whacked out, bam bam bam. I’ve got book three in the series planned. It’s going to be fun. And I’m re-working an outline and sample chapters for the next grown-up novel, Hopeland. Every ten years it’s time to reinvent myself as a writer, hence the YA series—the younger reader series, I hate the expression “YA.” And I also thought it was time to kill off what I call the New World Order series, you know, River of Gods, Brasyl, The Dervish House. It’s time to move on from that, and try something new. It’ll still be near-future. I’ve always set stuff in the near-future, but it’s been getting ever-closer to the present. 2047, River of Gods. 2042 for Brasyl. 2027 for The Dervish House. And this one starts so near-future it’s actually last August, during the Tottenham riots. So ever closer to the now.

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 publisher and 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. He is a two-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a three-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include: Armored (Baen, April), Epic (Tachyon, Fall), and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (Tor, 2013). 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
Ed Basa

Artist Spotlight: Ed Basa
J. T. Glover

Ed Basa (sekido54.deviantart.com) is an artist specializing in science fictional scenes featuring the mechanical, whether attack ships or powered armor. His influences range from Macross to Monet, and he brings a strong industrial flavor to the worlds that he imagines. Across the board, his paintings have a sense of movement—whether a moment snatched from the middle of a space battle or the calm immediately before some critical action. He lives and makes his art in Japan.

“Descent” is an energetic painting, with clear, strong action. Does that energy come from the design stage, choice of thumbnails, or something further down the line?

I think it comes from the rough sketches I start from. There has to be some kind of action and power involved before I start developing artwork similar to “Descent.”

What were some of the challenges that “Descent” presented while you were working on it?

There were several challenges, such as choosing the right color to fit the mood, how many troopers to put in, and how much detail was needed. The most difficult challenge, however, was trying to get the perspective right.

What are the biggest rewards for you in painting images of the future?

I think it’s when viewers wish they could own a ship, mech, or vehicle that I’ve created in a particular artwork.

Who are some of your favorite artists, and how have they influenced your work?

There are so many artist who have influenced me, but to narrow them to just three, they would have to be Ralph McQuarrie (Star Wars), Syd Mead (Tron, Aliens, Blade Runner), and Shoji Kawamori (Macross). In most of my artwork, I tend to use a very industrial, gritty, and weathered style.

When did you first try your hand at science fiction art? What led you to want to create your own images?

That would have to be when I first started watching Robotech/Macross in the early 1980’s. I was in middle school, and I was completely blown away by the designs. Although I had started drawing at a much earlier age, drawing mostly planes and cars, the Robotech/Macross series opened my eyes, and it inspired me to come up with my own designs.

How do you see SF in Japan as differing from U.S. or worldwide science fiction? More dystopian? Fewer steam-driven robots?

I think the effort and imagination put into SF in Japan seems a little more advanced than in worldwide sci-fi. After going to a few robot, motorcycle, and anime exhibitions, you’ll understand why.

What advice would you give to yourself, five years ago, based on what you’ve learned about painting in that time?

You should keep learning new techniques and never be satisfied. Not only learn from contemporary artists, but learn from famous artists of long ago. Personally, I enjoy Impressionist artwork, especially the works of Monet.

Can you describe your normal workday?

For most of the day, I teach English at a junior high school. However, I spend my nights watching movies, reading magazines, and working on my artwork.

What’s your dream illustration assignment?

I think my dream illustration assignment is to be asked to work on the vehicles for the next Avatar movie. I wouldn’t mind spending sleepless nights trying to come up with exciting designs that would end up on the silver screen. That would be awesome!

What projects are you working on right now?

Right now I’m on a break, but I have some rough sketches I’m looking through.

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.

The Day They Came
Kali Wallace

You remember the day they came.

The shady corner behind the store smelled of Lou’s cigarettes and the dumpster down the alley, just shy of pick-up day and overflowing already. You chewed your sandwich and stared at the weeds growing through the asphalt. The day was stifled by summer heat and suffocating humidity, too bright and too hazy all at once.

A shadow passed overhead. You looked up.

You remember the day they came because it was the day your father died. He died in the early morning, just after two, twenty miles away. The nurse who called spared you the details, but you know his lungs were filled with fluid and his eyes were milky white, the blood in his veins slow and thin. The nurse’s name was Jenny. Her call woke you from a dream about worms the size of back-road culverts chewing through the land and churning under the fields, houses and cottonwoods toppling like dominoes in their wake.

Your father has been dying for days, months, years. He has been dying for as long as you can remember. His wheezing cough and sluggish hands, the tired slouch of his body on the sofa, these are the parts of him that fill your memories.

Solemn and sympathetic, Jenny said, “Your father has passed. I’m so sorry.”

There is only one funeral parlor in town. You haven’t seen it but you know it is empty and dark now, like everything else. There are seven graveyards, but your father does not lie in one of them. You had planned to cremate his remains. There was so little left of him, only a bag of skin and bones and broken-down parts, coarse white hair like individual threads pierced through his scalp and drawn out long and slow, a half-finished doll of shabby fabric.

You told the doctors you could not care for him at home anymore.

The hospital is well outside your five-mile radius.

You remember the day they came because you tried to go back to sleep after the nurse called. You lay in bed and thought about getting up, thought about making coffee and thought about turning on the television. You thought about your father, dying alone in a hospital bed, and you thought about the nurses on night duty hearing the frantic trill of his heart monitor. You thought about it so long that when you finally shuffled into the living room and grabbed the remote, the infomercials were surrendering to the earliest morning news. Asian markets closing, European markets opening, the tailored suits and shiny hair of people far away, they were all reduced to numbers scrolling along the bottom of the screen and calm news desk reports interspersed with shaky camera clips of war and poverty. They were images of places you have never been, roadsides you have never seen. It didn’t occur to you that you never would.

You’ve lost your chance now. They do not allow travel.

Your five-mile radius encompasses fields and farms. Your five-mile radius includes the chicken plant on Highway 9, now silent but just as pungent as ever, and the new high school the county built even when the voters went against it. Your five-mile radius includes two creeks, but there is something wrong with the water. The grass on the banks is dying, leaves are falling from the nearest trees, and slimy moss the color of fresh-cut grass grows where none grew before. While waiting in line for food at the high school, the local kids whisper about small, squirmy water snakes of an unknown species wriggling under the rocks when anybody approaches. The children dare each other to splash in and make a catch, but none have succeeded.

You remember the day they came because your coffee was too strong and your toast was burnt and you went to work like it was any other day. Your car coughed and grumbled when you started it, but once it was moving forward the noises stopped. The problem wasn’t enough to warrant a trip to the garage, you thought, not until payday. You drove along familiar roads beneath a sky mottled with dull, flat clouds, the leftovers of yesterday’s rain. On the radio the DJ promised another storm before nighttime. You sighed at the news then felt guilty; all around the county lakes were shallow, reservoirs dry, blades of grass sharp and crackling with thirst.

You remember the road looked gray rather than black, the summer wheat leeched of color, the fences no more than ink-sketched lines around the fields. You remember a moment of confusion: You couldn’t find the sun, couldn’t remember which way was east. You stopped at the intersection of South Marshall and Judge Taylor Road. There is a stop sign on the corner, pockmarked with bullet holes, leaning away from a decade of wind. The moment passed, and you drove on.

You remember the day they came because you were late for work for the first time in five years. The store was already open and Lou was working one of the registers. You apologized as you rushed in, but he waved it off and didn’t say a word as you tied on your blue apron.

Lou waited for a quiet moment later in the morning to say, “I heard about your dad. I’m real sorry. At least he’s resting easy now.” His brown face crinkled with sympathy and he patted your arm before heading into the back.

You remember the day they came because Mrs. Meester brought all six of her kids into the store just before noon. It was the last time you saw all of them together.

Seven days later Mrs. Meester was standing in line for rations at the high school, just inside the front door by the trophy case. Five of her little ones stood hand in hand behind her. A week after that, you met her at the high school again, in the gymnasium this time. She was waiting impatiently behind the red line on the floor, four children beside her.

Mrs. Meester gave you a nod that day in the gymnasium. Her lips curled in a thin, weak smile as she asked after your dad.

“He’s still dead,” you said.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Meester. “How terrible.” She turned away and stepped up to collect her rations.

The rations they provide are bland, simple meals, much like the MREs your father remembered from his time in the army. Every item is sealed and ordered in unmarked packets. You don’t know what the food is made of; you don’t know if it matters. Each meal is packaged in a lightweight gray box, easily collapsed, with no markings or writing on any surfaces. The food is enough to keep you full. After a couple of weeks your cravings for fresh fruit and vegetables faded away.

Every night you eat your rations in front of the television. When you turn on the old set, the picture snaps into clarity and there is a man sitting behind a desk in front of a blank wall. He wears a dark suit with a blue tie and he says, “Please stay within your defined zone for your own safety.” He reminds you of your ration distribution center and your five-mile radius, the restrictions and rules you have now memorized. He is on the television twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He says, “It is not safe to venture outside your defined zone.” Every channel is the same, every broadcast identical no matter the time.

When you saw Mrs. Meester two days ago, she was hurrying through the empty parking lot outside the school. It was a hot, blustery day and she had no children with her. Her hair whipped about her face and her cheeks were pink.

She saw you and stopped, and she asked, “How is your father doing these days?”

And you said, “He’s just fine.”

You have been counting the weeks by Mrs. Meester’s children. Oldest to youngest they’ve slipped away: six, five, four, three, two, and the baby was last. Now there are none.

You remember the day they came because Mrs. Meester’s four-year-old escaped her grip in the freezer section of Lou’s store and hid amidst the produce while his older siblings called his name and the baby gurgled happily on her mother’s hip. You could smell the bananas a few days past ripe and the cleaner Lou used to mop the floors, the stale odor of well-used money and powder-soft children, Mrs. Meester’s perfume and optimistic hairspray. Your stomach churning, you remembered hiding from your father in the farm store when you were a child, curled up in a dog crate while he and the elderly clerk searched the aisles. He wasn’t angry when he found you; he laughed and bought you a bag of sour candies on the way out.

Then Mrs. Meester and her children were gone—the toddler found in a flurry of scolding and laughter—and the hours crawled by. Noon, one o’clock, two. Lou told you to take a break, and you carried your lunch outside to the shaded curb behind the store where Lou sneaked his cigarettes and the odor of smoke lingered. In the paper bag was a ham sandwich and an apple, the same meal you ate every day. The apple was soft, its bruises sour. Across the alley there was a closed garage; you can’t remember a time when it was anything other than abandoned. Spray-painted graffiti in smears of red and black marred the bay doors and the plywood over the windows, an unremarkable record of squalid boredom. Broken bottles glittered in the sunlight, scattered across asphalt and shriveled weeds growing through the cracks. There was a faded sign hanging in the window and a padlocked chain holding the door shut.

You remember. The garage was the last thing you saw before they came.

Lou’s store is well outside your five-mile radius, as is the rest of the town. The town is surrounded by fields, the fields by green hills, and your father’s house is a speck beside a road that is little more than a line on an old map. In the spring when it rains the road is muddy and rutted; in winter it’s among the last county roads to be cleared. Joe Harry used to plow it with the crooked blade attached to his F-250. The sound was unmistakable: an angry, grating growl of metal on gravel any time there was more than three inches of snow on the ground. Your father joked that Joe measured the snowfall with a ruler every morning. On the rare snow days of your childhood, before your father wrapped you in a puffy coat and wool scarf and too-big mittens attached to a string, before he took you outside for sledding and snowmen, you would sit in the window in hopes of catching Joe stepping onto his porch in the dark, ruler in hand. You imagined that he would lean over stiffly to peer at the numbers, face twisted up in his customary scowl, eyeing that last tenth of an inch that meant he owed the neighbors a cleared road before coffee. Joe Harry has been an old man all your life. He was a widower, arthritic and unsmiling, childless.

Joe Harry’s house is empty. His was the first you checked. You shouted yourself hoarse and knocked until your hand ached, then broke a window to climb inside. But Joe was nowhere to be found. That was six weeks ago.

Every house on the road is empty except for your father’s.

You don’t know why they let you stay.

Once a week you walk to the high school to collect your rations. The first week you didn’t count your neighbors as you stood in line. You listened to their conversations; you watched their faces; you studied their eyes. They asked after your father and expressed their sympathy. They discussed the state of the county roads and the new school superintendent. They gossiped about their spouses, their siblings, their friends. The day was hot and humid and windless. Shadows like empty voids marred a clear blue sky.

But nobody glanced upward. Nobody said, “I wonder what they want.”

The line moved forward and you stepped into the school. The hallway was cool and lit only by dusty sunlight filtering down the long hallway. It took a moment for your eyes to adjust. You wondered why Mrs. Meester had left her oldest at home.

“That’s better,” said Mike Philips. “I swear, that sun gets hotter every day. Maybe there’s something to that global warming bullshit after all.”

Mike Philips is an old friend of your father’s. They played baseball together in high school and sometimes met up for a beer on Friday nights. Mike is a retired plumber; his wife Laura used to run a daycare out of their home. She wasn’t with him that first day in line at the high school. You didn’t know at the time what her absence meant.

You said, “Maybe they’re doing something to the atmosphere.”

Mike looked at you, puzzled. “What?”

“Them,” you said. You nodded upward. There was no sign of them in the hallway, but you knew they were nearby. The window to the front office was dark; you imagined them hiding behind the smudged glass, watching. You lowered your voice and said, “Maybe it’s part of their plan.”

The confusion didn’t leave Mike’s face. “Whose plan?”

You thought Mike was playing dumb, as scared of them as you were, but before you could press him you saw a flicker of movement from the corner of your eye. It was outside the line, in a dark corridor intersecting the main, so fast it was gone before you turned your head.

The line was straight and quiet. Nobody noticed. Nobody strayed.

But you watched. You narrowed your eyes and you watched.

A shadow moved. It was barely more than a play of light and dark on the far wall, below a line of posters advertising a Partnership For a Drug-Free America with bright images of healthy children, green parks and white smiles. The way it moved reminded you of a barn cat or a raccoon, but bigger, longer, bending itself just out of sight.

Mike touched your shoulder and you started. “It’s okay,” Mike said. “I know you’re worried about your daddy, but he’ll be just fine. You’ll see.”

Your father had been dead for seven days.

You stand in line for rations once a week. You never see your neighbors at any other time. Nobody comes to visit, not even those within the five-mile radius. If they are in when you knock on their doors, they choose not to answer.

The phones don’t work anymore, but nobody in line mentions it.

There are no cars on the roads. Yours still runs, but you can’t bring yourself to drive it, not when you might need it later.

There are no planes in the sky. Some days there are vast silhouettes above the clouds; some days there is nothing.

There is still electricity running to your house, but there are fewer and fewer lights each night when you look out the window before bed. If it weren’t for the one morning a week you walk to the high school to await the distribution of rations, you might suspect you are the last person on Earth.

You eat your rations methodically and think of Edward G. Robinson and the miracle of strawberries, of the chicken plant now silent and empty, of the shorter and shorter lines at the high school every week, of Mrs. Meester’s children and the snakelike creatures in the changing creek.

The man on the television says, “It is not safe to venture outside your defined zone.” Perhaps he is a human puppet coerced into speaking for them. Perhaps he is only wearing a human shape.

You turn on the television at midnight, at four a.m., at noon, at sunset in hopes of catching something different. But the broadcast never changes.

Until today.

The man is saying, “Please stay within your five-mile radius for your own safety.”

His blue tie is askew and there are dark smudges under his eyes. You wonder if puppets can get tired, if he has been broadcasting nonstop for weeks on end.

He says, “It is not safe to venture outside your defined zone.”

You frown at the television and mutter, “Why the hell not? That’s what I want to know.”

The man on the broadcast blinks twice and says, “Because you will be punished if you do.”

You drop the plastic fork. Your mouth is open, your heart racing.

The man asks, “Are you thinking about leaving?”

“No,” you say. The word trips from your tongue before the thought is fully formed. “No. Absolutely not.”

It’s a lie, and the man with the blue tie knows it. You can see it in the narrow way he watches you. The corner of his mouth twitches.

“You will be next,” the man says.

“No,” you say again.

He blinks. “Please stay within your five-mile radius for your own safety. It is not safe to venture outside your defined zone. Once a week you will obtain rations from a central distribution center.”

You fumble for the remote and switch the television off.

You count to one hundred, willing your heartbeat to slow and your hands to stop trembling.

You count to one hundred again.

You finish your meal and sip the last of the orange drink that comes in every ration. It isn’t enough to wet your mouth. Silence settles over the old house. You fold up the meal box and add it to the stack in the kitchen. It is the only trash you generate anymore. You wonder what will happen when you have so many there is no more room.

You’ve explored the boundaries along your invisible border. You’ve walked to an intersection that marks the extent of your five-mile radius. Nothing stopped you, but there were shadows darting at the edge of your vision. They hid behind fence posts, crouched in the ditch, ducked into a culvert when you turned your head. They were watching. You didn’t cross the road.

There are no dishes to wash, but you stand at the kitchen sink anyway. The water still flows, like the electricity, but when you turn on the faucet and cup your hands to drink a mouthful, then another, it is slick on your tongue and tastes like spinach gone slimy, smells like the pond where you used to hunt for frogs with your father’s help. The kitchen is dark but in the window you can see the shape of your reflection, lit from behind by the hallway light.

You step outside and the screen door still creaks, still falls shut with a clap. You used to think about replacing the spring to stop it from banging. Now you think about what will happen when winter comes and things begin to break. There are shingles on the roof that need to be repaired. The furnace was temperamental and unreliable last winter. The windows are old and drafty. If the pump breaks, you’ll have no water.

You think about what you said to Mike Philips. Maybe there will be no winter.

Maybe you won’t be here to find out.

You lean on the railing of the back porch and look across the fields. You can see the outline of the nearest barbed wire fence, but everything beyond it is a patchwork of shadows. Last night there was a light shining to the east half a mile away. It was the porch light of Mr. and Mrs. Gryzbowski, a young couple who just moved here from Atlanta. They wanted to raise their unborn child in the country. The baby was due in September.

Last night their light was on, but tonight it isn’t. Theirs was the last. You can’t see any lights from your porch anymore.

To the north a dark smudge of forest interrupts the fields along a clean, tamed line. A creek flows from the hills through those trees; you played along its banks when you were a kid. Your father gave you a bucket and a trowel and said you never knew what you might find. You dug in the mud and splashed in the water until your clothes were soaked through. You collected interesting pebbles and autumn leaves and crooked sticks to show your father when he came home from work. You pretended to be a troll, a warrior, an explorer, a scientist. You imagined the creek was somewhere else, anywhere else: the Nile, the Amazon, a frozen river high in foreign mountains you would never see.

There is something wrong with the water. There are fewer children in line every week, but those who remain are more certain than ever. There is something wrong with the water; it is slowly killing the forest. There are patches of dead, barren trees marring the hillside. The water snakes are impossible to catch.

The night is clear and calm, just cool enough to be comfortable. It takes you a few moments to spot the shadows overhead. There are never any lights; the only sign of their presence is an absence of stars, a void in the sky. You hear crickets chirping nearby and it disturbs you that they should care so little for what is happening. But while crickets sing, no moths bump and dance around the porch light. You have not seen a single moth since the day they came. You wonder what the moths know that the crickets haven’t figured out yet.

Resting against the porch railing, looking across the valley where your neighbors’ lights used to shine, you make a decision.

Tonight.

Tonight you will go to the creek and see what the children have seen. You will wait an hour, maybe two, and you will walk across the fields toward the forest and the hills. You will pretend to be ten years old again and fearless. You will find the snakes swimming in the water. You won’t care if you ruin your sneakers squelching through the mud.

You remember the day they came.

It was a hot summer day. Your father had died in the early morning, alone and drowning in the fluid that filled his lungs. The nurse who called was named Jenny. Half a day later you were sitting on a broken curb behind Lou’s store, eating a ham sandwich and a disappointing apple, trying to decide if you had any good memories from before your father was sick. Days at the park, vacations on the beach, camping and playing catch and collecting frogs from the pond: They felt like memories of another life, recorded in grainy home video and played back without sound, the colors weak and the smiles uncertain, forced, twisted by the years that stretched around each captured moment.

The world did not tremble when they came.

You thought the shadows were from the clouds. Then you looked up.

You remember the day they came.

You think you might be the only one who does.

© 2012 Kali Wallace.

Kali Wallace was a geophysicist before she decided she liked making things up more than she liked being a scientist. Her short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and is forthcoming in Asimov’s. She lives in Colorado.

My She
Mary Rosenblum

I wait outside the speaking chamber, where the young Speakers learn to Hear and Speak. The walls and carpeted floor are purest white, the color of this God place and the Speakers who live here walk by, all dressed in white like the walls and the floor, their palms on the shoulders of their guides. They all look the same with their pale hair and pale eyes. Only their smell tells me who they are. I am a guide for my Speaker. Until she puts on the robe and is sent to another place to Speak between the worlds for the citizens. Then I will have a new pup to raise. I will miss this puppy. Her scent comes to me from beneath the door of the learning room, smelling of trying hard and not sure.

She is never sure, my she, not since I first came to her, when she was just small. I sometimes smell her silent tears at night and slip into her room from my cubicle to lie beside her. She strokes the fur on my head and shoulders and it comforts her. It is our secret—kept secret, I think, because she does not know if it is permitted for me to sleep on her bed at night. I, myself, do not know, even after all these years here. Never before have I slept beside a pup in my charge. Perhaps there is nothing wrong. Perhaps there is. But it is our secret and it binds us. When I sleep in her bed, I hear my litter-brother in my dreams and I like that. I miss him always.

I will miss her, when she leaves. Unless they finally send me with her, the way they sent my litter-brother with his Speaker. But they say I am good at raising puppies and they have not sent me with a newly-robed Speaker yet.

While I wait for her, I pull out my brother’s last mail to me. The tiny disk feels cool and hard in my palm. Disk-mail is not expensive, but it is slow. This disk traveled in four ships before it found its way here from the colony world where my brother now lives. But we guides are servants and servants are not entitled to use the Speakers; they are for citizens only. Perhaps they think that because we mostly smell to each other that we do not need to speak with words. But we cannot smell between the stars. I would like to speak to my litter-brother and hear his answer. I will never see him again, except on my she’s bed. There, he speaks to me, tells me how he misses me. We used to wrestle in the meadow around the school where we were raised, chasing each other into the creek, splashing and laughing. Sometimes it snowed and I still dream of snow, cold and white, stinging my palms and the soles of my feet, tingly as it melted in my fur.

There is no snow in the convent. Only spring, forever.

The door opens and I have been dreaming of snow and my brother. I am not ready. I leap to my feet, ears going flat.

“Siri? Where are you?”

Her hand goes out and I step beneath it so that my shoulder fur comes up against her palm. I feel the tickle of her mind finding my eyes and the white-walled corridor blurs just a bit as our minds share my eyes.

I wonder if that is how I speak to my brother when I sleep in her bed? “I had a mail from my litter-brother,” I tell her.

She understands litters. The Speaker puppies are born in litters of ten. We walk down the hall and I see that she is heading for the garden in the center of the convent. Sadness darkens her scent and I reach up to touch her hand lightly, wanting to make the smell go away.

“You don’t understand.” She shrugs me off but she does not smell angry. “What if I fail?”

Fail? The word chills me. My puppies to do not fail. Have never failed. We step out into sunlight, soft and gentle through the dome. Water trickles and the rich tapestry of dirt smells, the small beings that inhabit this space, the breath of the water itself make me dizzy. Most of the convent is clean of such smells. She sits on a bench covered with bright chips of color and I squat beside her, leaning lightly against her thigh because that comforts her. Her fingers slide into the long fur on the back of my neck and that makes me shiver. “Who said you would fail?”

“My Speaker-Mistress.” Her words are low and she smells sharp, unhappy. “The one who . . . trains me. I . . . Hear more than the voice I’m tuning to. I can’t shut the others out. But I don’t listen to them.” She smells distress and a tinge of anger. “I am good. I would not listen to any other voice. I would not Speak the God Words to another. Not ever.”

I wince—I cannot stop myself—because her fingers digging in hurt me. She lets go and covers her face with her hands.

“I am not trying to Hear them. I listen only for the voice that speaks to me. Too sensitive she said, the Speaker-Mistress.” Her voice is hard to hear, but she smells frightened. “She said it could not be, that my genes will not permit it.”

I shiver as if I am a puppy again and have played too long in the snow.

“Will they make me leave?”

She does not understand. Maybe none of them do. Speaking only the God Words, Hearing the God Words is all there is for them. Only Speakers live here in the convent. And we servants.

No one leaves, except on a ship, to Hear and Speak in another place, so that the citizens can talk between the stars. The way my brother left with the new Speaker assigned to him.

I try to distract her. I can smell the vanilla orchids opening and she loves them. Even she can smell them with her poor dead nose and she loves the touch of their thick petals. So I take her to them. And she puts on a face that means she is happy. But she smells sad.

And I smell afraid.

She is my puppy. She was given to me to raise. And none of my puppies have ever failed.

If she fails, I will no longer speak to my litter-brother in my dreams.

I wake in darkness and smell her tears. I leave my cushion and pad across the carpet in the soft, warm darkness, slipping onto the soft mattress beside her. She puts her arm around me and buries her face in the fur that covers my shoulders. I can feel the wetness of her tears as they soak my fur, like the melting snow, so long ago. But warm. She reeks of sorrow but not fear.

How can she truly know fear?

I envy her that.

“Tell me about snow,” she says.

“It is frozen water. It falls from the skies.”

“Tell me more. Tell me about when you were a child.”

She is using her command voice and it’s hard, very hard, to say no to her, even though we do not speak of things outside. Not in here. The God of Speakers will be angry. The God of Speakers is only angry at you one time.

But if she has failed? So I shrug. What can it hurt now? “I was never a child.” The tail stub that doesn’t show under my coveralls wriggles in amusement. “But my litter was born in a place where winter—the cold time when snow falls—lasts a very long time. So we were old enough to play in it before we were old enough to be sent to our homes.”

“You were young. So you were a child.”

“We are not called children when we are young.” I flatten my ears, uneasy. Never has one of my young Speakers talked to me like this. I suddenly want to tell her. “Our people have forever served yours. Even as I serve you now.”

“I do not understand.” But she has stopped thinking about it and she smells wistful. “I keep wondering what type of world they will send me to. I dreamed of snow, you know. Snow. White, fluffy flakes falling from a gray sky. And two furry creatures chasing each other through humps of white. Was that you?” She smells happy. “Did I dream of you?”

I flatten my ears and nod.

“I hoped they would send me to a world with snow.” She buries her face in my fur again. “But will they send me anywhere now?”

My ears are tight to my head and my nose quivers. I want to point to the moon that I remember but cannot see here and want to howl.

I have not howled since I was a puppy far younger than my she. Instead I kiss her cheek and let her soak my fur with her warm-snowmelt tears and my howl fills my belly. When she is gone, my litter-brother will be gone, too.

I dream of my brother. We are playing chase in the snow and it glitters like stardust from a thousand frozen galaxies as he catches me and we tumble over and over in the cold, dry whiteness. Then we are curled together in our sleeping place, warm, dreaming. That was a long, long time ago, before we learned to be servants, before we left to guard the Speaker pups. I will never forget the smell of him. How can I forget you? He blinks green eyes in the darkness and his tongue curls over his white, white teeth. We dream together every night.

Once, in his mail, he sent me a map of the place where he is, a sweep of glittering stars with their silent planets. He had flagged the world he was on, a mote of darkness in that sea of light. You are younger than I now, could be my puppy, I tell him and nuzzle his ears. That is what happens when you sleep on the slow ships that carry living things.

You look like you always look, he says, and then we romp off to play in the snow.

My she stirs and wakes and stares up into the darkness. My dream is gone, my litter-brother’s voice is gone, and even when she finally falls asleep again, it does not return.

She is quiet this morning. I take her to the dining room, her hand on my shoulder. She is not using my eyes, is looking inward, walking in darkness, trusting me to guide her feet. I bring her breakfast and take my own plate to squat along the wall with the others like me. Their ears flick and flatten as I pass and they smell sympathy for me. Ah, well, we know before anyone else, always. I have no appetite for my roll this morning but I eat it. I am a good servant.

Each litter of young Speakers sits at its own table, ten together, the oldest and tallest near the front, the young ones with their servants close in the rear, near the big doors. The room is light and warm. I have made many trips across it over the years, moving from the door to the front of the room, then back to the door as my puppy assumes the Speaker’s gown and departs and I am assigned to a new puppy.

Now, my she sits at the front table with her litter, all identical, with the same, white-gold hair braided down their backs, the same white coveralls that mark them as Speakers-in-Training. The same faces and pale, lavender, unseeing eyes. Only the smell identifies them.

My she smells sad.

And this morning . . . afraid.

Perhaps, even among the Speakers, the news is spreading. Perhaps even they, with their nearly-dead noses, can smell failure.

The litters rise together at their tables, the youngest first, to return to their meditation where they can learn to Hear the words of God across the space between the stars. One after another, we rise as we smell our puppy and we follow. And it occurs to me as they pass—identical hair, identical pale, sightless eyes, identically curved spines and graceful fingers—that they are as created as we are.

That is a blasphemous thought because we are taught that citizens are not created. Servants are. I rise to join my she and I feel her arm brush against my shoulder. Secretly. I smell sympathy from the other servants, and think that she is like us.

I should not think it, but I do.

After breakfast we go to the room where she learns to Hear the God words. But when she gets there, an old one like she waits for her, wearing the full robe of a Speaker. Her servant flicks his ears at me then flattens them slightly and my own flatten in return. I want to squeeze against my she and comfort her. She lowers herself before the Speaker, like any pup. Respectfully. But her fear stings my nose and my ears flick back and forth.

“Your presence is requested at Council.” The Speaker offers a hand.

“The DNA analysis came back?” My she doesn’t move.

I take her hand, place it in the Speaker’s hand. It feels dead, heavy without life.

“Yes.” The Speaker closes her hand around my she’s and then releases it, walking away with her hand on her servant’s shoulder.

The Council room is white but the table and the chairs are brown, made of dead trees from the Home World. I was not born on the Home World, I know. That world is at the far end of the stars, too far to visit, farther even than my litter-brother. But the Speakers can Speak there. They can Hear a whisper on the far, far away world.

I am proud to be a servant to Speaker pups.

But the scent of the room keeps my ears flat and the others along the wall smell sympathy for me as we come in. Three Speakers wait at the table, their robes all around their feet, their faces creased and wrinkled like a pile of clothes that has been slept on. They smell very old. And of power.

The fur on my neck stirs and rises even though that is not permitted here. I flatten my ears but I cannot make my fur lie down. I sit along the wall with the others.

“The power to Speak is all,” they murmur, all together. “The power to Hear is all.” They bow their heads. Except my she. She has seated herself but her eyes are on the far wall.

“The Speaker is a pure being.” The Speaker who smells oldest, the one who made my fur stand up, speaks. “In a thousand years, the purity has been maintained. Only those of that purity can Speak between the worlds with the words of God. What is the holy trinity?”

She speaks command and my throat wants to answer her.

“A pure life, a pure mind, and a pure body.” My she’s voice is so soft even I can barely hear it.

“You have never compromised the purity of your life, nor of your mind.” The powerful Speaker whispers on. “But even in the sanctity of the convents, purity must be defended. Always.”

“How can I be impure?” My she rises, smelling of anger now. “I came into being here. I have nine siblings. They are pure. You cannot have found anything wrong.”

“It is a tiny mutation.” Another of the powerful old ones speaks. “A small thing. It occurred late in gestation, after our final test pre-decantation. We will expand our testing after this and we have alerted the other convents.”

“I can block out the other voices. I can concentrate on the one I’m supposed to Hear.”

“Communication is the neurosystem that holds our civilization together. Flesh and blood, impure as we are, we must emulate the purity of electronics. Interpretation, alteration, destroys purity.”

“But I don’t . . .”

“The quantum effect is doubled by the mutation. That is why you Hear more than the voice you tune to.”

“But I can—”

“Communication must be pure, perfect. Private. There is no room for impurity.” The old-smelling, power-smelling one stands.

Even her standing is a command. The others stand with her and their servants leap into position. My she does not react as I reach her side, refusing my sight, keeping her face turned to the wall as the others file out. The last one out the door, the one who came to summon her, smells sad. Only she.

We stand there for a long time after the others have left. My fur no longer stands up, but my ears are still flat to my head and the howl that has troubled me has returned to knot in my gut. Finally, she stirs and the room shimmers as she takes my sight. She strides out of the room and I have to almost trot to stay with her. It is dinner time and my stomach growls as we pass the corridor that leads to the dining room and the scent of fish stew wafts out. But my she marches on past servants like myself moving floaters piled with laundry or stacked with goods that came in as tithe from the citizen communities around the convent. We pass into the old hallways in the center of the convent, the ones that were built long ago, perhaps before my gene-line even existed, when my ancestors still ran on four feet and ate from the floor. I know where she is going. We come here, sometimes. And she always smells thoughtful. It is after these visits that she often wants me to creep onto the bed with her.

At last we reach it, the center of the old convent, the room with eight sides and the old, dark screens that once, my she told me, offered information the way a holographic window does now. And in the very center of that center room stands the statue. She stops in front of it.

It is of two women standing palm to palm. I don’t know what it is made from—none of the materials in the convent smell like it and I never smelled anything like it when I was a pup. Even the taste, when I once licked it, is strange. But it is smooth and milky and the eyes of the two women seemed to gleam with faint light, the same pale lavender as the Speakers’ eyes, as my she’s eyes.

“Once upon a time, more than a millennium ago, a pair of identical twins were born. They were born disabled because at that time, people couldn’t read DNA well enough . . . to fix it.” Her words stumble here and her smell of sadness makes me want to kiss her cheek, but when I lean gently against her, she steps away.

“No one else could do what they did so they . . . preserved the gene-line. And thus was the origin of the convents. Purity of thought, word, and deed. You must not know the words you Hear, you must only repeat them perfectly, and only to the one you are tuned to.”

Her face is dry but she smells like crying. I want to press against her, but I stay still.

“I am impure.” Her voice grows softer, deeper. “Perhaps my DNA has betrayed me, but my mind betrayed me first. Making me wonder why. Why can we not know history? Why can we not know the world outside the dome? Why can we not simply Speak when we choose? To whom we choose? Why only here, only the words that are given us, without understanding what those words mean?”

She smells angry again now. And I flick my ears forward and back, fighting an urge to crouch low.

“The convents exist on every inhabited planet.” Her face looks strange and tight. “And there are no Speakers other than at the convents. Communication is . . . valuable.”

I don’t understand, but her angry smell makes my neck fur rise, wanting to protect her.

“How can I think such thoughts?” She clenches both her pale hands now. “No wonder my DNA betrayed me. My impure thoughts must have warped it. Where will I go now? What can I do if I cannot Speak to the stars? Who will I Speak to?”

The howl knotted in my gut nearly escapes, but I flatten my ears and crouch in spite of myself, forcing it down. Even when she uses my eyes she cannot see me without a mirror, and for that I am now grateful. There are no mirrors here and if she looked in my eyes she would see the truth.

“Perhaps I’ll end up a servant like you.” Her shoulders droop. “Cleaning the gardens or cooking in the kitchen. I’ve never seen one of our type as a servant before. Not many fail, I suppose.”

Not many fail.

I shiver, glad that she is not touching me to feel my crouch, my shiver, glad that she cannot smell.

I am old, but the Speakers that smell old tell me that I am a good puppy raiser. Will they give me a new small one tomorrow? Next week? Then I will sit at the table nearest the door with my small puppy while she learns how to eat, and walk, and Speak. Will I ever need to slip onto her bed at night? Will she ever wet my neck fur with warm snow-melt tears?

Will I ever speak with my litter-brother again, nested in our dreams?

Perhaps she is right and she is impure.

We are all impure, us servants here. We cannot Speak and we know far too much for purity. Perhaps my dreams have made her impure.

“We’ve missed dinner.” She gropes for me finally and I place myself beneath her palm. “Take me to the garden and then you can go to the kitchen and get food. I’m not hungry but I want you to eat.”

They are waiting for her, in her room or in the garden. I smell the traces of tension in the air circulating through the room, the smell of distress like bitter smoke in my nose. We always know. She starts forward, knowing the way to the garden without my eyes. I step in front of her and she bumps into me, smelling surprised, stumbling back a step.

“Siri, what happened? What’s wrong?”

“Not to the garden,” I tell her.

“Why not?”

They will be gentle. They will be kind. The way they are when we grow too old for our duties. That gentleness will come to me sooner rather than later. I am gray now; I have traveled the room many times from back to front. “No Speaker leaves the convent, except to a new world,” I say and the howl in my gut thickens the words.

“What do you mean? That I’ll be servant here?”

I do not answer and I do not need to. She knows that none of her kind serve here. I smell her sharpening fear.

“There’s no way out.” Her eyes are round now, reflecting the dim light in the room. “Where would I go if I could escape? What would I do?”

I take her hand, firmly. The corridor on the far side of the statue smells like old air and long-dead small things. We know everything, we who serve. She shuffles after me, clinging to my hand and I hurry, because if I go slowly, the fear will fill her and she will stop. At the end of the corridor is a narrow space, one that brought air, perhaps, or heat, or some kind of small cargo. We have to crawl and she can only touch me briefly so she loses her sight. But she hurries, perhaps afraid that I might leave her. If she could smell, she would know that I would never leave her. But she cannot smell, so I harden my heart against her fear and hurry. Fear of being left behind will keep her moving.

At the far end of the small corridor, an old, corroded screen gives way reluctantly, tangled in green vines that fill the air with the sweet-sharp scent of their injuries, a shout that fills the night air. But the Speakers have no nose and none of us will tell. I emerge and stand, helping her up. The two moons of this world—small and strange, one blue, one reddish—float against a blazing ceiling of stars.

“Where are we?” she gasps.

I take her hand, pull her. The door is small, not one for cargo, but for the people who must come and go. No one can get in. But the Speakers see no need to lock it from this side. You only go through a door if you have permission.

I do not have permission.

Terror rises up out of my bowels like a black snake, filling me as I place my palm against the door, and I reek into the night air. I wet myself and almost, almost turn and flee, releasing that knotted howl into the safe darkness of the convent.

But she has shared my dreams and brought me to my brother. I place both palms against the door, although pain sears me as if it is red hot. It swings open, silent, and I stumble through, falling to my knees. I feel her hands on me and I smell her worry. She is afraid for me. Not for herself.

“I am all right,” I tell her, standing up. My whole body shivers with reaction. But her arms around me, her worry for me fills me with strength. None of my pups have ever worried about me.

The convent sits in the middle of the city. It has many needs and many of us fill those needs every day. And we all share. So I know the city even though I have never walked it. And it frightens me, how easily we left it. But then, none of them try to leave. Only this one, the puppy who shares my dreams. It is warm this night but her clothes—the white coverall of a Speaker-in-Training—seem to shine like the midday sun. The narrow alley that leads to this door opens into a wide street. I see lights and shops and eating places and smell people, happy and angry and hungry and full. I smell my own kind, too. We servants are everywhere. People have always had servants.

Garden grows along the wall surrounding the convent, like the garden within, but smelling of people and city and no vanilla orchids. I take her to a bench in the deeper darkness against the wall. Her clothes still shine like the moon I remember or the snow my litter-brother and I rolled in. But she will be hard to see from the street. She smells fear, but more than that she smells curious.

“I hear things. I smell food. What is it like—let me see?”

But I am afraid. “I have to find you clothes. So that people don’t see you and know what you are.”

“What are we going to do, Siri?” The fear smell gets briefly stronger.

I don’t know. But I don’t want to say that. “I will be back. Stay here and be quiet and you will be safe.”

I hurry down the narrow alley to the main street, but there I stroll, sorting the thick woven fabric of scent for what I need. People don’t see me, they don’t really see any of our kind. Their eyes skate over us and past, as if we live on the other side of an invisible wall, as if we all live within a convent.

I smell my kind, a strong home smell, and I follow it, unraveling it from the tapestry of food and people-lust, of happy smells, and sad smells. It leads me to an alley that opens to another like it, a courtyard of clean paving surrounded by the back side of tall house-buildings and shops. Small apartments line the walls of this small courtyard along with shops lit dimly or not at all, unlike the shops on the main street.

One smells open. I sniff the doorway, smelling food, herbs, dust, invitation. The shopkeeper pricks his ears at me and smells a question. “I need clothes,” I tell him in the common tongue, although it is forbidden for me to speak it. I am not supposed to know the common tongue because the Speakers cannot know the words they repeat.

But of course, we servants know everything.

His ears flick another question at me, and he smells surprised. Because, of course, the simple coverall I wear in the convent is quite good. Not worn at all. “Not for me.” I flatten my ears in quick apology. “For a friend. A people friend.”

Now he smells wary.

“A friend of us.”

And he smells truth, so he shrugs and rummages in bins behind his small counter, smelling doubtful, because he does not sell to people, just to us. But he drags a long cloak out into the light and shakes it. I smell old dust, insect wings, and summer and sneeze. I have seen a few cloaks on the street on my way here, enough like this that she will pass and it will hide her convent-whiteness.

He wants money, of course.

I have no money. As the servant for a Speaker-in-training, I have no time of my own to trade with others in the convent, so have not amassed the coins that we use among ourselves. I flatten my ears in apology and smell need for that cloak. Now his ears flatten and he smells thoughtful and crafty.

“Bring your people here,” he finally says. And he reeks now of curiosity.

I cannot hide the smell of my relief and that makes his ears prick again. We servants love a good story and clearly I am going to have one to show him, never mind tell. I take the cloak, roll it tightly, and run down the narrow alley-of-us to the main street where I once again stroll—invisible to those people-eyes—to the garden. My ears are flat with worry by the time I reach the convent alley, even though I have been gone a short time. They may be looking for her. Someone may have wandered into the night shadows to see her whiteness.

But she is there, her sightless eyes turned upward, her hands palm up on her thighs. She no longer smells afraid.

I touch her, inviting her to use my eyes and see the cloak and the garden shadows.

“There is no place for me out here.” She smells peace as she says these words, but a whiff of darkness lurks behind that peace and it makes the hair on my shoulders bristle.

“We will find you a place,” I tell her. And I drape the cloak around her shoulders.

She raises a fold to her nose. “It smells like you. Where are we going to go?”

“To a place.” To pay for the cloak that smells of us. “I do not think the convent will look for you there.”

I am sure of it. The hair on my face is gray and I have lived all my life among the people in the convent. They will not think that the servant led her. We are eyes only, a tool to use. They will look for her among the people of the city.

I take her hand. People do not walk with their hands on our shoulders, the way they do in the convent. Out here, they have their own eyes. But all she needs is a touch to use my eyes. I feel the effort she makes to walk easily on this strange street and she smells fear even though she does not show it. I am full of pride for this puppy. She is much stronger than any other pup I have raised. She is . . . different.

Perhaps it is not my fault. Perhaps I have not contaminated her after all.

I lead her past the shops and through the crowds of people who see only a slight woman wearing a cloak, walking hand-in-hand with her servant. The food-smells make my stomach hurt because it has been a long time since I ate my breakfast roll. But I have no coins and I fear to take her into a shop where someone might speak to her.

Her head tilts and her steps begin to drag. She smells . . . shocked.

“They are speaking Words,” she whispers to me, almost too low to hear. “The God Words.”

“They are speaking the tongue that everyone speaks,” I tell her softly. I want to kiss her cheek, to comfort her. “They are only God Words to you.”

Now her feet stumble and I pause, smelling fear so strong that for a minute I think that even the people with their dead noses might notice.

“What are we?” she breathes.

My blasphemous thought comes to me, that she is as created as I. Only now, I think that she is more created than I. I have been created to be a servant, but she has been created to be a machine.

I relax a bit when we reach the darkness of the alley. By now, the convent must guess that she has left. They probably record our traffic in and out of the small door and now they will know that she left with me.

They will not look for her here. They will not even know that here exists.

The shopkeeper’s eyes widen as we enter his shop and her hair catches the light from beneath her hood. He reeks curiosity now. “Welcome,” he says and flattens himself almost like a puppy in front of her.

“She doesn’t understand, any more than she can smell.” I shrug. “She has run away.”

His eyes narrow and his ears flick nervously, but he smells thoughtful rather than afraid. “Why did you bring her here?”

“She speaks to my litter-brother.” My ears flatten in spite of myself and I cannot keep my lips from drawing back from my teeth. “He is on a star a long ship-travel from here. When I sleep next to her, I speak with him.” I know my teeth are showing now and his eyes burn bright in the dim light of the shop. My she was wrong when she thought that speaking-across-the-stars brought the convents money.

It brought them power.

“They can speak for us, too.” The words sound deep in my throat. Like a growl.

His eyes gleam in the darkness and I think for a moment that I can see the moon of my puppy-hood reflected in them. Only citizens can speak across the stars.

“She can speak for us.”

© 2009 by Mary Rosenblum.

Originally published in Federations, edited by John Joseph Adams.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Mary Rosenblum is the author of four science fiction novels, including her latest, Horizons, and The Drylands, which won the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. Water Rites—a compilation of The Drylands and the three novelettes that preceded it—is recently available from Fairwood Press. Her short work frequently appears in Asimov's, but has also appeared in Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and has often been reprinted in Gardner Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction annual.

Electric Rains
Kathleen Ann Goonan

Ella sat by Nana’s body for two days before she pushed it out the window.

She had spent the first half-day realizing what death was, the next half-day grieving, the following morning waking and feeling reverent if somewhat nauseated, and trying to decide what to do.

It was three in the morning when she finally did it, and it was almost the season of electric rains.

There had been one already, fitful and slight, harbinger of spring and the season of avoidance. Once the weather warmed in Washington, D.C., thunderstorms boiled up almost every evening, preceded by the leaves in the park across the street turning up silver undersides. Ella was twelve, and had grown up knowing that she could not let the rains, or the rare snows, touch her.

But Ella had to take Nana home. Besides, she was beginning to smell bad. Night was a good time, the time least likely to rain.

In the end it was easy. There was no heat in the old lady’s three-room apartment with the toweringly high ceilings and the hole in the plaster that looked like South America, so she’d not gotten very warm. The old lady had an electrical setup but used it only for cooking and powering a space heater in the most bitterly cold weather, hooking up big sparking clamps, which scared Ella. There were people who kept the grid alive, down by Anacostia. Engineers, and those whom they taught, people who had escaped the first electric rains, like Ella and Nana.

By now, the body was very stiff. Ella was not surprised to find that the tiny old lady was not terribly heavy. She wrapped the body in the sheet upon which she had died, which made her easy to pull over the shiny wood floor, through the sitting room with its yellowed lace doilies and once-valuable international knickknacks—the ancient Chinese vase, the intricately carved Vietnamese table, the rug from nineteenth century Baghdad—and managed to lift her to chairs and then push her onto an oval table of shiny hardwood, a table she herself had polished only days before, one of the unending chores the old lady had her do so they could “live with dignity in this shit-eating world.”

She shoved the table on its clawed wheels to the window. Grunting, she pushed up the reluctant sash. Paint chips flurried in the moonlit air, and the gust of wind took Ella by surprise: It was warm.

That was not good.

She leaned out the window; sniffed the air. It smelled too warm, like sudden spring. Perhaps it was. And the stars were obscured by cloud.

No matter. She had to do this, and soon.

She looked up and down the length of the street, waited until a lone car stopped at the light and then moved past, low, prowling beams of light ahead. She leaned out further, saw a few ragged shapes curled on the sidewalk. She swallowed. The rain people, those who didn’t go down into the Metro but let the rain wash them countless times, could sometimes be normal, harmless. But sometimes . . .

She looked back at Nana’s face, her delicately curved nose, her imp-like face overwhelmed by wrinkles, her high lacy collar always kept clean and white.

A middle-aged man used to visit, and talked to Nana blusteringly, with wide frantic gestures. He always frowned at the sight of Ella and she knew that the man did not like her being there and couldn’t do a damned thing about it. She didn’t like him much either. “Little bitch,” he called her, the time he had squeezed her back in among Nana’s spicy-musty clothes, but she had kicked him hard and he hadn’t tried it again.

She sat down in one of the high-backed chairs and watched Nana for a moment.

Then, through the doubled wavy glass of the high windows, she saw a light streak through the heavens. A monitor plane, checking for contagion. Very rare. Nana laughed derisively whenever they saw one. “It won’t be safe in our lifetimes, missy. At least,” her voice gentled, “not in mine.”

Ella knew, though, that the light was the spirit of Nana and that it was all right, that she did not have to tell anyone, that she could stay here as long as she wanted to. That was Nana’s plan. Nana had talked about papers she had signed, and showed her the key to the safety deposit box at the bank. That nasty old man would do something about it, she was sure. He blabbered about the apartment being a “gold mine,” and called Nana stupid all the time, even though he was her nephew.

But because of the newspaper room, she knew that both of them might well be insane. In the back of the townhouse was a huge room filled with stacks of old Washington Posts, yellowed, crumbling, musty-smelling. Nana had her cut out the crossword puzzles from each day, right by the funnies, and put them into a box from which she drew; she did one a day.

The newspapers were sorted roughly into years, but the year that Ella was most interested in was the year, the very day, that terrorists had run an Amtrak Silver Eagle from New York into Union Station in downtown Washington at full speed, crashing right into the lobby of the station.

They had hoped that in the resulting confusion they would be able to get into the Capitol Building, a block away, and set off their dirty bomb.

Their particular dirty bomb was not full of radioactive material. It was, instead, full of what became taken up by the atmosphere, rather than filling up the Capitol Building. That material was what had turned into electric rains.

The Post headline for that day said TERRORISTS DECIMATE DIRTY BOMB.

The terrorists had, apparently, been Ella’s parents. She deduced this by reading several month’s worth of Washington Posts, and hid them from Nana. That was not difficult in a room full of newspapers.

There was probably no bank anymore with the important papers in it; or, if there was, there was no one to pay attention to them, anyway.

Ella knew that Nana had lived here all her life and had seen her beloved city change and change and change and all the relatives and friends who really cared for her die until she was all alone, except for Ella, in the place she owned; the rest of the building she had divided into apartments when younger and rented them. Now, she kept the squatters out with fierce bars, preferring them to be empty rather than full of the “rain riffraff” which now inhabited Washington.

Ella climbed onto the table, knelt, and pushed the woman’s shoulders. She leaned forward and grunted. It was harder than she thought it would be. Finally Nana’s legs and her hips were outside and Ella, with a shriek, let go.

The window had a deep sill which overlooked 14th Street in Washington D.C., between R and S Streets. It was a place, Ella had been made to understand from listening to endless stories of hell and glory from Nana, burnished to mahogany smoothness by many tellings, which had felt the ebb and flow of time. When Nana’s grandfather had bought the building, the street was genteel, alive with a shop for each need, even if that need was for fresh flowers, a need which Nana and now Ella felt keenly as stomach-hunger: brilliant purple zinnias mixed with broad creamy spider chrysanthemums, studded with red baby rosebuds, ah! Set on the grand dining room table, they made one feel royal.

But Nana, Ella often observed, had no problem feeling royal. She told Ella tales of the city lights being akin to blood for her, tales of being young and speeding about the city in a fine gray car, and then jolting on the farting buses when they still ran. Now, there were no buses, and the Metro entrances glowed. People had taken refuge underground when the electric rains had begun, but of course it had been too late: The rains, with their voices, had gotten them, had spread its contagion among them.

Now, if they went anywhere, they had to walk, even after Nana was attacked and raped. After that she walked her same route, head held high, Ella in tow and terrified, a heavy gun in her pocket that she practiced with once a week in the back alley on bottles and cans, laughing every time she blew one to bits. Once she dropped a young woman gangster just like that, when the gangster walked toward them holding a knife, and then she became known and feared, even by the people who danced up and down the street singing, “What a glorious feeling, I’m happy again!” The electric-rain people sometimes had ragged parades, which marched beneath their window. They blew horns, and usually wore hats to hide their terrible deformities.

A warm breeze stirred the curtains. Ella was filled with terrified reverence as she gazed down on Nana, who had landed spread-eagle, face-up. The sheet had caught on a ledge and fluttered just below Ella, so Nana gazed at the stars.

Nana loved the stars, and had taught Ella their names; she had a formidable telescope she kept inside a little concrete room on the roof. On clear nights, cold or hot, they would go up, unlock the giant padlock, roll out the telescope onto the bumpy roof, and gaze all night, drunk on pulsing lights arranged with the precision of numbers. “If you got close they’d change position so you wouldn’t recognize them but of course you can’t get that close,” Nana told Ella. One night, as a great treat, she’d shot out the six remaining park lights so that the sky would be darker. “Ha!” she laughed. “Think the cops will show up? Not a chance.”

Ella knew there was not a chance—she knew what cops were, but had never seen one. She only knew that now that park would be dark at night forever.

“I used to go to lectures with my dad every Friday night at the Naval Observatory,” she told Ella in her deep, rough voice, sticking her gun back in her pocket. “Now that’s dark. Gentle man, so kind, too good for this world. Nothing like me.”

But Ella saw gentleness everywhere in her, in the way she took care of Ella, how she took care to keep her in fine silk pajamas, how she made sure the linens were always clean, lowering the laundry down to Ella waiting nervously on the street with a red wagon that said Radio Flyer on the side, then trundling down to the Deep-Clean Laundro-Mat. “Shitty machines,” she always said, “and they cheat us on the drying time but what can you do?”—a litany Ella had grown quite used to. Once she asked if they could not just dry the clothes on a clothesline and had received a lecture about the possibility of electric rain polluting the clothes. The Deep-Clean was operated by an old man who wore very clean clothes, a fine and eccentric mix of clothes—thin wool suits in winter with vests and colorful silk ties and combat boots; beautiful, starched cotton dresses with aprons in the summer that he claimed he’d stolen from the Smithsonian Historic Collection. He ran his machines with a generator and spent most of his time gathering fuel.

Well, now Nana had returned to the streets.

Ella was very unhappy as she gazed down at her. She should have wrapped her more tightly, she thought now; she should have hidden her from the world; she should have cushioned the fall.

Suddenly frantic, she ran for the linen closet. Every sheet was ironed and folded; Nana knew how to take up the time of day, that was certain. Ella pulled a chain and the closet lit up and she felt the neat but sparse row with her finger and lit on the smoothest, oldest one, white cotton limp with age and use, smooth as glass, and yanked it out.

She paused to look around the apartment. She felt in her pocket for the key. She went to Nana’s bedroom; got her purse which she had never before violated, a shapeless black leather affair, and pulled out the wallet, stuck it next to the key in her pocket. The gun was already there. She stepped out into the hall holding the sheet, locked the door, and ran down five flights of stairs.

At the foot of the stairs she pulled out the key chain and felt for the key to the closet beneath the stairs. Unlocking the storage closet, she pulled out the laundry wagon.

Once outside, she felt exposed. She’d never been outside, alone, that she could remember. She took a deep breath and looked down at Nana.

She expected blood but there was none. Maybe death had dried it; maybe it was frozen in Nana’s veins now that there was no heart to move it. She heard glass break a block away, and distant gunfire. She felt in her pocket Nana’s heavy gun, filled with bullets; she had checked as Nana had taught her.

She hastily spread the sheet on the sidewalk next to Nana. Taking a deep breath, she knelt and shoved her hands beneath Nana’s shoulder and bony hip and pushed. Nana rolled on to the sheet, twice, there, now she was well on and Ella took the edge of the sheet, pulled it over her face, and felt better. Pushing with all her might, she rolled the woman up in the sheet like an egg roll, tucking the ends in.

Now for the hard part. Nana was not tall; in fact, she was no taller than Ella and often complained of having shrunk.

Ella tipped the wagon on its side and pulled it next to Nana. Now what? She set the wagon back up. She could do it. She had lifted her onto the chairs, the table, hadn’t she? But she was a lot more tired now.

She heard shuffling footsteps behind her and whirled.

A shape of rags was making its way toward her.

The shape had a greasy silk scarf folded like a triangle and tied beneath the chin; probably a woman. She looked at Ella, the wagon, and the sheeted shape. Squatting, she shoved her arms beneath the body and lifted it into the wagon. Ella noticed that she had very large feet in dark untied boots. She stammered, “Thank you.”

The . . . person said, “S’all right,” and shuffled along.

Nana’s torso and thighs took up the wagon; her legs stuck out stiffly behind and her head was just a bump. Ella picked up the handle and paused.

She looked out across the park, her only play yard for so long, and then only rarely. She remembered little before Nana: a beautiful face framed by smooth, sweet-smelling, pitch-black hair which swung forward and tickled Ella’s face; an older brother. Ella would always remember him, his baggy sweater hanging from wide shoulders; she never told these things to Nana, nor did she tell her about the special school she attended, and though she knew that her whole family had died, she no longer believed the story Nana told her, that they had been shot all of them by a thin white man for no reason at all as they left a restaurant in Georgetown while Nana watched from inside, then rushed out and grabbed her, then jumped into a taxi, when Ella was about four or five. She had no memory of such a thing, and she remembered things before.

She knew who she was. She had been there. At the train crash. And now, she had seen the newspaper article.

TERRORIST’S CHILD SAVED BY DECORATED ADMIRAL

She took another deep breath of sharp air. The park benches across the street were filled with dark lumpy shapes. She and Nana planted tulips there every fall, which they got from the cold basement of a deserted nursery, and nothing delighted them so much as to see them come up every spring; they did not even mind when people picked them, for flowers are meant to be picked, Nana said. But for a precious two weeks they flamed gold and red and when the twisty old trees were darkened with rain the flowers took on deeper color and then everything was so absolutely beautiful.

But now the blooms had come and gone. A match flared tiny across the street then went out. 14th Street stretched before her. She had a very long walk ahead of her. She picked up the wagon handle, glad that the street was level here.

Her memory of the route was of changing constellations of lights, for once a month they had walked this route, at night, Nana swinging her gun in her hand openly. “Exercise,” she would exclaim with satisfaction at regular intervals. “Exercise! This is my city too, dammit!”

Now, Ella was terrified. Here she was, all alone, pulling a dead old woman in a wagon through no-man’s land. She leaned forward and yanked hard.

She was wearing her glasses. She felt like taking them off, but did not. When she walked with Nana, she had often removed them, until their absence was noticed and Nana demanded that she put them back on. She had noticed Ella stumbling several years earlier and checked her eyes. It was then that Ella found out that there were such people as ophthalmologists, and that Nana was one—or had been one. After the months of the first electric rains, when her parents, fifth-generation Americans from Kansas City, had been on trial for treason, everyone who could, fled the city, or were drawn into the Metro station, where, rumor had it (and they so claimed), her parents had placed some of the first uploading devices. Even the Washington Post faltered, but then cloaked their intrepid reporters in rain gear—ineffective, they soon learned—and soldiered on.

Nana’s office was two blocks away from the apartment, dark and full of mysterious shapes until Nana flicked on the lights. “Ah,” she said. “Electricity. And my equipment is still here. Amazing. Sit up there in that chair, missy. Here’s a pillow.” And she looked into Ella’s eyes and clicked this and that until the world was sharp enough to draw tears; sharp enough to force Ella to leave fuzziness behind, enough to make her behold, remember, yearn, and regret.

Nana let Ella pick out several frames and made lenses for them all. “Who knows if this will even be here, next month,” she said, sighing. “I loved my work. Not many can say that, missy.”

Ella had been amazed to see, once the glasses had been slid onto her face and they stepped out into the night, that the moon was a single sharp sliver, and not white mounds resembling scoops of snowy ice cream on a velvet black sky. With glasses, she had seen the stars for the first time without the telescope. She had always believed that she needed that special tool to see stars, but there they were: a part of the everyday life of those who could see. But still she missed the blurry blossoms of light, the fuzzed red taillights shimmering on wet streets, the towers of lights, which, with glasses, were revealed as buildings with actual edges.

After that, Nana’s newspaper room beckoned increasingly. “Never could bear to throw away the paper till I’d read the whole thing,” she said.

Ella read advertisements from a lost world. She read advice columns about strange and alien problems: my mother-in-law is too controlling; when should I tell my fiancée that I’m bisexual?

Finally, after figuring out the dates and searching extensively, she found biographies of her parents, starting above the fold on page one and continuing on page A-9. A thrill went through her when she saw their pictures. Then she burst out crying.

They had both worked for the Department of Homeland Defense, and decided that what their country was doing was all wrong. Ella felt very strange reading her mother say, “You have killed my son. I demand to have my daughter back. We only wanted the best for her. She was supposed to be one of the first people uploaded.”

When she read that, Ella stood up and made her way to the window through and over stacks of newspapers. She stared out at the park, with its soldier-statue darkened in patches by the rain that had been falling for days, at the shiny, wet streets, no longer full of evacuees but only the occasional car, inside of which, she could only imagine, sat intrepid, stubborn people like Nana. You could tell electric rain from regular rain because the charged nanocrystals glowed. Each one was unimaginably small, the paper said, but together they produced sweeping rainbow effects, and, at night, a seductively beautiful scintillation, like you were traveling among the stars.

It was an initiation device, which changed the biochemistry of your brain, readying you for uploading. Making you want it.

You would remain uploaded until the world was ready for peace, when you would be downloaded into the new bodies they would have ready for you by then.

Outside, in the air above 14th Street, in colors of electric rains, Ella saw her parents’ faces, an afterimage of staring at their newspaper photographs.

According to the paper, they had been executed several years ago, on August 17th of the year of their terrorist attack. Because they worked for the Department of Homeland Defense and knew all possible avenues of attack, so far no one had been able to hack into any of the components of their grand plan, which swept up the East Coast, and was borne inland and then out to sea by hurricanes. By then, it was reproducing, and had taken over New York City and all of the coastal cities down to Miami.

Ella yanked at the tall window sash, but it was painted shut. She banged and smashed on it with her fist and was finally getting it to open, just a crack, when Nana came in. She immediately saw the paper and grabbed Ella. Ella fought her, struggled, but Nana was surprisingly strong and finally Ella collapsed, sobbing, into her arms.

“There’s nothing out there,” Nana told her, in a surprisingly tender voice. “You’ve got to live your life here and now. Remember how I found you.”

They planted crops in the back yard of the townhouse—soybeans, corn, potatoes, and kale—and the electric rains did not survive their trip through the soil to the roots.

And Ella did not forget what she had read.

Ella felt relatively safe on 14th Street, especially with the gun in her pocket. She had no qualms about shooting someone who might want to hurt her. Nana had drilled her fiercely about that, shoot first and think later, they wouldn’t do any different. She knew this was true, and she needed her glasses to see these threats approaching, and in gauging the degree of threat. She knew she looked defenseless trudging along with her strange bundle. This walk would take till well past daylight, and then she would find a place to nap and return at night.

Now, the city unfolded around her with splendor. A liquor store on the next block glowed with neon of all colors, green, blue, yellow, and she slipped her glasses down briefly and saw it: yes, the unfolding flower the lights became without that focus. She loved that flower, and Nana always had to yank her along, at this point. She stopped, though, and absorbed the beauty of the flower, the glowing petal-point of intersecting green and red which read quite dully COORS with her glasses on. This was one of the landmarks. She went faster to get past the rotting smell of the dumpster in the alley next to the store, another landmark.

The usual bodies lay in front of it, and some cardboard structures. She was not afraid; these people were the least of her problems. The wagon squeaked past them. They would not rouse even if kicked, for Nana always gave each one a token kick as she passed, saying, “Scum! Sluggards! Weaklings! You’re ruining my beautiful city!” and the like, and no one ever moved. Music blared from the door as Ella passed, and within she saw a bald, wary black man, his head washed in white neon, and rows and rows of bottles. He glanced up from a tiny TV sitting on his counter as she squeaked past. They had a television set, but Nana never turned it on anymore. There was no news, only old sitcoms and soap operas.

Next was a block of pawnshops drawn tight with aluminum fences drawn down in the evening, terribly dark, no streetlights. She waited on that corner until a car swept down 14th Street and illuminated the sidewalk for a moment. A few bums in doorways, nothing more. She pulled forward as quickly as she could, trying not to seem afraid and hurried, standing straight, as if she were strong and powerful. In the middle of the block a shadowy figure lurched toward her. She veered to the left and reached into her pocket, then saw him fall with a thump without any assistance from her.

On the next corner she pulled her glasses down again, for an instant, and could just see the red blinking light on top of the Monument, which stood atop a low green hill behind all the buildings ahead of her. Prostitutes postured in very short skirts and low blouses, running out and stopping a rare car. A door opened and two got in; an arm reached out and shoved the others away; one fell down on the street and got up dusting her butt off yelling, “Fuck you too.” But they did not bother Ella as she trundled past.

Ella was feeling a little better now. Chinatown was to her left, a few blocks over, and Ella pulled her glasses down to blur the beautiful green dragon which arched high above the buildings hiding the rest of Chinatown, fusing it into a creature who roared into flame with the pulse of her own heartbeat then returned to a coiled position. There was no clearer place to see the dragon; a block further back or forward the dragon was hidden by other buildings. She was filled with joy at the sight of the dragon each time she saw it.

Once she had been walking down the street and stopped at a tangle of white string at her feet. It was fringed with red and blue, and as she looked Ella had become aware that it was, miraculously, twisted into the shape of a dragon, perfectly and unmistakably. She had picked it up carefully and pressed it in one of Nana’s musty books which crumpled in tiny sharp triangles from the corners of the pages whenever she opened it, with print so small that it was almost impossible to read. The dragon always gave her strength and it did now, flashing beneath the moonless sky as if, without her glasses, it were independent of buildings, poised in the sky, dancing for her, telling her that she deserved to be alive for reasons she did not understand.

Next came the Man on Horseback, one of her favorite statues. His sword was brandished. He would protect her. She had seen him many times, dappled with sunlight, which moved as the broad branches overhead shifted in the summer wind; plastered with dead orange leaves. The bums there were old and kind, never mean; Nana told her that they were different, that for many bum generations they had preyed on government workers ascending from the Metro, an easy touch. And she always gestured toward the site of the old YWCA Cafeteria a few blocks over. Nana used to meet her friends there for lunch, and Ella knew Nana’s memory of the inside almost as well as she knew the inside of their apartment: the tall windows, the wide booths, the cheap, good food, the sound of silverware plunked on trays drifting up to the high ceiling. Nana had a table and two ladder-back chairs she bought from the cafeteria when it had been closed and the furnishings went up for sale, sitting in one of the apartment alcoves. Ella had never minded polishing the old worn wood; she loved polishing all the things in Nana’s apartment; they seemed to miraculously hold a past just beneath their surface which was lush and carefree and deep, like flowers, like city lights, something she could feel like heat as her fingers felt out their ornate crevices; and afterwards they always had good green tea from a beautiful pot covered with china flowers, and Nana always seemed so happy to see everything shining and perfect like the rows of linens in the closet.

Ella was very tired. Her feet burned; her legs felt like rubber. She became afraid that she had gone out of her way and fear closed her throat for a moment. She removed her glasses and recognized none of the blurred constellations.

And it began to rain.

She saw one scintillation and it was like the first flake of snow: Was it real?

The Smithsonian Institute was two blocks away. Nana had brought her here on sharp blue winter days, carrying flashlights so that she could see the insides of the dark museums. One time when they went, self-appointed technicians had found the central power switch and illuminated everything, but usually they saw everything in the focused beam of a flashlight, in pieces. Nana liked Modern Art more than anything else, so Ella had seen the reclining Matisse women with hairy armpits, the two-faced Picassos, the sharp edges of Cézanne. She had also seen things much more mysterious: a pendulum that never stopped swinging; the history of atomic energy; a small thing called a capsule which had orbited the earth. These were the things that interested her the most.

Ella began to run. She was tired, but she had no choice: She had to get out of the electric rains before it began to pour. As far as she knew there were two alternatives. You would hear ethereal singing voices, or beautiful music, the intrepid Washington Post had reported, and be irresistibly drawn to a Metro entrance. If you went down into the Metro, you would be uploaded. Or you could stay out of the rain.

The trial of her parents had taken place in Los Angeles, which had become the new capital of the United States. The Post had gotten hold of some of their classified scientific papers and published them; the papers were subsequently critiqued by other scientists who condemned their uploading processes as being untested and dangerous. Others said that they had been tested, and that they worked, and that the entire Cabinet and the President and all of the Congress had been briefed on an alternate uploading system, one that was manufactured by the company that the President had once run.

As Ella ran uphill, a glow lit the grayness of the morning and she realized that not only was she almost at the Smithsonian, she was also almost at the Metro entrance for the museum.

It was glowing most brilliantly now and she stopped, panting, as the scintillations increased. She only had moments before the singing would begin, before she would become one of the derelicts drunk on electric rain living in the streets, or drawn down into the Metro.

Her parents had not been uploaded, according to the newspaper. But . . . would they not have made copies of themselves? She had asked Nana once, and Nana had become very angry and said that those people were not her parents; they were criminals and that they had ruined her city and that she should be grateful to have a home at all, and that was the end of it. She kept her thoughts to herself after that, but did not stop wondering.

Perhaps they were there, in the brilliant light emanating from the subway entrance.

Perhaps she could see them again.

If she just went into that glowing, beautiful entrance, down the rainbowed stairs . . .

She took a few steps toward it, across the Mall, then forced herself to stop. She looked back at the sheet-wrapped body.

Nana had taken good care of her. She had to do this one thing. Even though Nana had not asked, she knew it was what she wanted.

Turning, she ran under the deep concrete overhang of a nearby building and huddled down to wait out the shower.

Electric rains drifted across the face of the Castle, making it look magical. She could see the top of the Washington Monument; the anti-terrorist doors had long since been removed and she and Nana had hiked to the top one lovely winter morning, and that was one of the few times she had seen Nana cry. “My city,” she had said. “My beautiful city.”

Ella thought that she heard one vagrant melody, in her head, faint, like birdsong through the closed window in the spring, like all the loveliness she had ever known, like flat clean sheets, like glowing polished wood, like bright tulips, and she began to sing her own songs, loudly, songs that Nana had taught her. “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” “From the Halls of Montezuma,” and “Beautiful Ohio.” She stood up in the concrete alcove and shouted, “B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O and Bingo was his name-o.” The echo was almost like a round, as if Nana was singing with her, overlapping her sounds to make chords.

But it was so hard to think that her own parents had been wrong. And it made her angry that Nana had never told her the truth. She began to cry, then wiped away her tears.

The shower was over. The slight green buds on the trees lining the Mall sparkled in the morning sun.

And five people approached the wagon holding Nana.

Three were women and two were men, walking across the tall, dry winter grass of the unmown Mall. They were of various ages. One woman, with long blonde hair, was wearing shorts and a sweater. The two men wore business suits and red ties. The other two women were middle-aged and also wore suits.

The wagon was about two hundred feet away from Ella’s shelter.

She wasn’t sure what to do. She decided to stay in hiding until they passed.

But apparently they had spotted the wagon, all alone out there, and were heading toward it. She could hear them faintly.

“What’s this?” asked one of the men. He bent down and began pulling at the sheet. The women murmured excitedly, and the blonde woman smiled broadly.

“A body! What luck!” She picked up the wagon handle.

Ella, heart beating hard, ran out from beneath her alcove. “Stop!”

They all turned, looking surprised.

“She’s . . . mine.”

Ella was closer now, about twenty feet away.

“Why, how could she possibly be yours?” asked one of the middle-aged women. “You’re far too young to have your own body.”

“We need her,” smiled the blonde woman. “For the greater good. So that more of us can get out. And change things. You come with us, sweetie.” She gestured toward the Metro entrance, still glowing.

“She’s not very old,” muttered one of the men. “She can wait a while.”

Ella fumbled in her pocket. The gun got caught on some folds, but finally she got it out. She held it steady, as Nana had taught her. “You can’t have her.”

“Why, you greedy little—”

Ella thought sure he was going to say “bitch.” She fired over his head.

The blonde woman turned pale. Ella was glad. She was afraid that they would not care if they were shot. “Get away or I’ll shoot you all.”

They all looked at each other uneasily. One of the middle-aged women crouched down and held out a hand. “I . . . used to have a daughter like you, honey. I know you’re scared and lonely. Come with us and we’ll help you out.”

Ella advanced steadily, still holding the gun on them. “I have plenty of bullets.”

One of the men pulled on the blonde woman’s arm. “Come on. It’s not worth it. It took us a long time just to get our bodies.”

“But—two!”

Still, they backed away slowly, as of one accord. They did not turn away from Ella until they were farther away, and then they ran toward the Metro entrance and disappeared into the glow.

It was then that Ella knew for sure: She did not want to go down into the Metro. Not ever.

A gray overcast crept over the sky, threatening a day of spring drizzle. Ella figured she had about three miles to go. She’d better get started.

Independence Avenue was right across the street. Now it was just a few blocks’ walk, past the Washington Monument and the Vietnam War Memorial. She had gone there with Nana several times. Her son’s name was on the wall.

Ella picked up the handle from where she had let it clank to the sidewalk and trudged on. She smelled the dampness of the river and knew well where it was anyway. She and Nana often sat on its banks and watched the beautiful lights of traffic wind along the Virginia shore, and from time to time Nana dressed them both up in finery, took a taxi to a restaurant full of crushed velvet and dark wood, high above the river, sipped a tiny bright drink before dinner as she watched the lights hungrily, sometimes through a glimmer of tears, and taught Ella to like snails.

She stopped.

No. Neither of those were true. They were stories Nana had told her, many times, stories about how it would be again once everything was right. Once the electric rains were over.

She was getting tired, she realized. Tired and hungry and thirsty. After a long trudge, while the sky became steadily more gray, she finally glimpsed them: the magnificent naked people, the man astride the horse, the woman leading it.

And across the bridge, set on a hill, the white mansion.

Ella’s arms ached, but the wagon didn’t seem quite as heavy now though she dreaded the hill. The river was swift and rushing below the bridge and she felt as if the dragon of light was bursting through her own chest as she walked across the arch of the bridge.

Once across it, she had to turn back, not forward, to get her bearings, crossing the main highway via another circle and running up the asphalt until the angle of the hill stopped her. There were only four turns now. And here—

Here was the stone that said Admiral James Tolliver.

The man who had rescued her, and then died.

To the right was another stone for Nana: Rose Ann Tolliver.

Nana always hurried past these stones, but Ella always saw her glance at them; saw tears well in her eyes. Perhaps she thought that Ella didn’t know her real name. Perhaps she was pretending that Ella had never seen the newspaper articles.

Perhaps she was pretending that, by rescuing Ella, her husband had ingested the electric rains, and was lost somewhere, uploaded to an unknown future. There was no body here, beneath the stone that read National Hero. He had given his life to help prevent what had actually happened. Maybe.

Or maybe, because of him, it had not happened everywhere.

Ella, grunting, tipped the wagon sideways. Rose Ann Tolliver tumbled out. Ella pushed and pulled on her until she was roughly aligned with the headstone. It was all she could do. She had no shovel. She got out Nana’s old driver’s license and slipped it inside the sheet. She saw fresh flowers on some of the graves. Maybe there were real people here. Maybe they were taking care of things. She was not sure she wanted to meet them, though. Just because they took care of Arlington Cemetery did not mean they were sane. But they might bury Rose Ann Tolliver next to the memory of her husband.

There was the Pentagon, to her right. Five sides, Nana had taken care to teach her the shapes, but somehow Ella thought she had already known.

She sat below the decaying white mansion and thought of the things that could happen. The things Nana had said might happen. The day that she said might come, the day that Nana told her she had to live for.

All the people living in Washington the day of the attack, the ones caught in the electric rains, the ones who had rushed into the Metro and been uploaded, would be downloaded. The world would be new, peace-loving, like Ella’s parents had believed it could be.

Those people would go about their lives in Nana’s timeless, beautiful Washington. They would go to office jobs, come home to families, eat snails in French restaurants or dim sum in Chinatown. They would think, read, do research, go to concerts and plays. They would walk the lovely, tree-lined streets of Washington with friends and relatives.

They would not be afraid of the rains.

But when would that be? Ella wondered.

And why would they be any different than the people she had just met?

How long was she supposed to polish the furniture, iron the sheets, and plant the dwindling supply of tulip bulbs?

And how was this supposed to happen?

Were there really people elsewhere? Normal, old-fashioned people, not rain-mad? In California? Was anyone flying the monitor planes?

Was there any place the electric rains had not reached, a place where they were doing all the things Nana had longed to do, or figuring out how to do them very soon?

What would happen if the electric rains fell on her and there was no place to run to, no Metro where she could be uploaded? Would she just go mad herself?

Nana might not have thought that these were good questions to ask. But she did.

Ella rose from the damp ground and brushed leaves from her pants. She picked up the wagon handle. The wagon would be useful.

“Goodbye, Nana,” she said, and walked down the narrow cemetery road heading west.

© 2007 by Kathleen Ann Goonan.

Originally published in Eclipse One, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Kathleen Ann Goonan is the author of seven novels, the most recent being This Shared Dream (Tor, July 2011). In War Times (Tor, 2007) won the John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2007; it was also the American Library Association’s Best SF Novel of 2007. Previous novels were finalists for the Nebula, Clarke, and BSFA Awards. Angels and You Dogs, a short story collection, will be published by PS Publishing in 2012. She is working on her eighth novel, Hemingway’s Hurricane, and is a Visiting Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.

Test
Steven Utley

Something is eating the starship Stephen W. Hawking, chewing it slowly and efficiently to pieces. Hurtling through hyperspace, or merely hanging suspended therein (who can really tell about hyperspace?), the vessel has become entangled with an unknown entity that exhibits at least one recognizable attribute: curiosity. Possibly malevolence is one of its attributes as well, but possibly it’s just very clumsy, inclined to break things it’s unused to handling, such as starships and their occupants, like a child destroying a toy while trying to understand how it works—as before, who can really tell? The fact remains: in a theoretically infinite universe theoretically full of possibilities, the ship has had the infinite bad luck to run afoul of some kind of monster, and it is wreaking havoc with us.

This, anyway, is what I think. My shipmates have their own ideas about what is going on.

None of us denies that something is going on. Soon after the Stephen W. Hawking left normal space on the first manned faster-than-light voyage to the stars, the terrible dreams began, dreams of black tentacles coiling about the ship, reaching into it, touching us in our sleep, dreams of choking darkness. I said nothing about them to my shipmates, even though Systems Engineer Tilford, who shared quarters with me, sometimes woke me up with his thrashing and moaning. Out of respect for his privacy—privacy being at a premium aboard the ship—I said nothing to him. If Commander Bell or First Officer Sutter also suffered from nightmares, neither admitted it. Nevertheless, I could tell by looking at them that they felt as tired as I.

Next, things started to go wrong with the ship. The environment and food processing systems broke down. Sewage went untreated, and parts of the ship began to stink intolerably. The food processor dispensed a viscid brown sludge—nutritious, not bad-tasting, but hardly appetizing given its resemblance to the sewage.

Training, camaraderie, and shared purpose at first enabled us to take these things in stride, but lack of restful sleep took its toll in due course, and tempers grew short. Commander Bell, always a man difficult to approach, became remote to the point of nonexistence: We scarcely saw him at all. Sutter grew crisp to the point of snappishness.

As for Systems Engineer Tilford, whose omnicompetence had won him a berth aboard the Stephen W. Hawking, he could not fix anything and grew increasingly exasperated. “It’s like the source of the trouble is constantly moving around,” he complained to us, “and stays just out of my reach.”

Sutter discreetly approached me on the bridge during one of my watches. Without preamble, she said, “The commander worries me. He’s failing to command.”

“I have to admit,” I had to admit, “that he hasn’t seemed like himself since these problems started.”

Commander Bell, tall, lean, hawk-nosed, with dark eyes and close-cropped hair the color of iron filings—a Hollywood casting agent’s idea of a spaceship commander—did not simply look the part, he had lived it. He was already a legend, at least within the hermetic structure of the agency, when he was named commander of this mission. He had first distinguished himself as a pilot aboard close-orbit research ships out around the gas giants, territory with which Sutter and I had had our own harsh experiences. Commander Bell never spoke of it, and wasn’t the kind of person who would have spoken of it even in the absence of agency guidelines about possibly hurtful publicity, but fabulous accounts of his exploits had circulated through the middle and lower echelons. According to one of these stories, it had been Bell’s determination and ability that narrowly averted disaster during the first manned mission to the Jovian moons. Malfunctions had plagued the close-orbiter, compelling him to do some tricky seat-of-the-pants piloting so that the scientific team aboard could finish its work. Another version of the story hinted darkly that it had been the scientists themselves who were the source of trouble—that some among them hadn’t been able to cope with the sight of the great banded planet filling the sky, of the Great Red Spot gaping overhead like a ravenous maw, that Bell had held them in line by force of will.

Sutter, sitting before a console on the bridge, said, “Tilford worries me, too. I hardly ever see him any more. He never talks to me.”

“He spends all his free-shift time in the systems. Trying to fix things.”

“When you’re with him, in your quarters, does he tell you things? You know.” She made a groping motion. Her voice was calm, but she looked haggard and baffled. “Does he talk to you?”

“Not much. Not as much as he used to.”

“I’m trying to understand all this. I’m trying to take stock of the situation. I just want to know how he really feels. I need to know, I really am trying to stay on top of things, but I—I don’t know.”

“Tilford feels—not being able to keep the systems working eats at him. Professional pride. I think he may feel personally responsible for our morale problem.”

“Well, maybe he ought to feel that way. Systems are his responsibility. He is our engineer.” Sutter swiveled in her chair and slapped her fleshy hand down on the console.

“We’re all showing signs of strain,” I said. “I personally think it’s—we’re just apes, Sutter, and here we are aboard a starship, stuck fast in hyperspace. I think we’re up against something we never foresaw. Something sentient and malevolent that’s playing with us, playing with the ship, too. Playing with the systems and programs, causing all our problems. A monster of some kind.”

“A monster.”

“Yes.”

“Good God, I’d hoped that you, at least, could still be relied on. I hope you’re not serious.”

“I’m perfectly serious.”

“Then you’ve watched too many science fiction shows. There’s nothing outside this ship that can chew up computer programs and people’s minds.”

“Then how do you account for the malfunctions?”

“Malfunctions occur.”

“And ourselves?”

“I personally think it’s Commander Bell’s fault,” she said. “Instead of pulling us together as a team, he’s let everything fly apart. If the person in charge is derelict in his duty, the subordinates will—Tilford hides out in the walls of the ship, you, you’re going on about space monsters. There’s nothing out there. Your brain’s turning to mush.”

“Obviously,” I said, “my opinion is worth nothing,” and I left the bridge. To hell with whose watch it was.

About an hour later, I encountered Commander Bell in the main passageway just as he began his rampage. He had got hold of one of Tilford’s tools, a heavy wrench—Tilford himself was off somewhere deep inside the ship, doing who knows what—and even as I watched swung it against one of the monitoring devices. I made to stop him, but he took a vicious swipe at me, and I got out of his way and stayed out. Bell was a big man, bigger than me, and it was a big wrench. I followed at a discreet distance as he left a trail of shattered equipment. “Come on, you son of a bitch,” he kept yelling, “come out!” and the wrench would strike high and hard, and he’d grunt with evident satisfaction and go on to his next victim. And all the while I could hear Sutter and Tilford screaming in the background, demanding to know what was happening.

The commander was approaching the bridge, and I was beginning to realize the need to act, to save the delicate controls, when his fury passed as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had come. He tossed the wrench aside, sat down amid the wreckage of the last object of his wrath, and looked dazedly about. I crept forward to kneel beside him. “Oh Jesus help me,” Bell sobbed, “oh Jesus I’m in trouble now,” and at his side I murmured to him, softly, with tender solicitude, and said to myself, We’re all in trouble now.

Sutter arrived then at a dead run from the bridge, and the two of us managed to get Bell to his cabin. Sutter had me administer a light sedative.

“I think,” I said as we left the commander sleeping in his cabin, “the time has definitely come to discuss the future of this mission.”

“So do I,” said Sutter. We returned to the bridge. Tilford addressed us from the intercom speaker, tsk-tsking over the damage. “As though I didn’t have enough on my plate,” he said.

“Where are you, Tilford?” Sutter demanded.

“Deep inside the ship, trying to find a gremlin. Do you need me there, physically?”

“No. Go on about your business. I’ll bring you up to date later.”

“Roger.”

I noticed then that Sutter had brought along the wrench I’d taken from Commander Bell. She seemed to notice, too: With a sigh that could have signified surprise or disgust, she laid the thing on the console and regarded it unhappily.

“Any idea at all,” she asked me, “what might have precipitated Bell’s funk?”

I told her that something was eating the ship.

Now she regarded me unhappily. “I’m going to pretend you haven’t said anything as ludicrous as what you’ve just said. I have to believe you and I can depend upon each other in this crisis. Unless and until we bring Commander Bell out of his funk—”

“We can’t do anything for him here. He needs help we can’t give him. I think the best thing we can do for him, and for ourselves as well, before we all go crazy—before we’re chewed up by this thing outside the ship—is to cut the mission short and return to Earth.”

Sutter stared at me in frank amazement and disbelief. “Cut the mission short? That’s out of the question! The agency didn’t send us all this way just so we could turn tail and run home at the first sign of trouble.”

“There—”

“No, shut up and listen to me. We’ve got some problems here, I admit that, but I’m going to straighten everything out. We’ll put this thing back together. It’s all up to us.” She reached and wrapped a hand around my forearm and pulled me a step closer. “What we’re doing here is important. We can’t throw it away. The hopes and dreams of—”

“For God’s sake!”

“—the human race ride with us. We can’t let everyone down.”

I said, “Sutter, listen,” and no more for she cut me short with a vehement shake of her head.

“Not a word,” she said, and her voice suddenly had an angry deadly cold tone I’d never heard before. “Don’t even open your mouth, because if you do I’ll put my fist in it. This mission is not going to end in failure. I personally am going to see to it that it succeeds.” It was at this moment that I noticed that the particular console at which she sat housed the emergency manual override. She loomed before it protectively. “Regulations cover such situations as we now have aboard this ship—an infirm commanding officer can be removed and replaced. I am taking over as of now.”

“Sutter—”

“I don’t want to talk about this any longer, I don’t want to talk about anything right now, so just get the hell out of here. That’s an order.”

“Sutter—”

“We can’t pack up!” she exploded. “We can’t go back and tell them, ‘Ooh, things got scary and messy, so we came home.’”

Things got scary and messy during my next watch, when the commander somehow made his way from his cabin to the shuttlecraft bay. And opened both the airlock doors. My first intimation of this came when one of the consoles beeped a warning and a lighted panel began to pulsate. The readout on the panel said, BAY DEPRESSURIZING. I screamed for Sutter and ran from the bridge, knowing, even as I went down the axis toward the shuttlecraft bay, that I was too late. Bell had let the monster into the ship.

We found Bell himself smashed against the outer airlock door. He seemed to me to have been broken open and examined thoroughly. Part of him appeared to be missing. Sutter, however, muttered something about explosive decompression and ordered Tilford to present himself. It was our task as subordinates to clean up the mess.

Nevertheless, I felt calm, at peace. Now Sutter was inarguably in charge of the expedition. The commander’s death would bring her to her senses, make her realize that our only course of action was to return to Earth.

Tilford was pale and tight-lipped when he arrived. We gingerly slid the commander’s remains into a plastic bag, and then came the accident. The bag, improperly sealed in our haste and confusion, split open, and part of the commander slid out onto the deck, splashing Tilford and myself. He and I screamed and kept on screaming, or at least it seemed so, until Sutter came down from the bridge to see what was the matter. Tilford shut up when he saw Sutter, while I went on yelling God, God, get me out of here, I can’t stand it, I’m not going to take this any more! And Sutter, overcoming her own shock, had reached for me only to have me turn on her and curse her, curse the commander and Tilford, curse the ship and the mission. Then, muttering, not looking back, I left them in the shuttlecraft bay.

They moved the commander’s body to the freezer without my assistance.

During the next watch, I actually saw Tilford for the last time. He was removing a large access panel preparatory to crawling within the walls of the ship again. “I’m going to track the gremlin to its lair,” he said just before he disappeared, “and kill the little bastard with my bare hands.”

I sheepishly reported to Sutter on the bridge and apologized for my earlier behavior. She seemed not to care, almost not to hear, as she sat hunched before a console, her face flashing red, green, yellow as lights winked on and off and on again—the ship’s way of reassuring us that, despite everything, as far as it was concerned, all was well. I knew better, and I’m sure Sutter knew better as well. I felt tired and sad and sorry for her and for myself. I said, “I think we’re way out of our depth here. I think what they did to us on Earth to prepare us for this—it wasn’t enough, it could never be enough. They were too eager to get us aboard the ship and get us on our way. They were in too much of a hurry.”

“They did the best they could. Next time, with what we’ve learned on this trip, they’ll do better. Be that as it may, though. I am now in command here, and I say we’re going to carry out our mission to the best of our ability.”

So there truly was nothing for me to do except kill her. Tilford’s heavy wrench, the one the commander had used to disable monitoring devices, still lay upon the console. I picked it up and hefted it. It felt good in my hand, primitive, efficient.

It did the job.

When I knew that Sutter was dead I went to my own seat. My head hurt; there was a buzzing in my ears that made me dizzy. Then I realized that, all around me, the consoles had suddenly begun to click and hum. A tremor passed through the deck.

Tilford said over the intercom, “Better buckle in. The ship exits hyperspace in twenty-one minutes.”

“Tilford? Tilford! What’re—”

“Stop yelling. I’m trying to concentrate here. Where’s her highness?”

“She’s—she’s here with me on the bridge.”

“You listening, Sutter?”

I said nothing. Sutter said nothing.

“Well, she’s dead, isn’t she?” he said. He didn’t sound too surprised. “I guess she must be. Good for you. I sort of figured one of us would end up having to kill her. She was determined to see this thing through no matter what. She would’ve got all of us killed before she’d admit failure.”

“Listen, I—”

“It’s okay. Don’t worry. They’re never going to know. The first thing I did was to dump all the stuff the monitors have recorded, lo, these many weeks past. That gave me the first real satisfaction I’ve had since we left Earth.”

“You said we’re leaving hyperspace.”

“Eighteen minutes from now. It’s too late for me to stop it now and too late for you to stop me.”

“Why—why would I try to stop you?”

“Why indeed? So relax. I’m in control here. I’m running the ship now.”

I moved to the console that housed the emergency manual overrides and tried to unlock it. It refused to accept my entry code.

“The overrides are useless,” Tilford said. “All of that stuff on the bridge, all of those nice buttons and switches and pretty lights, they’re all junk. It’s all for show now. None of it does anything. You can press all the buttons you want, dance on ‘em if you like, nothing’ll happen. The instruments lie. The agency lied, too. They built this ship and sent us out in it to be tested to destruction. They programmed the malfunctions. No wonder I couldn’t get anything to work. None of this was ever my fault.”

“That’s insane. Listen to yourself. Don’t you see how demented that sounds?”

“Demented, hell, it sounds downright paranoid. But it’s the truth.”

“No, it’s an alien entity, manipulating us, driving us crazy—”

“I was only kidding about the gremlin.”

“The gremlin is real! It exists! It’s hyperspace itself! We’re—”

“Look, I can’t stop to argue with you about it right now. I’m going to be awfully busy for a while—right up to phase-out. Better go buckle yourself in, bunkie.”

First, I took Sutter down to the freezer and returned to the bridge. I didn’t try to talk to Tilford again. Whatever he was doing, however he had managed to do it, it kept him busy. I got back to the bridge and into my seat moments before the tardyon-tachyon converter translated the ship and all it contained out of hyperspace, back into normal space. A sound as solid as a fist crushed me flat in my chair. All about me the ship screamed as it simultaneously compressed in and stretched through the void. So began that first, eternal nanosecond of the voyage home.

“I didn’t want to believe it,” Tilford said over the intercom. He sounded exhausted. “You know how much this mission meant to me, to all of us. But all those malfunctions . . .”

I was on the bridge, massaging the muscles in my left arm and enduring the torment of returning circulation. I had regained consciousness after phase-in to find myself on the deck, bleeding from the nose, with my arm pinned beneath me. I was doing a poor job of holding up my end of the conversation.

“I can’t remember when it first hit me,” Tilford went on, “or even when I stopped dismissing it out of hand. The idea, I mean, was crazy. The idea I’d been trying to maintain systems that’d been designed to fail. But I couldn’t take it any more. I had to do something drastic. Had to find out. I went deep into the systems and took ‘em apart. Killed a lot of stuff.” He tried to laugh; the sound was more like a groan. “Then I took over.”

“What now?”

“I don’t feel so good. Feel like I need to throw up.”

“You sound like you’re dying.”

“Yeah. Guess I should’ve given more though to protecting myself before I crawled in here.” He retched over the intercom. The fit lasted for almost half a minute. “Sorry. I don’t think I have the patience to die of radiation poisoning. I’m going to have to find a quicker way.”

He said no more, even when I called his name.

I enter and cross the cold silvery room to cry beside Sutter, my tears freezing on my cheeks. Stretched out on her back beside a bag containing the mortal remains of Commander Bell, she waits patiently until I’ve finished crying. She lets me talk. My breath comes out white mist as I argue my case for what feels like the thousandth time: hyperspace isn’t a place but a thing, a being—and it doesn’t like us.

Sutter doesn’t appear to resent my having bashed her skull in. Perhaps she still can’t quite believe I could have done such a thing. In other respects, she is as unyielding as ever.

The commander had a nervous breakdown, she says, Tilford was just paranoid, and you still believe in space monsters. You all failed me. You failed everybody. You failed the human race.

Commander Bell says nothing, but, then, he’s in no condition.

Tilford, who presumably has long since crawled off into some niche deep within the ship to die, comes to disturb my meditations in the cold room by telling me, If I had it to do all over again, I’d be more methodical.

He looks pale and drawn, like a ghost, and I can only think, Well, of course.

I’d kill you and Sutter, he goes on, and jettison the bodies before I went into the systems. Nothing very personal. Sutter always had that ramrod up her butt, but you were okay. It’s just that I hate untidiness. Spoils everything. I’d send the ship back to Earth in perfect running order. Just no bodies and no data. If the mission has to be a failure, better it should be an enigmatic failure. It’s the unexplained failures that infuriate. The puzzles without solutions.

I’m glad you don’t have it to do all over again, I say. I think the idea of being jettisoned into the void is horrible.

You’d be dead, what would it matter? Paying back those evil bastards on Earth is all that’s important now. Think about it. The ship gets back to Earth, locks into the proper orbit around the Moon. Everyone’s curiosity is already piqued because there’s been no answer to their greetings. The boarding party doesn’t find a damn thing, no records, no trace of us, nothing. A mystery that’d haunt ‘em forever. The Mary Celeste of space. It’s what those bastards deserve for what they’ve done to us.

I think you may be wrong about them. They didn’t send us out here to die. They just didn’t—none of us realized what we’d be up against. There was no way to prepare for what we encountered out here. No way on Earth.

That elicits a laugh from Tilford. He shakes his head and moves toward the hatch. Over his shoulder he says, Sutter was right about the necessity of what we were doing, or thought we were doing. I give her that. We could reach the stars if we’re given a fair shot at it. But they wanted to send out guinea pigs first, and throw unsolvable problems at them, and see what they did. Know what I’d tell them if I made it back? His face darkens with anger. I’d tell them, You betrayed good people who believed in the nobility, the necessity, the inevitability of what they were about. You betrayed the entire human race.

And his face, meanwhile, has continued to darken until it is black. He becomes a shadow. He opens the hatch and beyond is a vaster shadow that extrudes a tentacle into the room. The greater and lesser blacknesses merge and move toward us.

So, Tilford asks me, further thoughts on the matter?

Any more, I tell him, I really don’t know what to think.

© 2012 Steven Utley.

Steven Utley, a founding member of the Turkey City writing workshop in Texas during the 1970s, is the author of three story collections, Ghost Seas (Ticonderoga Publ., 1997), The Beasts of Love (Wheatland Press, 2005), and Where or When (PS Publ., 2006), and co-editor of the anthologies Lone Star Universe (with Geo. W. Proctor, Heidelberg Publ., 1976) and Passing for Human (with Michael Bishop, PS Publ., 2009). His series of Silurian tales, which have been appearing in Asimov’s SF, F&SF, Analog, Sci Fiction, and other venues since 1993, are forthcoming in two collections, The 400-Million-Year Itch and Invisible Kingdoms, to be issued by Ticonderoga in 2012-13.

Alarms
S. L. Gilbow

This is my list of superpowers I wish I had:

— Flight

— Invisibility

— Mind Control

— The Ability to Stop Time

— The Ability to Speed Up Time

But I don’t have a single one of those superpowers. All I have is a supercurse. My curse is that I set off alarms. Smoke alarms. Car alarms. House alarms. It doesn’t matter what kind; I set them all off as soon as I get close to them. Close is usually about thirty feet.

I don’t know why I set them off. I haven’t always been like this. I used to be fairly normal. Fairly normal means:

— You can wear a wristwatch without it constantly beeping.

— You can drive a car without disabling the alarm first.

— You can have the smoke detectors turned on in your house.

— You can walk around the neighborhood without avoiding every parked car.

— You can go to the Walmart in Chanton without it being evacuated.

I am no longer fairly normal.

I keep a little, spiral notepad of lists tucked away inside my purse. I make lists all the time, and every list I make has five items on it. The lists comfort me and bring order to my life. They make me feel good. Jimmy says I make the lists because I was potty trained way too early. He thinks he’s clever when he says this and usually throws in the phrase “anal retentive.”

Dr. Zimmerman says Jimmy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Dr. Zimmerman doesn’t think most people know what they’re talking about.

This is why I see Dr. Zimmerman:

— Ran up student loan debt

— Was stalked by Doug (ex-boyfriend)

— Lost focus and flunked out of college

— Took a few too many (okay 12) Tylenol PM

— Landed in the emergency room

I want to tell Dr. Zimmerman about what’s happening to me. I want to tell him I’m setting off alarms. But how do you explain something so irrational to such a rational person?

I used to see Dr. Zimmerman every week, but I haven’t seen him in over two months. He’s left me a few phone messages. I think Dr. Zimmerman is worried about me. I think I’m worried about me.

This is my list of things I would do first if I didn’t set off alarms:

— Take a long walk without avoiding parked cars

— Visit a friend (need to make some new friends first)

— Go to Walmart again

— Get a job

— Visit Dr. Zimmerman

When I was twelve, I would put on a black leotard my mother bought me for dance class and imagine I was a superhero. I would call myself Cara Cool and run through the house establishing order. Establishing order meant making my little sister put her stuff away. Kelly and I shared a bedroom, and she was always tossing her dirty clothes on the floor. Establishing order meant lining up the books in the living room until their front edges made a neat line across the bookshelf. I liked things neat. I liked things straight. I liked things perfect. I thought it was my job to establish order in the bedroom, the house, the world.

It is a Wednesday night, and I lie in bed staring up at a ceiling dotted with green luminescent stars I put up right before Jimmy moved in with me. I spent hours making the ceiling look like a winter’s night-sky. It is perfect now, every star in the right place.

Jimmy doesn’t understand why I put them up, and I’ve had a hard time explaining it. I tell him that the stars seem so stable to me. So unchanging.

“Cara, you awake?” whispers Jimmy opening the bedroom door. He’s been out drinking with his friends. I don’t say anything. I shouldn’t be mad at him because there’s no way I could have gone out with him, and he really shouldn’t have to stay home just because of me.

“Cara?” he says again.

“Yeah,” I say.

“You want to do something?” he asks.

“Okay,” I say, knowing what he means by “do something.”

Jimmy and I have been together for almost six months now. Together means we have regular sex. Regular sex means different things to Jimmy and me. Regular to Jimmy refers to frequency. Regular to me is more of a qualitative statement. Kind of like a regular meal or a regular day. I like regular sex.

When I turn on the light on my nightstand, Jimmy’s already got his shirt off.

When we’re done Jimmy rolls off of me, and I go wash up. The light is already out when I crawl back into bed.

“I want to go somewhere,” I say, speaking up at the stars on the ceiling.

“Where?” asks Jimmy.

“Anywhere. Not far.”

“You can go places.”

“Not where I want to go.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“I’d like to go into Chanton again. Maybe go shopping.”

“You have the money for that?” asks Jimmy.

“I can look at things,” I say.

“Someone might find out your secret,” says Jimmy. “Can you handle that?”

I think about it. “Well, I want to go someplace,” I say.

“Go to Whitson Park tomorrow.”

“I’ve been to the park.”

“Go again. It’s a nice park.”

“Will you come?”

“Can’t,” says Jimmy. “Got things to do at work.” Jimmy works at the Gamestop in town, and he’s trying to make manager. He’s already got a business degree, but manager jobs are hard to find these days.

All jobs are hard to find these days. I can’t find one, but I set off alarms.

When I was a junior in high school, I read The Metamorphosis in an Honors English Class. I used to try to imagine what Gregor Samsa felt like when he found himself turned into a giant cockroach.

As I lie in bed with Jimmy snoring next to me, I start thinking about Kafka again. I hadn’t thought about him in years, but I can’t get him off my mind tonight, can’t stop thinking about poor Gregor Samsa.

I pull my elbows in tight to my body, extend my forearms into the air and wiggle my fingers as if they’re little insect legs.

While I wiggle my fingers, I wonder what sound a cockroach makes. I’m not sure, so I make a long, wavering squeal. I lift my legs into the air and kick them up and down five times. I wonder if superheroes ever feel like cockroaches.

Jimmy rolls over onto his side. “You okay?” he asks.

“I’m fine,” I say. But I don’t think Dr. Zimmerman would say I’m fine.

I remember the night I started setting off alarms pretty clearly. It began around midnight while I was in that funny state between waking and sleeping. I was thinking about my student loan and my bills and how I probably wouldn’t be able to pay next month’s rent. Then I started thinking of my ex-boyfriend, Doug, who used to follow me everywhere, staring at me, telling me how I belonged to him. And suddenly my world was filled with sound.

The first alarm to go off was the smoke alarm. I turned on the light, got out of bed, put on my robe, and dashed to the bedroom door to smell for smoke. Jimmy came up next to me, and the alarm on his wristwatch went off. He pressed the stem over and over again but nothing happened, so he took off his watch and tossed it on the bed. Then the alarm clock on my nightstand started to beep.

Jimmy and I ran out of the house as fast as we could. When we got to the sidewalk, the car alarm on my Subaru went off. Then the alarm went off on Jimmy’s Ford.

It was a night of sounds. Some of the sounds came from the alarms, and the rest came from Jimmy. This is my list of things Jimmy said:

— “What’s going on?”

— “I don’t see a fire.”

— “Why’s the car alarm going off, too?”

— “I think it’s you.”

— “What are you doing, Cara?”

I don’t remember saying much. I stood in the center of the front yard with my arms wrapped tight across my chest and my fingers tucked into my armpits. Jimmy told me to stay put. Then he turned off the car alarms and went inside to unplug the clocks and take the batteries out of the smoke alarms.

When Jimmy called me to come back inside, he was sitting on the dining room table with a smoke alarm in his hands. He put the battery back in and the alarm went off.

“It’s you,” he said.

“What do you mean, it’s me?”

“You’re setting off the alarms. What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I was just lying in bed thinking.”

“You had to have done something.”

Jimmy and I talked for almost an hour. Finally Jimmy went upstairs to go to sleep, but I slept downstairs on the couch.

But I didn’t really need an alarm because I always seem to wake up on my own. Before Jimmy got up, I went outside to figure out what was going on. I didn’t go near the cars but walked over toward Mr. Wilkin’s house next door. I took one slow step after another, pausing a long time between each step. I passed the hydrangea bushes along the edge of the house without anything happening, but I hadn’t even gotten to that invisible line that divides our properties when Mr. Wilkin’s smoke alarm went off. I backed away, but the alarm kept on going. Mr. Wilkin came out, looked around the left side of his house and then the right, studying everything carefully. He held his nose up as if he were sniffing for something. Then he looked over at me. “You see any sign of fire?” he asked.

“No,” I said, looking down at the ground. “I haven’t seen anything.”

“That’s strange. I’ll just reset the alarm then.” He went back inside and a few seconds later the alarm stopped. I guess I was far enough back because it didn’t go off again.

I ran back into the house, curled up on the couch and covered myself with a blanket. That was two months ago.

This is my list of the places I can still go:

— Anywhere in the house

— The backyard (can’t go past the pear tree near the fence next to Mr. Wilkin’s yard)

— Part of the front yard around the porch

— Whitson Park

— The bathrooms at Whitson Park

Anyplace else would probably be a bit of a risk. Someone might see me, and then what would I say?

— Hi, I’m Cara.

— I set off alarms.

— You’ve never heard of that?

— Most of my friends set off alarms too.

— It’s perfectly normal where I come from.

What would I really say? What could I say?

Dr. Zimmerman says I’m too controlling. He says I should try to relax. He says I should take more risks. But I don’t think Dr. Zimmerman ever thought of this.

I keep a calendar on the side of the refrigerator and mark each day I set off an alarm with a red X. I mark my period with a blue X. Birthdays are in green and the day I’m supposed to pay each bill is in yellow, but I haven’t paid a bill on time in months. I used to mark my visits to Dr. Zimmerman in purple, but I’ve put away my purple pen.

Jimmy says my calendar is too busy. I like it though. It makes perfect sense to me and gives my life a little more order.

Jimmy and I sit at the kitchen table eating breakfast: leftover peas and baked chicken from the night before. Money’s real tight right now, so I don’t waste anything. I’ve quit my job as a substitute teacher. I wasn’t crazy about it anyway. Too many people. Too much noise. Chaos all day long.

“How’d you sleep?” asks Jimmy.

“Fine,” I say, chasing a pea across my plate with my fork. Once I eat this pea, I’ll be down to five.

“I heard you making noise in your sleep.”

“I was pretending I was a roach,” I say.

He looks at me.

“I can’t help it,” I say.

“Pretending you’re a roach?”

“No, setting off alarms.”

“I know,” says Jimmy.

“I haven’t done anything wrong.” I stop chasing the pea, stab it and stick it in my mouth.

“I know,” he says again. “I’m not blaming you.”

“But you’re mad.”

“Not mad,” says Jimmy. “More like frustrated.”

“So am I.”

“There’s got to be something we can do.”

“Like what?”

“Go to a doctor.”

“I’d set off his alarms,” I say.

“Go back to Zimmerman,” says Jimmy. “Go to someone. Get some help.”

“I don’t know what people would say. I don’t think I want to find out.” I imagine people flocking around me and staring right at me. I don’t know what they would do to me, but they sure as hell didn’t treat Gregor Samsa very well.

After breakfast, I take a smoke alarm out of a drawer and put a battery in it. It goes off. I take the battery out, put the alarm back into the drawer, and mark another red X on my calendar.

Someday the alarm won’t go off when I put the battery back in. Someday I’ll get out of this house and go where I want to. Someday I’ll even go back to Walmart. I’m trying to stay positive.

I’ve tried to figure things out. I really have. The best I can figure is that I’m damned for some reason. I try to think of the things I have done that may have earned me some kind of cosmic punishment.

This is my list of why the universe may hate me:

— Not going to church.

— Having too much sex (or not having enough sex).

— Not finishing college.

— Not calling home enough.

— Maybe it’s random.

After Jimmy finishes his breakfast and heads off to Gamestop, I go outside and work in the garden, making sure I don’t get close to Mr. Wilkin’s house. At around noon I drive out to Whitson Park on the east side of town, pulling far over to the right side of the road so as cars go by I won’t set off their alarms.

While I’m driving, I start thinking again about what Jimmy said at breakfast about seeing a doctor. When I get to Whitson Park, I gaze at a sea of parked cars, each one with an alarm waiting for me to set if off. I could park on the far end of the lot and walk around all the cars to get to the park. Instead, I turn the car around and head toward Chanton, toward Dr. Zimmerman’s office.

This is my list of my favorite superheroes:

— Batman

— Storm

— Spiderman

— Wonder Woman

— Daredevil

I used to drive into Chanton to work every day and imagine that my favorite superheroes lived out on the edge of town. Batman lived off the main road in a large stone mansion. Storm lived over by the swimming pool at the country club. Spiderman lived on top of the water tower. Poor Gregor Samsa lived in the loft of an old barn. But Gregor Samsa wasn’t a superhero.

As I pass the city limits sign, the traffic gets heavier and the chance of setting off alarms on passing cars gets even greater. I’m hugging the right side of the road as tight as I can, but when I set off an alarm on a passing SUV, I pull off the road and park my car. I start walking toward the center of town on foot. I like walking more than driving. I feel like I have more control. But I wish Dr. Zimmerman didn’t work all the way downtown.

I do fairly well for quite a while, walking in a ditch well off the road, keeping my head down. I don’t even look up to see if anyone is watching me, but I know they are. I can feel it.

I set off my first alarm walking by an old Victorian house on Hammond Street. I don’t think I’m anywhere near the house, but the alarm goes off anyway. It’s one of those high-pitched beeping alarms, loud enough to send its squeal sailing across the neighborhood. I don’t know what to do so I start running. I set off the fire alarm on the next house I pass and then the one after that.

Now I’m running as fast as I can, and people are staring at me, staring out their windows, but I don’t look up. I keep running until I see an alley to duck into. I run down the alley, feeling as if my heart is about to rip out of my chest, when I see a big cardboard box leaning against a dumpster. I climb into the box and squat real low and pretend I’m a cockroach.

I listen for a long time, listen for someone coming after me, someone looking for that crazy girl who sets off alarms. Finally, I dig a hole in the box with my index finger and peek out of it. I don’t see anyone so I crouch low in the box. Cara the Cockroach is hiding. Cara the Cockroach is afraid.

This is the list of my fears I made for Dr. Zimmerman:

— Fear of people

— Fear of noise

— Fear of getting hurt

— Fear of not having money

— Fear of fear

No one comes near the box for over half an hour, so I crawl out and start making my way toward Dr. Zimmerman’s office again, following alleys all the way.

I’m real careful and set off only one alarm along the way, a pickup truck that speeds past me as I try to cross the street to get from one alley to the next.

When I get to the center of town, I sit down on a bench and count the windows in the office complex where Dr. Zimmerman works. It’s all doctors in the building. Five of them. But I’ve noticed that before.

Dr. Zimmerman is on the third floor. All I can think as I stare up at the window to his office is that as soon as I get near the building all the alarms are going to go off. But Dr. Zimmerman says I need to face my fears. I hope he knows what he’s talking about.

I take half a dozen steps toward the building, and the fire alarm goes off like a Klaxon. I expect people to start flooding out of the building, but that’s not what happens. It’s not like the fire drills at school where everyone quickly heads to the doors with administrators looking hard at their watches.

I brace myself against the blast of noise and step inside to the large lobby filled with potted plants, black leather chairs, and an oak coffee table littered with magazines.

The alarm is so loud now I can barely stand it. A man in gray coveralls comes down the stairs and moves up close to me. I tense up real tight. “You’re going to have to go outside,” he shouts, his breath uncomfortably hot on my ear.

A few more people filter down the stairs, through the lobby and out the main entrance. The man in the coveralls goes to the entrance and stands there pointing outside as if people don’t know how to get out of a burning building. He signals me with his right hand, but I turn and run away. I think he yells at me, but I don’t hear him as I work my way up the stairs past a small trickle of people.

As I climb the stairs I practice what I’m going to say to Dr. Zimmerman.

— How have you been?

— I’m sorry I stopped coming.

— Dr. Zimmerman, I need your help.

— Can we talk?

— I have a situation.

I can’t even whisper the word “alarm,” not even with alarms going off all around me. So I just recite my five little phrases over and over, unable to hear my own words.

I pass the second floor and head for the third and say the “I’m sorry I stopped coming” part for the fourth time when I look up and see Dr. Zimmerman coming down the stairs.

“Cara,” he mouths.

“Doctor Zimmerman,” I shout.

He shakes his head and points to his right ear to show that he can’t hear me.

I move closer. “I need your help,” I yell.

“We have to get out of the building.” Dr. Zimmerman gently grabs my wrist and pulls me after him, but when we get close to the main entrance, I pull away from him and shake my head “no.”

“I need to talk to you alone,” I yell.

He nods and leads me down a hallway out a door marked “Emergency Exit.” We enter the alley and walk away from the building until we get to a spot by a telephone pole where we can talk.

This is the list I made about Dr. Zimmerman after our first meeting:

— Long, gray hair

— Big nose

— Soft, blue eyes

— Large hands

— Gentle voice

“What’s wrong?” asks Dr. Zimmerman.

I don’t say a word.

“You need to start coming back to therapy,” he says.

“I can’t.”

“We can change your time if Monday’s not good for you.”

“That’s not it.” I’m looking down at my feet even though I know he doesn’t like it when I do that.

“Then what’s wrong?” he asks again.

“I’m setting off alarms.” I cross my arms and squeeze my ribs real tight.

“Alarms?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why.”

“Is this a new compulsion?” he asks.

“It’s not a compulsion.”

“Well, something is driving you to do it.”

“I’m not doing it on purpose.”

“Cara, doesn’t that sound like a compulsion?”

He’s not getting it. I’m not making myself clear. Coming here was a mistake. I want to run away.

“Cara, what’s going on?” asks Dr. Zimmerman.

“I set off alarms,” I say, speaking slowly. “I set them off automatically whenever I get close to them.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why.” I want to cry now.

“Cara, do you really think it’s you?”

“It is me.”

“You’re making connections that aren’t there.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You feel you’ve lost control, don’t you?”

I nod.

“Why do you think you’ve lost control?” he asks.

I give him the “I don’t know” shrug.

“Cara, look at me.”

I look up at Dr. Zimmerman’s big nose and try to smile.

“Why have you lost it?” asks Dr. Zimmerman.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Well, don’t you think you should try to get it back?” he asks.

I have no idea of how to get control back. How can you control something so random? Or is it random? I close my eyes and do what I have done before—I concentrate real hard and slowly count to five, whispering so softly Dr. Zimmerman can’t hear me. As I reach the number five, the fire alarms stop blaring.

I’m standing in the alley now, repeating the number five over and over to myself. Dr. Zimmerman stands there looking down on me.

“The alarms have stopped,” he says. I don’t think he even realizes I stopped the alarms myself.

“I know,” I whisper. But I’m careful not to break my concentration, afraid the alarms will sound again.

“Cara,” says Dr. Zimmerman, “you need to make another appointment. Our usual time is still open.”

“I’ll be there,” I say.

“Are you okay now?”

I nod.

Dr. Zimmerman turns to go back inside and motions me to follow him into the building and down the hallway.

“I’ll see you next Monday,” he says to me as he heads up the stairs.

I go out the main entrance, concentrating all the way until I’m standing near the bench again, wondering which way to go. To the left is the way back to my car. To the right is the way to Walmart, almost half a mile down the road.

I go right.

I walk down the sidewalk, counting my steps in fives. As I pass a red Honda, I see a dent on the passenger door. I stop and gaze at the gash in the red paint. The car alarm sounds. I count to five slowly under my breath and the alarm stops.

I walk to another car and count again. The alarm blasts a loud, low whooping sound. I close my eyes and concentrate, but the alarm seems to get louder. I open my eyes and look across the street and count five windows in a drugstore. I count them out loud, almost chanting each number. When I hit the number five, the alarm stops.

I walk down the street practicing setting off alarms and silencing them again. Sometimes I don’t have to count out loud. Other times I do. My control isn’t good. But Cara Cool can set off alarms. Cara Cool can turn them off again.

This is what I think about as I walk to Walmart:

— What good is setting off alarms?

— What is Jimmy going to say?

— What will I tell Dr. Zimmerman on Monday?

— How am I going to get home?

— How am I going to pay all my bills?

As I approach the store, I see a black Buick parked off by itself on the far end of the parking lot. I walk over to it and set off the alarm. Then I stop it again. This is a good place to practice, so I set off the alarm and stop it over and over again. On the fifth try, the car unlocks. I concentrate, counting slowly under my breath, and the car locks again. Then I count down from five and unlock it.

“Yes,” I say. This is my power. This is my superpower. I just hadn’t recognized it, hadn’t learned how to use it. I am Cara Cool, and Cara Cool is setting off car alarms. Cara Cool is unlocking cars.

I step closer to the car and look in. This is my first conquest as a superhero. My first prize. A simple car. Nothing too elaborate. A coffee cup in the cup holder. A tan coat in the right rear seat. A strap sticking out from under the passenger’s seat.

I look around and think about my student loans. About the rent I’m not going to be able to pay next month. About the job I don’t have.

And as I look around, I’m all alone. For once, no one seems to be watching me. I open the car door, reach under the seat and pull out a purse. I tuck the purse under my arm and start walking to Walmart as fast as I can.

And as I walk, it hits me. I’m not Cara Cool. Cara Cool is dead. Maybe there never even was a Cara Cool. I am Cara the Cold, Cara the Cruel, Cara the Dark, Cara the Demon, Cara the Nightmare. I approach another car, concentrate real hard and listen to the locks click open. I walk on feeling a great sense of power, a sense of pleasure. I am Cara Chaos, supervillain.

Here is my list of my favorite supervillains:

— Doctor Doom

— Lex Luthor

— The Green Goblin

— Catwoman

— The Joker

I walk through the parking lot, passing car after car. I set off an alarm and then stop it again quickly. “I am Cara Chaos,” I whisper. “I am the Green Cara. I am Cara Luthor. I am Cara Doom. “

As I walk, I hear a sound coming from deep inside my head. It is an alarm. Or is it a scream?

As I get to entrance of Walmart, people skitter around, moving in and out of the store in a steady stream. I wonder what I’m going to do inside. I wonder what will happen if I lose control. I wonder what people might say if I’m discovered.

But I have power now. I can clear the entire building if I have to. I softly count to five and feel my power. I am Cara Choas.

I pull the purse tight into my ribs, and take a deep breath. I take one step into Walmart and hear someone yell, “Stop!”

I stop. I’ve been discovered. I squeeze the purse so tight I can feel the circulation to my arm cut off.

“What are you doing?” It’s a low angry voice.

“Nothing,” I whisper. The purse feels like lead now.

“Come back here,” says the voice.

I’m about to turn around when I hear a softer voice say, “Leave me alone.”

I look over and see a man grab a woman by the arm.

“I said it was over,” yells the woman.

“No, it isn’t,” the man growls, pulling the woman away from Walmart toward a blue station wagon.

As the woman pulls hard, struggling to get loose, I think of Doug, my stalker ex-boyfriend. I think of how he tried to push me around. How he tried to intimidate me.

“Leave her alone,” I say, but my voice is no more than a soft whisper.

“Mike,” says the woman, “you’re hurting me.”

I move past the couple to the passenger door of the station wagon. Mike looks at me, more like right through me. “This isn’t any of your business,” he says.

“It’s okay,” says the woman. “We were together.”

“It’s not okay,” I say.

“Be careful,” says the woman. “You don’t know him.”

“It’s not okay,” I say again. I can’t help looking down, but I’m still able to block their way.

“Damn it,” Mike mutters, letting go of the woman who backs away toward the Walmart entrance.

“Move,” he says.

But I don’t move. Instead I lean back against car door and close my eyes. I feel Mike grab my right wrist and I scream, and as I scream, the alarm on his station wagon goes off.

“See, you set off the damn car alarm,” Mike growls.

I feel Mike’s hand squeezing hard on my wrist, and I feel the weight of the purse under my arm.

I slowly count to five and the alarm on Mike’s wristwatch goes off. Then I open my eyes and look down. The alarm apps on a cell phone in his pants go off too.

Then I just keep counting to five over and over again and alarms start going off on all the cars around me.

“What in the hell is going on?” shouts the man.

“Five, five, five, five, five,” I say, my voice getting louder with each number.

Now there’s a large crowd in front of Walmart and people really are watching me. They’re all watching me. I want to turn into a cockroach and slide under a car and hide.

“Let her go,” someone yells.

Mike just keeps squeezing my wrist.

“Leave her alone,” someone else says.

Mike lets go but not without a push which sends me flying away from the station wagon. “Screw you, you crazy bitch.”

“Are you okay?” says the woman moving toward me.

“And screw you too,” Mike says to the woman. He jumps into in his car, slides over to the driver’s seat and speeds away, the alarm still sounding. “I’m so sorry,” says the woman. “He gets kind of crazy.”

I want to say something, but I can’t. I just stand there shaking.

“Everything’s okay,” I hear another voice say, and I look up at Jimmy. “Dr. Zimmerman called and said you were headed this way.”

Jimmy pulls me close, and I roll my fingers across his back, counting each finger as it touches his shirt. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. The alarms around us shut off one by one.

I guess the rule is that you don’t always get to pick your superpower. You may not even get to pick whether you’re good or evil either.

As we drive away from Walmart, I make Jimmy stop by the black Buick and slide the purse back under the passenger seat. When we pass my car, Jimmy says, “We’ll get it tomorrow.”

On the way home, I tell Jimmy everything that happened. All he says is, “It’ll be okay.”

Jimmy and I have dinner, talk for a while and go up to bed. We don’t do anything. I think he knows I’m exhausted.

I count to five and put the battery back in the alarm clock on my nightstand. It doesn’t go off. Then I carefully reach over and turn out the lamp next to the clock. Still no alarm. I count to five again, and the alarm sounds. I take a deep breath and hold it. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. The alarm stops.

“Cara,” says Jimmy. “What are you doing?”

“Be quiet,” I whisper. “Cara Cool is working on her superpowers.” Then I stare up at the ceiling, concentrate real hard, and watch the stars brighten above me.

© 2012 S. L. Gilbow.

S. L. Gilbow is a 2011 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. He has published six stories to date, five in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and one in John Joseph Adams’s anthology Federations. He debuted in the February 2007 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction with “Red Card,” a dystopian SF story in the vein of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” which was later reprinted in John Joseph Adams’s Brave New Worlds. Gilbow is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and navigator with over 2000 flying hours in the B-52. He began to write short stories as he neared the end of his Air Force career. He currently teaches English at a high school in Norfolk, Virginia.

The Legend of XI Cygnus
Gene Wolfe

In the fall sky, not long after sundown, you may see Cygnus the swan, which the Greeks called Ornis. In its right wing is the small yellow star that the Arabs (the only people to have named it as far as I know) call Gienah. Its legend is ancient, having reached us at the speed of light.

A small world circling that star was ruled by a giant. To be sure, he was not such a giant as we have here, a giant with eyes and arms and legs all like a man’s, only larger. But he was a giant indeed among his own kind, both huge and strong, and so we will call him that. Like most giants, he was inclined to be tolerant and rather lazy; but like other giants, too, he could be roused to anger, and his size and strength were so great that when thus roused he was terrible indeed. The legend concerns him, his life, and his death.

There was, upon the world ruled by this giant, a race of Dwarves, numerous, malevolent, and proud, much given to cruel jests and small thefts, the bane of the Centaurs, the Sylphs, the Demons, and all the other peoples of that world, detested and feared. And so it was that when the giant had at last unified it under his rule, he punished these Dwarves severely, to the applause of all those whom they had so long vexed and despoiled. Their fortresses, castles, citadels, and other strong places he pulled down, so that they might no longer mock their neighbors from their ramparts. Into the many mouths of their mines (which were rich and extensive, and very deep) he directed the waters of a hundred rivers and streams.

Nor was that all. He burned their towns and villages, gave over their flocks and their herds to the bears and the wolves, returned their fields to the herbs and the thronging wildflowers from which they had been taken, and set free the bondsmen who had worked them. Lastly, he caused all of the Dwarves to be counted; and finding them too many, with his own hand he slew every tenth.

This done, he declared their chastisement at an end; but in order that they might never return to their evil ways, he made them his slaves; to sweep and scrub his palace; hoe and manure his flower beds; catch, cook, and serve his food; and answer his door; and very busy he kept them, that they might have no time for evildoing.

That they hated him goes without saying. Whispering one to another while they labored, by nod and wink and gesture and secret word, they brewed the First Plot. Thus it was that one cold winter night, while the giant slept, a hundred of their largest, strongest, and most courageous entered his bedchamber with scythes, cleavers, pruning hooks, pickaxes, and such-like implements. Five stood at each foot to cut the tendon there, and five more at each hand. Forty took their places upon his belly, ready at the signal agreed-upon to plunge their weapons into his vitals. On either side of his neck there waited twenty more, the chiefs and bullies of the whole hundred, to cut the giant’s throat. On them was the greatest reliance placed.

When each was well positioned, the strongest and slyest of them all gave the signal. His trumpeter put lip to horn and blew a mighty blast; and at the sound, all hundred struck as one. Then were broadaxe and hatchet laid to tendon, and sickle, shears, and saw to artery! Scarlet blood spurted to the ceiling of that high chamber, till every Dwarf was dyed with it, and the sheet, and coverlet, and pillow, too, until the tallest stood knee deep in the hot reeking rush of it, and those small creatures that dwell in the blood of those who live upon that world of the star called by Arabs Gienah clambered out of it, rosy or pale, and clung to the skirts, and beards, and faces of the Dwarves, murmuring and muttering with soft tongues in an unknown speech, and in that fashion saying many things that no one could know.

Then the giant waked, and rose roaring. Those Dwarves who were yet in his bedchamber when he slammed shut its great door, he slew. And when day came, he most carefully examined all the rest, blinding any upon whom he discovered the least trace of his blood. And lastly, he declared an end to the stipend he had previously granted to each Dwarf for bread and meat. Thenceforward, they were made to beg those who had been their victims in times past for peelings and state crusts, and were made to work harder than ever, toiling for the giant from the first light of the star that the Arabs call Gienah until the last stall in the market closed.

That they hated him goes without saying. Year followed year, and in all those years there came not a night in which they did not dream of murder. To their children and their grandchildren they whispered of revenge about the fire, and they painted their doorposts and lintels with certain uncouth signs, red or black, whose signification they themselves well understood.

At last the giant grew old. His step was no longer so quick as it had been, nor his voice so loud, nor his eyes so keen. He fell ill, and when word of it went abroad, Shee and Sidhe, Fairy and Sprite, Kobold, Nisse, and Centaur, Goblin and Demon trooped to his palace, bringing with them gifts they hoped might bring him pleasure: Hams smoked with rare woods, so great in size that no champion of the Trolls could lift one to his shoulder; tuns brimming with wine, ale, and strong beer; salt whales, their tails in their mouths, with pickled melons for eyes; perfumes in crystal and incense in thuribles hollowed from diamonds, and with these many meadows of blossoms: yellow, red, incarnadine, mauve, and celestine. And weapons of hammered steel, chased with gold. The old giant received them in the Great Court and blessed them, smiled upon them, spoke with them for a time, and sent them away. Sadly they returned to their own homes and countries, there to pray for him, and sacrifice, and sing.

But the Dwarves, seeing how many, and how vast and rich, were the gifts that had been brought him, and seeing too that he himself was no longer the great and terrible foe of whom their fathers had spoken, then contrived the Second Plot.

And when the last Nixie had departed, leaving behind her gift of silver foam, and the giant dozed in his chair, they heaped about it all the wood that they could gather—that which had been meant to feed the palace fires, and furniture, and precious painted carvings, too, the work of the great xyloglyphists of old, whereby might be seen many a figure quaint yet imbued with a curious grace, and even the sticks and stumps of their own huts, with all their thatching and daubed doorposts. And to all this mass, which at last rose higher than the giant’s waist, they put fire in a score of places.

So terrified were they of the giant, that the first had fled before the last torch was applied. Yet some few stayed behind to watch—a dozen (or so the legend reports) through the crevice of a certain door, half a hundred peering between the petals and leaves of the hills of blossoms, each thinking himself or herself alone.

Up climbed the smoke, and the flames after it. Burned through, some accidental prop in the mountainous pile of heaped wood broke, and half the whole shifted with a grinding roar, so that a column of sparks vied for a time with all the watching stars.

At last the giant stirred, and blinked, and closed his great, slow eyes again. Perhaps he heard the twittering of the Dwarves’ distress through the crackling of the flames. Perhaps not. However that may have been, it is certain that he shouted so loudly that the very walls of his palace shook, rose and kicked the fire apart, and with a half-burned brand for a club hunted and slew all he found that night, battering the trees till showers of Dwarves dropped like ripe fruit, and stamping, stamping, stamping, until scarcely one of the fallen Dwarves still drew breath.

When the kindly light of that star which the Arabs called Gienah returned, however, he took to his bed, and summoned physicians from among the Centaurs, who are famous healers. These buttered his many burns with ointments, peered into his eyes, examined his great tongue as so many merchants might a carpet, and stamped upon his chest in order that each might know for himself, through all his feet, the beating of that mighty heart.

And when all that had been done, they shook their heads, and spoke brave words of comfort and encouragement, and went away.

For eight days and eight nights, those Dwarves who yet lived waited outside the giant’s bedchamber door with food and drink, and spoke among themselves of poisons (though none dared to fetch them), and turned back such Peris, Ouphes, and Titans as would have brought the giant comfort if they could. On the ninth day, however, a great Worm, white and blind and thicker through the body than any Dwarf, wriggled from beneath the door of the giant’s bedchamber.

They entered, first a few pushed forward by the rest, and afterward the whole of them, or rather all that remained alive. This they called the Third Plot. They climbed his sheets, explored the great foul cavern of his open mouth, danced clogs and reels where the Centaurs had stamped, and pierced and slashed his blind eyes again and again with hedge bills and pokers. Then they carved those rude signs that they had aforetime scrawled upon their own doorposts and lintels into the dead giant’s forehead, and nose, and cheeks, slicing away the putrescent flesh with their knives until each sign stood out boldly in sullen, weeping crimson. And when the last had been cut deep, they emptied their bowels and bladders wherever they stood, each boasting of what he had done, and where he had done it, and telling the rest how in years to come Dwarf children yet unborn would learn, when they were come to the age of understanding, what he, their ancestor had once done, and glory in it.

Thus they were speaking when the thundrous voice came. So mighty it was that it filled every hall and chamber of the palace; and its first word dashed the pictures from the walls so that their crash and smash added to the roar, though they were lost in it.

Its second word broke all the crockery in the palace and set the shards to sliding like screes of stones, so that they burst open cabinets and cupboards and descended to the floors in avalanches.

Its third word toppled all the statues along the broad avenue that led up to the Great Gate; its fourth stopped the fountain and snapped off both arms of the marble nymph who blessed the waters; and its fifth cracked the basin itself.

Its sixth, seventh and eighth words maddened every cat in the place, struck dead seventeen bat-winged black rooks of the flock that swept the sky about the Grand Campanile, and set all the bells to ringing.

Its ninth soured every cask in the cellars, while its tenth word stove them in. Its eleventh stopped the clocks and started the hounds to howling.

Its twelfth and last (which was an especially big word) knocked the Dwarves off their feet and sent every one of them rolling and somersaulting amongst all their foulnesses while they held their ears and screeched.

And what that voice said was, “What vermin are these who dare defile the body of a Giant?”

Oh, my friends! Let us of this star, who are ourselves but Dwarves, heed well the warning.

© 1992 by Gene Wolfe.

First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, from the author's collection, Innocents Aboard.

Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

Gene Wolfe—who is perhaps best known for his multi-volume epic, The Book of the New Sun—is the author of more than 200 short stories and thirty novels, is a two-time winner of the Nebula Award, a four-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, and was once praised as “the greatest writer in the English Language alive today” by author Michael Swanwick. His most recent novels are An Evil Guest, The Sorcerer’s House, and Home Fires.

Beauty
David Barr Kirtley

Nicole Sanders was beautiful. One night after work, she stopped off at a bar downtown, which is where she met the beast.

“Hi,” the beast said, in a gentle voice. “Can I buy you a drink?”

He was a hulking, hairy creature. His spindly goat legs ended in a pair of cloven hooves. Massive sheep horns poked out of his forehead and curled around his gremlin ears. Instead of hands he had two furry paws. His demon eyes were bloodshot and sad.

Nicole studied him. He certainly wasn’t the best-looking guy in the place, but he seemed so hopeful and shy, and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

“Okay,” she said. “A drink would be nice.”

He bought two beers and carried them over. “I’m the beast,” he said, sitting down beside her.

“I’m Nicole,” she said.

He smelled sharp and fiery.

“That’s an interesting cologne you’re wearing,” she said. “What is it?”

“It’s brimstone,” he said flatly, then added, “It isn’t cologne.”

“Oh.”

The beast studied his drink.

“So what do you do?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Telemarketing.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s all right.” He gulped some beer. “Actually, I’ve been having some problems with my coworkers.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, I mean, things used to be a lot better there, before the whole, you know . . .” He gestured at his appearance.

“Oh,” Nicole said. “So it’s . . .”

“A spell.” The beast nodded wearily. “Yeah. I actually used to be pretty handsome, if you can believe that.”

“So what happened?”

He lowered his voice. “I was cursed by an evil sorceress.” He held up his huge paws. “She turned me into this.”

Nicole gasped. “That’s horrible.”

The beast sighed. “Oh, it’s not so bad. I have some magic talking furniture that keeps me company. It’s enough, most of the time . . . ” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Look, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to . . . maybe I should go.” He started to get up.

“Wait,” Nicole said. “No. It’s all right, really.” She added, “I’ve never met anyone before who owned any magic talking furniture.”

He glanced at her hopefully, then sat back down again.

They chatted for a long time, then she walked with him back to his apartment, and he invited her up for a drink. The apartment was small, and kind of a mess.

“I should straighten up a bit,” said the beast.

“No, it’s fine,” Nicole assured him. She glanced through a doorway into the kitchen. “Where’s the magic furniture?”

He lumbered into the living room and turned on his tiny television. “That’s it.”

She stared. “That’s just a television.”

“It talks,” the beast said weakly.

“But . . . that’s not magic at all.”

He settled down on the couch and hung his head in his paws. “I know,” he moaned, “I haven’t got any magic furniture. I haven’t got anything.”

“Hey,” Nicole said softly. “Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”

The beast called her the next day.

“I had a good time last night,” he said. “You’re such a good listener.”

“It was nice,” Nicole said. It had been a long time since a guy had opened himself up to her like that.

“Can I see you again?” he asked.

“All right.”

They started going out together—to movies, to restaurants, and bars. Her friends didn’t approve.

Her best friend Katie said, “I mean really, Nicki. The guy’s a telemarketer. You could do so much better.”

But she ignored them.

One night Nicole and the beast were relaxing in a local restaurant. Suddenly he gasped.

“What?” Nicole said.

“That’s her,” he whispered. “The evil sorceress I was telling you about. Over there, by the register.”

Nicole sneaked a glance. The woman he’d indicated was in her mid-twenties, attractive, with curly red hair. “She doesn’t look evil,” Nicole said. “She looks pretty normal, actually.”

“They always do.” The beast sighed. “They always do.”

Nicole dated the beast for a few more months. She began to really like him. His bloodshot eyes were soft and caring. His werewolf paws were strong and gentle. When he slept, he would fold his goblin ears in the most adorable way. He giggled whenever she poked him on his cute little doggie nose.

One night, as they sat on his couch watching TV, Nicole asked, “Is there any way the spell can ever be broken?”

“It’ll never happen.”

“Tell me.”

He sighed. “For the spell to be broken, I must marry a beautiful girl who loves me for who I am.”

“A beautiful girl?” Nicole echoed. “Only a beautiful one?”

“Yes.”

She frowned. “Is that all I am to you? A way to break the spell?”

“No!” he said, wounded. “How can you think that? Yes, you are beautiful, Nicki—and smart, and sweet, and caring, and I love you.”

She studied him for a moment, then took his paw and squeezed it tight. Of course he wanted to break the spell. Who wouldn’t? That didn’t mean he didn’t love her.

He did love her, and she loved him. He was an honest, dependable, adorable creature.

And he wasn’t shy about commitment either.

They got married in the spring.

The morning after their wedding, Nicole awoke to find a stranger in her bed—a gorgeous man with jet black hair.

“Beast?” she whispered.

He opened his eyes, which were bright blue.

“Beast no longer,” he said, in a deep voice. “The spell is broken, Nicki. We did it.”

He sprang from the bed and paced barefoot across the floor, studying himself in the full-length mirror. His shoulders were broad and toned, his calf muscles vividly defined. He stretched and flexed and laughed.

“Look at me!” he said, turning. “I’m my old self again.”

“Beast . . .” she whispered.

“Brett,” the man insisted happily. “That’s my real name—Brett.”

“Brett,” she repeated, uncertainly.

He leaped back into the bed and kissed her over and over. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for being who you are.”

She studied this man, this stranger. He noticed her expression and said, “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, it’s just . . . I’ve gotten to love you one way, and now you change.”

“You’re a beautiful woman, Nicki,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to live with some ugly monster. What kind of happy ending would that be?”

“It didn’t matter to me,” she said. “I didn’t care how you looked.”

He settled back, kneeling, troubled. “I don’t know what to say.”

After a moment she added, “I’m sorry.” She pulled him close and embraced him. “I don’t mean to be like this. You look great. Really.”

Shortly afterward, Brett got promoted. He got his own office, and an assistant named Cindy. Then he started working late at the office more and more.

On weekends he’d recline shirtless on the front porch of their new house and play the guitar, and women from all over the neighborhood, who just happened to be walking or jogging by, would come over and talk to him.

One day Nicole came home early and found him relaxing in the living room, sharing a bottle of wine with her best friend Katie.

“Katie,” Nicole said. “Could I talk to you for a minute?” She led Katie into the kitchen, and demanded, “What are you doing here?”

“It’s not what you think,” Katie said. “Brett’s been teaching me to play the guitar, that’s all.”

“Katie,” Nicole growled. “You were a music major. Brett only knows three songs.”

Katie sighed dreamily. “But he’s such a good teacher.”

That night at dinner, Nicole said to him, “It’s like I don’t even know you anymore. These women hanging around all the time, your late nights at the office, you never call—”

“Nicki, calm down. You’re not being fair.”

“Oh, I’m not?”

“It’s not easy, being attractive,” he said, wrapping spaghetti around his fork. “You of all people should know that. I can’t help it if women like me.”

“You are not the man I married,” she said. “The man I married was a kind, gentle—”

“Oh, come on, Nicki,” he said. “Did you really think nothing would change? Nothing at all? If you woke up tomorrow and you were some ugly monster, would you still act exactly the same way? Feel exactly the same way about everything?”

“I’d still love you,” she said. “Would you still love me?”

He glared. “I don’t have to take this.” He threw his napkin out on the table. “I’m going to bed,” he said, as he stomped up the stairs.

The next morning Brett awoke with horns. There were two of them, stubby pale things, poking out of his temples like giant whiteheads.

“No!” he raged, pacing back and forth in front of the mirror. “No! This can’t be happening.”

Nicole watched from the bed. She said softly, “How?”

“I don’t know. The spell was gone, broken, it—” He turned on her suddenly. “You! You did this to me.”

“What? But I . . .”

He sat down beside her and took her by the hand. “Do you still love me?”

“Of course I do.”

“With all your heart? Like you used to?”

She stared at the blanket.

After a moment, he stood. “I’m late for work.”

When he returned home that night, he’d changed again. The stubs on his brow had grown into great horns nine inches long. His pant legs were shredded, and his knees bent backward when he walked. His smooth tanned arms now ended in a pair of jarringly incongruous werewolf paws.

At work, he had been demoted.

“Look at me!” he shrieked, grasping her by the shoulders and shaking her. “Look what you’ve done!”

“Get away from me!” she screamed. “Don’t touch me!”

Later, he packed up a few belongings and disappeared into the night, slamming the door behind him.

He called the next day, but she hung up on him. He called her at home, at work. She wouldn’t speak to him.

“These damn telemarketers,” Katie said. “They never leave you alone.”

He sent her roses, which she threw in the trash.

“I told you he was no good,” Katie said. “I always said you could do a lot better.”

One night he showed up at the front door, drunk. It was raining.

“Please, Nicki,” he said. “Please. You have to take me back. No one will ever love me the way you can.”

His ears were pointed and his face had grown into a half-snout. He gazed at her longingly, adoringly. He looked so much like the old beast that it was all she could do not to touch him on his cute little doggie nose, to tickle his adorable gremlin ears.

“I’m sorry,” she told him sadly, “but this is the way it has to be.”

Months passed. The paperwork for the divorce came through.

One night, on her way home from work, Nicole stopped by a bar to have a drink. As she squeezed through the crowd, she came face to face with him. He was beastly as ever, and had a pretty young girl at his side.

Nicole said awkwardly, “Hi.”

He studied her with his bloodshot demon eyes. “Hi.”

The girl glanced back and forth between them. Finally she said, “Beast? Who’s this?”

He was silent a moment, then said wearily, “That’s the evil sorceress I was telling you about.”

© 2012 David Barr Kirtley.

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, and is the co-host of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. He lives in New York.

Halfway People
Karen Joy Fowler

Thunder, wind, and waves. You in your cradle. You’ve never heard these noises before and they are making you cry.

Here, child. Let me wrap you in a blanket and my arms, take you to the big chair by the fire, and tell you a story. My father’s too old and deaf to hear and you too young to understand. If you were older or he younger, I couldn’t tell it, this story so dangerous that tomorrow, I must forget it entirely and make up another.

But a story never told is also a danger, particularly to the people in it. So here, tonight, while I remember.

It starts with a girl named Maura, which is my name, too.

In the winter, Maura lives by the sea. In the summer, she doesn’t. In the summer, she and her father rent two shabby rooms inland and she walks every morning to the coast, where she spends the day washing and changing bedding, sweeping the sand off the floors, scouring and dusting. She does this for many summer visitors, including the ones who live in her house. Her father works at a big hotel on the point. He wears a blue uniform, opens the heavy front door for guests and closes it behind them. At night, Maura and her father walk on tired feet back to their rooms. Sometimes it’s hard for Maura to remember that this was ever different.

But when she was little, she lived by the sea in all seasons. It was a lonely coast then, a place of rocky cliffs, forests, wild winds, and beaches of coarse sand. Maura could play from morning to night and never see another person, only gulls and dolphins and seals. Her father was a fisherman.

Then a doctor who lived in the capital began to recommend the sea air to his wealthy patients. A businessman built the hotel and shipped in finer sand. Pleasure boats with colored sails filled the fishing berths. The coast became fashionable, though nothing could be done about the winds.

One day the landlord came to tell Maura’s father that he’d rented out their home to a wealthy friend. It was just for two weeks and for so much money, he could only say yes. The landlord said it would happen this once, and they could move right back when the two weeks were over.

But the next year he took it for the entire summer and then for every summer after that. The winter rent was also raised.

Maura’s mother was still alive then. Maura’s mother loved their house by the ocean. The inland summers made her pale and thin. She sat for hours at the window watching the sky for the southward migrations, the turn of the season. Sometimes she cried and couldn’t say why.

Even when winter came, she was unhappy. She felt the lingering presence of the summer guests, their sorrows and troubles as chilled spaces she passed through in the halls and doorways. When she sat in her chair, the back of her neck was always cold; her fingers fretted and she couldn’t stay still.

But Maura liked the bits of clues the summer people left behind—a strange spoon in a drawer, a half-eaten jar of jam on a shelf, the ashes of papers in the fireplace. She made up stories from them of different lives in different places. Lives worthy of stories.

The summer people brought gossip from the court and tales from even farther away. A woman had grown a pumpkin as big as a carriage in her garden, hollowed it out, and slept there, which for some reason couldn’t be allowed so now there was a law against sleeping in pumpkins. A new country had been found where the people had hair all over their bodies and ran about on their hands and feet like dogs, but were very musical. A child had been born in the east who could look at anyone and know how they would die, which frightened his neighbors so much, they’d killed him, as he’d always known they would. A new island had risen in the south, made of something too solid to be water and too liquid to be earth. The king had a son.

The summer Maura turned nine years old, her mother was all bone and eyes and bloody coughing. One night, her mother came to her bed and kissed her. “Keep warm,” she whispered, in a voice so soft Maura was never certain she hadn’t dreamed it. Then Maura’s mother walked from the boarding house in her nightgown and was never seen again. Now it was Maura’s father who grew thin and pale.

One year later, he returned from the beach in great excitement. He’d heard her mother’s voice in the surf. She’d said she was happy now, repeated it in every wave. He began to tell Maura bedtime stories in which her mother lived in underwater palaces and ate off golden clamshells. Sometimes in these stories her mother was a fish. Sometimes a seal. Sometimes a woman. He watched Maura closely for signs of her mother’s afflictions. But Maura was her father’s daughter, able to travel in her mind and stay put in her body.

Years passed. One summer day, a group of young men arrived while Maura was still cleaning the seaside house. They stepped into the kitchen, threw their bags onto the floor, and raced each other down to the water. Maura didn’t know that one had stayed behind until he spoke. “Which is your room?” he asked her. He had hair the color of sand.

She took him to her bedroom with its whitewashed walls, feather-filled pillows, window of buckled glass. He put his arms around her, breath in her ear. “I’ll be in your bed tonight,” he said. And then he released her and she left, her blood passing though her veins so quickly, she was never sure which she had wanted more, to be held or let go.

More years. The capital became a place where books and heretics were burned. The king died and his son became king, but he was a young king and it was really the archbishop who ruled. The pleasure-loving summer people said little about this or anything else. Even on the coast, they feared the archbishop’s spies.

A man Maura might have married wed a summer girl instead. Maura’s father grew old and hard of hearing, though if you looked him straight in the face when you spoke, he understood you well enough. If Maura minded seeing her former suitor walking along the cliffs with his wife and children, if her father minded no longer being able to hear her mother’s voice in the waves, they never said so to each other.

The hotel had let her father go at the end of the last summer. They were very sorry, they told Maura, since he’d worked there so long. But guests had been complaining that they had to shout to make him hear, and he seemed with age to have sunk into a general confusion. Addled, they said.

Without his earnings, Maura and her father wouldn’t make the winter rent. They had this one more winter and then would never live by the sea again. It was another thing they didn’t say to each other. Possibly her father didn’t know.

One morning, Maura realized that she was older than her mother had been on the night she’d disappeared. She realized that it had been many years since anyone had wondered aloud in her presence why such a pretty young girl wasn’t married.

To shake off the sadness of these thoughts, she went for a walk along the cliffs. The wind was bitter and whipped the ends of her hair against her cheeks so hard they stung. She was about to go back, when she saw a man wrapped in a great black cape. He stood without moving, staring down at the water and the rocks. He was so close to the cliff edge, Maura was afraid he meant to jump.

There now, child. This is the wrong time to go to sleep. Maura is about to fall in love.

Maura walked toward the man, carefully so as not to startle him. She reached out to touch him, then took hold of his arm through the thick cape. He didn’t respond. When she turned him from the cliff, his eyes were empty, his face like glass. He was younger than she’d thought. He was many years younger than she.

“Come away from the edge,” she told him and still he gave no sign of hearing, but allowed himself to be led, step by slow step, back to the house.

“Where did he come from?” her father asked. “How long will he stay? What is his name?” and then turned to address those same questions to the man himself. There was no answer.

Maura took the man’s cape from him. One of his arms was an arm. The other was a wing of white feathers.

Someday, little one, you’ll come to me with a wounded bird. It can’t fly, you’ll say, because it’s too little or someone threw a stone or a cat mauled it. We’ll bring it inside and put it in a warm corner, make a nest of old towels. We’ll feed it with our hands and protect it, if we can, if it lives, until it’s strong enough to leave us. As we do this, you’ll be thinking of the bird, but I’ll be thinking of how Maura once did all those things for a wounded man with a single wing.

Her father went to his room. Soon Maura heard him snoring. She made the young man tea and a bed by the fire. That first night, he couldn’t stop shaking. He shook so hard Maura could hear his upper teeth banging against his lower. He shivered and sweated until she lay down beside him, put her arms about him, and calmed him with stories, some of them true, about her mother, her life, the people who’d stayed in this house and drowsed through summer mornings in this room.

She felt the tension leave his body. As he slept, he turned onto his side, curled against her. His wing spread across her shoulder, her breasts. She listened all night, sometimes awake and sometimes in dreams, to his breathing. No woman in the world could sleep a night under that wing and not wake up in love.

He recovered slowly from his fevers and sweats. When he was strong enough, he found ways to make himself useful, though he seemed to know nothing about those tasks that keep a house running. One of the panes in the kitchen window had slipped its channel. If the wind blew east off the ocean, the kitchen smelled of salt and sang like a bell. Maura’s father couldn’t hear it, so he hadn’t fixed it. Maura showed the young man how to true it up, his one hand soft between her two.

Soon her father had forgotten how recently he’d arrived and began to call him my son and your brother. His name, he told Maura, was Sewell. “I wanted to call him Dillon,” her father said. “But your mother insisted on Sewell.”

Sewell remembered nothing of his life before, believing himself to be, as he’d been told, the old man’s son. He had such beautiful manners. He made Maura feel cared for, attended to in a way she’d never been before. He treated her with all the tenderness a boy could give his sister. Maura told herself it was enough.

She worried about the summer that was coming. Sewell fit into their winter life. She saw no place for him in summer. She was outside, putting laundry on the line, when a shadow passed over her, a great flock of white birds headed towards the sea. She heard them calling, the low-pitched, sonorous sound of horns. Sewell ran from the house, his face turned up, his wing open and beating like a heart. He remained there until the birds had vanished over the water. Then he turned to Maura. She saw his eyes and knew that he’d come back into himself. She could see it was a sorrowful place to be.

But he said nothing and neither did she, until that night, after her father had gone to bed. “What’s your name?” she asked.

He was silent awhile. “You’ve both been so kind to me,” he said finally. “I never imagined such kindness at the hands of strangers. I’d like to keep the name you gave me.”

“Can the spell be broken?” Maura asked then, and he looked at her in confusion. She gestured to his wing.

“This?” he said, raising it. “This is the spell broken.”

A log in the fire collapsed with a sound like a hiss. “You’ve heard of the king’s marriage? To the witch-queen?” he asked.

Maura knew only that the king had married.

“It happened this way,” he said, and told her how his sister had woven shirts of nettles and how the archbishop had accused her of witchcraft, and the people sent her to the fire. How the king, her husband, said he loved her, but did nothing to save her, and it was her brothers, all of them swans, who encircled her until she broke the spell, and they were men again, all except for his single wing.

So now she was wife to a king who would have let her burn, and queen of those who’d sent her to the fire. These were her people, this her life. There was little in it that he’d call love. “My brothers don’t mind the way I do,” he said. “They’re not as close to her. We were the youngest together, she and I.”

He said that his brothers had settled easily enough into life at court. He was the only one whose heart remained divided. “A halfway heart, unhappy to stay, unhappy to go,” he said, “a heart like your mother’s.” This took Maura by surprise. She’d thought he’d slept through her stories about her mother. Her breath grew thin and quick. He must also remember then how she’d slept beside him.

He said that in his dreams, he still flew. It hurt to wake in the morning, find himself with nothing but his clumsy feet. And at the change of seasons, the longing to be in the air, to be on the move was so intense, it overtook him. Maybe that was because the curse had never been completely lifted. Maybe it was because of the wing.

“You won’t be staying then,” Maura said. She said this carefully, no shaking in her voice. Staying in the house by the sea had long been the thing Maura most wanted. She would still have a mother if they’d only been able to stay in the house by the sea.

“There’s a woman I’ve loved all my life,” he answered. “We quarreled when I left; I can’t leave it like that. We don’t choose whom we love,” he told Maura, so gently that she knew he knew. If she wasn’t to be loved in return, she would have liked not to be pitied for it. She got neither of these wishes. “But people have this advantage over swans, to put their unwise loves aside and love another. Not me. I’m too much swan for that.”

He left the next morning. “Good-bye, father,” he said, kissing the old man. “I’m off to find my fortune.” He kissed Maura. “Thanks for your kindness and your stories. You’ve the gift of contentment,” he said, and as soon as he named it, he took it from her.

We come now to the final act. Keep your eyes shut tight, little one. The fire inside is dying and the wind outside. As I rock you, monsters are moving in the deep.

Maura’s heart froze in her chest. Summertime came and she said good-bye to the seaside house and felt nothing. The landlord had sold it. He went straight to the bars to drink to his good fortune. “For more than it’s worth,” he told everyone, a few cups in. “Triple its worth,” a few cups later.

The new owners took possession in the night. They kept to themselves, which made the curious locals more curious. A family of men, the baker told Maura. He’d seen them down at the docks. They asked more questions than they’d answer. They were looking for sailors off a ship called The Faucon Dieu. No one knew why they’d come or how long they’d stay, but they had the seaside house guarded as if it were a fort. Or a prison. You couldn’t take the road past without one or another of them stopping you.

Gossip arrived from the capital—the queen’s youngest brother had been banished and the queen, who loved him, was sick from it. She’d been sent into seclusion until her health and spirits returned. Maura overheard this in a kitchen as she was cleaning. There was more, but the sound of the ocean had filled Maura’s ears and she couldn’t hear the rest. Her heart shivered and her hands shook.

That night she couldn’t sleep. She got up, and like her mother before her, walked out the door in her nightgown. She walked the long distance to the sea, skirting the seaside house. The moonlight was a road on the water. She could imagine walking on it as, perhaps, her mother had done. Instead she climbed to the cliff where she’d first seen Sewell. And there he stood again, just as she remembered, wrapped in his cape. She called to him, her breath catching so his name was a stutter. The man in the cape turned and he resembled Sewell strongly, but he had two arms and all of Maura’s years. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you were someone else.”

“Is it Maura?” he asked and the voice was very like Sewell’s voice. He walked toward her. “I meant to call on you,” he said, “to thank you for your kindness to my brother.”

The night wasn’t cold, but Maura’s nightgown was thin. The man took off his cape, put it around her shoulders as if she were a princess. It had been a long time since a man had treated her with such care. Sewell had been the last. But Sewell had been wrong about one thing. She would never trade her unwise love for another, even if offered by someone with Sewell’s same gentleness and sorrow. “Is he here?” Maura asked.

He’d been exiled, the man said, and the penalty for helping him was death. But they’d had warning. He’d run for the coast, with the archbishop’s men hard behind him, to a foreign ship where his brothers had arranged passage only hours before it became illegal to do so. The ship was to take him across the sea to the country where they’d lived as children. He was to send a pigeon to let them know he’d arrived, but no pigeon had come. “My sister, the queen,” the man said, “has suffered from the not-knowing. We all have.”

Then, just yesterday, for the price of a whiskey, a middle brother had gotten a story from a sailor at the docks. It was a story the sailor had heard recently in another harbor, not a story he’d lived. There was no way to know how much of it was true.

In this story there was a ship whose name the sailor didn’t remember, becalmed in a sea he couldn’t name. The food ran out and the crew lost their wits. There was a passenger on this ship, a man with a deformity, a wing where his arm should be. The crew decided he was the cause of their misfortunes. They’d seized him from his bed, dragged him up on deck, taken bets on how long he’d stay afloat. “Fly away,” they told him as they threw him overboard. “Fly away, little bird.”

And he did.

As he fell, his arm had become a second wing. For just one moment he’d been an angel. And then a moment later, a swan. He’d circled the ship three times and vanished into the horizon. “My brother had seen the face of the mob before,” the man said, “and it made him regret being human. If he’s a swan again, he’s glad.”

Maura closed her eyes. She pushed the picture of Sewell the angel, Sewell the swan away, made him a tiny figure in the distant sky. “Why was he exiled?” she asked.

“An unnatural intimacy with the queen. No proof, mind you. The king is a good man, but the archbishop calls the tune. And he’s always hated our poor sister. Eager to believe the most vile gossip,” said the man. “Our poor sister. Queen of a people who would have burned her and warmed their hands at the fire. Married to a man who’d let them.”

“He said you didn’t mind that,” Maura told him.

“He was wrong.”

The man walked Maura back to her rooms, his cape still around her. He said he’d see her again, but summer ended and winter came with no word. The weather turned bitter. Maura was bitter, too. She could taste her bitterness in the food she ate, the air she breathed.

Her father couldn’t understand why they were still in their rented rooms. “Do we go home today?” he asked every morning and often more than once. September became October. November became December. January became February.

Then late one night, Sewell’s brother knocked at Maura’s window. It was iced shut; she heard a crack when she forced it open. “We leave in the morning,” the man said. “I’m here to say good-bye. And to beg you and your father to go to the house as soon as you wake tomorrow, without speaking to anyone. We thank you for the use of it, but it was always yours.”

He was gone before Maura could find the thing that she should say; thank you or good-bye or please don’t go.

In the morning, she and her father did as directed. The coast was wrapped in a fog that grew thicker the farther they walked. As they neared the house, they saw shadows, the shapes of men in the mist. Ten men, clustered together around a smaller, slighter figure. The eldest brother waved Maura past him toward the house. Her father went to speak to him. Maura went inside.

Sometimes summer guests left cups and sometimes hairpins. These guests had left a letter, a cradle, and a baby.

The letter said: My brother told me you could be trusted with this child. I give him to you. My brother told me you would make up a story explaining how you’ve come to own this house and have this child, a story so good that people would believe it. This child’s life depends on you doing so. No one must ever know he exists. The truth is a danger none of us would survive.

Burn this letter, is how it ended. There was no signature. The writing was a woman’s.

Maura lifted the baby. She loosened the blanket in which he was wrapped. A boy. Two arms. Ten fingers. She wrapped him up again, rested her cheek on the curve of his scalp. He smelled of soap. And very faintly, beneath that, Maura smelled the sea. “This child will stay put,” Maura said aloud, as if she had the power to cast such a spell.

No child should have a mother with a frozen heart. Maura’s cracked and opened. All the love that she would someday have for this child was already there, inside her heart, waiting for him. But she couldn’t feel one thing and not another. She found herself weeping, half joyful, half undone with grief. Good-bye to her mother in her castle underwater. Good-bye to the summer life of drudgery and rented rooms. Good-bye to Sewell in his castle in the air.

Her father came into the house. “They gave me money,” he said wonderingly. His arms were full. Ten leather pouches. “So much money.”

When you’ve heard more of the old stories, little one, you’ll see that the usual return on a kindness to a stranger is three wishes. The usual wishes are for a fine house, fortune, and love. Maura was where she’d never thought to be, at the very center of one of the old stories, with a prince in her arms.

“Oh!” Her father saw the baby. He reached out and the pouches of money spilled to the floor. He stepped on them without noticing. “Oh!” He took the swaddled child from her. He, too, was crying. “I dreamed that Sewell was a grown man and left us,” he said. “But now I wake and he’s a baby. How wonderful to be at the beginning of his life with us instead of the end. Maura! How wonderful life is.”

© 2010 by Karen Joy Fowler.

Originally published in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited by Kate Bernheimer.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of five novels and three short story collections. Her first novel, Sarah Canary, won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian; her third, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner; and The Jane Austen Book Club was a New York Times bestseller. She has two Nebulas for short fiction, one being for the title story in a new collection, What I Didn’t See. Another story, “The Pelican Bar,” recently won the Shirley Jackson and the World Fantasy Award. She lives in Santa Cruz, California with her husband.

Author Spotlight: Elizabeth Hand
Gina Guadagnino

The theme of metamorphosis runs throughout this novella. How does Jane’s transformation mimic that of the moths and butterflies she studies?

I wanted Jane to become a vengeful butterfly: her innocent, pre-pubescent chrysalis stage giving way to the predatory creature she becomes after she’s raped. Interestingly, I just finished reading a fantastic literary thriller, Cara Hoffman’s So Much Pretty, which also has a butterfly motif and the (non-supernatural) transformation of a teenage girl who’s a witness to a violent sexual attack.

Jane’s obsession with butterflies begins with her infancy and runs through her sexual awakening, until the end of the novella. What was your inspiration for using this motif?

As a girl, I was fascinated by butterflies—by all insects. I had a pet praying mantis named Gideon, and for a while collected butterflies and had a killing jar, until it got too sad and I stopped hunting them. Several times I’ve come upon monarch butterflies right after they emerged from the cocoon, and watched as they pumped the blood into their wings and finally flew off.

I had that butterfly mobile, too, when I was little, though I only remember it from when it was passed down to my younger brothers and sisters—I don’t recall seeing it in my own crib. But years ago I read an amazing account of a man who had the same mobile in his crib as an infant. He later grew up to become a noted lepidopterist. That was the genesis of the story’s opening.

Elements of the story rely on the technical and scientific elements of Jane’s academic interest in Lepidoptera. Can you tell us a little bit about the research you did in preparation for this story?

I have some books on butterflies and moths, research books, though, not overly technical ones. And I have some stuff by Nabokov that deals with his own career as a collector—he was an extremely high-achieving amateur lepidopterist. The rest I researched online, by reading several scientific papers on methodology and the various techniques used in analyzing and examining butterflies for research.

Jane’s personal metamorphosis takes her from victim to predator. She mitigates the trauma of her rape, consciously or unconsciously, by inflicting ultimate control over her sexual partners, yet the ending—as well as her relationship with David Beirce—is left ambiguous. How does this ambiguity fit into the arc of Jane’s transformation?

I wanted it to be ambiguous, sort of a “hunter gets captured by the game” scenario. Years before I wrote the story, I came across the species Cleopatra Brimstone in one of my research books, and filed it away as a great title. In the early 1990s I’d thought of doing it as a graphic novel, with an SM theme, and some of that bled into the story’s subtext when I finally wrote it.

You have stated that your writing tends to be very autobiographical. What elements of your life and experiences have you incorporated in this novella?

Well, as mentioned, all the butterfly stuff. I was a smart science geek when I was a kid, and wanted to be some kind of scientist, an entomologist or zoologist or paleontologist. When I was 21, I was abducted and raped a few blocks from where I’d gone to college in DC. That sense of horror and violation informed a lot of my work before “Cleopatra Brimstone,” but that story was the first time I specifically drew on the event in my fiction. It was cathartic, in the sense that I finally wrote about it, and channeled some of my emotional experience into Janie’s.

What are you working on currently? What projects do you have in the pipeline?

I’ve got several books coming out this year: Available Dark, the sequel to Generation Loss, will be published on February 14. Radiant Days, my YA novel about Arthur Rimbaud, is out in April. This fall Small Beer will release Errantry, a collection of short stories, and Underland Press will publish a revised edition of my 1997 novel Glimmering. I’m currently working on Wylding Hall, a contemporary YA gothic inspired by Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. And soon I’ll start on Flash Burn, the third Cass Neary novel.

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: Kali Wallace
Gina Guadagnino

“The Day They Came” is such a fresh take on the “alien invasion” story, particularly in that we never actually see “them.” What were your influences in crafting this type of story in such a new and unusual way?

There’s always a worry when writing an alien invasion story that the aliens will be silly, no matter how hard you try to make them interesting. Alien invasion stories belong to a subgenre with a lot of history and expectation built into it. It’s very well-trod ground, so I kept asking myself what, besides aliens, this story was supposed to be about. Alien invasion stories can be about a lot of things besides aliens: politics and culture, religion and war, ecology and medicine, teenage angst, the end of the world, small sentient household appliances saving the neighborhood, etc. How important the aliens are in those stories varies, and so does how much we need to know about them for the story to work.

At some point, during one of the many iterations, I realized that what I was writing is a story about grief and how terribly isolating grief can be. That’s when I finally clued in to the fact that it didn’t matter who or what the aliens were. There might be a war happening somewhere on the planet; there might be giant bugs destroying cities; there might be ships the size of moons in the sky. But none of it matters, because this is the story about one person who has suffered a great personal loss, and everybody else in the world is going on without realizing that nothing will ever be the same. It’s a small story about being alone in the middle of a big event, and that’s a different kind of story than those that require the aliens to be well-developed and in the forefront.

You’ve written this story in the second person, which is a relatively rare choice for fiction. Moreover, you’ve kept from revealing any details about the age or gender of the main character. What are you able to accomplish in this voice that perhaps wouldn’t be possible in a more traditional first or third person format?

There’s something a bit invasive about the second person perspective. Right from the start the story is demanding attention in a way that can be a bit obnoxious, and every sentence is full of you you you you, which means that even if the main character (and implied narrator) is somebody completely different from the reader, there is still an imaginary finger pointing from the page outward.

I like the layer of discomfort that adds. I like that it makes it possible to tell a story in which the character’s immediate surroundings are explained in great detail, but the character is moving through it almost detached or separated, because the external world no longer matches what is going on in that character’s personal reality.

I avoided assigning a gender to the character initially because I thought it would be a fun challenge, and later kept it because I wanted to keep it as an unanswered question, something that the reader has to fill in—or not—as part of reading. I have to admit I didn’t think much about the character’s age at all, even though the resulting ambiguity serves the same purpose, and I’m now curious about what assumptions reader make about the age.

The most threatening moment in the story—both for the main character and the reader—is the moment where the television anchor speaks back to the main character. What was your inspiration for creating this scene?

In an early draft of the story, I had written to an end (a different one than the story has now) without that moment, but as a whole found it very unsatisfying. I knew something needed to happen. There needed to be a significant upset of the status quo. However much the world had changed, it had still settled into a new stability of sorts, with its own predictability, and I wanted to disturb it.

But I knew that whatever happened couldn’t be flashy or explosive; it was never going to be that kind of story. I wanted something quiet and creepy and startling, and I figured that the television talking back qualifies. Is it real? How does it work? Who’s making it happen? Does it happen to everybody? Is it a precursor to disappearance? Who knows? (I certainly don’t.) They’re questions that aren’t meant to have answers, because the very worst (or best, I suppose) type of dread is the kind that comes from something is just familiar enough to be tangible, but not familiar enough to be explicable.

You play a lot with the ideas of memory and time. For example, as time goes on, Mrs. Meester, who seems more and more unconcerned about her disappearing children, keeps forgetting that the main character’s father is dead, and continues to inquire after his health. How does this contribute to the overall sense of creeping horror in the story?

The very first thing I thought of when I first imagined this story was the first sentence, but the very second thing I thought of was, “What if there was an alien invasion and nobody noticed?” Of course somebody does notice, and that somebody is the main character, because there’s no story to tell if there’s nobody around to witness it. If an alien spaceship falls in the forest, etc.

There is often a grandeur to invasion stories—the fate of the entire planet and all of humanity is at stake!—but I was more interested in the small scale, which meant taking something as mundane as remembering what happened yesterday and messing it up. A mother who doesn’t know that her children have been disappearing, neighbors who don’t remember that the main character has suffered a personal tragedy, the fact that nobody else even knows there’s an invasion going on, and even if they did, they don’t seem to care, all of those are individual moments of wrongness that add up to the larger horror.

The story is called “The Day They Came,” and although you’ve described the way that the world is radically changed as the result of that coming, you never describe “them” or what the exact moment of their coming is like. What does this allow you, as a story-teller, to do with the plot?

In an invasion story in which the aliens are richly developed and present in the plot, it becomes very important who they are, what they want, where they’ve come from, how they interact with humans, all of that. But that’s not what I wanted to focus on, so I cut all of that out almost entirely.

When I shuffle the aliens out of the way, I give myself a chance to move other aspects of the story into those places of importance. We don’t know what the aliens are doing elsewhere on the planet, but right here, in this one rural county, they are disrupting families, changing routines, limiting resources, bleaching away parts of people’s minds, and making people disappear. That’s what happening to the world we see from the very limited perspective we have, and by the end the range shrinks down even more to the scale of the memories and decisions and fear inside one person’s mind.

The invasion story is juxtaposed with the story of the main character’s father’s death. Can you describe the comparisons that the main character makes as he/she thinks back onto his/her relationship with his/her father, to the fearful uncertainty of the main character’s present?

When everything is strange and scary and uncertain, the human mind latches onto the familiar. I was playing with this idea in two ways. First, there is the difference between the main character, who knows that everything is changed, and the neighbors, who do not. It’s isolating, it’s unsettling, and it’s also a bit of salt in the wound of guilt and ambivalence that comes with losing a parent after a long, painful illness.

But alongside that are the incidences in which something strange and terrifying happening now reminds the character of life before. This is a character who got up and went to work and apologized for being late just hours after the father’s death; habit and familiarity are very important. The food, the strangeness in the woods, the parents and children in line, the disappearing neighbors, the taste of the water, all of it is linked to memories, because that is what the character is holding onto.

But it doesn’t last, and by the end there is a distance to all those memories, a filter through which they are no longer something clear and reliable. The world is too different, and the father is definitely gone, and there is very little left to cling to, so it’s time to go out and see what’s become of the world.

Does most of your work fall into the science fiction genre? What is your next project?

Most of my work has speculative elements, and quite a lot of it is science fiction, but I also write fantasy and stuff that could be either, or both. I like making things up, especially things that don’t exist in the real world. At any given time I have multiple short stories in various stages of completion, and I am currently working on a pair of YA urban fantasy novels.

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: Mary Rosenblum
Robyn Lupo

In your story, “My She,” the subject matter deals intensively with the evolution of humans’ relationship with dogs. What made you want to write a story dealing with this?

Well, it wasn’t dogs that I was focusing on first and foremost, but rather our definition of “human.” That is a topic that SF is perfectly situated to address, and it’s a favorite theme of mine. Is our nanny a dog or is she a human? And if she is a dog with her language, emotions, and ability to reason, how is she different from us? We don’t have a definition of human yet and as we get better with genetic engineering, we’re going to need one! But I fixed on dogs as my example since I own and train dogs. I had a puppy at the time and was watching my senior bitch teach the puppy good manners. And it occurred to me that engineered dogs would make the perfect nannies. And where is the boundary line between human and non-human if that bitch nanny is raising our children? On the flip side, if the human child is being raised and shaped merely to perform a role that is essentially a component in a communications system, which is the human and which is the non-human?

Can you tell us what a writing day for you is like?

These days I’m not only writing but I’m working with new writers, helping them edit, polish, and publish their work at The New Writers Interface. But whether it’s my own words I’m working with or someone else’s, I start the day with my dogs and a load of wood for the woodstove to warm up my woodstove-heated-only house. Then it’s words for the rest of the day, broken up by work in my vegetable garden, sheep work with my dogs (they’re sheep dogs), or reading and research. I’m also a pilot and I find that the sky is the perfect recharge for my creative well.

There seems to be a running thread of being punished or chastised for being special, i.e. in the case of Siri, she can hear more than the average Speaker, but her talents weren’t put to use. Can you tell us more about this?

We so often punish the one who is different in our societies. Perhaps it’s a leftover of our “mass production” mentality from the WWII years, or a more primitive “tribal” mentality, but we are not happy with someone who does not fit the specified mold, who marches to a drummer that the rest of us can’t hear. We are not tolerant of “different,” and I think it’s one of the biggest weaknesses we face as a race—that inability to value the unique.

Another theme appears to be thinking blasphemous thoughts—questioning the status quo—and how the common knowledge of the society seems to shape the inhabitants’ thinking away from these sorts of thoughts. Even what words people can say, and how they communicate is proscribed. Are there stories that dealt with these themes that inspired you? How important are these themes to your work?

These themes of proscribed speech and “right think” are very common in SF, from the novel 1984 on. I think that’s one of the most valuable roles SF plays in the body of world literature—as the watchdog that points to those trends that will ultimately confine and circumscribe thought and creativity. And they’ve always been important in my own work. Most of my stories deal with people who strive against the overt and subtle boundaries that we create to define and, consequently, constrain society. It’s all about “seeing the obvious” and sometimes it is easier to see that obvious through the mirror of near future science fiction than to see it by looking around you.

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: Kathleen Ann Goonan
Christie Yant

Much of your work is about the crossroads between humanity and biotech, and your story “Electric Rains” certainly fits. What is it about the theme that brings you back again and again?

We are technological creatures, and use the products of our scientific discoveries for various ends. Sometimes the results are predictable; often, they are not. Biotech is a strong presence in our lives today. As our scientific and engineering abilities become ever more finely honed, targeted biotech applications will become ubiquitous, with anticipated and unanticipated results. I apply a kind of Moore’s Law thinking to this process: biotech knowledge and applications are accelerating rapidly and will continue to do so at an exponential rate. I consider my scenarios to be day-after-tomorrow possibilities, though I must emphatically say that they are not predictions, nor do I think that any element will be realized as I might imagine it. It simply behooves us to play with these ideas in the form of non-rigorous fictional thought-experiments, or Einsteinian Gedanken experiments.

Also, I simply enjoy the intellection frisson of considering possibilities, and the play of creative work. Writing science fiction is a way to add another dimension to the process of depicting the emotional depth of well-realized characters, and it is the characters that matter most in my fiction.

You set the story in a post-apocalyptic Washington, D.C. What made you choose D.C.? Ella and Nana clearly held it dear, and as a reader I felt like I was being guided around a very important place. Is it a city you know well?

My family arrived in Washington D.C. on New Year’s Eve, 1961. We moved there from Honolulu, where my father, a fire protection engineer, had been working on designing the fire protection for the Arizona Memorial and checking out the far Pacific NASA satellite tracking sites, to D.C. and his new post at the Navy Yard.

It was a cold, snowy night, and we had been driving all day. Across a large, shimmering downtown intersection I saw a People’s Drug Store. “We can go there and get some comics,” I observed. Or whined, or importuned. “No!” was the immediate answer.

We settled about ten miles outside of Washington, before the Beltway was completed. D.C. was our city. All of us—my father, my mother, myself, and my sisters—worked there for many years. I attended the Washington Montessori Institute for a year-long course after graduating from Virginia Tech to obtain my teaching credentials. We had many friends there; favorite restaurants; streets we drove and walked and loved.

Our family base is still the D.C. area.

Nana was clearly a complex, formidable woman, someone to admire. Is she based on anyone in particular?

She is an amalgam of the many complex, formidable women I have known and admired. The source of our actions, and the roots of our character, are hidden by time, often to ourselves as well as to others. I find characters—people—eternally fascinating.

The rains and the Metro are terrifying and tempting at the same time—as much an unknown as what lies outside of D.C. We know which unknown Ella chose—which one do you think you would choose?

The unknown, of course, though Ella is unusually free of fetters, which makes that choice much easier.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about “Electric Rains,” and what are you working on next?

“Electric Rains” is a part of the bionan future I visited at length in four novels: The New York Times Notable Book Queen City Jazz, Darrell Lifetime Award-Winning Mississippi Blues, and Nebula Award finalists Crescent City Rhapsody and Light Music.

With Campbell-Award Winning In War Times and This Shared Dream (Tor 2011), I have moved on to an investigation of “human nature,” in particular looking at the sociobiological roots of our strong predilection for war.

I have just finished three semesters of teaching creative writing, science fiction literature, and the history of science, technology and culture at Georgia Tech as a Visiting Professor, and will continue to teach at Georgia Tech every fall. I’m working on Hemingway’s Hurricane, a historical novel, and will continue, in tandem, to write science fiction stories and novels that flow from my fascination with the confluence of science, technology, and what it means to be human.

Christie Yant lives on California’s central coast, where she writes science fiction and fantasy stories and blogs at Inkpunks.com, a site for new, nearly new, and newly pro writers. She lives with her husband, two daughters, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on Twitter @inkhaven.

Author Spotlight: Steven Utley
Steven Utley

Editor’s Note: For “Test,” author Steven Utley offers up a slightly different take on our Author Spotlight feature. In the following essay, Utley gives us an interesting take on not only his biography within the field, but a thumbnail of the genre’s history:

“Science Fiction and What it Means to Me, or Something”

Ah, science fiction—how I doted on the stuff from exuberant boyhood into sullen post-adolescence, a span of time encompassing Captain Video and Again, Dangerous Visions. In somewhat less general terms, between the ages of ten and about twenty-eight, I described an arc through Jules Verne (admittedly, a tough go at age ten), H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Philip José Farmer, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, and Barry Malzberg: ontogeny roughly recapitulating phylogeny. Early on, I belonged to that tribe of teenaged readers whom Kurt Vonnegut described in his own essay about SF (“Science Fiction,” in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Opinions), Delacorte Press, 1974.) as being excited by “the steady promise of futures which they, just as they were, could handle. In such futures they would be high-ranking noncoms at the very least, just as they were, pimples, virginity, and everything.”

By and by, because, according to Saul Bellow’s concise and elegant formula, “A writer is a reader moved to emulate,” and thinking it could do no harm, I tried my hand at producing science-fiction works of my own. In October 1970, I attended a meeting of the Dallas Area Science Fiction Society and effectively met my future—the fledgling or aspiring writers Howard Waldrop, Geo. W. Proctor, Tom Reamy, and Buddy Saunders, constituting more than half of the founding members of the Texas-based SF-writing workshop called the Turkey City Neo-Pro Rodeo. Later, we were joined by Lisa Tuttle, Joe Pumilia, and Bruce Sterling. We were young, excitable, and very competitive, which pushed us to work hard at learning our craft. We were also friends, however, and collaborative efforts inevitably ensued.

When I started writing SF professionally the SF field was still a cozy place, with discernible boundaries adjoined by the watery body of fantasy literature and overlooked by its own Mount Rushmore: Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and (gazing off in a slightly different direction) Ray Bradbury. John W. Campbell, Jr., was the Pope, and half a dozen long-lived magazines regularly delivered the gospel. Everybody knew everybody else, what they had written and were writing, what they would get paid for their work (pittances, for the most part) in the fullness of time, and even with whom they were sleeping. It was a realm sufficiently inbred and insulated so that some of its more ardent citizens could say such things as, “Science fiction is the living literature,” and hardly anybody would laugh at them; relatively few people in the realm knew enough about literature—that is, the literary mainstream, which they dismissed out of hand—to understand that not only was SF not the be-all and end-all of literature, but that there was no such thing as a be-all and end-all in literature (not even Henry James). Xenophobic nativists patrolled SF’s borders, ever vigilant against contamination by The New Yorker, academics, and other infidels. To a certain extent their paranoia was justified: Kurt Vonnegut had noted in his essay that many critics outside the SF field mistook it for a urinal, while within the field a subversive movement, sort of a Reformation in progress, called The New Wave, seemed to be gaining ground, threatening the very moral and intellectual foundation upon which all the steely-eyed, square-jawed, pulp-fictitious spacemen of yore had firmly planted their magnetic boots. Other controversies were as ridiculous in their way (“Can women write science fiction?”) as medieval disputes over the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin.

My original career as a science-fiction writer was brief. Suffering from undiagnosed and untreated clinical depression, I finally decided that, whatever was wrong with me, writing didn’t help, and so I stopped, and perhaps I did so just in time, as a Counter-Reformation gathered strength. My friend and occasional collaborator Howard Waldrop was warned by an editor at a major publishing firm against writing science fiction in the first person, because it could lead to introspection, and some of the rejection notes I received from the editor of a leading magazine struck me as being almost as insulting. So I stopped, and tried to get on with my life by pursuing interests that had nothing to do with SF.

This meant that I also stopped reading SF when I stopped trying to write it; there was simply too much else in the way of reading matter which I had been ignoring while Keeping Up With The Market, the excuse SF writers give for consuming lots of SF to the exclusion of so much else.

As it turned out, not writing didn’t help, either, and after about a decade I started again.

This time around, however, I didn’t bother Keeping Up With The Market. I would, I vowed, join no factions, subscribe to no credo, but go my own way, wherever it should lead, and concentrate on writing the stories I wanted to write exactly as I wanted to write them—bringing to bear whatever I had learned from my reading in the interim, whatever I had been moved to emulate. Not Keeping Up With The Market undoubtedly spared me much distraction and many headaches, because the market had changed significantly while I was otherwise engaged. The watery body of fantasy had burst its banks and swamped the landscape, isolating a bunch of semi-autonomous city-states that were barely on speaking terms with one another. When I reported this observation to Waldrop and Malzberg, their reactions were identical: Where have you been? “Well,” I could only respond, “away.”

Presumably there are still controversies, and in all likelihood some very ridiculous ones, but they do not concern me, for if SF was ever a holy cause for me, it has long since ceased to be so. Undoubtedly there is good work being done in the genre—there nearly always has been—but I just don’t have the energy and interest required to go digging for it. I am content in my ignorance of who’s hot and who’s not. It is safe to say that, anymore, my interest in science fiction is barely even scientific. Mostly, it is fictitious.

And yet, and yet . . . on occasion I find myself unable to settle down with a good murder mystery (possibly but not definitely my light reading matter of choice these past many years) and simply not up to head-butting my way through that next volume of Proust, and I reach instead for a Groff Conklin anthology, say, or Leigh Brackett, or some tattered old issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, in the full knowledge that absolutely nothing else will satisfy my inner pimply, virginal, teenaged reader.

Steven Utley, a founding member of the Turkey City writing workshop in Texas during the 1970s, is the author of three story collections, Ghost Seas (Ticonderoga Publ., 1997), The Beasts of Love (Wheatland Press, 2005), and Where or When (PS Publ., 2006), and co-editor of the anthologies Lone Star Universe (with Geo. W. Proctor, Heidelberg Publ., 1976) and Passing for Human (with Michael Bishop, PS Publ., 2009). His series of Silurian tales, which have been appearing in Asimov’s SF, F&SF, Analog, Sci Fiction, and other venues since 1993, are forthcoming in two collections, The 400-Million-Year Itch and Invisible Kingdoms, to be issued by Ticonderoga in 2012-13.

Author Spotlight: S. L. Gilbow
Theodore Quester

In your story “Alarms,” you make a heavy use of lists. What was the inspiration? Are you a list-maker?

No, I usually don’t make lists. When I do make one, I lose it in about five minutes. The inspiration for the list making comes from Brenda, my wife. She does indeed carry around several notebooks of lists in her purse. Some are to-do lists, some are directions, some are rather random thoughts.

My favorite list making experience came while we were living in Germany. We had to leave out of the Frankfurt Airport for the States the next day and Brenda wasn’t convinced I would be able to get us to the airport without getting lost. By the way, I was a navigator in the Air Force at the time. Anyways, we drove over fifty miles to the Frankfurt Airport while Brenda wrote down every turn in her book of lists. Then we turned around and came home so we could do it all again the next morning.

Your character wishes she had superpowers. Are you a comic book fan? Any secret superpowers you care to divulge?

I was raised on comic books, and you can see the ones I like most by what I mention in the story. For years I collected Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, Daredevil and X-Men comics. Unfortunately, I lost most of them in a military move. Such is the hazard of moving every few years. I still occasionally hit the comic book store down the road and buy a few.

My superpower? I think one of my favorite things about “Alarms” is that Cara doesn’t even recognize her superpower when she gets it. That may be the way with all of us. We may have superpowers we don’t even recognize as such.

Oh, and of course I can bend teaspoons with my mind by concentrating on old episodes of The Brady Bunch.

You make several references to Kafka, but also to Walmart and Gamestop. Was this a conscious decision?

Kafka, Walmart, Superheroes, Gamestop. Why not? Many things about Cara are based on me, so I included those things that are a part of my life. Life frequently seems to me to be mundane, exciting, and absurd all at the same time. I think Walmart, Kafka, Gamestop and superheroes capture that pretty well.

This story is very quirky, voice-driven. What came first, the story idea or the voice? Is voice something that is important to you as a writer?

Quirky? I love quirky. Ask the students in the Advanced Placement English Language class I teach. I think I’ve mastered quirky.

But, yes, getting the right voice is critical to me. I’ve had the idea for a story about someone who sets off alarms for several years now. But the story turned out quite different from what I had imagined. I originally started the story with Jimmy as the main character. I saw him being forced to leave society and find a place where there are no alarms. I pictured him at the end of the story as a hermit unable to interact with society. While I was working on the first draft Jimmy had a scene with his girlfriend, Cara. I liked Cara so much I made her the main character, gave her the curse of setting off alarms, and let her voice come out.

Was this a difficult story to write?

Once I made Cara the central character, it was an easy story to write. Her mind works quickly and she makes random associations that are fun to follow. As with all my stories, it took me quite a few drafts to get it right, but Cara was a fun character to work with.

You are a recent graduate of Clarion West, a retired officer of the Air Force, and a high school English teacher. How does all this influence your writing?

I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve spent my life doing things I wanted to do.

I was in the Air Force for twenty-six years, and have drawn on my military experience to develop characters in three of my short stories. However, I have dealt directly with my military experience in only one story and it isn’t published yet. The further I get away from the military, the more I find myself being drawn back to it for story ideas.

I love teaching and had the opportunity to teach English at the United States Air Force Academy for four years. When I retired from the military, I figured I would go back to doing something I love to do, so now I teach English at Granby High School in Norfolk, Virginia.

Attending Clarion West was a wonderful experience. The program is superbly run. I am very grateful to Neile Graham, Leslie Howle and the many other people who dedicated so much of their time to make it such a powerful experience. My fellow students were absolutely amazing, and I actually met a few people as quirky as me. I loved it and miss all my CW 2011 classmates very much.

What other work do you have coming down the pipeline? Anything else you’d like to mention?

I’m currently sending out a couple of stories I wrote at Clarion West. I’m trying to get a story published called “Pirates” about Brenda’s surgery for melanoma a few years back. I haven’t sold it yet but I’ve gotten several effusive rejections. I’ve also finished a work called “Remembering Verdun” about my deployment to Bosnia in 1995. I would like to see that one published, but I fear it’s so personal it may never make it into print. If anyone would like to publish either of them just email me at buymyquirkystory@gmail.com.

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: David Barr Kirtley
Jennifer Konieczny

You’ve described your story “Beauty” as “a twisted modern-day retelling of ‘Beauty and the Beast.’” Why retell it?

A lot of my fiction is a retelling of something or other, because I have serious problems with the philosophical underpinnings of a lot of stories, and it often seems to me that the best way to answer them is to rewrite them in a way that lays bare the absurdity. One advantage with something like “Beauty and the Beast” is that most readers will be familiar with the original story, so you’re writing for a broader audience. And of course, any fairy tale you read today is going to be the result of countless generations of people retelling the story before you. The fact that these stories have been retold so many times indicates that there’s something about them that strikes a chord with people, that speaks to something that people care deeply about, and so a good retelling is probably going to have a strong impact as well.

What inspired your version?

“Beauty and the Beast” has always driven me crazy. The message is like, “Hotness isn’t what’s important. And now that you’ve learned that, your reward is someone who’s TOTALLY HOT!!!” Um, hello? That more than anything provided the impetus for this story, to highlight just how dense that ending is.

I really enjoyed the reference to Disney’s anthropomorphic furniture, especially since Nicole’s expectations mirrored my own. How did you decide to make the Beast the only magically altered character in “Beauty”?

Mostly just because it’s funny. That part with the TV always cracks me up. I also think it sets the tone for the rest of the story—throughout the story things that you imagine are going to be more “fairy tale”-like (in the modern sense of a “fairy tale wedding”) constantly turn out to be crappier and more mundane than you expected. It also sets up that the Beast is not always entirely forthright, but not exactly dishonest either. After all, in a sense a television is pretty magical, and it does actually talk. And just as the Beast in the Disney cartoon has no one to keep him company but his talking candlestick or whatever, a lot of people in the real world have no one to keep them company but their talking television, and I thought that was an interesting analogy to draw.

How would you answer Brett’s question, “If you woke up tomorrow and you were some ugly monster, would you still act exactly the same way? Feel exactly the same way about everything?”

I’m a really analytical person, and back in college, in the wake of some truly devastating dumpings, I read through a pile of self-help books about relationships, to see if any of them might diagnose something I was doing wrong. One of those books described relationships using a sort of point system, and said that a relationship always balances itself out, like conservation of energy or something, in terms of looks, money, popularity, affection, etc. It described a marriage between a beautiful woman and an average-looking man, and said that because the woman “scored” higher, things had balanced themselves out in terms of her getting her way more often, and him giving her lots of gifts, etc. Then, it said, the woman was in a car accident and was seriously disfigured. Since her “score” had dropped so much, it was inevitable that the gifts would become fewer, and she wouldn’t be getting her way as much. I found that fascinating and horrifying—this idea that the husband’s level of affection for his wife wasn’t an act of free will, but instead an inevitable response to some hidden calculus of power and need.

Applying that to “Beauty and the Beast” then, where you have this relationship between a beautiful woman and an ugly monster, if the beast suddenly gains a lot of “handsomeness points,” is it true that his level of affection for and devotion to Beauty must inevitably drop, to bring things into balance? Looked at that way, transforming the beast into a handsome prince doesn’t just undercut the moral of the story, it seems a kind of curse.

That’s a big part of what the story’s about for me: To what extent is our level of affection for other people something we have any control over, and to what extent is it dictated by power dynamics? I want to believe it’s the former, but I sort of fear it’s the latter.

In addition to writing, you co-host The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. What’s the best thing about hosting the podcast?

There are a lot of things about it that I really love, such as getting a chance to interview some of my heroes, or getting positive feedback from listeners, but probably the best thing is just that it keeps me in touch with my friends. For years John Joseph Adams and I were part of a close-knit community of writers and editors in New York, and in recent years the group has largely dispersed, with people relocating to such distant points as Myrtle Beach and Portland, Oregon. And of course John moved to California. Doing the show means I’m on the phone with him at least four times a month (since we do two recording sessions for each bi-weekly podcast), and recently we’ve been bringing on some of our other friends as guest geeks, so it’s a good way to keep the old gang together.

What other projects are you working on? What’s next?

I have two stories coming out soon, in two new John Joseph Adams anthologies. “Power Armor: A Love Story” is a dark romantic comedy about an inventor from the future who never takes off his invincible armor for fear of a lurking assassin. It’ll appear in the anthology Armored from Baen Books. The other story is called “Three Deaths,” and is set in the Barsoom milieu from the novel A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (basis for the new Disney movie John Carter). That story will appear in the anthology Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom.

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: Karen Joy Fowler
John Nakamura Remy

Your story “Halfway People” is a powerful reworking of the “Wild Swans/Swan Brothers” fairy tale. What drew you to this tradition in particular, and what aspects were you eager to subvert, or at least to riff off of?

I wrote the story for Kate Bernheimer’s My Mother She Killed Me, so the fairytale tradition was baked into the assignment. When she emailed to ask for a story, I said I’d try, but I had no ideas, no free time, and, in my heart, believed I wouldn’t manage to produce anything. The next day, I sat down with “The Wild Swans” and wrote the story. I can count on one hand the stories that have come easily to me and still have fingers left over. I didn’t have this one in my head in any conscious way when I started, and yet there it all was, just waiting to be written down. This is the way I once imagined writing stories would be, but sadly isn’t.

“The Wild Swans” was one of my favorite fairy tales as a child. I think now that I chose it for two reasons. The first was its model of heroism. Instead of swordplay and dragon-slaying, it celebrated silent, unselfish endurance. I had an easy, happy childhood and was capable of no such thing, but I liked to pretend that I would be. I’m still more interested in this model of the hero than in the other.

The second was the messiness of the finish, the one brother left with a wing. When I picked the story up again after not having read it for many years, this was the thing I remembered most and the image of the single wing had already shown up in many of the things that I’ve written, wound all through my first novel Sarah Canary.

What I hadn’t remembered was the profound intimacy of the relationship between sister and brother in Andersen’s story.

Your story is populated with characters who are trapped at the threshold: They are stuck partway between human and swan form, or are “unhappy to stay, unhappy to go,” or are “half-joyful, half undone with grief.” Liminality is important to character-driven fiction in general, but it seems to be a particularly strong theme in this work. How do you feel about this theme, in this story and in others you’ve written?

The divided self as a permanent state (as opposed to the self-in-transformation) is something I think about a lot. Obsessively. It’s the central theme in the novel I’m currently writing and I expect it can be found in most of what I’ve written. As well as most of what I’ve read. As well as my life.

The fairy tale is particularly good at literalizing this in illuminating ways (as are science fiction and fantasy. Why I love them!) though it’s rare in a fairytale for the literal, physical transformation not to complete. This is one of the things that makes “The Wild Swans” so unusual and memorable.

My own story has less messiness in the ending, and I say that sadly, because I love a messy ending. What I’ve tried to do instead is create an ending that implies a new Once Upon a Time, but I know it may look like a They Lived Happily Ever After instead. I’ll let the reader choose.

Much of the power of both “Halfway People” and your Nebula Award winning story from the same collection “What I Didn’t See” seem to come from your choice of women who are some distance away from off-stage events that drive significant aspects of these stories. Do you feel that this is the case? How did you select your viewpoint characters for these two stories?

I’m drawn to characters with imperfect knowledge of events, because they seem real to me. This is the human condition. We all have to operate daily without the data needed and all of our lives are severely impacted by events we don’t witness and are powerless to affect. By the ends of my stories, the reader knows at least as much as my narrator knows and sometimes more; if I know more than the narrator, then I mean for the reader to know that, too. Whatever questions remain in the story are questions for which I don’t have the answers.

I’m also drawn to peripheral characters, always have been. I’m an unruly reader, stubbornly determined to look in the closet and out the window and rummage through the cupboards, when I’m supposed to be following the main action. It often seems to me that the barely glimpsed lives of the peripheral characters are more interesting than the story being told, probably because they’re barely glimpsed.

Finally, I have an aversion to the dramatic. This is just me acknowledging my own limitations as a writer. So hard to write certain kinds of scenes without becoming preposterous. When I feel I’m becoming preposterous, I tend to move the events in question off-stage. But I’m also more interested in the ripples of events than in the events themselves. More interested in Edwin Booth, for example, than his brother John Wilkes.

In your career, you’ve done a marvelous job of navigating what many see as the treacherous waters between genre and mainstream fiction. How do you feel about the distinction between the two? Do you have any advice on how we as readers and writers can approach this division?

As a reader, I’m omnivorous. Other writers tell me that the libraries they haunted as children had decals on the spines of books—rocket ships and cowboy hats, etc.—so that the young reader could identify the science fiction instantly, and the dog books, and the westerns. I’ve always counted myself lucky that my library did no such thing. The fact that there were genres is something I learned very, very late.

When I’m reading, I still pay no attention. When I’m writing, I pay no attention either. I try to use what’s needed in each story as I write it and worry later about what kind of a story it is and who might be willing to publish it. The career that’s resulted from this is a divided-self career. In general, my novels are mainstream and published as such. My short fiction appears in the genre magazines. I’ve never been able publish short fiction in the mainstream and my first novel, which I believed to be a first contact novel, was rejected by the genre presses. I’ve both suffered and prospered as a result of this division and some days it seems like more of the first and some days like more of the second. But the joy of being able to write whatever I wish to write is something that, even on my worst days, I never forget to be grateful for.

And the life of reading whatever I wish to read? Priceless.

This may be a bit of a tangent, but the Tiptree Award turned twenty years old last year. It is one of the highlights of the SF literary world, and you were involved in its creation and administration. Could you tell us a little bit about the genesis of this award?

When I first began to go to Wiscon, the feminist SF convention held annually in Madison, I was struck by how little overlap the books being read by the attendees overlapped with the books being hailed and discussed at other conventions. It was as if there were two entirely different fields. The year Pat Murphy, my co-conspirator, and I launched the Tiptree, Carol Emshwiller’s Carmen Dog, which everyone at Wiscon had read and loved, was inexplicably not going to make the Nebula ballot and we were incensed about that.

And about other things, too. We were kvetching one evening, fetchingly kvetching. This was the year I decided I would never again sit on the panel entitled Women in Science Fiction at any convention that didn’t also have a Men in Science Fiction panel scheduled as well. Some of our ire fell on the Dick award and the way that jury always seemed to be made up of four men and one woman. There should be an award named for a woman, we agreed, and the jury should always be four women and one man. If Carmen Dog wasn’t going to win the Nebula, then we should make up an award it would win. We should name it after the late, great James Tiptree and it should go to work that did interesting things with gender.

I thought we were just letting off steam here. I went home refreshed from an evening of complaining. But Pat is a woman of action. The next thing I knew, she had contacted the Tiptree estate for permission to use the name, and announced the new award in her Guest of Honor speech at Wiscon. Twenty years later, here Pat and I are, recently returned from Poland where the award itself was given the Clareson award for service to the field. And chocolates!

More info about the award can be found at tiptree.org.

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.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in April, in Lightspeed . . .

As of press time, our ebook-exclusive novella for April was still to be determined. But otherwise, we’ll have original fantasy by Half-Life creator Marc Laidlaw (“Forget You”) and Eric Gregory (“The Sympathy”), along with fantasy reprints by Caitlin R. Kiernan (“The Steam Dancer”) and M. K. Hobson (“Domovoi”).

For our science fiction offerings, we’ll have Vandana Singh’s “Ruminations in an Alien Tongue” and Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Mother Ship,” and reprints by Ansible’s own David Langford and bestselling, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson.

All that plus our artist showcase and our usual assortment of author spotlights and feature interviews.

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!