Editorial, April 2012
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue twenty-three of Lightspeed!

This month, we have original fantasy by Half-Life creator Marc Laidlaw (“Forget You”) and Eric Gregory (“The Sympathy”), along with fantasy reprints by Caitlín R. Kiernan (“The Steam Dancer (1896)”) and M. K. Hobson (“Domovoi”).

For our original science fiction offerings, we’ll have Vandana Singh’s “Ruminations in an Alien Tongue” and Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Mother Ship,” and our SF reprints will include “Our Town” by bestselling, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson and, from my new anthology Armored, “Nomad” by Karin Lowachee.

All that plus our artist showcase, our usual assortment of author spotlights, and feature interviews with bestselling authors William Gibson and Robin Hobb.

And for our ebook exclusives this month, we’re pleased to present the award-nominated novella “The Political Officer” by C. C. Finlay, along with excerpts from Nancy Kress’s, After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, her new novel coming out this month from Tachyon, and from Holly Black’s Black Heart, the new novel forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.

Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for The Killing Moon, the first installment in a new epic fantasy series by critically-acclaimed author N. K. Jemisin. You can find more from Orbit—including digital short fiction and monthly ebook deals—at www.orbitbooks.net.

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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, January 2013). John is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

The Political Officer
C.C. Finlay

Maxim Nikomedes saw the other man rushing towards him, but there was no room to dodge in the crate-packed corridor. He braced himself for the impact. The other man pulled up short, his face blanching in the pallid half-light of the “night” rotation. It was Kulakov, the Chief Petty Officer. He went rigid and snapped a salute.

“Sir! Sorry, sir!” His voice trembled.

“At ease, Kulakov,” Max said. “Not your fault. It’s a tight fit inside this metal sausage.”

Standard ship joke. The small craft was stuffed with supplies, mostly food, for the eighteen month voyage ahead. Max waited for the standard response, but Kulakov stared through the hull into deep space. He was near sixty, old for the space service, old for his position, and the only man aboard who made Max, in his mid-forties, feel young.

Max smiled, an expression so faint it could be mistaken for a twitch. “But it’s better than being stuck in a capped off sewer pipe, no?”

Which is what the ship would be on the voyage home. “You’ve got that right, sir!” said Kulakov.

“Carry on.”

Kulakov shrunk aside like an old church deacon, afraid to touch a sinner lest he catch the sin. Max was used to that reaction from the crew, and not just because his nickname was the Corpse for his cadaverous and dead expression. As the Political Officer, he held the threat of death over every career aboard: the death of some careers would entail a corporeal equivalent. For the first six weeks of their mission, after spongediving the new wormhole, Max cultivated invisibility and waited for the crew to fall into the false complacency of routine. Now it was time to shake them up again to see if he could find the traitor he suspected. He brushed against Kulakov on purpose as he passed by him.

He twisted his way through the last passage and paused outside the visiting officers’ cabin. He lifted his knuckles to knock, then changed his mind, turned the latch and swung open the door. The three officers sitting inside jumped at the sight of him. Guilty consciences, Max hoped.

Captain Ernst Petoskey recovered first. “Looking for someone, Lieutenant?”

Max let the silence become uncomfortable while he studied Petoskey. The captain stood six and a half feet tall. His broad shoulders were permanently hunched from spending too much time in ships built for smaller men. The crew loved him so much they would eagerly die—or kill—for him. Called him Papa behind his back. He wouldn’t shave again until they returned safely to spaceport; his beard was already quite full, and juice-stained at the corner with proscripted chewing tobacco. Max glanced past Lukinov, the balding “radio lieutenant” and stared at Ensign Pen Reedy, the only woman on the ship.

She was lean, with prominent cheekbones, but the thing Max always noticed first were her hands. She had large, red-knuckled hands. She remained impeccably dressed and groomed, even six weeks into the voyage. Every hair on her head appeared to be individually placed as if they were all soldiers under her command.

Petoskey and Lukinov sat on opposite ends of the bunk. Reedy sat on a crate across from them. Another crate between them held a bottle, tumblers, and some cards.

Petoskey, finally uncomfortable with the silence, opened his mouth again.

“Just looking,” Max pre-empted him. “And what do I find but the Captain himself in bed with Drozhin’s boys?”

Petoskey glanced at the bunk. “I see only one and he’s hardly a boy.”

Lukinov, a few years younger than Max, smirked and tugged at the lightning bolt patch on his shirt sleeve. “And what’s with calling us Drozhin’s boys? We’re just simple radiomen. If I have to read otherwise, I’ll have you up for falsifying reports when we get back to Jesusalem.”

He pronounced their home Hey-zoo-salaam, like the popular video stars did, instead of the older way, Jeez-us-ail-em.

“Things are not always what they appear to be, are they?” said Max.

Lukinov, Reedy, and a third man, Burdick, were the Intelligence listening team assigned to intercept and decode Adarean messages—the newly opened wormhole passage would let the ship dive into the Adarean system undetected to spy. The three had been personally selected and prepped for this mission by Dmitri Drozhin, the legendary Director of Jesusalem’s Department of Intelligence. Drozhin had been the Minister too, back when it had still been the Ministry of the Wisdom of Prophets Reborn. In fact, he was the only high government official to survive the Revolution in situ, but these days his constellation was challenged by younger men like Mallove, who’d created the Department of Political Education.

“Next time, knock first, Lieutenant,” said Petoskey.

“Why should I, Captain?” returned Max, congenially. “An honest man has nothing to fear from his conscience, and what am I if not the conscience of every man aboard this ship?”

“We don’t need a conscience when we have orders.”

“Come off it, Max,” snorted Lukinov. “I invited the Captain up here to celebrate. Reedy earned her comet today.”

Indeed, she had. The young ensign wore a gold comet pinned to her left breast pocket, similar to the ones embroidered on the shirts of the other two officers. Comets were awarded only to crew members who demonstrated competence on every ship system—Engineering, Ops and Nav, Weapons, Vacuum and Radiation. Reedy must have qualified in record time. This was her first space assignment. “Congratulations,” said Max.

Reedy suppressed a genuine smile. “Thank you, sir.”

“That makes her the last one aboard,” said Petoskey. “Except for you.”

“What do I need to know about ship systems? If I understand the minds and motivations of the men who operate them, it is enough.”

“It isn’t. Not with this,” his mouth twisted distastefully, “this miscegenated, patched-together, scrapyard ship. I need to be able to count on every man in an emergency.”

“Is it that bad? What kind of emergency do you expect?”

Lukinov rapped the makeshift table. The bottles rattled. “You’re becoming a bore, Max. You checked on us, now go make notes in your little spy log, and leave us alone.”

“Either that or pull up a crate and close the damn hatch,” said Petoskey. “We could use a fourth.”

Lukinov waved his hand in clear negation, showing off a large gold signet ring. “You don’t want to do that, Ernst. This is the man who won his true love in a card game.”

Petoskey looked over at Max. “Is that so?”

“I won my wife in a card game, yes.” Max didn’t think that story was widely known outside his own department. “But that was many years ago.”

“I heard you cheated to win her,” said Lukinov. He was Max’s counterpart in Intelligence—the Department of Political Education couldn’t touch him. The two Departments hated each other and protected their own. “Heard that she divorced you too. I guess an ugly little weasel like you has to get it where he can.”

“But unlike your wife, she always remained faithful.”

Lukinov muttered a curse and pulled back his fist. Score one on the sore spot. Petoskey reached out and grabbed the Intelligence officer’s elbow. “None of that aboard my ship. I don’t care who you two are. Come on, Nikomedes. If you’re such a hotshot card player, sit down. I could use a little challenge.”

A contrary mood seized the Political Officer. He turned into the hallway, detached one of the crates, and shoved it into the tiny quarters.

“So what are we playing?” he asked, sitting down.

“Blind Man’s Draw,” said Petoskey, shuffling the cards. “Deuce beats an ace, ace beats everything else.”

Max nodded. “What’s the minimum?”

“A temple to bid, a temple to raise.”

Jesusalem’s founders stamped their money with an image of the Temple to encourage the citizen-colonists to render their wealth unto God. The new bills carried pictures of the revolutionary patriots who’d overthrown the Patriarch, but everyone still called them temples. “Then I’m in for a few hands,” Max said.

Petoskey dealt four cards face-down. Max kept the king of spades and tossed three cards back into the pile. The ones he got in exchange were just as bad.

“So,” said Lukinov, glancing at his hand. “We have the troika of the Service all gathered in one room. Military, Intelligence, and—one card, please, ah, raise you one temple—and what should I call you, Max? Schoolmarm?”

Max saw the raise. “If you like. Just remember that Intelligence is useless without a good Education.”

“Is that your sermon these days?”

“Nothing against either of you gentlemen,” Petoskey interjected as he dealt. “But it’s your mother screwed three ways at once, isn’t it. There’s three separate chains of command on a ship like this one. It’s a recipe for mutiny. Has been on other ships, strictly off the record. And with this mission ahead if we don’t all work together, God help us.”

Max kept the ten of spades with his king and took two more cards. “Not that there is one,” he said officially, “but let God help our enemies. A cord of three strands is not easily broken.”

Petoskey nodded his agreement. “That’s a good way to look at it. A cord of three strands, all intertwined.” He stared each of them in the eyes. “So take care of the spying, and the politics, but leave the running of the ship to me.”

“Of course,” said Lukinov.

“That’s why you’re the captain and both of us are mere lieutenants,” said Max. In reality, both he and Lukinov had the same service rank as Petoskey. On the ground, in Jesusalem’s mixed-up service, they were all three colonels. Lukinov was technically senior of the three, though Max had final authority aboard ship within his sphere.

It was, indeed, a troubling conundrum.

Max’s hand held nothing—king and ten of spades, two of hearts, and a seven of clubs. Petoskey tossed the fifth card down face-up. Another deuce.

Max hated Blind Man’s Draw. It was like playing the lottery. The card a man showed you was the one he’d just been dealt; you never really knew what he might be hiding. He looked at the other players’ hands. Petoskey showed the eight of clubs and Lukinov the jack of diamonds. Max glimpsed a dark four as Ensign Reedy folded her hand and said “I’m out.”

“Raise it a temple and call,” Max said, on the off chance he might beat a pair of aces. They turned their cards over and it was money thrown away. Petoskey won with three eights.

Lukinov shook his head. “Holding onto the deuces, Max? That’s almost always a loser’s hand.”

“Except when it isn’t.”

Petoskey won three of the next five hands, with Lukinov and Max splitting the other two. The poor ensign said little and folded often. Max decided to deal in his other game. While Lukinov shuffled the cards, Max tugged at his nose and said to the air. “You’re awfully silent, Miss Reedy. Contemplating your betrayal of us to the Adareans?”

Lukinov mis-shuffled. A heartbeat later, Captain Petoskey picked up his spittoon and spat.

Reedy’s voice was as steady as a motor churning in low gear. “What do you mean, sir?”

“You’re becoming a bore, again, Max.” Lukinov’s voice had a sharp edge to it.

“What’s this about?” asked Petoskey.

“Perhaps Miss Reedy should explain it herself,” said Max. “Go on, Ensign. Describe the immigrant ghetto in your neighborhood, your childhood chums, Sabbath day afternoons at language academy.”

“It was hardly that, sir,” she said smoothly. “They were just kids who lived near our residence in the city. And there were never any formal classes.”

“Oh, there was much more to it than that,” pressed Max. “Must I spell it out for you? You lived in a neighborhood of expatriate Adareans. Some spymaster chose you to become a mole before you were out of diapers and started brainwashing you before you could talk. Now while you pretend to serve Jesusalem you really serve Adares. Yes?”

“No. Sir.” Reedy’s hands, resting fingertip to fingertip across her knees, trembled slightly. “How did they know women would ever be admitted to the military academies?”

Reedy hadn’t been part of the first class to enter, but she graduated with the first class to serve active duty. “They saw it was common everywhere else, perhaps. Does it matter? Who can understand their motives? Their gene modifications make them impure. Half-animal, barely human.”

She frowned, as if she couldn’t believe that kind of prejudice still existed. “Nukes don’t distinguish between one set of genes and another, sir. They suffered during the bombardments, just like we did. They fought beside us, they went to our church. Even the archbishop called them good citizens. They’re as proud to be Jesusalemites as I am. And as loyal. Sir.”

Max tugged at his nose. “A role model for treason. They betrayed one government to serve another. I know for a fact this crew contains at least one double agent, someone who serves two masters. I suspect there are more. Is it you, Miss Reedy?”

Lukinov and Petoskey had turned into fossils before his eyes. Petoskey stared at the young Intelligence officer across the table like a man contemplating murder.

Reedy pressed her fingertips together until her hands grew still. She refused to look to Petoskey or Lukinov for help. “Sir. There may be a traitor, but it’s not me. Sir.”

Max leaned back casually. “I’ve read your Academy records, Ensign, and find them interesting for the things they leave out. Such as your role in the unfortunate accident that befell Cadet Vance.”

Reedy was well disciplined. Max’s comments were neither an order nor a question, so she said nothing, gave nothing away.

“Vance’s injuries necessitated his withdrawal from the Academy,” Max continued. “What exactly did you have to do with that situation?”

“Come on, Max,” said Lukinov, in his senior officer’s cease-and-desist voice. “This is going too far. There are always accidents in the Academy and in the service. Usually it’s the fault of the idiot who ends up slabbed. Some stupid mistake.”

Max was about to say that Vance’s mistake had been antagonizing Reedy, but Petoskey interrupted. “Lukinov, have you forgotten how to deal? Are you broke yet, Nikomedes? You can quit any time you want.”

Max showed the roll of bills in his pocket and Lukinov started tossing down the cards. As he made the second circuit around their makeshift table, the lights flickered and went off. Max’s stomach fluttered as the emergency lights flashed on, casting a weak red glare over the cramped room. The cards sailed past the table, and into the air. Petoskey slammed his glass down. It bounced off the table and twirled toward the ceiling, spilling little brown droplets of whiskey.

Petoskey slapped the ship’s intercom. “Bridge!”

“Ensign!” barked Lukinov. “Find something to catch that mess before the grav comes back on and splatters it everywhere.”

“Yes, sir,” Reedy answered and scrambled to the bathroom for a towel.

“Bridge!” shouted Petoskey, then shook his head. “The com’s down.”

“It’s just the ship encounter drill,” said Lukinov.

“There’s no drill scheduled for this rotation. And we haven’t entered Adarean space yet, so we can’t be encountering another ship . . .”

Another ship.

The thought must have hit all four of them simultaneously. As they propelled themselves frog-like toward the hatch, they crashed into one another, inevitable in the small space. During the jumble, Max took a kick to the back of his head. It hurt, even without any weight behind it. No accident, he was sure of that, but he didn’t see who did it.

Petoskey flung the door open. “The pig-hearted, fornicating bastards.”

Max echoed the sentiment when he followed a moment later. The corridor was blocked by drifting crates. They’d been improperly secured.

“Ensign!” snapped Petoskey.

“Yes, Captain.”

“To the front! I’ll pass you the crates, you attach them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can I trust you to do that?”

“Yessir!”

Max almost felt sorry for Reedy. Almost. In typical fashion for these older ships, someone had strung a steel cable along the corridor, twist-tied to the knobs of the security lights. Max held onto it and stayed out of the way as Petoskey grabbed one loose box after another and passed them back to Reedy. There was the steady sound of velcro as they made their way toward the bridge.

“What do you think it is?” Lukinov whispered to him. “If it’s a ship, then the wormhole’s been discovered . . .”

The implications were left hanging in the air like everything else. Max compared the size of Lukinov’s boot with the sore spot on the back of his head. “Could be another wormhole. The sponge is like that. Once one hole opens up, you usually find several more. There’s no reason why the Adareans couldn’t find a route in the opposite direction.”

Lukinov braced himself against the wall, trying to keep himself oriented as if the grav was still on. “If it’s the Adareans, they’ll be thinking invasion again.”

“It could be someone neutral too,” said Max. “Most of the spongedivers from Earth are prospecting in toward the core these days, but it could be one of them. Put on your ears and find out who they are. I’ll determine whether they’re for us or against us.”

“If they’re against, then Ernst can eliminate them,” laughed Lukinov. “That’s a proper division of labor.”

“Our system is imperfect, but it works.” That was a stretch, Max told himself. Maybe he ought to just say that the system worked better than the one it replaced.

“Hey,” shouted Petoskey. “Are you gentlemen going to sit there or join me on the bridge?”

“Coming,” said Lukinov, echoed a second later by Max.

They descended two levels, and came to the control center. Max followed the others through the open hatch. Men sat strapped to their chairs, faces tinted the color of blood by the glow of the emergency lights. Conduits, ducts, and wires ran overhead, like the intestines of some man-made monster. One of the vents kicked on, drawing a loud mechanical breath. Truly, Max thought, they were in the belly of the leviathan now.

“Report!” bellowed Petoskey.

“Lefty heard a ship,” returned the Commander, a plug-shaped double-chinned fellow named Gordet. “It was nothing more than a fart in space, I swear. I folded the wings and initiated immediate shutdown per your instructions before our signature could be detected.”

“Contact confirmed?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good work then.” The ship chairs were too small for Petoskey’s oversized frame. He preferred to stand anyway and had bolted a towel rack to the floor in the center of the deck. The crew tripped over it when the grav was on, but now Petoskey slipped his feet under it. With the low ceilings it was the only way he could keep from bumping his head. It was against all regulations, but, just as with his smuggled tobacco, Petoskey broke regulations whenever it suited him. It was a quality shared by many of the fleet’s best deep space Captains. “Those orders were for when we entered Adarean space, Commander,” Petoskey added a second later. “I commend your initiative. Put a commendation in Engineer Elefteriou’s record also.”

“Yes, sir.” Gordet’s voice snapped like elastic, pleased at the Captain’s praise.

“Identity?”

“Its prime number pings up Outback. Corporate prospectors. Her signature looks like one of the new class.”

Petoskey grabbed the passive scope above his head and pulled it down to his eyes. “Vector?”

“Intercept.”

“Intercept?”

“It’s headed in-system and we’re headed out. At our current respective courses and velocities, we should come within spitting distance of it just past Big Brother.”

Big Brother was the nickname for this system’s larger gas giant. Little Brother, the smaller gas giant, was on the far side of the sun, out past the wormhole to home.

“Are they coming from the Adares jump?” Petoskey asked.

“That’s what we thought at first,” said Gordet. “But it appears now that they’re entering from a third wormhole. About thirty degrees negative of the Adares jump, on the opposite side of the elliptic.” He glanced over the navigator’s shoulder at the monitor. “Call that one thirty-six degrees.”

Petoskey continued to stare into the scope. “Shit. There’s nothing out here.”

Gordet cleared his throat. “It’s millions of kilometers out, sir. Still too far away for a clear visual.”

“No! I mean there’s nothing out here. This system won’t hold their attention for long. It’s only a matter of time before they find the opened holes to Adares and home.” He paused. “Do that and they’ll close our route back.”

Indeed. Max had a strong urge to pace. If he started bouncing off the walls, he was certain Petoskey would order him off the bridge, so he tried to float with purpose. Burdick, the third member of the Intelligence team, paused in the hatch, carrying a large box. He nodded to Lukinov and Reedy, who followed him forward toward the secure radio room. Max wondered briefly why Burdick had left his post.

“The intercept makes things easier for us,” Petoskey concluded aloud. “Calculate the soonest opportunity to engage without warning. With any luck, the missing ship will be counted as a wormhole mishap.” Absorbed by the sponge.

Elefteriou turned and spoke to Rucker, the First Lieutenant, who spoke to Gordet, who said, “Sir, radio transmissions from the ship appear to be directed at another ship in the vicinity of the jump. If we take out this one, then the other dives and lives to witness.”

“Just one other ship?”

“No way of telling this far out without the active sensors.” Which they couldn’t use without showing up like a solar flare.

“The order stands,” said Petoskey. “Also, Commander, loose cargo in the corridors impeded my progress to the bridge. This is a contraindication of ship readiness.”

Gordet stiffened, as crushed by this criticism as he’d been puffed up by the praise. “It’ll be taken care of, sir!”

“See to it. Where’s Chevrier?” Arkady Chevrier was the Chief Engineer. He came from a family of industrialists that contributed heavily to the Revolution. His uncle headed the Department of Finance, and his father was a General. Mallove, Max’s boss in Political Education, had warned him not to antagonize Chevrier.

“In the engine room, sir,” answered Gordet. “He thought that the sudden unscheduled shutdown of main power resulted in a drain on the main battery arrays. I sent him to fix it.”

“Raise Engineering on the com.”

“Yes, sir,” said Gordet. “Raise Engineering.”

Lefty punched his console, listened to his earphones, shook his head.

Petoskey shifted the plug of tobacco in his mouth. “When I tried to contact the bridge from quarters, the com was down. If I have to choose between ship communications and life support, in the presence of a possible enemy vessel, I want communications first. Get a status report from Engineering, and give me a com link to all essential parts of the ship within the next fifteen minutes if you have to do it with tin cans and string. Is that clear?”

Sweat beaded on Gordet’s forehead. His jowls quivered as he answered, “Yessir!”

Gordet did not divide his attention well, Max noted. The Commander had been so absorbed with the other ship, he had not yet noticed the ship communications problem. Several past errors in judgment featured prominently in his permanent file. He seemed unaware that this was the reason he’d been passed over for ship command of his own. But he was steady, and more or less politically sound.

He could also be a vindictive S.O.B. Max watched him turn on his subordinates. “Corporal Elefteriou,” Gordet shouted. “I want a full report on com status. Five minutes ago is not soon enough! Lieutenant Rucker!”

“Sir!”

“Get your ass to Engineering. I want to receive Chevrier’s verbal report on this com here!” He punched it with his fist for emphasis. “If it doesn’t come in fifteen minutes, you can hold your breath while the rest of us put on space gear.”

The First Lieutenant set off for Engineering. Petoskey cleared his throat. “Commander, one other thing.”

“Yes?”

“We’ll switch to two shifts now, six hours on, six off. All crew.”

“Yes, sir.”

Petoskey gestured for Max to come beside him.

“So now we wait around for three days to intercept,” Petoskey said in a low voice. “You look like a damn monkey floating there, Nikomedes. We could surgi-tape your boots to the deck.”

“That’s not necessary.” Petoskey wasn’t the only captain in the fleet who’d tie his political officer down to one spot if he could. Max needed to be free to move around to catch his traitor.

“If you were qualified for any systems, I’d put you to work.”

An excellent reason to remain unqualified. “And what would you have me do?”

“At this point?” Petoskey shrugged. Then he frowned, and jerked his head toward the Intelligence team’s radio room. “Was that true? About . . . ?”

“This is not the place,” Max said firmly. Illusion was not reality; the crew pretended not to hear Petoskey speak, but they’d repeat every word that came from his mouth.

“I hate the Adareans, I want you to know that,” Petoskey said. “Anything to do with the Adareans, I hate, and I’ll have none of it aboard my ship. So if there’s any danger, even from one of the intelligence men—”

“There will be no danger,” Max asserted firmly. “It is my job to make certain of that.”

“See to it, Lieutenant.”

“I will.” Max was surprised. That was the most direct command any Captain had given him during his tenure as a political officer.

Petoskey returned an almost respectful nod. Max was about to suggest a later discussion when Lukinov shouted from the hatch.

“Captain. You might want to listen to this. We tried to raise you on the com, but it’s not working.”

Petoskey slipped his feet free and followed the Intelligence officer. Max invited himself and swam along.

Inside the listening room, Reedy sat at a long desk, wearing a pair of headphones, making notes on the translation in her palm-pad. Burdick had a truck battery surgi-taped to a table wedged in the tiny room’s rounded corner. Wires ran from it to an open panel on the main concomsole, and Burdick connected others. He looked up from his work and grinned as they came into the hatch. “Gotta love the electrician’s mates,” he said. “They’ve got everything.”

Lukinov laughed and handed a pair of headphones to Petoskey. “Wait until you hear this.”

Petoskey slipped the earpieces into place. “I don’t understand Chinese,” he said after a minute. “Always sounds like an out-of-tune guitar to me.”

Lukinov’s smile widened. “But it’s voices, not code, don’t you see? The level of encryption was like cheap glue.” He made a knife-opening-a-letter gesture with his hands.

“Good work. What have you learned so far?”

Lukinov leaned over Reedy’s shoulder to look at the palm-pad. “Corporate security research ship. Spongedivers.”

Petoskey nodded. “Bunch of scientists and part-time soldiers. Soft, but great tech. Way beyond ours. It’s a safe bet their battery arrays don’t go down when they fly mute. Lefty says there’s another one parked out by the wormhole.”

Lukinov confirmed this. “We know it because the radio tech is talking to his girlfriend over on the other ship.”

Burdick snickered, and Petoskey muttered “mixed crews” with all the venom of a curse. He glared at Reedy so hard his eyes must have burned a hole in the ensign’s head. The young woman looked up from her pad. “Yes, sir?” she asked.

“I didn’t speak to you,” Petoskey snapped.

Mixed crews were part of the Revolution, a way to double manpower—so to speak—in the military forces and give Jesusalem a chance to catch up. So far it was only in the officer corps, and even there it hadn’t been received well. Some men, like Vance at the Academy, tried to openly discourage it despite the government’s commitment.

Lukinov held the back of Reedy’s seat to keep from drifting toward the ceiling. “The inbound ship’s called the Deng Xiaopeng. Why does that name sound familiar?”

Petoskey shrugged. “Means nothing to me.”

If they didn’t know, then Max would give them an answer. He cleared his throat. “I believe that Deng Xiaopeng was one of Napoleon’s generals.”

Lukinov curled his mouth skeptically.

“That doesn’t sound right,” said Petoskey.

“I’m quite certain of it,” said Max, bracing himself between the wall and floor at an angle sideways to the others. “Confusion to the enemy.”

“Always,” replied Petoskey, apparently happy to find something he could agree with. “Always.”

When Max’s mind became restless, so did he. Two days after the spongedivers were sighted, his thoughts still careened weightlessly off the small walls. The presence of the ship from Outback complicated the ship’s mission and his. Meanwhile, he was cut off from all his superiors, unable to guess which goal they wanted him to pursue right now. Or goals, as the case more likely was. So he was on his own again. Forced to decide for himself.

Nothing new about that, he thought ruefully.

He released the straps, and pushed off for the door to take a tour of the ship. He still had his traitor to catch.

When he opened the door, he saw another one cracked open down the corridor. Lieutenant Rucker peeked out and gestured for Max to come inside. Max checked to see that no one was in the hall and slipped into the room.

The blonde young man closed the door too fast and it slammed shut. “Didn’t know if you were ever going to come out,” Rucker said, producing an envelope. “This is from Gordet.”

Max took the multi-tool from his pocket, and flicked the miniature vibra-knife on to slice open the seal. He studied the sheet inside. Commander Gordet had written down the codes for the safe that held the Captain’s secret orders. Interesting. Max wondered if Rucker had made a copy for himself. “Did Gordet say anything specific?”

“He said to tell you that if we were to engage the Outback ship in combat and anything unfortunate were to happen to the Captain, you would have his full cooperation and support.”

“So what did he tell the Captain?”

Rucker looked at the wall, opened his mouth, closed it again. He was not a quick liar.

Max gave him an avuncular clap on the shoulder. “You can tell me, Lieutenant. I’ll find out anyway.”

Rucker gulped, still refusing to meet Max’s eyes. “He told the Captain that, um, if we were to engage the other ship in combat, and anything unfortunate were to happen to you, he’d make sure it was all clear in the records.”

So Gordet was indecisive, trying to play both sides at once. That was a hard game. The Commander had no gift for it either. “What’s your opinion of Gordet?” probed Max.

“He’s a good officer. I’m proud to serve under him.”

Rather standard response, deserving of Max’s withering stare. This time Rucker’s eyes did meet his.

“But, um, he’s still mad about losing his cabin to you, sir. He doesn’t like bunking with the junior officers.”

“He’ll get over it,” said Max. “Just remind him that Lukinov is bunking with Burdick, eh?” He gestured at Rucker to open the door. Rucker looked both ways down the corridor, motioned that it was clear, and Max went on his way.

He headed topside, pulling himself hand over hand up the narrow shaft. When he exited the tube he found Kulakov conducting an emergency training drill in the forward compartments. Stick-its were hung up everywhere, indicating the type and extent of combat damage. Crews in full space gear performed “repairs” while the Chief Petty Officer graded their performance.

“You’re dead,” shouted Kulakov, grabbing a man by his collar and pulling him out of the exercise. “You forgot that you’re a vacuum cleaner!”

“But sir, I’m suited up properly.” His voice sounded injured, even distorted slightly by the microphone.

“But you’re not plugged in,” Kulakov said, tapping the stick-it on the wall. “That’s open to the outside, and without your tether you’re nothing more now than a very small meteor moving away from the ship! What are the rest of you looking at?”

He glanced over his shoulder, saw Max, and froze. The crews stopped their exercise.

“You just spaced another crewman,” said Max, tilting his head toward a man who’d backed into the wall. “Carry on.”

He turned away without waiting for Kulakov’s salute. He didn’t know why he had such an effect on that man, but now he was thinking he should look into it.

He proceeded through several twisting corridors, designed to slow and confuse boarding parties headed for the bridge, and passed the gym. He needed exercise. The weightlessness was already starting to get to him. But he decided to worry about that later.

He paused when he came to the missile room.

The Black Forest.

That was the crew’s nickname for it. Four polished black columns rose four uninterrupted stories—tubes for nuclear missiles, back when this ship was intended to fight the same kind of dirty war waged by the Adareans. It was the largest open space in the entire ship. When the grav was on, the men exercised by running laps, up one set of stairs, across the catwalk, down the other, around the tubes, and up again.

Max went out onto the catwalk, climbed up on the railing, and jumped.

If one could truly jump in zero-gee, that was. He pushed himself towards the floor, and prayed that the grav didn’t come on unexpectedly. On the way down he noticed someone who feared just that possibility making their way up the stairs.

Max did a somersault, extending his legs to change his momentum and direction, pushed off one of the tubes, and bounced over to see who it was. He immediately regretted doing so. It was Sergeant Simco, commander of the combat troops.

Every captain personally commanded a detachment of ground troops. It could be as big as a battalion in some cases, but for this voyage, with an entire crew of only 141, the number was limited to ten. Officially, they were along to repel boarders and provide combat assistance if needed. Unofficially, they were called troubleshooters. If crewmen gave the Captain any trouble, it was the troopers’ job to shoot them.

Simco would enjoy doing it too. He had more muscles than brains. But then nobody had that many brains.

“Hello, Sergeant,” Max called.

“Sir, that was nicely done.”

“I didn’t have you pegged for the cautious type.”

Simco shook his head. “I don’t like freefall unless I’ve got a parachute strapped to my back.”

Typical groundhog response. “Are your men ready to board and take that Outback ship, Sergeant?”

“Sir, I could do it all by myself. They’re women.”

They both laughed, Simco snapped a perfect salute, and Max pushed off from the railing. When he landed on the bottom, he saw placards marked “Killshot” hanging on each of the four tubes. That meant that were loaded with live missiles, ready to launch. Something new, since the last time he’d passed through the Black Forest. He saw handwriting scrawled across the bottom of the placards, and went up close to read it. A. G. W.

Under the old government, the hastily thrown together Department of War had been called the Ministry of A Just God’s Wrath. Considering the success of the Adareans, the joke had been that the name was a typo and should have been called Adjust God’s Wrath. Some devout crewman still had the same goal.

On the lower level, Max continued to the aftmost portion of the ship, off-limits to all crew except for Engineering and Senior officers. Only one sealed hatch allowed direct entrance to this section. Max found an off-duty electrician’s mate sitting there, watching a pocketvid. The faint sound of someone dying came from the tiny speaker.

Max stopped in front of the crewman. “What are you watching?”

The crewman looked up, startled. DePuy, that was his name. He jumped to his feet and went all the way to the ceiling. He saluted with one hand, while the thumb of the other flicked to the pause button. “It’s A Fire On The Land, sir. It’s about the Adarean nuking of New Nazareth.”

“I’m familiar with it,” Max replied. Political Education approved all videos, and practically ran the video business. “The bombing and the vid. Move aside and let me pass.”

“Sorry, sir, the Chief Engineer said . . .”

Max turned as cold as deep space. He reached under DePuy to open the hatch. “Move aside, crewman.”

“The Chief Engineer gave me a direct order, sir!”

“And I am giving you another direct order right now.” Damn it, thought Max, the man still hesitated. “Rejecting an order from your Political Officer is mutiny, Mr. DePuy. A year is a very long time to spend in the ship’s brig waiting for trial.”

“Sir! A year is a very long time to serve under a chief officer who holds grudges, sir!”

“If I have to repeat my order a third time, you will go to the brig.”

DePuy saluted and pushed off from the wall. Though he seemed to seriously consider, for a split second, whether he wouldn’t rather be locked up than face Chevrier’s temper.

Max went down the corridor and paused outside the starboard Battery Room. The hatch stood open on the two-story space. One of the battery arrays was completely disassembled and diagrammed on the wall, with the key processing chips circled in red. A small group of men, most of them stripped to their waists, crowded into the soft-walled clean room in the corner. A large duct ran up from it toward the ceiling, the motor struggling to draw air. A crewman looked up and tapped the Chief Engineer on the shoulder.

“You!” Chevrier shouted as soon as he saw Max. “This is a restricted area! I want you out of my section right now!”

“Nothing is off-limits to me,” Max replied.

“Fuck your mother!” Chevrier thundered, shooting across the room and getting right in Max’s face. Chevrier’s eyes had dark circles around them like storm clouds, and red lines in the whites like tiny bolts of lightning. He probably hadn’t slept since the spongediver was spotted; no doubt he was also pumped up on Nova or its more legal equivalent from the dispensary. That would explain his heavy sweating. It couldn’t drip off him in the weightlessness, but had simply accumulated in a pool about a half inch deep that sloshed freely in the vicinity of his breastbone. Max noticed that the comet insignia was branded on Chevrier’s bare chest. The Revolutionary government had banned that tradition, but the branding irons were still floating around some ships in the service. Chevrier was the type who had probably heated it up with a hand welder and branded himself. He jabbed a finger in the direction of the empty spot on Max’s left breast pocket. “You haven’t qualified for a single ship’s system,” he said, “and you sure as hell aren’t reactor qualified. Now get out of my section!”

“You forgetting something, soldier?” Max asked, in as irritating a voice as he could manage.

Chevrier laughed in disbelief. “I wish I could forget! I’ve got a major problem on my hands, a ship with no fucking backup power.”

Max took a deep breath. “Did somebody break your arm, soldier?”

Chevrier’s eyes flickered. He made a sloppy motion with his right hand in the general direction of his head. Had Mallove sent word in the other direction too? Did Chevrier know that Max was supposed to leave him alone?

“Good. Give me a status report on the power situation.”

The Chief Engineer inhaled deeply. “Screwed up and likely to stay that way. The crewman on duty panicked—he folded the wings and powered down the Casmir drive without disengaging the batteries first and fried half the chips. We are now trying to build new chips, atom by atom, but you need a grade A clean hood to do that. And our hood is about as tight and clean as an old whore.”

Max had heard all this already, less vividly described, from the Captain’s reports. “Go on.”

“Normally, we could just switch over to the secondary array, but some blackhole of a genius gutted our portside Battery Room and replaced it with a salvaged groundside nuclear reactor so we can float through Adarean space disguised like background radiation in order to do God knows what.”

“But you can switch communications, ship systems, propulsion, all that, over to the reactor, right?”

That was the plan: Dive into Adarean space, do one circuit around the sun running on the nukes while recording everything they could on the military and political communications channels, then head home again.

“We’ve already done all that,” answered Chevrier, “but we can’t power up the Casmir drive with it. It’s strictly inner system, no diving.” He suddenly noticed the pool of sweat on his chest, went to flick it away, then stopped. “The Adareans won’t scan us if we’re running on nuclears, but they wouldn’t scan canvas sails either, so we might as well have used them instead. We’ve got to fix the main battery at some point.”

“Can you bring the grav back online?”

“Not safely, no, and not with the reactor. It’s a power hog. Too many things to go wrong.”

“Lasers?”

Chevrier ground his teeth. “You could talk to the Captain, you know. He sends down here every damned hour for another report, asking the same exact damn questions.”

“Lasers?” repeated Max firmly.

“I recommended other options to the Captain, but if you want to turn some Outback ship into space slag, I’ll give you enough power to do it. As long as you let me comb through the debris for spare parts once you’re done. Might be the one way to get some decent equipment.”

“Fair enough. How are your men holding up?”

“They’re soldiers.” He pronounced the word very differently than Max had. “They do exactly what they’re told. Except for that worthless snot of a mate who apparently can’t even guard a fucking sealed hatch properly.”

Max didn’t like the sound of that. Chevrier couldn’t keep pushing his men as hard as he pushed himself, or they’d start to break. “Men are not machines,” Max began . . .

“Hell they aren’t! A ship’s crew is one big machine and you’re a piece of grit in the silicone, a short in the wire. With you issuing orders outside the chain of command, the command splits. You either need to fit in or get the hell out of the machine!”

Chevrier jabbed his finger at Max’s chest again to punctuate his statement. This time, he made contact with enough force to send the two men in opposite directions.

It was clear that he didn’t mean to touch Max, and just as clear that he didn’t mean to back down. He glared at Max, daring him to make something of it. Aggressiveness was the main side effect of Nova. It built up until the men went supernova and burned out. On top of that, Chevrier also had that look some men got when things went very wrong. He couldn’t fix things so he wanted to smash them instead.

Max could bring him up on charges, but the ship needed its Chief Engineer right now. And if Mallove had promised his friends in government that he would protect Chevrier . . .

Max decided to ignore the incident. For the time being. “I’ll be sure to make a record of your comments.”

Chevrier snorted, as if he’d won a game of chicken. “If you have problems with any of the big words, come back and I’ll spell them out for you.” He flapped his hand near his head again, turned and went back to the clean hood.

The other men scowled at Max.

That was the problem with anger—it was an infectious disease. Frustration only made it spread faster. He continued his tour, looking into the main engine room and then at the nuclear reactors. Nobody was in the former because there was nothing to be done there, and nobody was in the latter because radiation spooked them. One man sat in the control room, reading the monitors. Max hovered near the ceiling a moment looking over the crewman’s shoulder, comparing the pictures on the vids to the layout of the rooms. The crewman stared at the monitors intently, pretending not to see Max. Yes, thought Max, anger was very infectious. You never knew who might catch it next.

The hapless mate DePuy still guarded the hatch, whipping the vid behind his back as he snapped to attention. Max ignored him. Accidents happened. Some idiots would just slab themselves.

He went back through the Black Forest, acknowledging salutes from a pair of shooters, the Tactics Officer’s mates. He swam through the air to the top level, and down the main corridor, past the open door of the exercise room. He turned back. If grav was going to be offline much longer, he needed to sign up for exercise time. Physically, he needed to stay sharp right now.

Max pushed the door open. The room was dark. It surprised him briefly that no one was there, but then, with the six-and-sixes, and all the drills, the men were probably too busy. He hit the light switch. Nothing came on. He moved farther into the room to hit the second switch. Something hard smashed him on the back of the head. He twisted, trying to get a hold of his assailant but there was no one behind him. He realized that the other man was above him, on the ceiling, too late, and as he twisted in the dark room, he suddenly became very dizzy, losing any sense of direction, any orientation to the walls and floors. A thick arm snaked around his throat, choking off his nausea along with his breath. Max got hold of a thumb and managed to pull it halfway loose, but he had no leverage at all.

He swung his elbows forcefully and futilely as black dots swam before his eyes like collapsing stars in the darkened room.

Then the darkness became absolute.

He experienced a floating, disconnected sensation, like being in the sensory deprivation tanks they’d used for some of his conditioning experiments. Max had hated the feeling then, of being lost, detached, and he hated it now. Then light knifed down into one of his eyes and all his pains awoke at once.

“Do you hear me, Lieutenant Nikomedes?”

“Yes,” croaked Max. His throat felt raw. The light flicked off, then stabbed into the other eye. “That hurts.”

“I should imagine that it’s the least of your hurts. Has the painkiller worn off completely then?”

“I hope so, because if it hasn’t . . .” His throat felt crushed and his kidneys ached like hell. The light went off and Max’s eyes adjusted to the setting. He was in the sickbay, with the Doc hovering over him. His name was Noyes, and he was only a medtech but the crew still called him Doc. The service was short of surgeons. Command didn’t want to spare one for this voyage.

“Your pupils look good,” Noyes continued. “There’s a ruptured blood vessel in the right eye. It’s not pretty, but the damage is superficial. We had some concern about how long you’d been without oxygen when you came in.”

Yeah, thought Max. He was concerned too. “So how long was it?”

“Not long. Seconds, maybe. A couple of the shooters found you unconscious in the gym.”

“And so they brought the Corpse to sickbay?”

“You know that nickname?” Noyes administered an injection and Max’s pain lessened. “Whoever attacked you knew what he was doing. He cut off your air supply without crushing your windpipe or leaving any fingerprint type bruises on your throat. You’re lucky—the shooters did chest compressions as soon as they found you and got you breathing again.”

So this wasn’t just a warning. Someone had tried to kill him, and failed. Unless the shooters were in on it. But who would do it and why? His hand shot up to his breast pocket. Gordet’s note with the secret codes was still there.

“What’s that?” asked Noyes, noticing the gesture.

“A list of suspects,” replied Max. He wondered if someone had followed him from Engineering. “Did you hear the one about the political officer who was killed during wargame exercises?”

Suspicion flickered across the Doc’s face. “No,” he said slowly.

“They couldn’t call it friendly fire because he had no friends.”

Noyes didn’t laugh. He was young, barely thirty, if that. But his face was worn, and he had a deep crease between his eyes. “Can I ask you a direct question?”

“If it’s about who did this . . .”

“No. It’s about the ship’s mission.”

“I may not be able to answer.”

“It’s just the crew, you know what they’re saying, that this is a suicide mission. We’re supposed to sneak into Adarean space, nuke their capital, and then blow ourselves up, vaporize the evidence.”

“Ah,” no, Max hadn’t heard that one yet, though he supposed he should have thought of it himself. Sometimes there were disadvantages to knowing inside information; it limited one’s ability to imagine other possibilities. “We could blow up their capital, but their military command is space-based, decentralized. That kind of strike wouldn’t touch them at all. That doesn’t make any sense, Doc.”

“It doesn’t have to make sense for the service to order it.” Noyes laughed, a truncated little puff of air. “I was scheduled for leave, I was supposed to be getting married on my leave, and I got yanked off the transport and put on this ship without a word of explanation, and then found out I was going to be gone for a year and a half. So don’t tell me the service only gives orders that make any sense.”

Max had no answer for that. He knew how orders were.

“Is this a suicide mission?” asked Noyes. “Tell me straight. The shooters think that’s why someone tried to kill you, because they don’t have to worry about what would happen when they got back home.”

And they could die knowing they’d offed an officer. There were definitely a few of that type on board. But Max didn’t think it was that random. “And if it is a suicide mission?”

The medtech’s face grew solemn. “Then I want to send some kind of message back to Suzan. I don’t want her to think I simply disappeared on her. I don’t want her to live the rest of her life with that.”

Noyes couldn’t be the only one having those thoughts. No wonder there was tension on the ship. “This isn’t a suicide mission,” Max said firmly.

“Your word on that?”

“Yes.” This was a rumor he would have to try to kill. Even if it were true. Max touched his pocket again. What exactly were the secret orders? He thought he knew them, but maybe he didn’t.

Noyes shook his head. “Too bad you’re the Political Officer. Everyone knows your word can’t be trusted.” He handed Max a bottle of pills. “The Captain wants to see you on the bridge right away. Take one of these if you feel weak, or in pain, and then report back to sickbay next shift.”

Max sat up, and noticed his pants pockets were inside out. So someone had been searching him after all, and the shooters had interrupted them. Unless that too was part of the ruse. For now, he’d stick to the simpler explanation.

Noyes helped him to his feet. “I ought to keep you for observation,” he said.

“No,” replied Max. “I’m fine.” I’m as rotten a liar as Rucker is, he thought. He wondered if the First Lieutenant had changed his mind. Or changed his allegiances.

The door opened and Simco waited outside. His bulk seemed to fill up the small corridor. He snapped a crisp salute and whipped his hand down again. “Captain assigned me to be your guard, sir. He asks you not to speak about this incident while I’m investigating it. He also requires your immediate attention on the bridge.”

“The assignment comes a little too late apparently, Sergeant,” murmured Max. Simco smiled, and Max gestured for him to lead the way.

“You first, sir.”

Trouble never came looking for him face to face, thought Max as he led the way through the corridors. It always came sneaking up behind.

The bridge was crowded because of shift change. Double the usual crew packed into the tight space, giving report to one another in low tones.

No one but the Captain bothered to look up when Max entered, and even he only glanced away from the scope for a second. Vents hissed above the muted beeps from the monitors. The two shooters Max had seen in the Black Forest were seated next to the Tactics’ Officer. Max waited to make eye contact with them, to say thanks, but they were so absorbed in their work they didn’t notice him. He gave up waiting, and slid over to stand by Petoskey.

“It’s about damn time, Nikomedes,” growled Petoskey.

“I had a slight accident.”

“Well I have a slight problem. The incoming ship boosted. They’re in some kind of a hurry. So our window of opportunity is here, and it’s closing fast.”

He hadn’t made up his mind yet, Max realized. “Have they detected us?”

“No. We’re between them and the rings. They don’t see us because we’re floating dead, and because they don’t expect to see anyone out here.”

Max remained silent, running the calculations through his head. Outback’s presence would not affect the Jesusalem’s claim to the system, only the possible success of their mission through Adarean space.

“‘War is an extension of political policy with military force,’” prompted Petoskey, quoting regulations.

And it was the job of the political officer to be the final arbiter of policy. This was exactly the type of unforeseen situation that created the need for political officers on ships. “What are our options?”

Petoskey shifted his chewing tobacco into a spot below his lower lip. “Chevrier says we could power up and hit them with the lasers, but we wouldn’t get more than one or two shots. I don’t like our chances at this distance. We could launch the nuclears at them. They’d see them coming, but we could bracket them so that they’ll still take on a killer dose of radiation even if we don’t score a direct hit. Or we could do nothing.”

“What are your concerns?”

He sucked the tobacco juice through his teeth. “The last I heard officially, Outback was one of our trading partners.”

“We have met the enemy,” Max mused softly, “and they are us.”

Petoskey scowled. “But Outback also trades with Adares. If they find our dive to their system, they’ll let the Adareans know about it and that endangers our mission. So what’s the politically correct thing for me to do?”

“I would suggest that we haven’t been tasked with guarding the system or the other wormhole. I would point out that there are other ships in place specifically to do just that.” He paused. “And as long as we dive undetected, our mission isn’t really endangered.”

Petoskey leaned back, and straightened, so that his head nearly scraped the pipes. He slammed the scope back into its slot and stared hard at Max. “So we let them pass?”

“They’ve got a second ship outside our range. We pop this one, and the other one sees us, then Jesusalem could face a war on two fronts.” Although they weren’t technically at war with Adares any longer, the capital was filled with rumors of war. “Politically, we’re not ready to handle that.”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” said Petoskey, with a slight shudder that mixed revulsion with unease. “I’m glad not to use the nukes. Those are dirty weapons to use. On people.”

“I fail to see any difference,” said Max. “Two kinds of fire. Lasers or nukes, they would be equally dead.”

Petoskey had a lidded cup taped to the conduits on the wall. He pulled it off, spat into it, and taped it back up again. Pausing, so he could change the subject. “I understand that you were nearly dead a little while ago, Nikomedes. Simco has one of his men guarding Reedy.”

“Why?” asked Max. Had the ensign been attacked also?

“Spy or not, it’s obvious she’s trying to get back at you for your comments in quarters the other day. I asked around and found out what she did to Vance. Shows what happens when you don’t keep women in their place. Before I had her locked up, I wanted to make certain this wasn’t something arranged between the two of you. Some kind of duel. Not that I thought it was, but . . .”

He thought it might be, finished Max to himself. Or hoped it might be. “It wasn’t Reedy as far as I know. But let Simco’s man watch her while Simco investigates. If Reedy’s guilty, maybe she’ll give herself away.”

“Shouldn’t have a woman on board anyway, even if she is language qualified. We can’t afford dissension on a voyage like this one. I will personally execute anyone who endangers this mission. I don’t care if it is a junior officer.”

Or a woman, thought Max. “Understood,” he answered. He looked up one last time, to see if he could catch the shooters’ eyes. That’s when he noticed Rucker and Gordet staring at him. They had been whispering to one another and stopped. “In fact, I think I’ll head down to the radio room right now.”

“You’re dismissed from duty until Doc says you’ve recovered. And Simco or one of his men will stay with you at all times.”

That was not what Max wanted, not at all. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

Petoskey nodded, dismissing him.

Max began to wish that whoever had attacked him had done a better job.

He went to the secure radio room and all three of the Intelligence officers stopped talking and turned towards the doorway. It’s the Political Officer Effect, thought Max.

“What happened to your face?” Lukinov asked.

“I fought the law and the law won,” Max answered impulsively.

Burdick burst out laughing. Even Lukinov smiled. “Why does that sound so damned familiar?” he asked.

“Judas’s Chariot,” answered Burdick. “The vid. It was one of Barabbas’ lines.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember that one now. It had Oliver Whatshisname in it. I got to meet him once, at a party, when he did that public information vid. Good man.” He twisted around. The smell of his cologne nearly choked Max. “Seriously, Max, what happened? And why has the Captain put a guard on one of my men?”

“Someone tried to kill me.” Max was disappointed with the surprise in Lukinov’s expression. In all of their expressions. Intelligence was supposed to know everything. “Captain suspects the ensign here.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Lukinov rolled his eyes. Anger flashed across Reedy’s face.

“It wasn’t my suggestion,” Max replied. “But if you don’t mind my asking, which one of you is just coming on shift?”

“I am, sir,” Reedy answered immediately.

“And where were you?”

“In her quarters sleeping,” interjected Lukinov. “Where else would she have been?”

“You were there with her?” No one wanted to answer that accusation, so Max slid past it. “You two usually work one shift together, and Burdick takes the other, right?”

The senior officer hesitated. “I double shifted with Burdick because of the information we were getting.”

So. Reedy had been alone. Not that Max suspected her of the attack. But now he’d have to. Maybe he’d misestimated her in the first place. “What information is that?”

“The other Outback ship is doing some kind of military research defending the wormhole. Based on what we’re overhearing from observers in the shuttles. We’ve got a name on the second ship. It’s the Jiang Qing, same class as the other one.” He paused. “You aren’t going to try to tell me that Jiang Qing was one of Napoleon generals too, are you Max?”

“Why not?” asked Max flatly. “Historically, Earth has had women generals for centuries. Jesusalem was the only planet without a mixed service.”

Lukinov’s lip curled. “We finally tracked down Deng Xiaopeng. He and this Jiang Qing woman were both part of the Chinese revolution. Reedy found the information.”

“The Chinese communist revolution,” clarified the ensign. “They were minor figures, associated with Mao. Both were charged with crimes though they helped bring about important political changes that led to the second revolution.”

“Ah,” said Max. A wave of pain shot through him. If his legs had been supporting his weight, they would surely have buckled. “Please cooperate with Sergeant Simco until we can get this straightened out. Now if you will excuse me.”

He didn’t wait for their response, but turned back to the hall. Simco waited at parade rest, his hands behind his back. Another trooper stood beside him.

“I’m going to return to my cabin now,” Max said.

“I’ve detailed Rambaud here to watch you while I begin my investigation,” Simco replied. Rambaud was a smaller but equally muscled version of his superior officer. “I’ll be rotating all my men through this duty until we find the culprit.”

“Keeping them sharp?” Max said.

Simco nodded. “A knife can’t cut if you don’t keep it sharp.”

“I couldn’t agree more.” Max barely noticed the other man shadowing him through the narrow maze of corridors. When he reached his room, he took a double dose of the doctor’s pain killers, added one from his own stock, and washed them all down with a gulp of warm, flat water. He looked in the bathroom mirror at his damaged eye. That’s when he started to shake. He had the ludicrous sensation that he was going to fall down, so he grabbed hold of the sink and tried to steady himself. Eventually it passed, but not before his breath was coming out in ragged gasps.

He’d come too close to dying this time. And why?

The rumor of the suicide mission still bothered him, and so did the problem of Reedy. When he drifted off to sleep, he dreamed that he was wandering an empty vessel searching for someone who was no longer aboard, through corridors that were kinked and slicked like the intestines of some animal. They started shrinking, squeezing the crates and boxes that filled them into a solid mass, as Max tried to find his way out. The last section dead-ended in a mirror, and when he paused to look into its silver surface an eye above a pyramid filled his damaged socket.

He woke up in a cold sweat. According to the clock, he’d slept nearly four and a half hours, but he didn’t believe it. He wasn’t inclined to believe anything right now.

He rose and dressed himself. He needed better luck. If it wouldn’t come looking for him, he’d have to go looking for it.

Down in the very bottom of the ship rested an observation chamber that contained the only naked ports in the entire vessel. Max went down there to think, dutifully followed by Simco’s watchdog.

Max paused outside the airlock. “You can wait here.”

“I’m supposed to stay with you, sir.”

“The lights are off, it’s empty,” said Max, realizing as soon as the words were out of his mouth what had happened the last time he went into a dark room alone. “If someone’s waiting in there to kill me, then you’ve got them trapped. You’ll get a commendation.”

Rambaud relented. Max entered the room, closing the hatch behind him. It sealed automatically reminding Max of the sound of a prison cell door shutting.

Outside the round windows stretched the infinite expanse of space. The sun was a small, cold ember in a charcoal-colored sky dominated by the vast and ominous bulk of Big Brother. They were close enough that Max could see crimson storms raging on its surface, swirling hurricanes larger than Jesusalem itself. He counted three moons spinning around the planet, and great rings of dust, as if everything in space was drawn into satellite around the self-consuming fire of its mass.

A quiet cough came from the rear of the compartment.

Max pirouetted, and saw another man floating cross-legged in the air. As he unfolded and came to attention, light glinted off the jack that sat lodged in his forehead like a third eye. It was the spongediver, the ship’s pilot, Patchett.

“At ease, Patchett,” said Max.

Patchett nodded toward the port as he clasped his hands behind his back. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“It’s no place for a human being to live,” Max said. “Give me a little blue marble of a planet any day instead.”

The pilot smiled. “That figures.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re a Political Officer, and politics is always about the place we live, how we live together.” He gestured at the sweep of the illuminated rings. “But this is why I joined the service—to explore, to see space.”

“Has it been worth it?”

“Too much waiting, too much doing nothing.” He shifted in his seat. “The diving makes it worthwhile.”

“Good,” murmured Max, looking away.

“You and I are alike that way,” Patchett said. “We both are the most useless men on the ship except for that one moment when we’re the only one qualified to do the job.” He stared out the port. “What happened to you, that was wrong, sir.”

Max gazed out the window also, saying nothing.

“I’d guess I’ve been in the service as long as you have, nearly twenty years.”

“Just past thirty years now.” It wasn’t all in the official records, but thirty years total. A very long time. Patchett clearly wanted to say something more. “What is it?” asked Max. “Speak freely.”

“Things have been going downhill the past few years, sir. The wrong men in charge, undermining everything we hoped to accomplish in the Revolution. They all want war. They forget what the last one was like.”

“Are you sure you should be telling this to your political officer?”

“You’re the political officer. You have to know it already. You may be the only one I can say it to. Petoskey’s an excellent Captain, don’t get me wrong, sir. But he’s too young to remember what the last war was like.”

They hung there, in the dark, weightless silence, watching the giant spin on its axis. If Patchett was right, there was one moment in the voyage only when Max’s skills would make a difference. But what moment, and what kind of difference, there was no way to know in advance.

Simco was in the med bay when Max went to check in with Noyes. “I’d salute,” said the Sergeant, “but Doc here’s treating a sprain.”

“Dislocation,” corrected Noyes.

“What happened?” asked Max.

Simco grinned. “I scheduled extra combat training for my men. Want to make sure they’re ready in case they run into whoever attacked you. It doesn’t really count as a good workout unless someone dislocates something.”

Noyes snorted.

“Plus, Doc here says that we have to exercise at least an hour a day or we’ll start losing bone and muscle mass.”

“Nobody’s had to deal with prolonged weightlessness in a couple of hundred years,” added Noyes. “I’m only finding hints of the information I need in our database. The nausea, vertigo, lethargy, that I expected and was prepared for. But we’re already seeing more infections, shortness of breath, odd stuff. And we’ve got orders to spend months like this? It’s madness. Take it easy on this thumb for a few more days, Simco.” He went to lay his stim-gun on the table and it floated off sideways across the room. “Damn. Not again.”

Max snatched it out of the air and handed it back to the Doc. “Any word on who my attacker was?” he asked Simco.

“No.” The Sergeant blew out his breath. “But I did hear that you picked a fight with Chevrier down in Engineering.”

“Nothing even close to that.”

“Good. He’s a big man, completely out of your weight class.”

“Right now, we’re all in the same weight class.”

That won Max a laugh from both Simco and Noyes. “Still, if you go see him again, about anything, please inform me first,” the Sergeant said.

“You’ll know about it before I do,” promised Max.

After the Doc was done checking him, Max went back through the crate-packed corridors towards his quarters. On the way, he passed Reedy, whose mouth quirked in a brief smile as Max squeezed past her.

“What do you find so funny, Ensign?” Max growled.

Reedy’s eyes flicked, indicating the trooper following her and the one behind Max. “For a second there, sir, I wondered which of us was the real prisoner.”

Very perceptive. She had an edge to her voice that reminded him of Chevrier. He recalled that she had shown a strong aversion to confinement after the incident with Vance. “Remember who you’re speaking to, Ensign!”

“Yes, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.”

“See that it doesn’t.”

He went into his room and swallowed another pain-killer. Even if the moment came when he could make a difference, would he be able to get away from his minders long enough to do it?

Eight more shifts, two more days, and nothing.

Max had no appetite, the food all tasted bland to him. He couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time. If he turned the lights off, he’d wake in a panic, disoriented, unsure of where he was. But if he slept with the lights on, they poked at the edge of his consciousness, prodding him awake. He tried to exercise one hour out of every two shifts, but everything seemed tedious. It just felt wrong, empty motions with nothing to push against.

On the bridge, he asked Petoskey if it was still necessary to have a guard.

“The attack’s still unsolved,” Petoskey said. “Until Simco brings me the man—or woman—who did it, I want you protected.”

Max had the sinking feeling that might be for the rest of the voyage. “How are the repairs going?”

“Chevrier replaced all the chips in the dead array with new ones, but something failed when he tested it. He has an idea for rebuilding the chips with some kind of silicon alloy crystal. Says he can grow it as long as we stay weightless. Some other kind of old tech. Inorganic. He tried to explain it to me, but he’s the only one that really understands it.”

“Can we wait that long?”

“We can’t power up to jump as long as those Outback ships are in the vicinity. They’d see us—and the wormhole—in a microsecond. So far they still haven’t detected our buoy. Or if they have, they just took it for a pulsar signal.” Which was the idea, after all. Petoskey tugged hard at his beard. There were dark stains of sleeplessness under his eyes. “Don’t you have some work to do, some reports to write?”

He meant it as a dismissal. Max was willing to be dismissed. He was still no closer to catching his traitor, and his luck couldn’t have been more execrable.

He went to the ship’s library to read. Rambaud, his trooper again this shift, had no interest in reading or studying vids of any kind. He writhed in almost open pain as Max made it clear that he intended to stay at a desk alone for several hours. Max decided that it wouldn’t be murder if he bored Simco’s men to death.

He sat there, scanning Fier’s monograph on the Adarean war, skimming through the casualty lists in the appendixes, thinking about some of the worst battles, early on, and the consequences of war, when a voice intruded on his contemplations.

“. . . bored as hell down here. Uh-huh. Wargames. That sounds interesting. Can you understand that Outback lingo?”

Rambaud was whispering on the comlink to his compatriot in charge of Reedy. Max let the conversation turn to complaints about the exercise regimen and weightlessness before he flipped off his screen and rose to go.

The Intelligence radio room was on his regular circuit of destinations, so he made no excuse for heading there now. The door was propped open, and the scent of Lukinov’s imported cologne hit Max’s nose out in the corridor. He paused in the doorway. The trooper stood behind Lukinov and Reedy, with a pair of headsets on.

“So this is how well you keep secrets?” asked Max.

The trooper saw Max, yanked the earphones out of his ear, and handed them back to an ebullient Lukinov. “Wait until you hear this, Max!” Lukinov said.

The trooper tried to squeeze by Max without touching him. Max stayed firmly in his way, making him as uncomfortable as possible. “Rambaud,” he said to his own man, “I believe I left my palm-pad down in the library by accident. Retrieve it for me and bring it to this room immediately so I can record this conversation.”

Rimbaud hesitated before answering. “Yes, sir.”

The other trooper took up station outside the door. Max kicked the door shut and latched it.

“What’s going on with the spongediver?” asked Max.

“They’re testing a new laser deflector, using it for wormhole defense.” Lukinov grinned. “Go ahead and listen.”

Max picked up the headphones and fit the wires into his ears. Pilots chattered with tactics officers, describing the kind of run they were simulating. No wonder Outback outfitted their survey ships with the newest military equipment. The blind side of a wormhole dive was probably the only place in the galaxy they could test any new weapons without being observed. “Very standard stuff here,” he said after a moment. “Is there just one channel of this?”

“Their scientists are on the other channel, the one Reedy’s monitoring. But don’t you see what an advantage this gives us if we can steal it? We can attack Adares with impunity and keep them from diving into our system.”

Max switched the channel setting to the one Reedy listened to. “Do unto others before they do unto you?”

“Exactly!” replied Lukinov.

Reedy’s eyes went wide open. She started tapping the desk to get their attention. “Sir,” she said. “There’s something you should . . .”

“Not right now,” said Max.

Lukinov frowned at him. “Now see here—”

“No, you see here. Has the Captain been informed of this?”

“Not yet,” replied Lukinov.

“You invite some grunt in here to listen to information that will certainly be classified top secret before you notify the Captain?” He sneered at Lukinov, pausing long enough to listen to the scientists talk. “You can be sure that my Department will file a record of protest on our return. In the meantime, I better go get the Captain.”

Lukinov popped out of his seat. “No, I’ll do that. I was just planning to do that anyway, if you hadn’t interrupted.”

“Sir,” repeated Reedy. “Sirs.”

“Ensign,” said Max, “Shut. Up.”

The ensign nodded mutely, her eyes shaped like two satellite dishes trying to pick up a signal.

“I’m coming with you, Lukinov,” Max said.

“No, you aren’t, Lieutenant,” snapped the Intelligence officer. “I’m the one man on this ship you can’t give direct orders to and don’t you forget it.”

Max saluted, a gesture sharp enough to have turned into a knife hand strike at the other man’s throat. Lukinov stormed out of the room. Max turned back to the ensign, who simply stared at him.

“They just broadcast the complete specifications,” said Reedy. “They were checking for field deformation—”

“I know that,” said Max. And then he did something he never expected to do, not on this voyage. He said aloud the secret Intelligence code word for “render all assistance.” Silently, to himself, he added a prayer that it was current, and that Reedy would recognize it.

“Wh-what did you say?” stammered the ensign.

Max repeated the code word for “render all assistance” while he pulled off his earphones and reached in his pocket for his multi-tool. His fingers found nothing, and he realized that it had been missing since his attack. “And give me a screwdriver,” he added.

Reedy handed over the tool. “But . . . but . . .”

Max ignored her. In thirty seconds, he’d disconnected the power and disassembled the outer case of the radio. “Give me the laser,” he said.

The ensign’s hands shook as she complied.

“I need two new memory chips and the spare pod.” Reedy just stared at him, uncomprehending. “Now!” spat Max, and the ensign dove for the equipment box.

Max shoved the loaded memory into his pockets and snapped the replacements pieces into their slots as Reedy handed them over. The radio was still a mess of pieces when someone rapped on the door.

“Stall them!” hissed Max.

The rap came again, and the door pushed open. Reedy flew toward it like a rocket. Rambaud pushed his head in partway. “Here’s your palm-pad, sir.”

“I’ll take it,” said Reedy, grabbing it and pushing the door shut again.

“Thanks!” called Max. He’d lost one of the screws, and when he looked up from the equipment to see if it was floating somewhere, he was temporarily disoriented. His stomach did a flip-flop and his head spun in a circle. “Shit!”

Rambaud pushed back on the door. “Are you safe in there, sir? I’m coming in.”

Reedy wedged herself against the wall to block the door.

Max heard a plain thump as Rambaud bounced against it. He saw the screw floating near his ankles and scooped it up. He fixed the cover and powered the machine up again. Reedy grunted as the door pushed against her, cracking open. “I’m fine,” Max said loudly.

Rambaud nodded, but he stood outside the cracked door peering in.

Reedy was breathing fast. A thousand questions formed and died on her lips when Max spun to face her. Max had taken the leap, and now he had to see how far that leap would take him.

“Ensign,” he whispered.

“Yes, sir?”

“From this moment forth,” his lips barely moved, “you will consider me your sole superior officer.”

Her eyes jumped to the door. “Sir? But—”

“That is a direct order!”

“Yes, sir!”

“You will not tell anyone—”

But he did not get the chance to tell Reedy what she should and shouldn’t say. The door swung open and Lukinov entered, followed by Captain Petoskey. Lukinov grinned like a party girl full of booze. “Wait until you hear this,” he said. He put his headphones on, and handed one to Petoskey as Reedy slid quickly back into her place.

They listened for a moment. Petoskey squinted his eyes, and rounded his shoulders even more than usual. “Sounds like they’re bringing the shuttles in, getting ready to leave. Radioing a safe voyage message to their other ship. What was I supposed to hear?”

“They’re testing a new deflector for wormhole defense. If we attack their ship and kill them, we can take it. Their other ship will be stuck in-system and we can nuke them.”

“Captain,” said Max.

“Yes?”

“I didn’t hear any evidence of this deflector. I can’t recommend an attack.”

Lukinov frantically punched commands into his keypad. “Let me back up to an hour ago.” His face went as blank as the records he was trying to access. “I can’t seem to find it. Reedy, what’s going on here?”

“Sir,” she muttered, with a pleading glance at Max, “uh, I don’t know, sir.”

“She’s covering up,” said Max.

Three faces stared at him with variations of disbelief.

“Look at the battery, it’s not properly grounded.” It was an awful explanation, but the best that Max could come up with on the spot. “Reedy was moving some equipment around, hit it with something. I didn’t see what. Sparks flew and the screens all went dead. She got them back up right away, but she probably wiped the memories.”

“Ensign!” screamed Lukinov. “Explain yourself!”

Reedy’s mouth hung open. She didn’t know what to say. Betrayal was written all over her face.

Petoskey took off his headset. “Lukinov, I trust you to take care of this. Nikomedes . . .”

“Yes, sir?”

Petoskey couldn’t seem to think of any orders to give him. “I have to go talk to Chevrier. We have our mission. With the second ship out of the way, we have to prepare to dive.”

Max followed Petoskey out into the corridor, but returned to his room to stash the stolen memory. Only two things mattered now: getting the information to his superior, and keeping Lukinov from getting it to his. It needed to be used as a defensive weapon, not as an excuse to start a war. Lukinov had access to the radio, and official channels. Max didn’t. That stacked the cards in Lukinov’s favor.

He had to do something with it soon, before they jumped to Adarean space. And he had to hope that a baby-faced ensign just out of the Academy didn’t fold under pressure and give him away. It was like a game of Blind Man’s Draw. Max had already put everything he had into the pot.

There was nothing else he could do at this point except play the card that he was dealt.

Meal time. Max sat by himself, as usual, at his own narrow table in the galley. Even the trooper guarding him sat with some of the other crewmen.

Lukinov entered, saw Max, and came straight over to him. “Reedy won’t say that you were lying, but you were,” the Intelligence officer said. “Not that it matters. The machines are buggered, the data’s all gone. Even Burdick can’t find it.”

Max had a blank sheet in his pocket. He pulled it out, and a stylus, and passed it over to Lukinov. This was the way duels were proposed at the Academy. According to the Academy’s cover story, it was the way Reedy had arranged to meet with Vance.

Lukinov looked at the sheet, then scratched ‘observation room’ and a time two hours distant on it. He pushed it back over to Max, who shook his head, and wrote ‘reactor room.’

“Why there?” asked the Intelligence officer.

“They’ve got cameras there, but no mikes. It’s off-limits to Simco’s troopers, but not to us. We won’t be there long.”

“So this is just to be a private conversation? I should leave my weapons behind?”

“I wish you would.”

“More’s the pity,” said Lukinov, and stormed out.

Max was putting his tray away, trying to resolve his other problem, when Simco came in. “Lukinov won’t let us throw the ensign in the brig, not yet. But he thought it was best if I stuck with you personally in the meantime.”

Perfect, thought Max, just perfect.

Two hours had never stretched out to such an eternity before, in all Max’s life. Simco escorted him to his quarters and joined him inside.

“Do you want to follow me into the head and shake it dry for me?” asked Max on his way into the bathroom.

Simco laughed, but remained in the other room. Max retrieved a bottle of pills and an old pair of nail clippers from the medicine cabinet, putting them in his pocket. Then he led Simco on a long, roundabout trip through the corridors that ended up on the floor of the Black Forest. He stopped when he got there and snapped his fingers.

“I forgot something,” Max said. “You don’t mind if I borrow that multi-tool in your pocket, do you?”

Simco stuffed his hand automatically into his pants, wrapped it around the bulge there, and froze. “Sorry, sir, I don’t have one with me,” he said, grinning. “Got one in my locker. Or do you want to hit Engineering to borrow one?”

“No, it’s nothing I need that badly.” He jumped. “Meet you up top, in the exercise room.” He grabbed hold of the service ladder outside one of the missile shafts, and pulled himself up. He used his momentum to spin, kicking off from the side of the shaft, and shot like a rocket towards the ceiling.

“Hold up there,” called Simco, halfway up the stairs.

Max ducked into the upper corridor. He dove through the hall as fast as he could, past the exercise room, down the access shaft, and back out the corridor below, returning to the missile room. He watched Simco’s feet disappear above him into the top corridor, and then he flew straight across the cavern to the section over Engineering, opened a portside hatch, and closed it again after himself.

A long time ago Max had modified his nail clippers to function as a makeshift tool. Bracing himself against the wall, he used it now to remove the grille from the ceiling vent—it was the supply duct for the HEPA filters in the clean hood corner of the battery room directly below. He squeezed inside, feet first, pulling the grille after him. There was no way to reattach it, but with no gravity he didn’t need to. He simply pulled it into place and it stayed there.

It was an eighteen-inch duct and he was a small man. Even so, he felt like toothpaste being forced back into the tube. He had to twist sideways and flip over to get past the L-curve, but after that it was a straight trip down to the reactor room. With his arms pinned above his head, and no gravity to help him, he writhed downward like a rat caught in a drainpipe. He reached bottom, unable to go any further. His kicks had no effect at all and his heart began to race as he wondered if he’d be trapped inside the duct. Finally, by pressing his elbows out into the corners, and hooking one foot on the lip where the vent teed out horizontally, he was able to push the other foot downward until the duct tore open.

He eased downward into the plenum space above the hood ceiling, and kicked through the tiles. When he finally lowered himself into the battery room he was drenched in sweat, and his pants were ripped in the thigh. He hadn’t even noticed. He undid his belt and looked at the scrape on his leg. It was mostly superficial. Not much blood.

He leaned in the corner, with the hood’s softwalls pulled back, catching his breath. The cameras were all installed to monitor the reactor, so they faced the center of the two-story tall room. Most of them close-upped on specific pieces of equipment. He eased out, pushing himself up toward the ceiling.

He glanced at his chrono. Already seven minutes past his meeting time with Lukinov. He waited two more minutes before the hatch popped open. He had a split second to decide what he would do if it was one of the engineers.

But a familiar balding head thrust through the door. Max eased out of the hood area. “Hey, Lukinov.”

“Max?” The other man twisted around to see him. He entered, closing the hatch behind him. “How the hell did you get in here? Chevrier’s guard at the door gave me the runaround, swore he hadn’t seen you! The mate watching the monitors said you never came in here either. What are you, some damn spook?”

Max ignored the questions. “You wanted to talk to me about the radio room. It was me. I stole the memory chips.”

Lukinov came toward him, pale with fury. “You did what? By god, I’ll see you hang.”

“Intelligence won’t touch me,” said Max. “Not for this.”

“I’ll get Political Education to do it, you goddamn weasel,” Lukinov vowed. He launched himself towards Max, keeping a hand against the wall to orient himself. “Your boss, Mallove, is a personal friend of mine. He won’t like—”

Max jumped, tucking his knees and spinning as he sailed in the air. He wrapped his belt around Lukinov’s throat, pivoted, twisting the belt as he pulled himself back to the floor. The motion jerked Lukinov upside down so that he floated in the air like a child’s balloon.

“Your boss, Drozhin,” whispered Max, “doesn’t like the way you’ve been selling Intelligence’s secrets out to Political Education and War.”

Drozhin was Max’s boss too. He’d moled Max in Political Education as soon as the new Department formed.

Lukinov panicked. He thrashed his arms and legs, disoriented, trying to make contact with any surface, clutching futilely at Max, who was behind his back and below him. Max twisted the belt, pinching the carotid arteries and cutting off blood flow to the brain. Lukinov was unconscious in about seven seconds. His body just went still. He was dead a few seconds later.

Drozhin had ordered Max to watch Lukinov, not kill him, but he couldn’t see any other way around it. He shoved the body toward the corner, under the vent, and put his belt back on.

Still nobody at the hatch. Maybe they hadn’t noticed. Maybe they were summoning Simco. There’d be no denying this one, not if he’d missed the location of any cameras.

But he had no time to think about failure. He didn’t want anyone looking closely at Lukinov’s body, and he didn’t want the ship making the jump to Adares. Intelligence was publicly part of the war party, but Drozhin believed that war would destroy Jesusalem and wanted it sabotaged at all costs. Max took the medicine bottle from his pocket and removed the two pills that weren’t pills. He popped them into his mouth to warm them—they tasted awful—while he removed the wire and blasting cap from the bottle’s lid.

He couldn’t blow any main part of the reactor, he understood that much. But the cooling circuit used water pipes, and a radioactive water spill could scuttle the jump. Max darted in, fixed the explosive to a blue-tagged pipe, plugged the wire in it, and hurried back to the hood. He pushed Lukinov’s corpse in the direction of the explosive before he climbed through the hole into the vent.

There was a soft boom behind him.

Max cranked his neck to peer down between his feet and saw the water spray in a fine mist, filling the air like fog. All the radiation alarms blared at once.

They sounded far off at first while he wiggled upward. He thought he was sweating, but realized that the busted air flow was drawing some of the water up through the shaft. Droplets pelleted him with radiation, and that made him crawl faster. He got stuck in the bend for a moment, finally squeezing through, and thrusting the vent cover out of the way without checking first to see if anyone was in the corridor. But it was empty—so far his luck held! He retrieved the grille and screwed it back into place. One of the alarms was located directly beside him, and its wailing made his pulse skip.

He emerged into the shaft of the weapons compartment as men raced both ways, towards the accident and away from it. No one noticed him. He was headed across the void, toward his quarters when someone called his name.

“Nikomedes! Stop right there!”

He saw the medtech, Noyes, down by the corridor that led to Engineering. “What is it, Doc?”

“You don’t have your comet, do you?”

Max touched the empty spot on his breast pocket. “No. Why?”

“Radiation emergency!” he screamed. “You’re drafted as the surgeon’s assistant! Come on!”

Max considered ignoring the command, but according to regulations, Doc was right. Anyone who wasn’t Vacuum and Radiation qualified was designated an orderly to help treat those who were. Plus it gave him an alibi. He jumped toward the bottom of the Black Forest, and joined Noyes.

“Here, carry this kit,” Noyes said, handing over a box of radiation gear, as he went back across the hall to grab another.

“Where is it?” asked Max. He held the gear close, covering the rip in his pants. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t know. The com’s down again. But it has to be the reactor.”

Nobody guarded the main hatch to Engineering so the two men went straight in. A crowd gathered in the monitor room, spilling out into the corridor. Noyes pushed straight through, and Max followed along behind him. Chevrier was shaking a crewman by the throat.

“—what the hell did you let him in there for?”

“He ordered me too!” the man complained. It was DePuy.

“There’s water everywhere!” another one of the men yelled, coming back from the direction of the reactor room hatch. “The reactor’s overheating fast!”

“It’s already past four hundred cees,” said one of the men at the monitors.

Chevrier tried to fling DePuy at the wall, but they just flopped a short distance apart. The Chief Engineer turned toward the rest of crew in disgust.

Rucker, the first lieutenant, showed up behind Max. “Captain wants a report! The com’s down again!”

“That’s because the reactor’s overheating,” Chevrier said. “The cooling system’s busted.”

“My God,” said Rucker, invoking a deity he probably didn’t believe in, thought Max.

Noyes slapped a yellow patch on the first lieutenant’s shirt. “Radiation detectors, everyone! When they turn orange, you’re in danger, means get out. Red means see me for immediate treatment!” He handed some to Max. “Make sure everyone wears one.”

“We’ve got to go in there, fix the pipe, and cool the reactor,” said Chevrier. Some of the men started to protest. “Shut the fuck up! I’m asking for volunteers. And I’ll be going in with you.”

Rucker wiped the blonde cowlick back off his forehead. “I’ll go in,” he said. Six other crewmen volunteered, most of them senior Engineers. Max slapped radiation badges on those men first.

“Here’s the plan.” Chevrier pointed to pictures on the monitors. “We’re going to shut off these valves here and here, cut out and replace this section of pipe—”

Noyes, looking over his shoulder, said, “That man in there ought to come out at once. He looks unconscious.”

“That man is dead,” said Chevrier, “and it’s a good thing too, or I’d kill him. Then we’re going to run a pipe through here, from the drinking water supply—”

A moan of dismay.

“—shut up! We’ll take it from the number three reserve tank. That ought to be enough, and it won’t contaminate the rest of the water. Once we get the main engine back up, we can make more water.”

Everyone had a badge now, and Max hung back with Noyes.

“I’d like someone to go in there and turn off these,” Chevrier tapped spots on one of the monitors, “here, here, and here, while I get the repair set up.”

“That’ll be me,” Rucker said. Like any junior officer, Max thought, trying to set a good example.

Chevrier gave him a nod. “This one here is tough. It’ll take you a few minutes. It’s right next to the reactor, and it’s going to be hotter than hell.” He gave Rucker the tools he needed and sent him off down the tube to the reactor room.

“I’ll need a shower set up for decontamination,” said Noyes.

Max found the air shower over by the other clean room, and showed him where it was. Noyes started setting up the lead-lined bags for clothing and equipment disposal.

By the time they went back to the monitor room, Chevrier had diagramed his repair. His volunteers double-checked the equipment lined up in the hall. He sent others, who hadn’t volunteered, to run a connector line from the fresh water tank. They were just getting ready to go in, when Rucker staggered back out. He looked . . . cooked. Like the worst sunburn Max had ever seen. His clothes were soaked, and glowing drops of water followed through the air in his wake. Noyes was there, swiping the droplets out of the air with a lead blanket. He wrapped Rucker in it, and started leading him toward the shower.

The lieutenant’s badge was bright red.

One crewman bolted, and another one threw up. Fears about radiation ran deep on the planet, fed by a generations worth of vids. No one said anything about the smell, but one of the men took off his shirt and tried to catch the vomit as it scattered through the air.

Chevrier ripped his badge off. “Won’t need this. Just one more distraction. If we’re going to go swimming, we might as well go skinny-dipping.” He stripped off his clothes and the other volunteers followed his example. “Can’t handle tools in those damn vacuum suits anyway.”

Anger, fear, those things were contagious, Max reflected. But so were courage and foolhardy bravery. He hoped the price was worth it.

He supposed he ought to be at decontamination, with Noyes, but he couldn’t tear himself away from the monitors. There were no cameras aimed directly at the spot where the men were working with the pipes, but they passed in and out of the vids. The radioactive water pooled in the air, drop meeting drop, coalescing into larger blobs like mercury spilled on a lab table and just as poisonous. The drops floated through the air like anti-bodies in a bloodstream. The men splashed into them as they moved and the water clung to their skin, searing wherever it touched.

Simco appeared at the door demanding a report for the Captain. Max ignored him. The reactor was so hot that the paint peeled off it, curling like bits of ash as it burned away. Water that hit its surface boiled away into steam, but the steam hit the other water, and became drops again instantly, a swirling rain that never fell. And, except for the dead tone of the radiation alarms, it all happened in silence, with no one in the monitor room speaking for long minutes, and no sound at all from the reactor room.

Noyes appeared beside Max. “That man needs to come out right now,” he said, tapping at one of the monitors. There were glowing circles, spinning in slow lambent spirals on one man’s buttocks.

Max laughed, a sound that came out of his mouth only as a breathless sigh. “Those are tattoos, Doc. Jets. Lightning bug juice impregnated in the subdermal cells.”

“I’ve . . . never heard of that,” said Noyes.

“It’s supposed to bring a spacer safely home again.”

“It’s an abomination,” blurted Noyes. The people of Jesusalem were against any mixing of the species. “Let’s hope it does,” he said.

“Indeed,” replied Max.

DePuy stood beside them, shaking his head. “They’re not getting it fixed.”

Max was beginning to think he’d miscalculated badly. He hadn’t wanted anyone to look too closely at Lukinov’s corpse. He wanted the ship to turn around and head back home. But with the main engine down and the back-up scuttled, they were in big trouble.

The hatch flew open and two men came out.

“They’ve been in there almost an hour,” said Noyes.

“Is it done?” the men in the monitor room demanded. Max heard his own voice blurt out, “Is it fixed?”

But their faces were mute. The blistered flesh bubbled off as Doc wrapped them in blankets. Noyes helped one towards the shower, and Max took the other. “This is hopeless,” Noyes said, trying to clean the men. “You have to go back there now and get the other men out before they die.”

“I think we all die with the ship if they fail,” said Max.

Rambaud, one of the troopers, appeared in the door. “Message from the Captain, Doc. He wants you on the bridge.”

“Tell him no.”

The trooper’s eyes kept flicking nervously to their badges. Max noticed his own was a sickly orange color. “Beg your pardon, Doc, but he’s getting ready to abandon ship. If it’s necessary.”

“If he wants to give me an order, he can come down here and do it himself,” said Noyes, pumping the burned man full of painkillers, and starting an IV.

Rambaud fled.

Noyes stared after him. “They were going to suicide all of us anyway, for nothing. If I’m going to die, it might as well be doing my job.”

“Hell, yes.” Max’s job was getting the specifications on the deflectors to Drozhin. If the Captain took the escape shuttles and flew in system, then it was Max’s duty to retrieve the chips from his quarters and get on a shuttle.

He followed Noyes back into the mouth of fire instead.

“They’re coming out!” someone shouted.

Four more men this time, in worse shape than the others. Noyes had to hypospray them full of painkillers just to get them down to the shower, and it was the whole routine all over again. Max carried the man with the tattoos. They were coal black in his skin. Whatever lived in the cells and gave them their luminescence had been killed off by the radiation.

Before they finished the others, Chevrier was brought to them, covered with burn blisters, his hands raw meat, his eyes blind. He couldn’t speak.

“Did he get it done?” shouted Max.

No one knew, so Max flew back towards the monitor room, where the handful of men that remained were arguing over the monitors. “The temperatures are still rising,” shouted DePuy. His voice had risen an octave in pitch. “I tell you he didn’t get it running.”

“What’s going on?” asked Max.

“The pipes aren’t open,” said one of the Electrician’s mates.

“Somebody needs to go in there and turn this valve here,” said DePuy. He pointed to one right in the middle of the steam put off by the overheating reactor. It was almost impossible to see in the fog.

No one volunteered.

They were boys mostly, eighteen or nineteen, junior crewmen. They’d all seen the others carried out, had smelled the burned flesh, had listened to their weeping. They were heirs to a hard-earned fear about radiation, and they couldn’t get past that, couldn’t overcome it.

The cut on Max’s leg throbbed. His face and arms felt hot, burned. “I’ll go in,” he said.

Reactors were the only ship system he wasn’t officially trained on, and all the reading he’d done before the voyage seemed inadequate to the task now. But it was his responsibility. He could go in there and turn a valve. He could do that much.

He went out to the corridor and found it blocked by a man in a vacuum suit, dragging a plasma cutter on a tether and reading the manual in his palm-pad. The man turned, his face gray behind the clear mask covering his face. It was Kulakov, the Chief Petty Officer.

For a second Max thought the man would freeze up.

Kulakov looked back down at his diagram. “Be sure to seal the locks tight behind me,” he said. “Send someone right now to levels three and four, portside, directly above us, to clear the corridors and seal the locks there. You have to do that!”

“Will do,” said Max. Then, “Carry on.”

Kulakov passed through the hatch, but when Max went to seal it, the fresh water supply tubing blocked it. “Damn,” he said, with a very bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Damn, damn, damn.”

Then DePuy was there beside him with a clamp and some cutters. He severed the pipe, and tossed the loose end through the hatch after Kulakov. Max sealed the door. “Did someone go to three and four?”

DePuy nodded. “But I’ll go double-check,” he added, glancing at the bare spot where Max’s comet should have been. No, he was looking at Max’s radiation badge. It was orange-red, bleeding into a bright crimson.

“You better head over to see Doc,” said the Electrician’s mate at the monitors.

“Not yet,” said Max.

On the video feed they watched Kulakov move methodically from point to point, comparing the hook-up and settings with the diagram on his palm-pad. It took him much longer than it had Chevrier when he was naked. A couple times it was clear that between the fog, and the loss of sensation caused by the suit, Kulakov became disoriented crossing an open space. He spun in circles until he found the right side up again. He reached the final valve but couldn’t turn it. He peeled his gloves off, surrounded by the steam, and slowly cranked it over.

The Electrician’s mate pounded the monitors. “It’s running! Look at the temps drop!”

Max did, but he watched Kulakov too, as he struggled to put his gloves back on, picked up the plasma cutter, and then burned a hole through the hull.

The weeping sound of the radiation alarms was joined by the sudden keening of the hull breech alarms. There was a shudder through the whole ship, the bulkhead creaked beside him, and Max’s ears popped.

But he kept his eyes fixed on the screen in the reactor room. The steam and all the radioactive water whooshed out of the ship. So did Lukinov’s body. And so did Kulakov.

There was a dark, flat line straight across one of the screens, like a dead reading on a monitor.

Kulakov’s tether.

“Hey look!” whispered one of the crewmen as Max entered the sick bay. “The Corpse is up and walking!”

They all laughed at that, the survivors, even Max. Chevrier was dead, and so was Rucker, and so were two other men. Of the six surviving men who’d received red badge levels of radiation exposure, only Max was strong enough to walk.

Kulakov sat in the middle of them. His hands were wrapped in bandages, two crooked, crippled hooks. Max nodded to him. “They still giving you a hard time?” he asked.

“You know it,” grinned Kulakov.

“Well it’s not fair that he should be the only one who gets leave while we’re on this voyage,” said one of the men.

“How can it be shore leave without a shore, that’s what I want to know,” said Kulakov.

They all laughed again, even Max. That was going to be a ship joke for a long time, how Kulakov got liberty—hanging on a tether outside the ship.

“Papa sent me down here with a message,” said Max. Captain Petoskey, Papa, had only been to the sick bay once since the accident, and quickly. Most of the other crewman stayed away as if radiation sickness were something contagious.

“What is it?” said Kulakov, the words thick in his throat.

“He wanted me to tell you that he’s going to request that they rename the ship.” The crewmen looked up at him seriously, all the humor gone from their eyes. “They’re going to call it the New Nazareth.”

New Nazareth had been nuked the worst by the Adareans. The land there still glowed in the dark.

Kulakov chuckled first, then the other men broke out laughing. Max saluted them, holding himself stiff for a full three seconds, then turned to go see Noyes. The medtech slumped in his chair, head sprawled across his arms on the desk, eyes closed. “I’m not sleeping,” he muttered. “I’m just thinking.”

“About your fiancée,” asked Max, “waiting for you at home?”

“No, about the bone marrow cultures I’ve got growing in the vats, and the skin sheets, and the transplant surgery I have to do later this afternoon, that I’ve never done unassisted before, and the one I have to do tonight that I’m not trained to do at all.” He twisted his head, peeking one eye out at Max. “And Suzan. Waiting for me. And the ship flying home. How are you feeling?”

“I’d be fine if you had any spare teeth,” Max said, poking his tongue into the empty spots in his gums. That didn’t feel as strange as having gravity under his feet again.

“They’re in a drawer over by the sink,” said Noyes. “Take two and call me in the morning.”

Max walked through corridors considerably less crowded than they had been a few days before. Almost everything inside the ship had received some radiation. The crewmen went crate to crate with geiger counters deciding what could be saved and what should be jettisoned. With the grav back on, the men’s appetites returned. They also had a year’s worth of supplies and only a few weeks voyage ahead of them. So every meal became a feast. Some celebrated the fact that they were going home, and others the simple fact that they’d survived

Only Captain Petoskey failed to join the celebration. When Max entered the galley, Petoskey wore the expression of a man on the way to the lethal injection chamber. Max couldn’t say for sure if the condemned man’s expression or the executioner’s.

Ensign Reedy sat on one side of a long table, with two troopers standing guard behind her. Petoskey and Commander Gordet sat on the opposite side with Simco standing at attention. Petoskey looked naked without his beard, shorn before they recorded these official proceedings. Burdick, the other Intelligence officer, sat off to one end.

Petoskey invited Max to the empty seat beside him. “Are you sure you feel up to this, Nikomedes?”

“Doc says I’ll be fine as long as it’s brief.”

“This’ll be quick.”

Petoskey turned on the recorder, and read the regulations calling a board of inquiry. “Ensign Reedy, do you wish to make a confession of your crimes at this time?”

Max looked at the youngster. He hadn’t seen or spoken to her since he’d taken the chips in the radio room. If Reedy broke and told them what Max had done, then the entire gamble was for naught.

“I have nothing to confess,” Reedy said.

“Corporal Burdick,” continued Petoskey, “will you describe what you found in the radio room.”

“The equipment had been disassembled, and the memory chips replaced with spares.” He made eye contact with no one. “This happened sometime during the last shift when Lieutenant Lukinov and Ensign Reedy were on duty together.”

“Sergeant Simco, please describe your actions.”

“Sir, we made a complete search of Ensign Reedy’s person and belongings looking for the items described by Corporal Burdick. We found nothing there, nor in any place he is known to have visited. We also searched Lieutenant Lukinov’s belongings and found nothing.”

“Lieutenant Nikomedes,” continued Petoskey. “Would you describe what you saw in the radio room?” He added the exact date and shift.

Max repeated his story about the battery short circuit. “If Lukinov removed the chips that Ensign Burdick described, and he had them on him, then they were spaced.”

Petoskey nodded. “Yes, I’ve thought of that. Ensign Reedy, can you explain what happened to the chips containing the communications from the neutral ship?”

“No sir, I cannot.”

“Were you and Lieutenant Lukinov working together as spies for the Adareans?”

“I was not,” answered Reedy. “I can’t speak for the Lieutenant, as I was not in his confidence.”

Petoskey slammed his fist on the table. “I think you’re a coward, Reedy. You’re too weak to take responsibility for your actions. I’d tell you to act like a man, but you’re not.”

If Petoskey hoped to provoke Reedy, then his gambit failed. She sat there, placid as a lake on a still summer day.

“Can we conduct a medical interrogation?” interjected Max.

Petoskey went to tug at his beard, but his fingers clutched at emptiness. “I’ve discussed that already with the surgeon and Commander Gordet. Noyes is only a medtech, and not qualified to conduct an interrogation that will hold up in military court. Conceivably, we could even taint the later results of a test.”

Max leaned forward. “Can we use more . . . traditional methods?”

“I won’t command it,” said Petoskey, looking directly into the recorder. He waited for Max to speak again.

Max ran his tongue over the loose replacement teeth, saying nothing, and leaned back. He might get out of this, after all.

“However, if you think . . .” said Petoskey.

Max looked at the camera. “Without an immediate danger, we should follow standard procedures.”

Petoskey accepted this disappointment and concluded the proceedings with a provisional declaration of guilt. He ordered Reedy confined to the brig until they returned to Jesusalem.

As Max limped back towards his quarters afterwards he noticed that Gordet followed him.

“What can I do for you, Commander?” asked Max.

The bull-shaped second-in-command looked around nervously, then leaned in close. “There’s something you should know, sir.”

“What?” asked Max wearily. “That Petoskey ordered Simco to kill me, that he intended to blame it on Reedy, and then have her arrested and executed?”

Gordet jerked back, flabbergasted. “Did you check the secret orders too?”

“What does it matter now? Simco failed, Reedy’s arrested anyway, and we’re on our way home. A bit of advice for you, Mr. Gordet.” He clapped him on the shoulder. “Next time you should pick your horse before the race is over.”

He walked away. When he returned to his room, he recovered the sheet with the combination from its hiding spot, and destroyed it. He didn’t know what the secret orders said. He didn’t care.

There was only one thing he had left to do.

Third shift, night rotation, normal schedule. Max headed down to the brig carrying a black bag. One of Simco’s troopers stood guard. “I’m here to interrogate the prisoner,” Max said.

“Let me check with Sergeant Simco, sir.”

Max had been thinking hard about this. Only two people knew that he had the plans for the deflector, and the only way two people could keep a secret was if one of them was dead.

“Sarge wants to know if you need help,” said the trooper.

“Tell him that I take full responsibility for this, in the name of the Department of Political Education, and that no assistance will be necessary.”

The trooper relayed this information, then gave Max a short, sneering nod. “He says he understands. Perfectly. But he wants me to make sure that you’ll be safe in there.”

Max patted a hand on his black bag. “If you hear screaming,” he said, “don’t interrupt us unless it’s mine.”

The trooper twitched uncomfortably under Max’s glare. “Yes, sir.” He opened the door for Max.

Reedy’s wrists and ankles were cuffed, and she wore insignia-less fatigues. She sat up quickly on the edge of her bunk, and folded her hands on her knees, fingertip to fingertip. She couldn’t salute, but Max doubted she would have.

He stepped inside. The room was barely eight feet by four, with a bed on one wall and a stainless steel toilet built into the corner opposite the door. “That’ll be all trooper,” Max said. “I’ll signal you when I’m done.”

The hatch closed behind him and latched shut. He looked at Reedy. Her eyes were red and puffy but devoid of feeling, her cheeks hollow and drawn. A blue vein stood out vulnerably on her pale neck.

With his lips tight, Max gave her a small nod. “You look depressed,” he said softly, holding the bag in front of him.

She shook her head, once. “No, I’ve been depressed before. This time it’s not bad.”

“Define not bad.”

“It’s bad when you want to kill yourself. Right now, I just wish I was dead.”

Max took that as his cue. He sat down with his back against the door placed and opened his bag. He removed two tumblers and a bottle of ouzo. The ensign remained perfectly still as Max pulled out a plate, and ripped open vacuum-wrapped packages of cheese, sausages, and anchovies to set on it.

“Not proper mezedes at all,” he said, apologetically. “The fish should always be fresh.”

He filled one cup and pushed it over towards Reedy, then poured and swallowed his own. It tasted like licorice, reminding him both of his childhood and his days as a young man, in completely different ways. Reedy remained immobile.

“I’ve been thinking.” Max spoke very quietly, unbuttoning his collar. “When two men know a secret, it’s only safe if one of them is dead.” Good men had died already because of this. So would many more, along with the bad. “Therefore you don’t know anything. Only I, and Lukinov, and Lukinov’s dead. Do you understand this?”

“I don’t know anything,” said Reedy, with just a hint of irony. She reached over and lifted the glass of ouzo.

“My department will declare you the most politically sound of officers. Intelligence will know the truth, at least at the level that matters. Drozhin will get the Captain’s official report, but he’ll get another report unofficially. You’ll be fine.” He picked up an anchovy. “There will be a very difficult time, a very ugly court martial. But you can survive that.”

“Again?”

“This one will not be removed from the record due to extenuating circumstances.” Her attack on Vance had been one of self-defense. “But you’ll be exonerated. You’ll be fine. Things are changing. They’ll be better.” He believed that.

She leaned her head back and tossed down the ouzo. Max reached over and poured her another glass while her eyes were still watering. “When I got this assignment,” she said, “I couldn’t figure out if I was being rewarded for being at the top of the class in languages, despite being a woman. Or if I was being punished for being a woman.”

“Sometimes it’s both ways at once,” Max said. He bit the anchovy and found he didn’t care for the taste.

“Can I ask you one question?” asked Reedy.

Why did people always think he had all the answers? “Information is like ouzo. A little bit can clear your head, make you feel better. Too much will make you sick, maybe even kill you.” He twirled his cup. “What’s your question?”

“Did you really win your wife in a card game?”

“Yes.” He drained his glass to cover his surprise. Though he’d won her with a bluff and not by cheating.

“Why did she leave you?”

Max thought about telling her that was two questions. Then he thought about telling her the truth, that his wife hadn’t left him, that she waited at home for him, not knowing where he was or what he did, going to church in every day, caring for their two grandchildren. His daughter was about Reedy’s age. But he’d kept his life sealed in separate compartments and wouldn’t breech one of them now.

“Love, like loyalty,” he said, “is a gift. You can only try to be worthy of it.”

The silence lengthened out between them like all of the empty, uncharted universe. The food sat untouched while they drank. Max could feel himself getting drunk. It felt good.

© 2002 by C. C. Finlay.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

C. C. Finlay’s first published story was “Footnotes” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2001), a series of fictional footnotes from a history article about a future nanotechnology disaster. Since then, his short fiction has appeared frequently in magazines and anthologies. His stories have been reprinted in volumes of the Year’s Best Fantasy, Year’s Best Science Fiction, and Best New Horror, and have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Sidewise, and Sturgeon awards. His early stories were collected in Wild Things, published by Subterranean. In 2005, his first novel, The Prodigal Troll, was published by Pyr. His Traitor to the Crown trilogy was published by Del Rey in 2009. His fiction has been translated into Chinese, Czech, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Russian.

From After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall
Nancy Kress

(An excerpt from the forthcoming novel to be published by Tachyon Publications, April 2012.)

November 2013

It wasn’t dark, and it wasn’t light. It wasn’t anything except cold. I’m dead, Pete thought, but of course he wasn’t. Every time he thought that, all the way back to his first time when McAllister had warned him: “The transition may seem to last forever.”

Forever was twenty seconds on Pete’s wrister.

Light returned, light the rosy pink of baby toes, and then Pete stood in a misty dawn. And gasped.

It was so beautiful. A calm ocean, smooth and shiny as the floor of the Shell. A beach of white sand, rising in dunes dotted with clumps of grasses. Birds wheeled overhead. Their sharp, indignant cries grew louder as one of them dove into the waves and came up with a fish. Just like that. A fresh breeze tingled Pete’s nose with salt.

This. All this. He hadn’t landed near the ocean before, although he’d seen pictures of it in one of Caity’s books. This—all destroyed by the Tesslies, gone forever.

No time for hatred, not even old hatred grown fat and ripe as soy plants on the farm. McAllister’s instructions, repeated endlessly to all of them, echoed in Pete’s mind: “You have only ten minutes. Don’t linger anywhere.”

The sand slipped under his shoes and got into the holes. He had to leave them, even though shoes were so hard to come by. Cursing, he ran clumsy and barefoot along the shoreline, his weak knee already aching and head bobbing on his spindly neck, toward the lone house emerging from the mist. The cold air seeped into his lungs and hurt them. He could see his breath.

Seven minutes remained on his wrister.

The house stood on a little rocky ridge rising from the dunes and jutting into the water. No lights in the windows. The back door was locked but McAllister had put their precious laser saw onto the wrister. (“If you lose it, I will kill you.”) Pete cut a neat, silent hole, reached in, and released the deadbolt.

Five minutes.

Dark stairs. A night light in the hallway. A bedroom with two sleeping forms, his arm thrown over her body, the window open to the sweet night air. Another bedroom with a single bed, the blanketed figure too long, shadowy clothes all over the floor. And at the end of the hallway, a bonanza.

Two of them.

Four minutes.

The baby lay on its back, eyes closed in its bald head, little pink mouth sucking away on dreams. It had thrown off its blanket to expose a band of impossibly smooth skin between the plastic diaper and tiny shirt. Pete took precious seconds to unfasten a corner of the diaper, but he was already in love with the little hairless creature and would have been devastated if it were male. It was a girl. Carefully he hoisted her out of the crib and onto his shoulder, painfully holding her with one crooked arm. She didn’t wake.

No doubt that the toddler was a girl. Glossy brown ringlets, pink pajamas printed with bunnies, a doll clutched in one chubby fist. When Pete reached for her, she woke, blinked, and shrieked.

“No! Mommy! Dada! Cooommme! No!”

Little brat!

Pete grabbed her by the hand and dragged her off the low bed. That wrenched his misshapen shoulder and he nearly screamed. The child resisted, wailing like a typhoon. The baby woke and also screamed. Footsteps pounded down the hall.

Ninety seconds.

“McAllister!” Pete cried, although of course that did no good. McAllister couldn’t hear him. And ten minutes was fixed by the Tesslie machinery: no more, no less. McAllister couldn’t hurry the Grab.

The parents pounded into the room. Pete couldn’t let go of either child. Pete shrieked louder than both of them—his only real strength was in his voice, did they but know it—the words Darlene had taught him: “Stop! I have a bomb!”

They halted just inside the bedroom door, crashing into each other. She gasped: perhaps at the situation, perhaps at Pete. He knew what he must look like to them, a deformed fifteen-year-old with bobbly head.

“Moommmeeeee!” the toddler wailed.

“Bomb! Bomb!” Pete cried.

Forty-five seconds.

The father was a hero. He leaped forward. Pete staggered sideways with his burden of damp baby, but he didn’t let go of the toddler’s hand. Her father grabbed at her torso and Pete’s wrister shot a laser beam at him. The man was moving; the beam caught the side of his arm. The air sizzled with burning flesh and the father let go of his child.

But for only a few precious seconds.

Now the mother rushed forward. Pete dodged behind the low bed, nearly slipping on a pillow that had fallen to the floor. Both of them sprang again, the man’s face contorted with pain, and clutched at their children. Pete fired the laser but his hold on the child had knocked the wrister slightly sideways and he missed. Frantically he began firing, the beams hitting the wall and then Pete’s own foot. The pain was astonishing. He screamed; the children screamed; the mother screamed and lunged.

Five seconds.

The father tore the little girl from Pete. Pete jerked out his bad arm, now in as much pain as his foot, as much pain as the man’s must be, and twined his fingers in the child’s hair. The mother slipped on a throw rug patterned with princesses and went down. But the father held on to the toddler and so did Pete, and—

Grab.

All four of them went through in a blaze of noise, of light, of stinking diapers and roasted flesh, of shoulder pain so intense that Pete had to struggle to stay conscious. He did, but not for long. Once under the Shell, he collapsed to the metal floor. The father, of course, was dead. The last thing Pete heard was both children, still wailing as if their world had ended.

It had. From now on, they were with him and McAllister and the others. From now on, poor little devastated parentless miracles.

March 2014

On the high plateau of the Brazilian state of Paraná, the arabica trees rustled in a gentle rain. Drops pattered off dark green, lance-shaped leaves, cascading down until they touched the soil. The coffee berries were small, not ready for harvest until the dry season, months away. At the far edge of the vast field, a fertilizer drove slowly among the rows of short, bushy trees, some of them fifty years old. A rabbit raced ahead of the advancing machinery.

Deep underground, something happened.

Nonmotile, rod-shaped bacteria clung to the roots of the coffee trees, as they had for millennia. The bacteria stuck to the roots by exuding a slime layer, where it fed on and decomposed plant matter into nutrients. In the surrounding soil other bacteria also flourished, carrying on their usual life processes. One of these was mitosis. During the reproductive division, plasmids were swapped between organisms, as widely promiscuous as all of their kind.

A new bacterium appeared.

Eventually it, too, began to divide, not too rapidly in the dry soil. By and by, another plasmid exchange took place, with a different bacterium. And so on, in an intricate chain, ending up with a plasmid swap with the nonmotile, rod-shaped root dweller. A mutation now existed that had never existed before. Such a thing happened all the time in nature—but not like this.

Above ground, thunder rumbled, and the rain began to fall harder.

November 2013

The woman was hysterical. As she had every right to be, Julie thought. Julie laid her hand across her own belly, caught herself doing it, and removed the hand. Quickly she glanced around. No one had noticed. They all watched the woman, and all of them, even the female uniform, had the expressions that cops wore in the presence of hysterical victims: a mixture of stern pity and impatient disgust.

“Ma’am . . . ma’am . . . if you could just calm down enough to tell us what happened . . .”

“I told you! I told you!” The woman’s voice rose to a shriek. She wore a gaping bathrobe over a flimsy white nightdress, and her hair was so wild it looked as if she had torn out patches by the roots, like some grieving Biblical figure. Perhaps she had. A verse from Julie’s unwilling Temple childhood rose, unbidden, in her mind: “In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they were no more.”

“Ma’am . . . shit. Get a doctor here with a sedative,” the “detective” said. He was a captain in this seaside town’s police. Julie had picked up from Gordon an FBI agent’s contempt for local law enforcement; she would have to rid herself of that, or else turn into as much of a machine as Gordon could be. She stepped forward.

“May I try?”

“No.” The captain glared; he hadn’t wanted her along in the first place. They never did. Julie stepped back into the shadows. Gordon would be here soon.

The woman continued to wail and tear her hair. A uniform phoned for a doctor. In the bedroom the forensics team worked busily, and through the window Julie could see men fanning out across the beach, looking for clues. Had this mother drowned her infants? Buried them? Hidden them safe in baskets of bulrushes, a crazy latter-day Jochebed with two female versions of Moses? Julie knew better. She studied the room around her.

Simple, classic North Atlantic beach cottage: white duck covers on the wicker furniture, sisal mats on the floor, light wood and pale colors. But the house had central heating and storm windows already in place; evidently the family lived here year-round. Bright toys spilled from a colorful box. Beside the sofa, a basket of magazines, Time shouting: can the president control congress? and the desertification of africa. On the counter separating the kitchen from the living area, a homemade pie under a glass dome, next to a pile of fresh tomatoes, onions, zucchini. Everything orderly, prosperous, caring.

Gordon strode through the door and went unerringly to the detective. “Captain Parsons? I’m Special Agent in Charge Gordon Fairford. We spoke on the phone.”

 Parsons said sourly, “No change from what I told.” On the sofa, the woman let out another air-splitting wail.

“What do you think happened, Captain?” Gordon said. Whatever his private opinion, Gordon was always outwardly tactful with locals, who always resented both the tact and the FBI involvement. The eternal verities.

Parsons said, “The husband took the kids, of course. Or they disposed of them together and he took a powder.”

“Any signs of his leaving, with or without them?”

“No,” Parsons said, with dislike.

Nor would there be, Julie thought. Gordon went on extracting as much information from Parsons as he could, simultaneously smoothing over as much as possible of the inevitable turf war. Julie stopped listening. She waited until Parsons moved off and Gordon turned to her.

He said, “This time your location forecast was closer.”

 “Not close enough.” If it had been, Gordon would have been at the beach house before the kids’ disappearance happened. As it was, he and she had only managed to be in the next town over. Not enough, not nearly enough.

The woman on the couch had quieted slightly. Gordon said softly to Julie, “Go.”

This was never supposed to be part of her job. She was the math wizard, the creator of algorithms, the transformer of raw data into useful predictions. But she and Gordon had been working closely together for over six months now, and he had discovered her other uses.

No, no, not what I meant!

Julie sat next to the sobbing woman, without touching her. “Mrs. Carter, I’m Julie Kahn. And I know you’re telling the truth about what happened to your husband and children.”

The woman jerked as if she had been shot and fastened both hands on Julie’s arm. Her nails dug in, and her eyes bored silently into Julie’s face, wider and wilder than any eyes Julie had ever seen. She tried not to flinch.

Julie said, “There was a flash of light when they were taken, wasn’t there? Very bright. Almost blinding.”

“Yes!”

“Tell me everything, from the beginning.”

“Can you get them back? Can you? Can you?”

No. “I don’t know.”

“You must get them back!”

“We’ll do what we can. Was it a short teenage boy with a wobbling head, as if the head were too big for his neck? Or was it a girl?”

Mrs. Carter shuddered. “It was a demon!”

Oh. It was going to be like that.

“A demon from Hell and he has Jenny and Kara!” She began to wail again and tear her hair.

Slowly, painfully, Julie extracted the story. It wasn’t much different from the others, except that this time there had been two children, and the husband had disappeared, too. Apparently he had been hanging onto one of the kids. Was that significant?

How did you know what was significant when it was all unthinkable?

Eight other children in the last year, all vanished without a trace, each taken from a different town on the Atlantic coast. Only three of the abductions had been witnessed, however, and one of those had not succeeded. The mother had beaten off the kidnapper—a young girl—before the perp vanished in a dazzlingly bright light. Or so the mother said. But children disappeared all the time, which is why the press had not yet gotten the larger story. But even the unwitnessed disappearances followed a pattern, and patterns were what Julie did. There were other incidents, too: mostly thefts from locked stores. She was less sure those fitted, and her algorithms had to weight for that. But the geographical pattern was there, if bizarrely nonlinear, and what kind of kidnapper was both smart enough to plan ten flawless abductions and stupid enough to leave any signature at all in their geography?

Julie was not law enforcement. Gordon was, and they had discussed the question endlessly over the last months. Gordon’s answer: A psycho who wants to be caught.

Julie had no answers. Only terrible fears.

“It was a demon! A demon!” Mrs. Carter suddenly shrieked. “I want Ed and my kids back!” She tore out of the dune cottage, robe flapping and hair whipping around her ravaged face, as if she could find her husband and children on the cold beach. A cop leaped after her; she was of course a suspect.

Julie wiped the blood off her arm where Mrs. Carter’s nails had pierced the skin. Did that mean she needed a tetanus shot? Was a tetanus shot even safe for her now?

She crossed her arms over her belly and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Gordon stood watching her.

April 2014

The sun rose above the salt marsh on the Connecticut coast. The tide flowed gently out, toward the barrier island that sheltered the land. A light breeze ruffled the cordgrass, although the breeze was not strong enough to cause waves on the pearly water. A blue heron did disturb the water, landing on a mudflat to dip its long bill, searching for breakfast. A sea-pink bloomed on a raised hummock, turning its dome-shaped cluster of flowers toward the sun.

In the mud beside the heron’s long thin toes, something changed.

Bacteria sliming the roots of cordgrass swapped plasmids with another species, the result of a long and intricate chain of such exchanges. The new bacteria began to feed. Abruptly, it died, unable in this mutated form to tolerate the high salt content of brackish marsh.

The heron rose and flew away into the dawn.

2035

It took Pete days and days to recover from the laser burn on his foot, which became infected. McAllister was out of her special medicine—“antibiotics,” Pete thought it was called—because one of the Grab kids had needed the last dose. Sometimes McAllister sat beside Pete, sometimes Paolo and once Caity, but usually no one tended him. No one could be spared.

He came to loathe his tiny, bare “bedroom” with no bed, just a pile of blankets on the floor and a shit bucket in the corner. Why hadn’t he taped something to the wall like Caity did in her room—something, anything to look at? They still had some tape left. Caity had taped up a picture that one of the children tore out of a precious book, a girl riding a big black horse, and beside it a bright piece of patterned cloth from an old Grab. All Pete had to look at was white Tesslie-metal walls, white Tesslie-metal ceiling, white Tesslie-metal floor.

He drifted in and out of sleep that never refreshed him. When his fever rose high enough he thought he saw other rooms around him: The impossibly gorgeous, rich bedroom from which he’d taken the round-headed baby that Bridget had named Kathleen. The ugly city apartment with stained and crumbling walls where he’d found Tina, alone in her bed except for the rat attracted by the milk around her unwiped little mouth. The strange house, decorated only with bright pillows and low, silver-inlaid tables where he’d snatched dark, curly-haired Karim, whose name he knew only because his mother had screamed it just before Pete pushed her down that short flight of stairs to get away. Those other rooms rose around him, shimmered on the air like the world he’d seen only in snatches on Grabs, and then collapsed into so much rubble.

“Sleep, Pete.” McAllister, a cool hand on his forehead. Or maybe not, because McAllister collapsed, too, but into a shimmer of golden sparks. Like the Tesslie that McAllister described in learning circles! Pete struggled to sit up.

“No! No . . . not you . . . Tessl . . .”

“Sleep.”

When he woke for the last time from fever and delirium, he was alone.

Cautiously he got himself up off the pallet of blankets. Pete recognized them; he’d brought them back himself, from his first store Grab. They needed washing. Everything needed washing, including himself. But that could wait.

He lurched dizzily to the door. A Grab was supposed to be painless, and usually it was. But you weren’t supposed to shoot your own foot! Still, everyone took risks during Grabs, or at least everyone who could still go. Look what had happened to Caity on her last Grab: that mother had beat Caity off, breaking her arm, and Caity hadn’t even been strong enough to keep the child. McAllister was thinking of taking Caity off Grab duty, which would leave just Pete, Ravi, and Paolo to do them all, at least until Terrell turned twelve. Anyway, it was better than shit-bucket duty.

Pete’s room opened onto the corridor that ran the whole half-mile length of the egg-shaped Shell. Each end of the corridor branched into maybe a hundred of these tiny rooms. The Survivors and the Six used some of them at the living end as bedrooms, and McAllister had designated a few more as storage or work areas. None of the rooms at the far end of the Shell were used at all. In the center was the important stuff.

Such a long way to hobble. Below Pete’s halting feet, one painful enough that finally he just hopped on the other and leaned against the wall for support, stretched the same featureless white metal as his room. Above curved the ceiling of the Shell, three times his height. On either side were doors, some open and some closed, leading to more tiny rooms, white metal walls. Tesslie stuff, all of it. Stuff preserving his life. Pete hated it.

Another hundred yards to the farm, the children’s room, the Grab room.

All at once he didn’t want to go to any of them. The children’s room, spacious and always busy, would be cheerful with toys, learning circles, babies cooing or wailing. Caity or Jenna or Terrell would be there, whoever was on duty. Someone would also be on duty with Darlene in the farm. Someone else would be watching—endlessly, boringly—the Grab machinery. Pete was sick of all of it. This time it had nearly gotten him killed. The only person he would have liked to see was McAllister, and he’d been sick so long that he’d lost track of the duty roster and had no idea where McAllister, or anybody else, might be now.

Miraculously unnoticed, Pete crept past the wide archways which opened on one side of the corridor to the children’s room and on the other to the farm. From the farm came the smell of dirt and the fall of water in the disinfecting and clean-water streams. Also the clank of buckets; someone was on duty at the fertilizer machine. From the children’s room came the usual babble, the playing and crying and talking of eight—no, now ten!—small children.

Head wobbling on his thin neck, he hopped past the smaller, doorless openings to the rooms holding Tesslie machinery and entered the maze of tiny, unused rooms at the far end of the Shell. His foot, wrapped in pieces of torn blanket, still hurt. “Stupid fucking foot!” McAllister had forbidden that word, but Pete—all of the Six—had learned a rich cursing vocabulary from Darlene. Her only useful contribution, in Pete’s opinion, to life in the Shell. Mean old woman.

Finally he reached a small, low chamber at the very tip of the Shell. Here part of the outer wall was, for some reason, clear. Why had the Tesslies done that? But, then, why had they destroyed the world nearly twenty-one years ago and then chosen to imprison a handful of survivors? Nobody knew why the fucking bastards did anything. Pete sank to the metal floor and looked out.

There wasn’t much to see: just a strip of land between him and where the ground curved abruptly away. That strip was a uniform expanse of empty black rock, once smooth but now starting to split in places. The rock had a name, and so did the thing the Shell sat on, but Pete didn’t remember them. Basil? No, that was a prince in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales. Balit? Basalt? He’d never been good at learning such stuff, not like Jenna or Paolo. They were the smart ones. What Pete was good at was the Grab.

And hatred. He was terrific at hatred. So he gazed out at his tiny view of the vast dead world the Tesslies had killed, and thought about the beauty of the shore cottage where he had Grabbed the two children, and he hated.

April 2014

 Deep beneath the ice pack of the Canadian glacier, the earth shifted. Basalt magma flowed into a chamber heavy with silica and the two mingled. From below, more magma pushed upward, exerting pressure. Above, glacial ice tens of thousands of years old but already thinned by global warming, gleamed under a cold spring sky.

November 2013

Gordon stood at one end of the table that was really two tables pushed together, one moved from the bedroom of the motel “suite.” Julie stood at the other end, willing him to leave. The rest of the task force had already gone to their own rooms for the night, leaving Styrofoam cups with the remnants of cold coffee, empty pizza boxes, crumpled paper napkins, half-crushed beer cans. On the desk Julie’s industrial-strength laptop, in sleep mode, glowed with a blue light.

It had been a bad idea to hold the team meeting in her room, but Gordon’s wife, impelled by some marital crisis Julie wanted no part of, kept phoning his room after she’d been told not to call his cell. Maybe that was why he hadn’t left yet; Deborah was a weeper. Or so Julie had been told. She didn’t want to know for sure. If Gordon tried to talk personally with her now . . .

He didn’t. He studied her latest printout, frowning at the equations as if he understood them. “So you think somewhere in Hingham, next Thursday?”

“That’s what the algorithms say.”

“God, Julie, I need a more specific location than that! Unless I can witness an actual kidnapping, maybe even have a camera set up—”

She held onto her temper. “I’m a mathematician, Gordon, not a magician. And I’ve given you everything I’ve got.”

A second later, horror hit her at her own wording, but Gordon, frowning at the sheaf of papers, apparently hadn’t noticed. That caused horror to give way to anger. He never had been any good at reading her feelings, had always enclosed himself in that “objective” professional shell. Well, let him.

He ran a hand over the gray stubble on his head. “I know. I didn’t mean to snap. But funding for this task force is hanging by a thread. The A-Dic isn’t convinced that the child abductions are linked, and he’s never believed any of the witnesses, you know that.”

“I know. Can’t blame him, really.” Two witnesses—no, three now, with Mrs. Carter—attesting that someone had invaded their homes, stolen or tried to steal a child, and then dissolved, child and all, into thin air, to the accompaniment of a burst of bright light. Twice the alleged intruder was a deformed teenage boy with a wobbly head, dressed in what was described as a blanket. Once it was a girl, who had been successfully fought off until she dematerialized. Who would believe any of that? Nor did it help that two of the women had been hysterical types; one was now in a mental institution. Some days Julie wasn’t sure that she herself believed this stuff. The common MOs, yes. The irrefutable fact that the children were gone, yes. Above all, the algorithms that traced a nonlinear but discernible mathematical path for the kidnappings.

She said, “Your Assistant Director has reason to doubt. But I think my usefulness to the task force is pretty much over, and anyway Georgetown wants me back for the spring semester. I’ve booked a flight back to D.C. for tomorrow.”

Gordon looked up. Was that relief in his eyes? She was lying about Georgetown, but he didn’t know that. He said, “Will you stay on call if we have any questions?”

“Sure.” She rose, which was a mistake. The wave of nausea took her by surprise, surging up her throat so suddenly that she barely made it to the bathroom. After she threw up, she kicked the door closed behind her, then took her time rinsing her mouth and brushing her teeth. By the time she came out, he would have gone.

He hadn’t. He stood at the end of the table, papers crumpled in one hand, his still handsome face as white as the printouts. A little vein throbbed in his forehead. “My God, Julie.”

“It’s nothing. Something I ate at dinner.”

“It’s not.” And then, “I have three kids, remember.”

Something in her that she hadn’t counted on, some streak of anger or blame, made her lash out at him. “Now you’ve got one more.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She sat down. The motel chair creaked under her. “Let’s get one thing straight, Gordon. This has nothing to do with you. I mean, it will have nothing to do with you. You don’t need to be involved at all.”

“You’re keeping it?”

“Yes.” She was thirty-eight, with no real relationship in sight now that the ill-thought-out thing with Gordon had ended. This might be her last chance.

“How far along are you?”

“Three and a half months.” Her stocky figure meant that, with her habitually loose clothing, no one had yet noticed. They would soon. She had arranged to extend her sabbatical from Georgetown to a full year, had already bought a crib, a changing table, impossibly tiny onesies. The nausea was supposed to have stopped by now but, as her obstetrician said, every pregnancy is different.

Gordon’s jaw tightened. “You weren’t going to tell me at all, were you?”

“No.” And then, from that same unexplored well of anger—but at what? “You have your hands full already, with Deborah and your kids.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. Julie found herself studying him almost impersonally, as if he were someone she’d just met. Such a handsome man, with his deep blue eyes, firm jaw, prematurely gray hair that looked masterful rather than old. “Masterful”—that was the right word for Gordon. He liked to control situations. And yet he had been tender with her, from the conventional beginning of too-long “business dinners,” through the trite progression to so much more.

Had she really ever loved him? It had felt like romance, those first few months of delicious hidden hours. And yet even then, Julie had had her doubts. Not because Gordon was married, but because of something in his character and—be honest!—in her own. Both of them wanted to make their own decisions, keep their options open. That stubborn independence was why Julie had never married, and why Gordon cheated on his wife. Neither had ever told the other “I love you.” Both had wanted freedom more than the inevitable compromises and sacrifices of genuine love.

And yet now Gordon stood at his end of the littered table, running his hand through his gray hair and looking more troubled than Julie had known possible. But, then, Gordon was not one to shirk responsibilities. That wouldn’t have fit with his image of himself.

“Julie, if there’s anything I can do . . . money . . .”

Her anger evaporated. This situation was not his fault. Nor hers—precautions sometimes failed. Gordon would never leave drama-queen Deborah, and she didn’t want him to, no matter what romantic fantasies dictated that she should want. Julie needed nothing from him.

“I’m fine,” she said gently. “Truly.”

“At least let me—”

“No.” She went into her motel bedroom and closed the door, her back to it until she heard him leave.

[End Excerpt]

From the book, After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress. © 2012 Nancy Kress. Excerpt appears here via arrangement with Tachyon Publications. All rights reserved.

Nancy Kress is the author of After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall and more than two dozen other books. She is perhaps best known for the Sleepless trilogy that began with Beggars in Spain, which was based on the Nebula- and Hugo-winning novella of the same name. She won her second Hugo in 2009 in Montreal, for the novella “The Erdmann Nexus.” Kress has also won three additional Nebulas, a Sturgeon, and the 2003 John W. Campbell Award (for her novel Probability Space). Her most recent books are a collection of short stories, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories; a bio-thriller, Dogs; and an SF novel, Steal Across the Sky. Kress's fiction, much of which concerns genetic engineering, has been translated into twenty languages. She often teaches writing at various venues around the country and blogs at nancykress.blogspot.com.

From Black Heart
Holly Black

(An excerpt from the forthcoming novel to be published by Simon & Schuster, April 2012.)

Chapter One

My brother Barron sits next to me, sucking the last dregs of milk tea slush noisily through a wide yellow straw. He’s got the seat of my Benz pushed all the way back and his feet up on the dash, the heels of his pointy black shoes scratching the plastic. With his hair slicked back and his mirrored sunglasses covering his eyes, he looks like a study in villainy.

He’s actually a junior federal agent, still in training, sure, but with a key card and an ID badge and everything.

To be fair, he’s also a villain.

I tap my gloved fingers impatiently against the curve of the wheel and bring a pair of binoculars to my eyes for about the millionth time. All I see is a boarded-up building on the wrong side of Queens. “What is she doing in there? It’s been forty minutes.”

“What do you think?” he asks me. “Bad things. That’s her after-school job now. Taking care of shady business so Zacharov’s gloves stay clean.”

“Her dad won’t put her in any real danger,” I say, but the tone of my voice makes it pretty obvious I’m trying to convince myself more than I’m trying to convince my brother.

Barron snorts. “She’s a new soldier. Got to prove herself. Zacharov couldn’t keep her out of danger if he tried—and he’s not going to be trying real hard. The other laborers are watching, waiting for her to be weak. Waiting for her to screw up. He knows that. So should you.”

I think of her at twelve, a skinny girl with eyes too large for her face and a nimbus of tangled blond hair. In my memory she’s sitting on the branch of a tree, eating a rope of red licorice. Her lips are sticky with it. Her flip-flops are hanging off her toes. She’s cutting her initials into the bark, high up, so her cousin can’t claim she’s lying when she tells him she got higher than he ever will.

Boys never believe I can beat them, she told me back then. But I always win in the end.

“Maybe she spotted the car and went out the back,” I say finally.

“No way she made us.” He sucks on the straw again. It makes that rattling empty-cup sound, echoing through the car. “We’re like ninjas.”

“Somebody’s cocky,” I say. After all, tailing someone isn’t easy, and Barron and I aren’t that good at it yet, no matter what he says. My handler at the agency, Yulikova, has been encouraging me to shadow Barron, so I can learn second-hand and can keep myself safe until she figures out how to tell her bosses that she’s got hold of a teenage transformation worker with a bad attitude and a criminal record. And since Yulikova’s in charge, Barron’s stuck teaching me. It’s supposed to be just for a few months, until I graduate from Wallingford. Let’s see if we can stand each other that long.

Of course, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the kind of lesson Yulikova’s been imagining.

Barron grins, white teeth flashing like dropped dice. “What do you think Lila Zacharov would do if she knew you were tailing her?”

I grin back. “Probably she’d kill me.”

He nods. “Probably she would. Probably she’d kill me twice for helping you.”

“Probably you deserve it,” I say. He snorts.

Over the last few months I got every last thing I ever wanted—and then I threw it all away. Everything I thought I could never have was offered up on a silver platter—the girl, the power, a job at the right hand of Zacharov, the most formidable man I know. It wouldn’t even have been that hard to work for him. It probably would have been fun. And if I didn’t care who I hurt, it would still all be mine.

I lift the binoculars and study the door again—the worn paint striping the boards and crumbling like bread crumbs, the chewed-up bottom edge as ragged as if it had been gnawed on by rats.

Lila would still be mine.

Mine. The language of love is like that, possessive. That should be the first warning that it’s not going to encourage anyone’s betterment.

Barron groans and throws his cup into the backseat. “I can’t believe that you blackmailed me into becoming Johnny Law and now I have to sweat it out five days a week with the other recruits while you use my experience to stalk your girlfriend. How is that fair?”

“One, I think you mean the extremely dubious benefit of your experience. Two, Lila’s not my girlfriend. Three, I just wanted to make sure she was okay.” I count off these points on my leather-covered fingers. “And four, the last thing you should want is fairness.”

“Stalk her at school,” Barron says, ignoring everything I’ve just said. “Come on. I have to make a phone call. Let’s pack in this lesson and get a couple of slices. I’ll even buy.”

I sigh. The car is stuffy and smells like old coffee. I’d like to stretch my legs. And Barron is probably right—we should give this up. Not for the reason he’s saying but for the one that’s implied. The one about it not being okay to lurk around outside buildings, spying on girls you like.

My fingers are reaching reluctantly for my keys when she walks out of the worn door, as though my giving up summoned her. She’s got on tall black riding boots and a steel gray trench. I study the quicksilver gestures of her gloved hands, the sway of her earrings, the slap of her heels on the steps, and the lash of her hair. She’s so beautiful, I can barely breathe. Behind her follows a boy with his hair braided into the shape of two antelope horns. His skin is darker than mine. He’s got on baggy jeans and a hoodie. He’s shoving a folded-up wad of something that looks like cash into an inside pocket.

Outside of school Lila doesn’t bother wearing a scarf. I can see the grim necklace of marks on her throat, scars black where ash was rubbed into them. That’s part of the ceremony when you join her father’s crime family, slicing your skin and swearing that you’re dead to your old life and reborn into wickedness. Not even Zacharov’s daughter was spared it.

She’s one of them now. No turning back.

“Well, now,” says Barron, gleeful. “I bet you’re thinking we just observed the end of a very naughty transaction. But let’s consider the possibility that actually we caught her doing something totally innocent yet embarrassing.”

I look at him absently. “Embarrassing?”

“Like meeting up to play one of those card games where you have to collect everything. Pokémon. Magic the Gathering. Maybe they’re training for a tournament. With all that money she just handed him, I’m guessing he won.”

“Funny.”

“Maybe he’s tutoring her in Latin. Or they were painting miniatures together. Or he’s teaching her shadow puppetry.” He makes a duck-like gesture with one gloved hand.

I punch Barron’s shoulder, but not really hard. Just hard enough to make him shut up. He laughs and adjusts his sunglasses, pushing them higher on his nose.

The boy with the braids crosses the street, head down, hood pulled up to shadow his face. Lila walks to the corner and raises her hand to hail a cab. The wind whips at her hair, making it a nimbus of blown gold.

I wonder if she’s done her homework for Monday.

I wonder if she could ever love me again.

I wonder just how mad she’d be if she knew I was here, watching her. Probably really, really mad.

Cold October air floods into the car suddenly, tossing around the empty cup in the backseat.

“Come on,” Barron says, leaning on the door, grinning down at me. I didn’t even notice him getting out. “Grab some quarters for the meter, and your stuff.” He jerks his head in the direction of the boy with the braids. “We’re going to follow him.”

“What about that phone call?” I shiver in my thin green T-shirt. My leather jacket is wadded up in the backseat of my car. I reach for it and shrug it on.

“I was bored,” Barron says. “Now I’m not.”

This morning when he told me we were going to practice tailing people, I picked Lila as my target half as a joke, half out of sick desire. I didn’t think that Barron would agree. I didn’t think that we’d actually see her leaving her apartment building and getting into a town car. I for sure didn’t think that I would wind up here, close to actually finding out what she’s been doing when she’s not in school.

I get out of the car and slam the door behind me.

That’s the problem with temptation. It’s so damn tempting.

“Feels almost like real agent work, doesn’t it?” Barron says as we walk down the street, heads bowed against the wind. “You know, if we caught your girlfriend committing a crime, I bet Yulikova would give us a bonus or something for being prize pupils.”

“Except that we’re not going to do that,” I say.

“I thought you wanted us to be good guys.” He grins a too-wide grin. He’s enjoying needling me, and my reacting only makes it worse, but I can’t stop.

“Not if it means hurting her,” I say, my voice as deadly as I can make it. “Never her.”

“Got it. Hurting, bad. But how do you excuse stalking her and her friends, little brother?”

“I’m not excusing it,” I say. “I’m just doing it.”

Following—stalking—someone isn’t easy. You try not to stare too hard at the back of his head, keep your distance, and act like you’re just another person freezing your ass off in late October on the streets of Queens. Above all you try not to seem like a badly trained federal agent wannabe.

“Stop worrying,” Barron says, strolling along beside me. “Even if we get made, this guy will probably be flattered. He’d think he was moving up in the world if he had a government tail.”

Barron is better at acting casual than I am. I guess he should be. He’s got nothing to lose if we’re spotted. Lila couldn’t possibly hate him more than she does. Plus, he probably trains for this all day, while I’m at Wallingford studying to get into the kind of college there is no way I am ever going to attend.

It still annoys me. Since I was a kid, we’ve competed over lots of things. Mostly, all those competitions were ones I lost.

We were the two youngest, and when Philip would be off with his friends on the weekends, Barron and I would be stuck doing whatever errands Dad needed doing, or practicing whatever skill he thought we needed to learn.

He particularly wanted us to be better at pickpocketing and lock-picking than we were.

Two kids are the perfect pickpocket team, he’d say. One to do the lift, the other one to distract or to take the handoff.

We both practiced dips. First identifying where Dad kept his wallet by looking for a bulge in a back pocket or the way one side of his coat swung heavily because something was inside. Then the lift. I was pretty good; Barron was better.

Then we practiced distraction. Crying. Asking for directions. Giving the mark a quarter that you claim they dropped.

It’s like stage magic, Dad said. You’ve got to make me look over there so I won’t notice what’s happening right in front of my face.

When Dad didn’t feel like fending off our clumsy attempts at lifts, he’d bring us to the barn and show us his collection: He had an old metal tackle box with locks on all the sides, so you had to run the gauntlet of seven different locks to get into it. Neither Barron nor I ever managed.

Once we learned how to open a lock with a tool, we’d have to learn to pick it with a bobby pin, with a hanger, then with a stick or some other found object. I kept hoping that I’d be naturally great at locks, since I was pretty sure I wasn’t a worker back then, and since I already felt like an outsider in my family. I thought that if there was one thing I was better at than all of them, that would make up for everything else.

It sucks to be the youngest.

If you get into the supersecure box, we’ll sneak into the movie of your choice, Dad would say. Or, I put candy in there. Or, If you really want that video game, just open the box and I’ll get it for you. But it didn’t matter what he promised. What did matter was that I only ever managed to pick three locks; Barron managed five.

And here we are again, learning a bunch of new skills. I can’t help feeling a little bit competitive and a little bit disappointed in myself that I’m already so far behind. After all, Yulikova thinks Barron has a real future with the Bureau. She told me so. I told her that sociopaths are relentlessly charming.

I think she figured I was joking.

“What other stuff do they teach you at federal agent school?” I ask. It shouldn’t bother me that he’s fitting in so well. So what if he’s faking it? Good for him.

I guess what bothers me is him faking it better than I am.

He rolls his eyes. “Nothing much. Obvious stuff—getting people to trust you with mirroring behavior. You know, doing whatever the other person’s doing.” He laughs. “Honestly, undercover’s just like being a con man. Same techniques. Identify the target. Befriend. Then betray.”

Mirroring behavior. When a mark takes a drink from his water glass, so should you. When he smiles, so should you. Keep it subtle, rather than creepy, and it’s a good technique.

Mom taught it to me when I was ten. Cassel, she said, you want to know how to be the most charming guy anyone’s ever met? Remind them of their favorite person. Everyone’s favorite person is their own damn self.

“Except now you’re the good guy,” I say, and laugh.

He laughs too, like I just told the best joke in the world.

But now that I’m thinking about Mom, I can’t help worrying about her. She’s been missing since she got caught using her worker talent—emotion—to manipulate Governor Patton, a guy who hated curse workers to begin with and now is on national news every night with a vein popping out of his forehead, calling for her blood. I hope she stays hidden. I just wish I knew where she was.

“Barron,” I say, about to start up a conversation we’ve already had about a million times, the one where we tell each other that she’s fine and she’ll contact us soon. “Do you think—”

Up ahead the boy with the braids steps into a pool hall.

“In here,” Barron says, with a jerk of his head. We duck into a deli across the street. I’m grateful for the warmth. Barron orders us two coffees, and we stand near the window, waiting.

“You ever going to get over this thing with Lila?” he asks me, breaking the silence, making me wish I’d been the one to do it, so that I could have picked another subject. Any other subject. “It’s like some kind of illness with you. How long have you been into her? Since you were what, eleven?”

I don’t say anything.

“That’s why you really wanted to follow her and her new hire, right? Because you don’t think that you’re worthy of her, but you’re hoping that if she does something awful enough, maybe you’ll deserve each other after all.”

“That’s not how it works,” I say, under my breath. “That’s not how love works.”

He snorts. “You sure?”

I bite my tongue, swallowing every obnoxious taunt that comes into my mind. If he doesn’t get a rise out of me, maybe he’ll stop, and then maybe I can distract him. We stand like that for several minutes, until he sighs.

“Bored again. I’m going to make that phone call.”

“What if he comes out?” I ask, annoyed. “How am I going to—”

He widens his eyes in mock distress. “Improvise.”

The bell rings as he steps out the door, and the guy at the counter shouts his customary “Thanksforcomingcomeagain.”

On the sidewalk in front of the deli, Barron is flirting like crazy as he paces back and forth, dropping the names of French restaurants like he eats off a tablecloth every night. He’s got his phone cradled against his cheek, smiling like he’s buying the line of romantic nonsense he’s selling. I feel sorry for the girl, whoever she is, but I am gleeful.

When he gets off the phone I will never stop making fun of him. Biting my tongue won’t be enough to keep me from it. I would have to bite off my whole face.

He notices me grinning out the window at him, turns his back and stalks to the entranceway of a closed pawnshop half a block away. I made sure to waggle my eyebrows while he was looking in my direction.

With nothing else to do, I stay put. I drink more coffee. I play a game on my phone that involves shooting pixelated zombies.

Even though I’ve been waiting, I’m not really prepared when the boy with the braids walks out of the pool hall. He’s got a man with him, a tall guy with hollow cheekbones and greasy hair. The boy lights a cigarette inside his cupped palm, leaning against the wall. This is one of those moments when a little more training would help. Obviously running out of the deli and waving my arms at Barron is the wrong move, but I don’t know the right one if the boy starts moving again. I have no idea how to signal my brother.

Improvise, he said.

I walk out of the deli as nonchalantly as I can manage. Maybe the kid’s just hit the street for a smoke. Maybe Barron will notice me and come back over on his own.

I spot a bus stop bench and lean against it, trying to get a better look at the boy.

This isn’t a real assignment, I remind myself. It doesn’t matter if he gets away. There’s probably nothing to see. Whatever he’s doing for Lila, there’s no reason to think that he’s doing it now.

That’s when I notice the way that the boy is gesturing grandly, his cigarette trailing smoke. Misdirection, a classic of magic tricks and cons.

Look over here, one hand says. He must be telling a joke too, because the man is laughing. But I can see his other hand, worming out of his glove.

I jump up, but I’m too late. I see a flash of bare wrist and thumb.

I start toward him, not thinking—crossing the street, barely noticing the screech of a car’s brakes until I’m past it. People turn toward me, but no one is watching the boy. Even the idiot guy from the pool hall is looking in my direction.

“Run,” I yell.

The hollow-cheeked man is still staring at me when the boy’s hand clamps around the front of his throat.

I grab for the boy’s shoulder, too late. The man, whoever he was, collapses like a sack of flour. The boy spins toward me, bare fingers reaching for skin. I catch his wrist and twist his arm as hard as I can.

He groans and punches me in the face with his gloved hand.

I stumble back. For a moment we just regard each other. I see his face up close for the first time and am surprised to notice that his eyebrows are carefully tweezed into perfect arches. His eyes are wide and brown beneath them. He narrows those eyes at me. Then he turns and runs.

I chase after him. It’s automatic—instinct—and I’m wondering what I think I’m doing as I race down the sidewalk. I risk a look back at Barron, but he’s turned away, bent over the phone, so that all I see is his back.

Figures.

The boy is fast, but I’ve been running track for the last three years. I know how to pace myself, allowing him to get ahead of me at first when he starts sprinting, but catching up once he’s winded. We go down block after block, me getting closer and closer.

This is what I’m supposed to do once I’m a federal agent, right? Chase bad guys.

But that’s not why I’m after him. I feel like I am hunting my own shadow. I feel like I can’t stop.

He glances back at me, and I guess he sees that I’m gaining on him, because he tries a new strategy. He veers abruptly into an alley.

I take the corner in time to see him reaching for something under his hoodie. I go for the nearest weapon I can find. A plank of wood, lying near a stack of garbage.

Swinging it, I catch him just as he gets out the gun. I feel the burn of my muscles and hear the crack as wood hits metal. I knock the pistol against the brick wall like it’s a baseball and I’m in the World Series.

I think I’m as surprised as he is.

Taking slow steps, I hold up the plank, which is split now, a big chunk of the top hanging off by a splinter, the remainder jagged and pointed like a spear. He watches me, every part of him tense. He doesn’t look much older than I am. He might even be younger.

“Who the hell are you?” When he speaks, I can see that some of his teeth are gold, flashing in the fading sun. Three on the bottom. One on top. He’s breathing hard. We both are.

I bend down and lift the gun in one shaking hand. My thumb flicks off the safety. I drop the plank.

I have no idea who I am right now.

“Why?” I say, between breaths. “Why did she pay you to kill him?”

“Hey,” he says, holding up both his hands, the gloved and ungloved one, in a gesture of surrender. Despite that, he seems more stunned than scared. “If he was your friend, then—”

“He wasn’t my friend.”

He lowers his hands slowly until they rest at his sides, like he has made a decision about me. Maybe that I’m not a cop. Maybe that it’s okay to relax. “I don’t ask why anyone wants anything. I don’t know, okay? It was just a job.”

I nod. “Let me see your throat.”

“No marks.” He pulls the neck of his shirt wide, but there’s no scarring there. “I freelance. I’m too pretty for all that bullshit. No one puts a collar on Gage.”

“Okay,” I say.

“That girl—if you know her, you know what she’s about.” He reaches into his mouth, pulling out a loose tooth—a real one—black with rot at the top. It sits like a flawed pearl in the palm of his glove. Then he grins. “Good thing murder pays so well, right? Gold’s expensive.”

I try to hide my surprise. A death worker who loses only a single tooth with each hit is a very dangerous guy. Every curse—physical, luck, memory, emotion, dream, death, and even transformation—causes some kind of blowback. As my grandfather says, all work works the worker. Blowback can be crippling, even lethal. Death curses rot a part of the worker’s body, anything from a lung to a finger. Or, apparently, something as minor as a tooth.

“What’s a death worker need a gun for anyway?” I ask.

“That gun’s real sentimental. Belonged to my gran.” Gage clears his throat. “Look, you’re not going to shoot. You would have done it already. So can we just—”

“You sure you want to double-dog-dare me?” I say. “You sure?”

That seems to rattle him. He sucks on his teeth. “Okay, all I know is what I heard—and not from . . . her. She never said anything, except where I could find him. But there’s rumors that the guy—he goes by Charlie West—bungled a job. Killed a family in what was supposed to be a simple smash and grab. He’s a drunk coward—”

My phone starts to ring.

I reach down and tug it out of my pocket with one hand, then glance down. It’s Barron, probably just having realized that I ditched him. At that moment Gage vaults himself at the chain-link fence.

I look at him go, and my vision blurs. I don’t know who I’m seeing. My grandfather. My brother. Myself. Any of us could be him, could have been him, coming from a hit, scrambling to get over a fence before getting shot in the back.

I don’t yell for him to get down. I don’t fire a warning shot or any of the stuff that I could do—that a federal agent trainee watching a murderer escape should do. I just let him go. But if he’s got the role that I was supposed to have, then I have no idea how to be the person left in the alley. The good guy.

I wipe off the gun on my green shirt, then tuck it in the waistband of my jeans, against the small of my back, where my jacket will cover it. After I’m done, I walk to the mouth of the alley and call Barron.

When he arrives, he’s with a bunch of guys in suits.

He grabs me by the shoulders. “What the hell were you doing?” his voice is low, but he sounds honestly shaken. “I had no idea where you were! You didn’t answer your phone.”

Except for that last time, I hadn’t even heard it ring.

“I was improvising,” I say smugly. “And you would have seen me if you hadn’t been busy hitting on some girl.”

If his expression is any indication, only the presence of other people keeps him from strangling me. “These guys showed up at the murder scene right after the cops,” he says, giving me a loaded look. As mad as he is, I understand what he’s trying to communicate. I didn’t call them, his expression says. I didn’t tell them anything about Lila. I didn’t betray you. I didn’t betray you yet.

The agents take down my statement. I tell them that I followed the hit man, but he got ahead of me and over the fence. I didn’t see where he went from there. I didn’t get that good of a look at him. His hood was up. No, he didn’t say anything. No, he didn’t have a weapon—or at least nothing other than his bare hand. Yes, I shouldn’t have followed him. Yes, I know Agent Yulikova. Yes, she will vouch for me.

She does. They let me go without patting me down. The gun remains tucked in the back of my jeans, rubbing against the base of my spine as Barron and I walk back to the car.

“What really happened?” Barron asks me.

I shake my head.

“So, what are you going to do?” he asks, like he’s challenging me. Like there’s even a question. “Lila ordered that hit.”

“Nothing,” I say. “What do you think? And you’re not doing anything either.”

Girls like her, my grandfather once warned me, girls like her turn into women with eyes like bullet holes and mouths made of knives. They are always restless. They are always hungry. They are bad news. They will drink you down like a shot of whisky. Falling in love with them is like falling down a flight of stairs.

What no one told me, with all those warnings, is that even after you’ve fallen, even after you know how painful it is, you’d still get in line to do it again.

[End Excerpt]

From the book, Black Heart by Holly Black. © 2012 Holly Black. Excerpt appears here via arrangement with Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.

Holly Black is the author of Black Heart and other bestselling contemporary fantasy books for kids and teens. Some of her titles include The Spiderwick Chronicles (with Tony DiTerlizzi), The Modern Faerie Tale series, The Good Neighbors graphic novel trilogy (with Ted Naifeh), and her new Curse Workers series, which includes WhiteCat and RedGlove. She has been a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award, a finalist for an Eisner Award, and the recipient of the Andre Norton Award. She currently lives in New England with her husband, Theo, in a house with a secret door.

Interview: William Gibson
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

William Gibson is the author of the novel Neuromancer, which defined the cyberpunk subgenre. Recent novels include Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. His latest book, Distrust That Particular Flavor, collects his best nonfiction pieces from the past twenty years.

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.

Your new book is called Distrust That Particular Flavor. What does that title refer to?

It’s a phrase from the piece in the collection called “Time Machine Cuba,” and the “particular flavor” is futurists in immediate apocalyptic mode, like, “the world is ending right now, so pay attention to me” . . . it comes after I quote H.G. Wells hitting that particular note in a very particularly shrill way. It’s akin to the “after us, the deluge” rant, which is something I watch for in other science fiction writers, because it’s usually a bad sign.

Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality, and they often decide that what’s going on is that everything is just totally screwed and shabby now, whereas when they were younger everything was better.

It’s an ancient, somewhat universal human attitude, and often they give it full voice. But it’s been being given voice for thousands and thousands of years. You can go back and see the ancient Greeks doing it. You know, “All that is good is gone. These young people are incapable of making art, or blue jeans, or whatever.” It’s just an ancient thing, and it’s so ancient that I’m inclined to think it’s never actually true. And I’ve always been deeply, deeply distrustful of anybody’s “golden age”—that one in which we no longer live.

Your new book opens with a photo of a young William Gibson. When was that photo taken, and why did you decide to include it in the book?

I’m not sure when it was taken. It would have been very late ‘80s or very early ‘90s, and I liked it because it was emblematic of the fact that beautiful women actually can marry guys who look like Dr. Seuss characters.

Many of the pieces in the book were written for Wired magazine. How did you first get started writing for Wired, and how did you end up writing so many articles for them?

I had met Kevin Kelly via the Global Business Network, and then Kevin and whoever else started Wired, back when it was a crazy, indie San Francisco thing. So, although I don’t actually remember, I’m sure Kevin called me up and started suggesting gigs, and it was easier and more fun to do that sort of thing with Wired than anybody else, because they weren’t the product of a major publishing company. They didn’t have a huge, ancient culture of magazine publishing in position to make things difficult, so they would suggest genuinely crazy and interesting things to highly unlikely people. I think Bruce Sterling may have gotten in there first and that could have been a factor, too.

Obviously the media world has changed a lot since you first started writing. If you were just getting started today, do you think you’d get into podcasting, YouTube, or webcomics, anything like that?

I think about that when young people ask me what they should do to get started, because when they ask me that, I realize that I don’t know, because I’m not really familiar with the news. When I began, I knew more or less what was possible with what was available then. Today I don’t really know. It’s one of the reasons that writers who’ve been established for a while actually can’t give younger writers very much advice, particularly today, because . . . you know, that stuff didn’t really change much for a long time. I saw advice to young writers when I was in my early teens, in the early ‘60s, that was perfectly valid and useful advice when I began writing in the late ‘70s, because things hadn’t changed that much, but now things have indeed changed quite a lot.

Speaking of your early work, did you basically achieve success right away when you were first sending out your short stories, or did you accumulate a bunch of rejections, like most writers do, before you made your first couple sales?

The first story I wrote was written in a class on science fiction criticism, and then people twisted my arm and forced me to submit it somewhere, and I submitted it to the most obscure market I could find, and it was immediately purchased. That story was “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” in a little magazine called Unearth, which only published people’s first stories. So the next time I wrote a short story, I sent it to that market, and they rejected it. It was some early version of whatever became “Johnny Mnemonic,” and it discouraged me. I was easily discouraged. The rejection discouraged me, and I didn’t go back to writing science fiction stories for a while.

Then a friend of mine, who was much more aggressive and ambitious than I was, had gone to New York and was hustling publication in Omni, and told me they were paying good money and I was a fool not to get in there. So he somehow talked me into submitting to them, and I think the idea of submitting to a bigger market created some pressure that caused me to push a little harder in the rewrite than I would have done submitting to a less big-deal market. Then they bought it. But I went from, you know, a market that paid like $27 for a story to a market that paid like $2,700 for a story of the same length.

So I did everything I could to stay in that market. That was Omni. You know, if you wrote for any of the digest-sized magazines, they’d give you—if you were lucky—a couple hundred bucks. They really didn’t pay. But with Omni you got like $2,700. And that was actually enough money to make a difference. I bought my wife a television set, and I bought myself a plane ticket to New York so I could go and meet the people who’d sent me that check, which actually proved to be a very good investment. After that, I don’t think my science fiction was ever rejected. Omni paid so much more than the other science fiction markets that I never wanted to go anywhere else, and as soon as I got into the novel market, I pretty much quit writing short fiction.

I listened to your Intelligence Squared interview with Cory Doctorow. From what he said, it sounds like a lot of people in Singapore sort of have a complex about you referring to their country as “Disneyland with the death penalty.” Is that the most worked up that people have gotten over something you’ve written, or are there other examples?

No, that’s the only thing I’ve ever written that caused a national government to make a formal complaint to the publisher [laughs] . . . and then to ban the magazine for a while.

The documentary No Maps for These Territories features conversations with you as you sit in the back of this moving car with weird psychedelic effects out the windows. I was just wondering, whose idea was it to do the film like that, and what did you think of the result?

That was Mark Neale’s idea. Mark Neale was the filmmaker there. Mark Neale and I are friends. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it, because it involved being gaffer-taped to the back of the car. And since the psychedelic shit out the window was put in later, I didn’t even get to enjoy that. That said, I’ve only seen it once. I saw it in a theater. I felt I needed to see it all, and to sign off on it. But since I seriously can’t stand the sound of my own recorded voice, it’s not something I’ll be likely to sit through again.

Why were you gaffer-taped to the car?

Well, once I got into the back seat, they had to tape a lot of stuff together. The car was rigged with eight or 10 pencil cameras, and wires all over the place. It was extremely difficult to get me in and out of the vehicle once we got into recording mode. So it was a little awkward that way. It was as though I was taped into the back of the car.

One of the pieces in the book talks about your hobby of collecting antique watches on eBay. Could you tell us about that?

The watch thing was about . . . I eventually figured out it was really about pursuing a totally unnecessary and gratuitous body of really, really esoteric knowledge. It wasn’t about accumulating a bunch of objects. It was about getting into something utterly, witheringly obscure, but getting into it at the level of, like, an extreme sport. I met some extraordinarily weird people. I met guys who could say, “Well, I’ve got this really rare watch, and it’s missing this little piece. Where might I find one?” Then the guy would kind of stare into space for a while, and then he’d say this address in Cairo, and he’d say, “It’s in the back room. The guy’s name is Alif, and he won’t sell, but he would trade it to you if you had this or this.” And it wasn’t bullshit. It was kind of like a magical universe. It was very interesting. But once I’d gotten that far . . . I got to a certain point, and there was just nowhere else to go with it. The journey was complete. Maybe one day I’ll use that stuff in fiction or something.

You wrote a script for Alien 3 that was never filmed. What did you think of the direction the series took, and are you planning to see Prometheus when it comes out?

Oh, gee, I might. You know, I’ve never actually seen Alien 3 [laughs]. I’ve seen the first two. But I’m always curious what Ridley Scott does. I’m more interested in Ridley than I am in the Alien franchise.

So when I first started going to science fiction conventions, I heard this funny story involving you, and I’ve never been sure whether it was true or if it happened the way I heard it, and I was just wondering if you knew what I was talking about. It was this story where you go to a hotel to check in, and you say, “Hi, I’m Mr. Gibson‚” and everyone acts all shocked at the hotel.

It was the Beverly Hills Hotel, and, I don’t know, somebody had checked me in. It was something film-related. It was when I had started doing some contract screenplay work after that Alien 3 script. So I got there, and they were like, you know, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. The desk people just looked gobsmacked and really unhappy. So the bellman takes me up to this very fancy suite, and in the suite there’s a table lavishly arrayed with very expensive wines and liquors and floral displays, and a big thing that says: “The Beverly Hills Hotel welcomes Mel Gibson.”

And so I looked at the bellman, and I said, you know, “I’m not him, you can take this stuff away.” And he said, “No, no, you get to keep it.” And I said, “What am I supposed to do with it?” And he said, “Call some friends, have a party.”

Have you written any other recent articles or blog posts or anything that people should check out?

No, all I do is tweet. So they can go to @GreatDismal on Twitter, and there I will be.

You had a recent short story appear in an anthology called Darwin’s Bastards . . .

Yeah, that’s true, that’s true. And you know, I wish that somebody would reprint that somewhere where it would be seen, because I quite liked it, and I hadn’t done a short story for ages, you know, for 20 years or something. That was the first one, and it’s quite unlike any short stories I’d done previously. It’s a Canadian anthology—it’s actually a very good anthology, there’s a lot of really interesting fiction in that thing—but it just doesn’t seem to have had much legs.

What was the story about?

It’s called “Dougal Discarnate.” It’s about a guy who takes acid in Vancouver hippiedom in the late ‘60s or the early ‘70s, and has a really tremendous rush from doing it and leaves his body, and then he can’t get back into his body. And his body is taken to the hospital and it eventually recovers and becomes a stockbroker or a real estate agent or something.

And he’s just left this disincorporated, bodiless spirit haunting this particular neighborhood in Vancouver, which for mysterious reasons he discovers he can’t leave—there’s a sort of invisible barrier. I myself am a character in the story, and I discover this disincorporated guy and become friends with him, and take him to the movies and stuff. He becomes my film-going buddy. But the rest of the story is about how he gets rescued from this seemingly hopeless state, and actually winds up married—sort of—and very, very happy, living in Okinawa. That’s all a spoiler, but you can use it anyway. Maybe it’ll encourage somebody to buy Darwin’s Bastards.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast airing on Wired.com. 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: Robin Hobb
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Robin Hobb (a/k/a Megan Lindholm) is the author of the Realms of the Elderlings epic fantasy series, which is comprised of several sub-series, including the Liveship Traders, The Farseer, The Tawny Man, and the Rain Wild Chronicles; this last is her most recent, the third volume of which, City of Dragons, came out in February 2012. Her other most recent book is The Inheritance and Other Stories, which showcases her short fiction published both under the bylines Robin Hobb and Megan Lindholm.

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.

You started out publishing fiction under the name “Megan Lindholm,” but your given name is actually “Margaret.” So how did you become a “Megan”?

One of my first professionally published stories was in an anthology called Amazons!, of which Jessica Amanda Salmonson was the editor. Prior to that I had been publishing as “M. Lindholm,” and when it came time to put the anthology together, Jessica said that she really wanted to use full names on the stories, as she felt that for many years female writers had been forced to hide behind a single initial—or a male name—in order to get published. My response was that the “M” was something that I used because I had no particular attachment to my given name of Margaret—or Peggy, or Maggie, or Meg—and I said, “Well, Megan’s not too bad. But none of those names really resonate with me, so I’ve always just left it as M. Lindholm.”

Well, when the anthology came out and I opened my copy, I saw that my byline was now “Megan Lindholm.” There had been a misunderstanding, and Jessica had thought that was the name that I was actually choosing as a first name for my pseudonym.

You recently released a book called The Inheritance & Other Stories, featuring short fiction from throughout your career—as both Megan Lindholm and Robin Hobb. Many of those stories deal with characters living in poverty. Why do you think that’s such a recurring theme in your work?

Well, they say, “Write what you know.” [Laughs] I will not claim to have lived in poverty. I have seen true poverty, and I know what it looks like, but I’ve certainly lived at the lower level of income. I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty—they are not out on the street, they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata. Why do the stories happen there? Well, because they do. It’s not as if I sat down and said, “I’m going to write a series of stories about people at the lower economic strata.” It’s simply that I get a story idea and I say, “Where is this set, and who are these characters?” And that’s how it comes out.

I think if you look at the full strata there, they are people who are mostly working blue-collar, and sometimes in the spectrum of fantasy people who actually work every day for a living and have a tight budget can seem like they’re poor, when actually for most of us that’s a reality.

One of the stories in the book is about gaining immortality by sticking roadkill in your mouth. How did you come up with that idea?

If you read a number of the older books about doing magic, and what people believed you could magically do, there is supposed magic whereby if you take the correct bone of a cat and put it under your tongue, you could become invisible. From there it was a short step to say, “What if, instead of that, it simply conferred this wonderful, huge rush of—not necessarily immortality—but renewed youth and vigor, and you didn’t need anything else except that? How would that work? What would you be willing to give up for that? Would you actually be giving up anything?”

That cross-referenced with an idea that I’ve often had, which is, “Who does magic work for?” In many of the stories that we read there is somebody who, by dint of their genetic heritage, or because they are going to be the rightful king, or whatever . . . magic descends upon them, and they can do magic. And I thought, “What about the person who doesn’t get that?” When you take those two ideas and put them in a bag and shake them up, then you get something like “The Fifth Squashed Cat.”

Your short story “Cut” is about a near-future in which female circumcision becomes a fad among teenage girls. Where did that idea come from?

That was written a number of years back, and tattoos were, at that point, becoming more and more popular, and the issue [arose] of, how old should a kid be before a kid is allowed to walk into a tattoo parlor and say, “I want six piercings in my ear”? Or “I want my belly button pierced”? Or [get] any kind of a tattoo? At what point is a person old enough to say, “I own my body and I get to do what I want with it”?

The flip side of that is, at what point does a parent’s decision of what to do with their child’s body become valid? You know, male circumcision is still very commonly practiced in the U.S., and yet we throw up our hands in horror when we talk about female circumcision, or genital mutilation, yet I’m sure that the parents who commonly practice this on their children are doing it with the same attitude that we see in male circumcision, or in having a child’s teeth straightened or whatever. There’s this whole hazy area of, who owns the body and at what point does that ownership of a body kick in? It’s not an area in which I have any answers. I just have a tremendous number of questions. And when I have a question about something, one of the things that I do is I sit down and I toss the question up in the air with some other factors, and usually what comes out is a short story.

How did you first start writing under the name “Robin Hobb”?

Fantasy encompasses a wide, wide spectrum of writing. We have beast fables, we have gothics, we have tales of vampires and werewolves, and we have sword & sorcery, we have epics from Homer, and there is just so much out there that we put under the umbrella of “Fantasy.” And there are readers who choose very selectively within that huge umbrella. Some readers only want to read ghost stories, or they only want to read a romantic fantasy, or a time travel fantasy, or sword & sorcery. So when you’re a fantasy writer and you’ve been writing—as I did as Megan Lindholm—all the way across the spectrum of fantasy, as my first agent Patrick Delahunt observed, he said it’s like you’re writing your first novel every year, simply because I would dabble in one area and then the next book I put out would be in another slice of the fantasy genre. So I was not building a following of readers, necessarily, except those who were adventurous enough to say, “Well, I liked your last book, so I’ll take a chance on where you’re going now.”

So when I submitted the Farseer trilogy—Assassin’s Apprentice—it’s very obvious that that was in a different slice of the fantasy genre than I had ever written in before, and so we decided that we would set it apart from my other work, and kind of “brand” it, so the people who were looking for that kind of story from me would know where to find it. I had a lot of fun choosing the name, choosing one that would fit nicely on the book cover. I went into bookstores and I checked out what shelf was at eye level, and in most bookstores it proved to be the “H” shelf, and I was looking at who would be on the H shelf with me, and it was Heinlein and Herbert and Hambly, and all sorts of writers who would pull people to come and look at that shelf. So I said, “OK, I want a surname that starts with ‘H,’ and I want it to be short enough to fit on the cover.” And then I deliberately chose “Robin” as an androgynous name, because there are still readers who, you know, if you are writing first-person male they expect the book to be written by a male, so I chose a fairly androgynous name. It gave me lots of room for the reader to step over that threshold and start reading.

As Robin Hobb you’ve written a number of fantasy books. Could you give us a rough idea of how those series fit together, and in what order people should read them?

In the Realm of the Elderlings, I’ve written very chronologically—it’s with the passing of time—so if you want to read the stories in chronological order and get all of the references to one another, you would start with the Farseer trilogy, which is Assassin’s Apprentice, Royal Assassin, and Assassin’s Quest. Then you would move on to the Liveship Traders trilogy, because although there’s no obvious continuation of characters from Farseer to Liveship Traders, the events that happen in Farseer directly affect what’s happening down in Bing Town. And, of course, after you’ve read the Liveship Traders trilogy and you return to the Fitz and Fool stories in the Tawny Man trilogy, you will find that what has been happening in Bing Town definitely affects what happens up in the Six Duchies, which is very true of our world as well. After the Tawny Man trilogy, I took a brief side step into a different world, and I wrote the Soldier Son trilogy, which has no relation at all to the Realm of the Elderlings—it’s kind of a gunpowder fantasy. And then I have returned to that world with the Rain Wilds chronicles. They continue events and they pick up the life threads of a few characters from the Liveships trilogy, but it`s also talking about what happens with the serpents and the dragons.

How many people recognize that the map of the Six Duchies is Alaska, and what’s the background on that?

People talk to me about “Is that the map of Alaska?” It shares a lot of features with it. Somebody pointed out that if you turn it upside down there are a lot of shared features. But basically, again, it’s a question of “Write what you know.” I wanted a long string of islands that went out into the sea, similar to the panhandle of Alaska. There are a lot of things that come from real life into my written work, such as seismic activity, and lahars, and tidal waves. [Laughs] The geography of the Six Duchies and the rocks and things are very similar to Kodiak Island. Essentially I sent off a scratched-out map—because I’m by no means artistic—to both of the publishers, in the UK and the U.S. That is why the maps are different in the UK editions from the U.S. editions, because the publishers immediately recognized my lack of talent in the map-drawing area, and they actually commissioned maps. So if you look at the two maps, they don`t exactly match, and things I had sketched in, such as the ice shelves that cover land to the far north, and the sea that’s there, are interpreted slightly differently in both of those. So the resemblance to Alaska actually became greater in the final product than when I was sketching out the panhandle and islands that I wanted, and things like that.

There’s a science fiction author David Marusek, and I heard that when he wanted to write his first novel he moved to this shack in Alaska, because the Government pays you to live there, and it’s really cheap. I was just wondering, do you think that’s a good strategy for novelists, to all move to Alaska?

I would say that “paying you to live there” is a wild exaggeration. There is a kickback from the oil pipeline money, which my relatives who have remained in Alaska do receive. They get a pipeline bonus every year. And of course there is no income tax up there. But for all of that, there are taxes to pay and other expenses. What you may save in taxes, you’re going to spend buying the correct gear to live in Alaska. If you’re actually living in a very rural area, you’re going to need to layer up. And what you’re going to spend on buying an orange, or a banana, or fuel oil is . . . you’re still going to experience a lot of expenses there. So it’s rather like people who talk about how Anne McCaffrey moved to Ireland. There’s probably benefits, there’s probably drawbacks. I would say that if you want isolation, if you want to get away from the internet, if you want to have peace and quiet . . . or if you want to experience some of the skills that are actually necessary in a more—I don’t want to say primitive, but a more self-reliant location—certainly Alaska would be a good choice. The fact that I grew up in a family where we hunted and fished a lot for food, and we had a huge garden, and we had to put that food up for the winter, and we had to deal with the kind of day-to-day thoughts about survival in deep cold. You didn’t run out in your shorts and T-shirt and flip-flops, and hop into a car and say, “I’m just going a few miles to a friend’s house,” because that could be a life-or-death decision, if you slid off the road or something like that.

What was your first exposure to science fiction and fantasy literature?

I think it’s really hard to draw a hard-and-fast line and say Grimm’s Fairy Tales doesn’t count as science fiction or fantasy. Or at what point do we say mythology is not fantasy, so reading mythology when you’re young does not count as an exposure to fantasy? And of course I grew up reading fairy tales, beast fables, Aesop’s fables, The Jungle Book, and a lot of my father’s old fairy tale books. My mom would sometimes bring home . . . from the second-hand store she would bring home the digest-size magazines of the time, you know, Fantastic and Amazing and Analog. And horror. I had a lot of exposure to writers like Robert Bloch when I was a teenager. I absolutely loved horror, The Twilight Zone, things like that, and that was where I definitely felt at home as a reader and as a writer.

Your Liveship Traders series, which you mentioned earlier, is about sailing vessels with magical figureheads that think and talk. What was it about the idea of living ships that made you want to write about them?

My husband is third generation maritime, and both of my sons have followed him more or less into that trade. I would often have the opportunity to go up and spend time on whatever ship he was working on. During the summer, I would take sometimes a younger child or two with me, and we would go up and spend some time on a salmon tender or herring tender, and be on the ship. What struck me about his experiences—all the way back to when he was a boy, because he grew up on fishing vessels—was that every one of the ships that he lived on or sailed on had their own personalities that seemed independent of who was crewing them. There were some ships where nothing ever seemed to go wrong, and other ships where everything seemed to go wrong. I remember dropping him off—he was taking a tug across from Seattle to Hawaii—and we got on it, and it was very restless at the dock, and the captain, Captain Jack, said to me, “One thing I want you to know about this boat is she rides really rough, but she always knows which way is up.” Which means she’s not going to roll, she’s not going to turn turtle. And so that was his way of reassuring me that I would see my husband again. [Laughs] But the fact that he would say that about the boat meant that he felt that the boat knew which way was up. And there are other boats that, if you talk to the local fishermen, they say, “No, that’s a bad luck boat. I don’t sail on that boat. Things just go wrong on there.” So to get from that to the idea that the ship is alive and has its own personality, and has a living, speaking figurehead, is a very small step.

You say in your author notes that your husband doesn’t read your fiction. Could you tell us a bit about that?

What I discovered with my husband reading my stories is that he sees right through me. Writers always think that we’re writing at a distance from ourselves, and actually we’re all out there walking around in our underwear, and people know much more about writers than we realize. They know what our fascinations are, they know what themes we come back to over and over. They see a character type who crops up over and over, and they say, “OK, I know something about you. This absent mother, or this cruel, heartless cousin, there’s something in your life that mirrors that.” Which may or may not be true. A lot of times it’s not true, and it’s strictly a fascination we have with that story element. But when Fred would read a story—or especially if it was a work in progress—he would say, “Oh, is that character modeled on so and so?” And half the time he would take something which I was not consciously aware of and bring it, boom, right out into the open, and when that happened it really . . . for me it was a total “Oh, I was about to have that character encounter a really messy death, and now that I know that it’s modeled on our dear friend whosit, that’s going to be really uncomfortable for me to write. I don’t think I can write that story the way I was thinking about it.” So one day we were talking about it and laughing about it, and Fred said, “Well, I just won’t read them anymore. It’s OK.” And I thought, “That might actually be the best.” For the most part, Fred is not a fiction reader. He likes to read non-fiction related to his trade. He likes to read adventure that is based on an actual thing that happened. For instance, The Long Walk is one of his favorite books, or The Life of Jigoro Kano, or a book called Supertanker, that talks about the latest technology and advances in tankers. So for him to read my work had actually been more or less his “Well, what are you doing?” favor kind of thing rather than “I’m deeply interested in fantasy and science fiction.” So it was no sacrifice for him, and it freed me up to write without having a reviewer within the walls, and it just works very well for us.

In an interview I heard you say that growing up you had a cat named “John the Baptist.” What’s the story with that?

We lived in Berkley at the time, and we had a kitten. My brothers and sisters, we all went to Catholic school. I was in preschool at the time, so I wasn’t there, but they were coming up with a name for the cat, and they decided they’d name the cat “John the Baptist.” We had a lot of cats with peculiar names, from “Dressing Salad”—not “Salad Dressing,” but “Dressing Salad”—to “John the Baptist,” to “Stupid,” to “C’mere,” which was because the cat would not respond to its name, so it just became “Hey, c’mere.” But I do recall my mother standing on the back porch in Berkley calling, “Here John the Baptist, John the Baptist, John the Baptist,” and the neighbors very much enjoying that.

Are there any other new or upcoming projects you’d like to mention?

I just sent out the galley corrections this morning on a short story for Asimov’s that’s called “Old Paint.” That’s a Megan Lindholm story. I am working through coming up with a final draft on a Robin Hobb shorter work—which doesn’t mean [shorter] by much—but it’s a shorter work, which will be “The Willfull Princess and the Piebald Prince.” It’s actually stepping back in time in the Six Duchies, and again, it will kind of shine a spotlight on something that happened back then, which triggered events that were set in motion in the Assassin’s Apprentice story. And then of course there is still the fourth book in the Rain Wilds chronicles, so those are all the things I’ve got coming my way and going on here right now.

 What other epic fantasies do you think people should check out?

Oh, I’ll throw Joe Abercrombie’s name in the hat there. I’m currently reading his book Heroes, and wow, in his string of books he’s definitely attacking epic [fantasy] on the very small and personal scale, which I like. I’ve read Prince of Thorns, and wow, that’s a strange and wonderful ride. I started into Prince of Thorns going, “Why on earth did my editor send me this? This is hard and this is dark and, oh gosh, it’s disgusting. This is a horrible character.” And then of course you turn the page! So I’m looking forward to his next book, and I think that he is definitely a writer to watch. Mark Lawrence. I’ll toss in one more—Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains, now that was one I really enjoyed. Oh, and Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn. See, I could keep you here all day, but I think I’ll stop with those.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast airing on Wired.com. 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.

Artist Gallery
Dylan Pierpont

Artist Spotlight: Dylan Pierpont
J. T. Glover

Dylan Pierpont is a young artist focusing on concept art and illustration. He got his BFA from the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in 2011 and has already worked with a number of companies, doing everything from environment illustrations to album art. Whether working with brush or stylus, he has a strong grasp of the foundations of art, giving even his conceptual sketches a strong sense of roundedness and texture.

What are your personal touchstones when it comes to steampunk, and how did they influence “The Cartographer?” Are you more gaslight romance, or airships on Mars?

I had wanted to do a steampunk-themed piece for some time before the inspiration finally hit for “The Cartographer.” It’s such a uniquely diverse genre to work with, and there are all sorts of interpretive ways to approach the subject matter. I suppose it depends on my mood, but if I had to choose I’d be part of an airship crew. I’m a huge adrenaline junkie, so I’m game for anything that gets me off the ground and into the stratosphere!

Elsewhere you’ve laid out your process for creating “The Cartographer” in great detail, including use of digital and traditional media for different stages of the project. The charcoal value study stood out in particular. Do you regularly combine media, or did something in the piece demand it?

Using charcoal for the value study was something my professor at the time suggested. Normally I would have maintained a completely digital approach, but I really enjoyed mixing up the media for a change. Charcoal was the most logical choice because of its malleability and versatility in regard to value. You can swath a whole page in a layer of charcoal and start drawing out your highlights with a kneaded eraser. All that’s left to do is re-establish your accents and shadows; you’ll start turning those forms in no time.

In general, what tools and media are you most comfortable with, and how do you choose between them for different projects?

I think it’s fair to say that I’ve started to grow into the title of “digital artist” despite my very traditional schooling. Learning to mix oils or feeling the crumble of charcoal in your hands is something no digital application can match. There’s something to be said for creating a one-of-a-kind original sketch, even if it’s just the foundation for a computer-generated end product, but I feel as though the tools each artist wields, whether digital or traditional, don’t matter nearly as much as the idea he or she is trying to convey.

Which artists inspire you and contributed to the development of your style?

Honestly, I’ve lost count. After entering art school and building relationships with other students and professors, my library of inspirational artists has just exploded. Anyone from Alberto Pasini to Craig Mullins; Jean-Léon Gérôme to Russ Mills to Kai Lim to Zdzislaw Beksinski. On the illustration side I’d definitely say Kekai Kotaki, Aleksi Briclot, James Gurney, Michael Komarck, and Lucas Graciano. Those gentlemen can compose like nobody’s business. If I had to list the people whose work has pushed me to pursue a career in production art, I’d say without hesitation Dylan Cole, Raphael Lacoste, Marko Djurdjevic, Feng Zhu, and Dermot Power. These guys are a wealth of knowledge and motivation, and they push me to keep working long after dark, night after night.

Can you talk about the experience of working on CBS’ Facebook game for The Big Bang Theory?

It was a completely different working environment than what I was used to in school. During my art education we were conditioned to construct stories for a multitude of fictitious clients, but overall the deadlines were fairly generous in comparison to production art. You were given days, not hours, to work through the thumbnails, explore lighting and color options, perfect the composition, design the characters and sets, and throw some nice polish on the whole piece before a class critique. At my internship working on Mystic Warlords of Ka’a, we were expected to handle all of those creative problems and work within the confines of a pre-established design. It took me a while to find my bearings, but I can’t thank my illustration lead and art director enough for their support and for teaching me how to further my craft.

Your more recent work includes naturalistic backdrops, often with trees and other vegetation incorporated into the central figures. Is this due to personal inclination? The demands of assignments? A desire to solve different problems?

Fantasy is a relatively new genre for me. I grew up on game and film titles like Halo, Splinter Cell, Pitch Black, and The Matrix, so my personal interests have always sided with a modern-to-futuristic design treatment. I’ve only just recently started exploring the fantasy realm and I’ve had a tendency (for better or worse) to set the scenes outdoors. In the case of Warlords, a lot of it had to do with the history of the given race or faction, so there wasn’t a lot of leeway as to where those particular characters could be depicted.

Do you follow any particular art/illustration blogs or communities? If so, how does what you get from them influence your own work?

One of the most valuable presents I’ve ever received was a subscription to ImagineFX magazine nearly 2 years ago. Along with a slew of new artists, IFX exposed me to online groups like Crimson Daggers and the Chiustream. It’s really amazing how guys like Dave Rapoza, Dan Warren, and Bobby Chiu offer free advice and critique to just about anyone that’s willing to submit their work. Feng Zhu uploads new work on his Twitter page almost daily, and he records a video tutorial that’s posted to YouTube at least once a month. I’m also a big fan of the guys over at sidebarnation.com and follow their artist interviews almost religiously. I need to be more proactive about this, but the weekly/monthly challenges on conceptart.org, cghub.com and gameartisans.org are great for getting your work seen by both amateurs and professionals alike and can help to get you working outside of your comfort zone.

What would be your dream illustration assignment?

Aside from publishing my own personal intellectual property, I’d love nothing more than to see my name attached one day to a piece of key art/illustration for one of two clients: Weta or Ubisoft.

Sometimes your palette is restrained and naturalistic, sometimes saturated and electric. How do you determine where you’re going to go with the color scheme for a particular painting?

Color has always been one of those tricky elements in painting for me. I have a habit of over-saturating my pallet, and that can at times completely go against the mood I’m trying to create. Every other day or so I’ll do some quick, hour-long color studies from movie stills or National Geographic photos just to see how certain colors work in various lighting situations. It’s amazing how, for example, one artist’s use of yellow brings warmth and light into a piece while another artist might choose to use a shade of that same yellow to bring about a feeling of sickness and despair. The images I see from games like Assassins’ Creed and Uncharted are absolutely gorgeous examples of what I’d like to see in my own work someday.

What are you working on right now?

For the past six months I had the good fortune to freelance with some extremely talented people over at Digital Adaptations on their first studio project, “The 39 Steps,” which should be released later this spring. Since finishing, I’ve been utilizing my time to work on personal projects or take on whatever commissions I can manage to help bulk up my portfolio. I’d like to start sending out my work in the next month or so and see what’s available because I’m ready to stop working from home and get back into a studio environment, wherever that may be.

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 Sympathy
Eric Gregory

The apartment was in his name, and the Accord was in hers. It took Lauren less than a minute to step out one door and into the other. She put her suitcase in the floorboard and her laptop bag in the passenger seat. Her container garden fit snugly in the back.

Lauren had expected some frisson at the threshold, a shiver as she shrunk from a we into an I. Instead, she cracked her knuckles and smiled and rolled down the window. She drove by the seminary, half-listening to You Bet Your Garden and glancing through windows. Inside, men of God slouched in office chairs, staring listlessly at a screen. She didn’t see Ryan, but that was all right; she felt quiet and rich and pleased, as if she’d reached the end of a sad book. She drove on.

The phone rang once, around six. Lauren had set it up to send him to a personalized voicemail, which explained that she was gone for good. He didn’t leave a message. Traffic was light.

Four hours out, she took a long, twisting exit into a town that was really a truck stop. It was, she thought, a pretty good truck stop, somehow more authentic than a Travel Plaza full of gelato and electronic massage booths. They had showers and barbecue and bitter coffee. In the strip mall across the street, there was a liquor store and a porn shop and a tattoo parlor, none of which seemed to be doing much business. She got a room in a smoky motel beside an empty Hardee’s (the sign still telling her to try a Thickburger), considered checking out the porn shop, and finally decided against. Instead, she sat on the toilet with her laptop and read about the weather in San Francisco, then turned on the TV and watched talking heads on mute, their jowls flushing as the ticker scrolled exposition. Sometime after midnight, the phone beeped: a voicemail. She dismissed it and set an alarm. She kicked off her boots and tugged off her jeans and tank-top, stripped the blanket from the bed and curled up between the yellow sheets. She left the TV on, its pale old faces pouting into the dark. She thought she might go west in the morning, maybe even as west as she could go, and she went to sleep thinking about Alcatraz and Long Beach and fault lines. She woke only once, to the scrape and rattle of something rooting through the trash outside.

Lauren dropped off her room key in a repurposed mailbox, then walked across the street to the truck stop. The breakfast buffet was better than the last night’s barbecue. French toast sticks, omelets full of garlic and jalapeno, smiling pancakes with enormous chocolate freckles. A young guy in a John Deere hat grinned at her piled-up plate, seemed like he wanted to comment, but only nodded and said, “Ma’am.”

Lauren had made it to the last pancake when the girl slid into her booth. She looked about a decade younger than her, hardly out of high school. Thin, short. Frizzy red hair. A shiny bead of a nose piercing. She wore an oversized Tulane hoodie, carried a purse covered with old comic book characters. Her voice was low and rough, much huskier than Lauren expected.

“Howdy,” she said. “I’m Madison. Going east.”

For a moment, Lauren thought her name was Madison Going East. Then she realized what the girl had asked. She shook her head, wiped chocolate from her lips with the back of her hand. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m headed west.”

“Really?”

“Sure. California.”

“Why?”

Lauren shrugged. “See what’s there.”

“Nothing out west but the devil and the sun gone down.”

Lauren frowned. Speared another chunk of pancake. Madison rested her elbows on the table, cupped her chin in her hands, and watched Lauren eat. “So, what,” she asked eventually, “you got people?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Out west. You got people there?”

“My sister,” Lauren lied.

Madison shook her head like a disappointed teacher. She took a sip of Lauren’s coffee, then put her purse on the table and dug around inside. Lauren thought she heard clinking glass. Finally, the girl pulled out a fistful of coins and dropped them on the table. Gestured for Lauren to examine them. They looked like candy gold. She picked one up. On one side there was a tree. On the other, a woman’s face in profile. Lauren put the coin down on the table. Glanced over her shoulder at the truckers in the next booth, who pretended not to watch her. All except John Deere, who smiled and nodded again.

“What are these?” she asked. “Canadian?”

Madison shrugged.

“You want to pay me in Canadian coins to take you east.”

“It’s you or them.” Nodding toward the truckers. “I like you better.”

Shit, thought Lauren. “How far you wanting to go?”

“Crossville, Tennessee. Couple hours outside Knoxville.”

“And you got people there?”

The question was a sigh. She already knew what she was going to do, and so did Madison. The rest was small talk. The girl leaned across the table, lowered her voice, careful in success. “Good people,” she said. “If you need a place to crash . . .” She let the offer hang.

Lauren thought of all the folks she knew on the East Coast, the cities where college friends had made colonies. Lexington, Atlanta, DC. Her mom lived in Nashville. It wasn’t the wild choice, perched over a fault line, but it was smarter, safer. She pulled the coffee back to her side of the table, drank it down, then swept the girl’s coins into her palm. “You got bags?” she asked, standing up.

Madison grinned.

At first, Lauren had worried that Madison would be a big talker, but once they were on the road, the girl leaned her head back and went to sleep. The GPS (Lauren called it “the Bitch”) gave cool, stern directions to Tennessee, and teenagers sang country music on the radio. It reminded her of vacations with Ryan: her driving, him sleeping. She’d always felt a sort of maternal loneliness on those trips, ferrying her passenger through worlds he never saw.

Madison twitched in her seat now and then. Lauren couldn’t tell if she slept hard or badly. When the girl woke, around eleven, she seemed confused, spooked. She hugged her knees to her chest, then took the phone from the dashboard and fiddled with the GPS.

“Bad dreams?” Lauren asked.

“Not exactly.”

Two words, muttered, and then Madison ignored her. Lauren tried to think of something else to say. She changed radio stations, found Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!

“How long you been at Tulane?” Lauren asked.

“Not long.”

“Were you there for the hurricane?”

Madison shook her head. Eyes on the phone, distracted. “I was out of the country. We need to get off. Now. Next exit.”

Lauren glanced aside at her. She was pale as paper. “You have to pee?”

“Just get off.”

“There’s a truck coming up on the right—”

“I’m telling you. Get off.”

Her eyes were bloodshot, and there was something fragile in her voice. Like glass, clinking. Lauren thought, Christ, I picked up a crazy person. She hit the blinker, swerved onto the exit ramp and started to make a left, but Madison shouted, “No, right!” When Lauren tried to pull into a McDonald’s, the girl slapped the dash. “Keep going,” she said. “Just a little farther.”

Madison told her to turn left in five hundred feet. Lauren pulled into a big, empty shopping center, where the only living business was WE BUY GOLD, and put the Accord in park.

“Look,” she said, “you’re going to have to—”

“Give me the coins.”

“What?”

“The coins I gave you. I need them.”

Lauren stared at her, and Madison stared right back. She’s not, Lauren thought, the kind of girl you can say no to. She dug the coins out of her pocket, slapped them in Madison’s palm. “You got the wrong driver,” she said.

“The wrong driver.”

“I can’t take you. I’m sorry. I can’t do it.”

Madison shook her head. “You don’t want to go,” she said.

“What?”

“You don’t want to leave me.”

Was that a threat? “Okay,” said Lauren.

“You don’t want to go,” Madison repeated. She dropped the coins in her superhero purse and slid out of the car. Looked back at Lauren. “I know your name, okay? I see you. You’re gonna stay here with me, right?”

Lauren didn’t mean to respond. But her mouth had its own answer.

“Right,” she whispered.

Madison nodded once, then headed into WE BUY GOLD. Lauren sat, utterly still, her hands on her thighs. The AC had only been off for a minute, and she was already sweating. She frowned, stared at the key in the ignition, thought of turning it. So easy. It would be so easy to turn that key and leave Madison behind. She was good at leaving; leaving was easy. But she couldn’t make herself raise her hand. You won’t go, Madison had said. She’d made the truth by speaking it plain.

“Shit,” Lauren said.

She yanked the key out, stuffed it in her pocket. Threw the car door open and stepped into WE BUY GOLD. The shop bell jangled behind her. Madison glanced over her shoulder and smiled, and the gold man gave her a little wave. He was short and stocky, leather-skinned, with bushy white eyebrows. Like Colonel Sanders’ younger cousin. Between his fingertips and the glass of his display was a small mountain of coins. Wordlessly, Madison handed Lauren her purse. Hold, please.

Without thinking, she took the purse and tucked it into the crook of her elbow. It was half-unzipped, too-heavy; Lauren found herself zipping up the purse, smiling at the gold man, pretty as you please. She felt powerless in the face of the younger woman’s gall. Like a helpless parent.

“I can’t imagine,” said the gold man, peering at a coin through a monocle, “where you found these.” He sounded amiable, more fascinated than concerned. “They are really very old.”

Madison blushed, as if he’d complimented her on her good taste.

“Estate sale,” she said.

The gold man frowned and scrutinized the coin between his fingers. Lauren looked down, echoed the man’s frown. Something felt off, detuned. The purse. It was too heavy, and the weight felt wrong. Like an unasked question in her mouth, some lost word on the tip of her tongue. The gold man shook his head, whistled. “Well, hon,” he said, sliding his laptop across the glass, “this here’s what I can give you.” He pointed to a number on the screen. Madison pursed her lips, feigned contemplation.

“Okay,” she said.

It was a ridiculous number. Madison held out her hand, Purse please, and Lauren gave it to her. Madison signed a paper and placed a folded set of bills in her bag. She thanked the man, started to walk away, and then stopped. Turned around. “You got any iron?” she asked.

The gold man looked confused. “You mean a gun?”

“I mean the metal.”

“No, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

“Right,” said Madison. “You have a good one.”

She led Lauren outside, handed her the folded bills.

“Back on the road,” she said.

Lauren had liked to annoy Ryan by saying she was born ten years too late to believe in God. But the fact was, she saw no real need for an opinion on the matter and so never developed one. When, on the other hand, her father claimed to dream people’s faces before he met them, she’d believed him, because her father wasn’t a lying man and the universe was a ridiculous place. It was important to believe in her father, so she did.

But she didn’t know what to make of Madison.

Of course there were people who could make you do things. Mothers and fathers and bosses. Preachers and police. There was power in the world; there were words spoken willfully. But this was something weirder, something wilder. This was gall. And Lauren didn’t know what to think about it. Worse, she didn’t know what she needed to think about it.

She drove. Madison was easy now, as cheerful and self-possessed as she’d been in the truck stop. She hummed along to a song about heartbreak and smoked out the window, glancing now and then at the Bitch. She joked about stupid billboards, pointed at animals on the side of the road. “Christ, that was a fox,” she said. “Jesus, did you see it?”

Lauren bit the insides of her cheeks. Drummed her fingers on the wheel, out of time with the music. The cracked, wet Mississippi roads reflected a gray sky. Even the trees seemed old, in disrepair.

“You need to calm down,” said Madison.

Lauren almost laughed. “Okay.”

“You running from something? Someone after you?”

“There’s nothing after me.”

“Looks like you picked up and ran,” said Madison. “What do you do?”

Lauren glanced at her. “I’m between jobs.” That wasn’t strictly true, not yet. She’d called Stephen before she left and persuaded him that she needed a few days’ vacation.

“What did you do?”

“Best Buy.”

Madison didn’t look like she understood. “And what’s next?” she asked.

“Something else.”

As she talked, Lauren felt her heart slow. Her fingers relaxed on the wheel. She wasn’t calm, exactly, but conversation was better than silent panic. The more she talked, the more she was able to persuade herself that Madison was a normal girl—a bit brusque, maybe, a bit forceful, but not even the strangest hitcher she’d ever picked up. That was the sculptor on the way back from New Orleans. He called himself a “chaos artist.” After a brief lull, she worked up her nerve, glanced aside at her passenger. “You grow up in Louisiana, then?”

“Oh, no. All over. My parents were kind of missionaries.”

“Yeah?”

“Spent a couple years in the Truant Valley, Yarrowhold, the Melancholy Coast. When I turned thirteen, we finally settled down in Portland. My parents opened an appliance repair place. I lived in Washington until college.”

“What kind of missionaries were they?” Lauren asked.

Madison didn’t understand.

“I mean, Baptists, Mormons, Scientologists . . . ?”

She looked out the window.

“Just missionaries.”

Lauren decided not to press the subject. She nodded, turned up the music. They were listening to the music on her iPod now, and the song was “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” The Bitch told her to bear right in a quarter of a mile. Lauren glanced aside, found the girl holding her knees against her chest.

“Was it hard?” Lauren asked. “Moving around?”

“It was the best time of my life.”

Madison pulled a cigarette from her jacket pocket but didn’t light it, merely pinched the little black cylinder between her fingers.

“I think it kind of ruined me for the real world. Once you see what all’s out there, all these beautiful, impossible places—it’s depressing, you know? You can stand in the driveway of any house in any American subdivision and see your whole life at once, the kids and the dog and the office, the diseases and the end and the realtors.” She fiddled with the cigarette. “I need something rawer than that.”

“Is that what’s in Crossville?” Lauren asked. “Something raw?”

Madison twisted around to smile at her. “Got it in one.”

Lauren looked down at her hands on the wheel, slender bones working beneath skin as she tightened her grip.

“Why did you want to ride with me?” she said. “Why me and not someone else?”

Madison took a drag from her cigarette. Lauren hadn’t seen her light it.

“You want the truth?” said Madison.

“Please.”

“You’re a rare girl. You have a strange soul.”

“I have a strange soul,” said Lauren.

Madison nodded. “You make the world more than other people do. Or you could. You could make the world and you don’t even know.”

“I don’t understand,” said Lauren. “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“That’s my point,” said Madison.

Ryan changed in the summer. Eight months out of twelve he was gentle, even generous, but once the mercury hit ninety, he withdrew until October, hardly speaking except to snipe at her. He was sexless, sullen; he spent hours staring at his laptop, pretending to write or playing Call of Duty. He ignored trash, dishes, bills; he snapped at her when she asked him to help with housework. When money was low, he asked her why she couldn’t find a real job.

She’d confronted him once, the July before last, suggesting that maybe he had reverse seasonal affective disorder. He said if anything was wrong with him it was that he grew up in Bangor but became a man in Austin, slowly associating the hot core of America with all the disappointments in his life. He said lots of things like that, especially when he was feeling defensive. He’d always wanted to be a poet.

After that lone confrontation, the subject of his summer cruelty was somehow anathematic, an edict enforced not so much by Ryan as the Ryan-voice in her head. Once or twice, after cookouts, their friends came to Lauren to ask what was up his ass, and she pretended not to have noticed a change in him. “He’s a divinity student,” she joked. “There’s always something up his ass.” They laughed and dropped the subject, but the uncomfortable truth was that it wasn’t true at all. By October he was giddy, ridiculous, demanding that his friends help him make home zombie movies for Halloween. He surprised her at work with homemade burritos, kissed her neck in the shower and left dirty haiku in the pages of her books. Eight months out of twelve, he was someone she could live with, and in a way, that was the worst of it.

She spent each summer waiting for the fall.

Madison insisted they stop outside Birmingham.

“It’s just three or four hours,” said Lauren, pointing at the Bitch. “I feel fine. We could keep going.” She didn’t say, I could be free of you. Her legs ached, and she had littered the backseat with Diet Mountain Dew bottles. She felt lightheaded. Madison wasn’t frantic this time, but she was firm. She shook her head, turned down the music.

“The sun’s going down. You’re tired. There’s a Holiday Inn off the next exit.”

They got off at the next exit. Madison paid for the adjoining rooms, then led them to the third floor. She opened Lauren’s room but kept the keycard. “In you go,” she said. Lauren dropped her bags and retreated to the bathroom. She tied her hair back, stared at herself in the mirror, then washed her hands until they blazed red. When she came back out of the bathroom, she found Madison waving a salt shaker over the windowsill. Something clinked like glass against the AC unit, glinting in the dusklight like metal snow.

“Uh,” said Lauren.

“I’ve already done the door. Don’t touch them.”

Lauren crouched by the door, examined the messy line of metal shards that crossed the carpet.

“What are they?” she asked.

“Iron filings.”

“Okay.” She paused. “Why?”

“Keep the Sympathy out.”

The word she used wasn’t exactly sympathy. It sounded like sympathy without the vowels.

“Okay,” said Lauren, this time to herself.

The girl spread her iron on the windowsill, then looked back at Lauren.

“Don’t touch them,” she repeated.

“I won’t.”

“You can’t open the door or fuck with the windows.”

Lauren nodded.

“The door to my room is open. Knock if you need me.”

“Okay.”

Madison tucked the salt shaker into her bag, opened the door between rooms. “Sleep well,” she said, and closed the door behind her. Lauren blinked, exhaled. She felt lightheaded, and sat down on the bed. For several minutes she stared out the window at the orange sky, breathing.

She opened her laptop, got on Facebook. Ryan had posted “What?” and several of their friends—probably without knowing she’d gone—had Liked it. She thought about responding, saying she was fine, but instead updated her own status to, “In Birmingham.” The Lauren on the screen smiled out at her, arm in arm with her boyfriend, and she frowned back. Sooner or later she was going to have to change that picture. She closed the laptop, took out the folded bills and counted them until she reached the ridiculous number. Between savings and the gold money, she thought she could get by for a year. Longer, if she stayed with friends.

Three hours, she thought. Three hours, I could be in Nashville.

She wanted to stuff the bills in her pocket. She wanted to kick apart the little line of iron filings, throw open the door, and race down the hall and stairwell. She wanted to call her mom and apologize for the short notice. But her head felt heavy, and the thought of running twisted her stomach. She closed her fist around the money, lay back on the bed and closed her eyes.

The lights are still on, she thought. Someone ought to turn out the lights.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” she said.

He didn’t respond. He didn’t turn to face her. She could tell by his breathing that he was awake, but he kept on pretending sleep. She glanced sideways at his back, pale blue in the nightlight, dotted with that familiar constellation of moles. “I know you’re awake,” she said.

Something batted at the window. Tree limbs in the wind.

“I know you’re awake,” she repeated. “But you’d rather be asleep. And that’s what terrifies me. I want to wait for the real you to come back, but I’m afraid the summer’s going to keep you. I’m afraid you’re going to go to sleep, and we’re never going to be the old us again. The summers will get longer because of global warming and you’ll be so hateful all the time that our friends will all leave us and I’ll only ever see this other you, this stranger, and we’re going to strangle one another. We are going to suffocate somewhere and no one’s going to find us.”

It felt good to say the words. It felt like fall. But he was quiet, his breathing shallow. The clicking on the window was regular, clicks in patterns of seven. She stared at her hands.

“Ryan,” she said. “Goddammit.”

No answer.

“I swear to God,” she said, quiet, as if kids might hear, “I will leave you where you lie if you don’t talk to me. You think I won’t?”

There was a pause in his breathing, but he didn’t speak, and she didn’t touch him.

“I won’t do this for the rest of my life,” she said. “I won’t do it—”

Seven clicks sounded against the window, neat and rhythmic, seven hard clicks in a row. Finally, she looked up. In the window was the silhouette of a horned man, his fingernails tapping against the pane. The light around his head made it seem like he’d eclipsed a blue sun. Lauren lay very still, thinking the figure was a tree, a trick of the light. The thing’s head tilted slightly to the left, and he struck his fingers against the window again, rattling the glass in its frame.

“Ryan,” she hissed.

Seven clicks.

“Ryan, there’s a man outside.”

She reached across the bed, gripped Ryan’s arm. He was hot to the touch, unmoving.

Seven clicks, and thin cracks spiderwebbed across the glass. Lauren wondered if she could make it to the kitchen, to the steak knives. She wondered, absurdly, if Ryan was sick, if he had heard what she’d said. Seven clicks and a crash, and the window shattered. There was a soft, trilling sound, like a chicken or a kitten, and the light was in her eyes, and she shielded her eyes with her hand. The breeze blew inside.

She woke up blinking away the light. Her clothes were soaked and cold with sweat, and the AC unit whirred to her right. Madison sat at the table beside the window, sipping from a tiny Styrofoam cup, dark rings like coffee stains under her eyes. “There’s cappuccino,” the girl said. “And a bagel if you want it.”

Lauren shook her head. She could still feel the heat of Ryan’s skin, the adrenaline and dread. The dream still felt more vivid than the morning. She sat up, threw off the sheets, and waved away the food, her stomach shifting uncomfortably. Madison shrugged, Your loss.

“Tell me about the dream,” she said.

Lauren swallowed. Her mouth tasted rancid with sleep. “I was with my—” She didn’t know what he was now. “With Ryan. I was trying to tell him something. I was telling him I was going to leave. But there was a thing at the window, tapping. Like a man. With horns. I thought it was a man, but I think it was just an it. It broke the glass and came inside.”

Madison frowned into her breakfast.

“You want a shower?” she said.

“I want to go. Just give me a second.”

Lauren stumbled into the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror. Fought back a wave of nausea and gargled a tiny bottle of complimentary mouthwash. When she returned, Madison was on her knees, scooping the iron filings into her palms. She unscrewed the top of the salt shaker and poured the metal shards back inside, careful as a kid with a collection. Lauren wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “You ready?” she asked.

Madison gave her the keycards and asked her to turn them in. “I’ll take your bags,” she said. What did she want them for, Lauren wondered. Collateral? Lauren handed over her briefcase but kept the laptop bag, headed down to the lobby. She turned in the cards and then lingered over the continental breakfast, finally settling on a danish and a cup of apple juice. A cable news morning show played on the lobby’s giant flatscreen, and she couldn’t help but watch as she finished her food, transfixed and mystified by the New York laughs and CGI skylines. Finally feeling awake, she threw out her Styrofoam cup and felt the folded-up bills in her pocket.

Okay, she thought. Three hours.

She found Madison standing frozen in the parking lot, Lauren’s briefcase hanging limply at her side. The morning was already brutally hot; sweat beaded on the girl’s face. Lauren smelled gas, thick and astringent in her nose.

“Sorry,” she said, a kneejerk apology, “I got caught up . . .”

She trailed off, stopped beside Madison.

Inside the Accord, blue and purple flowers pressed against the windows like the dead palms of zombies. Vines snaked around the seats, and stalks hung gravid with too-large serrano peppers, tomatoes like heads, pumpkins and eggplants and a dozen other outsized crops that Lauren didn’t recognize, that she knew she’d never planted. Flowers she couldn’t name crowded the dashboard, fighting for space with spiny weeds.

“Jesus,” she said.

Black roots had burrowed through the bottom of the car and into the pavement below. The tires were all flat, root-pierced, and roots dangled from cracks in the door. Fluid pooled beneath the car—spilled gas mixed with something else, something viscous and white. Madison took a hesitant step forward, but Lauren pulled her back.

“Shit,” whispered Madison. “Oh shit.”

Lauren gripped her arm. She felt strangely calm. Even if none of this made sense, she knew what she needed to think about it, knew how she needed to respond. “Stay back,” she said. “Don’t touch anything. We need to get out of here, don’t we? We need to get away?”

Madison was white, paralyzed. Her eyes darted from Lauren to the car.

“Yes,” she nodded at last. “We need to get away.”

Lauren called for a tow, wondered vaguely what the driver would say when he saw the car-cum-greenhouse. Hell, she thought, and laughed, what will the insurance say? She didn’t particularly care, and she didn’t intend to wait and find out. “The keys and cash will be with the woman at the front desk,” she said. She called for a rental car next, and she and Madison waited in front of the hotel with their bags in their hands.

The girl was as shaken as Lauren had seen her, quiet and distracted, picking at the whites around her fingernails. She hardly seemed to notice when the rental arrived and Lauren guided her into the passenger seat. Far-gone as the girl was, Lauren figured she could have ditched her without much difficulty, but the money was thick in her pocket, and they were three hours from Crossville, and Madison really was somewhere else. She seemed young, all of a sudden, green, and for all her own fear and uncertainty, Lauren couldn’t bring herself to abandon someone so needful.

They drove in silence until they crossed into Tennessee. No music, no radio. Madison stared out the window, her hands on her bag. The sky ahead was vague with rain.

“Before,” Lauren said. “When you asked what I was running from. I lied.”

Madison turned to face her.

“I thought I was pregnant.”

It felt good to say the words. She hadn’t said them aloud yet, even alone in the bathroom, even in the middle of the night. Madison frowned, looked briefly away. Lauren smiled wryly.

“Not when I left. Before. My period came late, so I bought the pee test and it came up positive. False-positive, which pretty much never happens, right? But it did, and I didn’t know for like two weeks. I felt like I was in college again, freaking out like that. I imagined myself in yoga classes and hospital beds with this stranger in Ryan’s body and I thought, we are going to suffocate one another. I felt like this whole awful path was unfolding under my feet, and all I could do was follow it to the end. When I found out I was wrong, I was free, leaving seemed like the most natural thing in the world.”

Madison was silent. They drove past outlet malls, billboards advertising Southern Exposure. Raindrops collected on the windshield.

“It wants you,” the girl said.

“What?”

“The Sympathy.”

That word again. Sympathy without the vowels.

“I didn’t think it would follow you. I thought it would just get confused and lose my scent. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. And I know you won’t want to trust me, but you don’t have a choice.”

Lauren’s stomach knotted. “What did you do?”

“I used you as camouflage.”

Lauren gripped the wheel. The Bitch told her to bear right in one mile.

“Madison,” she said. “What are you running from?”

The girl hesitated.

“You want me to try to make it sound normal?”

“Flowers ripped up my car.”

“Okay.” Madison nodded. “You’re right. That’s true. It’s like a bloodhound.”

“Like a bloodhound,” Lauren repeated.

“You saw it in your dream. The horned thing. I stole from its kin, and they sicced it on me.” There was a light in Madison’s eyes, a kind of giddiness that outshone the fear. “When you cross back and forth too much, when you make a mistake, when you get caught—they sic the Sympathy on you. It tastes souls, it tracks souls. You can track a soul from the other side of the country, and it did. It found me, it found us, and it fucked up your car. The only reason we’re alive right now is we’re not alone, we’re on busy highways and I was careful with the iron.”

Lauren swerved to avoid a pothole. “It doesn’t like iron,” she said.

“None of them do.”

“Or roads? What do you mean about the highways?”

“It’s not the roads. It’s the people on them. When a bunch of humans get together, when we see the world together, we shape it. That’s what we do. We build the world together. Things like the Sympathy, things like the Folk on the other side, they live outside of our realities, or in the dark unfinished corners. In the uncertain spaces. Dreams and deserts and forests at night. You want to hide from them, you have to stay in crowds, stay where there are plenty of people. Or make sure you have some iron in your hand.”

Lauren remembered fingernails against glass.

“You said you made a mistake.”

Madison shook her bag. “I stole from the Sympathy’s Queen.”

“It has a Queen.”

The girl nodded.

“The coins,” Lauren said. “The gold. You stole it all.”

“I stole a lot of things,” Madison agreed.

Lauren felt her foot pressing harder on the accelerator.

“So why does it want me?”

Now Madison looked frustrated, impatient. “I told you. You’re a rare girl. You’re a shaper. You shape the world more than other people, you make the world in your image. Your soul is loud and bright and I knew it would disguise mine, but it’s like catnip to the Sympathy. The monster got a taste and now it’s off the leash, it’s hungry. And I’m only telling you because I fucked up, because I want to help you, and if you try to kick me out or run away—if you don’t do exactly as I say—you will die.”

“And what do you want me to do?” Lauren asked tightly.

Madison told her.

The place was just off the Interstate, but there wasn’t much to Crossville. The Bitch led them a mile and a half down a road that turned quickly to gravel and then to dirt, and the trees grew so dense above and around them that rain no longer dotted the windshield. Here and there on the roadside were abandoned tires and chains, beer cans, worn and empty pairs of sneakers. Without the Bitch’s preview snapshot of the destination, Lauren doubted she would have gone the last half-mile. But she pressed on, gritting her teeth.

Finally, they came to the treehouse.

Lauren had heard of it before, but never visited. Treehouse was the wrong word—it was a labyrinth of lumber wrapped around a tree, a tower cast in boards and nails, twisting overhead like an Escher illusion. The regional papers ran interviews with the builder and owner, an ex-preacher, on slow weeks. He called it an eternal work-in-progress, an architecture whispered constantly in his ear, and he said he would continue to build it until he died.

“Every labyrinth,” said Madison, “every true labyrinth, is a way into the other side. But there aren’t many true labyrinths in America.” Now that she’d opened up, the girl wouldn’t stop talking. She gripped her bag, babbled about true labyrinths.

Lauren turned off the car.

“The farther in we go, the farther we go into the raw space,” said Madison. “Once we reach the heart of the maze, the Sympathy will be on us quick.”

Lauren nodded, wordless, and stepped out onto the gravel of the parking lot. There was a Land Rover parked beside a child-sized stack of lumber, but Lauren didn’t see any signs of life. She listened for voices and only heard birds. The entire lot was shaded, leaves and seedpods scattered in the gravel. Madison touched her elbow and nodded toward her labyrinth. From below, it looked like the wooden skeleton of an upside-down pyramid.

Madison took the lead, quickly climbing the steps to the entrance. Inside, the smell of sawdust. The first room felt like a backwoods church under construction—crosses on bare walls, pews arranged around a platform. Lauren’s boots clomped on the raw pine floorboards. Madison led her quickly past the pews and up a creaking set of stairs, into a long hall lined with cheap mirrors. Doorways opened into makeshift bedrooms, reading rooms, broad and empty nameless rooms. The girl walked like she was at home, every turn and loose board familiar. She pointed out hidden crawlspaces, secret stairwells.

“You said you had people here,” said Lauren.

“What?”

“When we met. You said you had people here. You offered me a place to stay.”

“Oh,” said Madison, not looking back. “That was maybe not entirely truthful.”

They took spiraling stairways, ducked through barren plywood passages. Sunlight sliced through cracks between the panels. They walked across a floor scrawled over with letters that looked a little like Greek. She’d helped Ryan study Greek for two years now, and she knew enough to read scraps of the gospels, but she didn’t recognize any words. As they climbed farther, the geometries of the space seemed to shift; the angles were off, the halls too narrow, not quite straight, improbably long. Lauren lost her sense of the way they came, tried to find a window simply to figure out how high they were.

“Not far now,” said Madison.

She could have driven away. She could have been on the way to Nashville, on her way to tell her mom that it had all gone fucked and she didn’t know what to do. Was that why she was here? Because it had all gone fucked? Because she wanted someone to tell her what to do? Or was Madison still using that gall, dragging Lauren along? The girl wanted her to believe that she shaped and resolved the world around her, but Lauren felt unresolved herself, shaped by Ryan, shaped by Madison, shaped by the Sympathy.

Madison stopped. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Here.”

They stood in an empty room. Light peeked through hairline cracks in the ceiling. No windows and a single door, set on rusty hinges. The floors were pale white wood, and sepia photographs of naked, indistinct figures hung on the walls. The space seemed older than the rest of the treehouse; nails longer than her hand jutted halfway out of the floorboards. Madison drew her salt shaker from her bag and poured a circle of iron filings around Lauren.

“Stay inside this,” she said. She tried to raise a brave face, but her words and hands shook. “You’ll be safe here. No matter what happens, no matter what you hear, stay inside the iron and you’ll be safe.”

Madison said she was going to kill the Sympathy, but she didn’t look like a slayer of monsters. She looked like a shoplifting teenager. “Okay,” said Lauren, swallowing a miserable laugh. “I’ll stay here.” She felt a numb anger, and she felt sort of silly and futile, standing there in the circle, but she couldn’t work herself into any terror. She didn’t feel the terror that she felt she ought to feel.

“These things,” said Madison, “things like the Sympathy, they don’t have shapes the way you and I do. If you see it, it’s going to appear in your image, it’s going to look the way you make it look. It’s going to be . . .”

“What?”

“Unpleasant,” she finished.

“It’s going to try to scare me?”

Madison crouched in the corner of the room. She pulled a hunting knife from her bag and flipped it open. “No,” she said, “not exactly.”

“You’ve seen it before.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“What does it look like to you?”

“Flowers.”

Madison avoided her eyes, and they waited in silence after that. Lauren tried to concentrate her anger on the girl, but it wouldn’t take, it wouldn’t stick. Whatever impossible mistake she had made, however maddening she was, Madison was only a girl and she was risking her life now. Lauren needed someone more distant and indefensible to hate. She fished around in her pocket, pulled out her phone. The icon in the corner still flashed: one voicemail. She pressed the icon, raised the phone to her ear. There was a moment of static. Then Ryan’s voice.

“Fuck you,” he said. Already, she could tell he was drunk. He didn’t drink often. “Man, I’ve wanted to say that. You know what? Just fuck you. You think you can do this? Let me tell you something, honey. I know you. I know how you work. You’re not even really gone. You left while I was out and now you won’t pick up your phone, all to sustain the illusion, all so you can convince yourself that you’re really leaving. But here’s the thing. I don’t think you ever really meant to, not for more than a couple of days. You left your birth certificate, you left the title to your car, you left your goddamned Social Security card. I mean, Christ. I called Stephen, you know. You didn’t even quit your job, did you? You must’ve always known you were coming back. You were just killing time.”

Below her, the floor shivered.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” Ryan said. He paused, and when his voice came back, all of the bravado had evaporated. “I mean, God, Lauren, I know I’m not easy. You’re not easy. But I need you to make me whole. I need you to make me a good man. I love you. You’re supposed to love me.”

Her grip on the phone tightened.

“Just—fuck you,” Ryan said softly. “Fuck you. I love you. I’ll see you soon.”

He hung up.

Four to save, seven to delete.

The hinges of the door whined. Madison raised her knife. Her hand shook.

Lauren closed the phone and saw the Sympathy.

At first, it looked like a pale and slender gorilla, walking on stubby back legs and long arms. It had wide antlers, familiar from her dream. It approached slowly, its head tilted at an angle, trilling like a chicken or a kitten. There was a faint blue luminance to the thing; it looked smooth and hairless. It came closer, step by hesitant step, and finally Lauren understood that it was made of bodies, two bodies.

She and Ryan were twined like pale, blue-veined snakes around a caduceus. They were nude and broken, their bodies twisted to form a new body, their limbs wrapped around one another like vines. The thing’s head was her own and Ryan’s, fused; wide, wicked stag’s horns curled out of their open mouths. It smelled like him, too, it smelled like both of them together, musky and familiar but subtly wrong, subtly fungal. The Sympathy’s four eyes blinked, mismatched and empty. It passed Madison, oblivious or simply bored by her now, and stood before Lauren, hesitating at the circle of iron.

Lauren stared up at her own face. She felt very heavy, very still, and her anger was a weight. No one should see this, she thought. No one should see their own corpse, their own empty face and suffocation. Slow as a stone wheel, Lauren turned her head toward Madison. The girl grimaced, her knife down by her side. She raised it again and moved haltingly toward the monster’s back, breathing hard. Whatever Madison had done in the past, whatever she had stolen, she had done it by wits and in shadows. She was not a warrior. Still, she moved toward the Sympathy; she was trying to be brave. Lauren looked up into her own eyes and Ryan’s eyes, all four of them looking so seduced and curious, these lively eyes in the middle of dead faces. Then the eyes widened, and the mouths yowled.

Madison stood behind the Sympathy, her shaking knife buried to the hilt in the monster’s back. A fungal tang filled the air. The Sympathy twirled around, bleeding flowers, and swatted Madison with one long arm. She dropped the knife and fell hard, cracked her head against the boards of the wall. One of the boards bent and let the light in. Purple flowers fell from the Sympathy’s wound and onto the floor—a few floated through the air and landed on Lauren’s arm. She tried to brush the blood-flowers away, but they clung to her, leaving a pleasurable prickly sensation on her skin. She supposed she ought to be nervous after what the flowers had done to her car, but she felt a sort of calm distance from herself. She dropped her arm to her side.

Across the room, Madison struggled to her feet. Lauren watched her turn pale, watched the decision pass across her face. The girl met Lauren’s gaze, at least, inclined her head a little—not quite an apology, but an acknowledgment. Then she lurched toward the doorway and was gone.

Lauren listened to the girl’s footfalls on the old lumber of the halls outside, her steps hard and then fading as she ran for her raw places. The Sympathy ignored Madison again, fixed its attentions on Lauren. It pawed the air above the iron, wary but curious, then drew back with a hiss. It settled on its haunches, shifted its weight restlessly, wanting. It looked sort of pathetic in its agitation, like a hungry dog. Ryan had always hated dogs: He said they were noisy needy pitiful animals, but Lauren had seen the way he flinched when one approached him on the street. So they’d bought a cat, even though she was allergic.

The Sympathy opened its mouths and moaned. It was an awful gagging sound—the mouths were full of antlers—and it went on for much too long, longer than any living thing should have been able to gag. Then the Sympathy closed its mouths and stared at her.

“She tricked you, you know,” Lauren said. “She ran right by you.”

The monster didn’t seem to hear or understand her. It snorted and inched closer to the iron. Lauren raised her arm again and examined the flowers. They had grown and multiplied, wrapped themselves around her arm like a sleeve of tattoos or a gauntlet. The entire arm tingled, but it didn’t hurt. She felt cleaner now, stronger, charged with possibility. Lauren crouched and pried a loose nail from the floor. She didn’t understand what she was doing until the nail was in her hand, long and red with rust. She held the white light of the phone in one hand and the nail in the other, smiled sadly up at the Sympathy.

“You’re not a beast, are you?” she said.

The creature watched her hands, trilled once and squared its shoulders. It ducked its head toward her in a way that felt eerily imploring. Lauren peered up at its bowed head and remembered how it had felt to start again, how it had felt to drive by the seminary and tell herself that she had finished the book of her time with Ryan. She thought she understood what the Sympathy was asking.

“If you are a beast,” she said, “you don’t have to be. You’re a hound, you get sicced on people. You have a Queen, someone to make you fearsome. Is that right?” She paused. “You want me to make you into something else.”

The flowers covered her right arm now in a sort of purple latticework, but they had stilled and stopped growing, they stayed put. She liked how they looked, how they felt: The petals were cool and staticky. They thrummed against her bicep. She was armored in flowers, and the nail in her hand blurred into a sword, long and elegantly curved. She hoped she wouldn’t have to use it, but she liked the heft of the thing. She imagined how Ryan would look when he saw it, when he understood that the book was finished. She pocketed her phone and passed the sword to her left hand. The air was crisp. Something inside of her, something like a vast hand reached out and shaped the Sympathy into something new.

The creature shuddered as it deflated, like a time-lapse vision of starvation. But it didn’t make a sound. Her face and Ryan’s face relaxed into soft anonymity, their limbs folding together until they were indistinguishable, then contracting and shifting until the body before her was smaller than Lauren. Thinner, definitely, and maybe a head shorter, subtle and girlish in its curves. Her curves. Her hair was thick and frizzy and crimson, her freckles splashed across her face and chest like a field of stars. She stood nude and awkward, staring at her hands, swaying uncertain on her feet. Lauren stepped out of the circle of iron, gripped the sword and hesitated. Then she wrapped her armored arm around the girl. The Sympathy sagged into her.

Her eyes darted back and forth across Lauren’s face. Taking her in. There was something alien in the girl’s expression, an emotion that Lauren had never seen on a human face. Maybe, she thought, it was an emotion that belonged to the dark unfinished corners of the world, something restless and raw. But there was a current of something familiar there, too: a sort of eagerness. The Sympathy smiled up at Lauren, then out the door into the labyrinth. And then back again, intent, like she was ready now, like she was ready to leave.

© 2012 Eric Gregory.

Eric Gregory lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is working toward his MFA at North Carolina State University. His stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Interzone, Futurismic, Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction, and other publications. Find more at ericmg.com.

Forget You
Marc Laidlaw

She came into his life the way his cats crept into his lap. One day he was alone, had been alone for years, his life and his home empty of anyone but himself and a few friends who didn’t visit all that often anyway. And then at some point he realized she had been there for a while, in his house, in his bed, in every part of his life, having accomplished the transition so subtly that he could never say exactly when or how it had occurred.

He ran his hand along her cheek in a swift caress, brushing the line of her jaw as he tucked the one stray lock behind her left ear as he often did, and said, “How did we find each other?”

“Oh, you,” she said, with that look, as if the question were another of their habitual endearments. “You’re sweet.”

He traced her other cheek, looked deep into her right eye, then her left, having memorized the stained glass kaleidoscope pattern of her irises so clearly from this practice that he could see them easily when he closed his own eyes.

“No,” he said, “I’m serious. How?”

She laughed without a sound, just an exhalation, and mirrored the movement his hands were making, cupping his face in her own palms.

“Just lucky, I guess,” she said. “Me, I mean.”

“Of course, me too, I just . . .”

She kissed him, and he thought, Well, that’s one difference between her and the cats.

He asked his friends, when he thought of it, in the very infrequent moments when she was not with him. “How did we meet?” he asked. And they laughed because it was such an odd question that they knew he was setting them up for some kind of joke. And when he said, “No, I’m serious,” they grew serious too, and took on a puzzled, questioning tone. “Uh . . . you’re asking us? You guys have been together longer than we’ve been friends.”

He went through his photographs, the digital images first, looking farther and farther back through the files, and she was in them all, and he could remember now how she had been there at the time. Beyond a certain point there were no more photos, but that was because of a huge lightning storm, when they’d gone a week without power and his computer had been fried, with everything on it lost. So of course there were no digital photographs from the years before that. He found a box in the closet full of older prints and negatives, in envelopes date-stamped by the pharmacies and photobooths where he had dropped them off to be developed. And it was something of a relief to see that she was not in any of these. He could clearly recall how alone he had been then, but he still could not remember how she’d come into his life. One thing was becoming clear though: It was getting harder to remember life without her. Soon he feared that he would not be able to remember a time when she had not been with him.

He dug out a photograph of himself alone and put it in his pocket to keep with him as a reminder. It was a self-portrait he had taken, just a solitary photo of himself alone in the kitchen looking out the window as if at the emptiness of his life, which had been very empty then. This image had always seemed to him to capture the essence of his loneliness, and looking at it now made him wistful and sad, even nostalgic. He kept taking it out and looking at it, trying to remember how it had ended. Her arrival must have come about sometime in the age of deleted images when everything was uncertain. But when he asked his friends about it, to try and zero in on a date, he couldn’t convince them that he wasn’t teasing them somehow. And when he started asking her, she began to take offense.

“Why are you always asking me this?” she asked. “What’s your problem? It’s like you’re obsessed. Do you want me out of your life or something? Do you want things back the way they were before we met? Is that it?”

“No, I . . . I just want to remember,” he said.

These conversations changed things between them. Or things were changing anyway, and the conversations were a symptom. There was no telling. But he felt he had started something and there was no going back. Just by noticing it, he had started it unraveling. It was as if, once she knew he had noticed the oddness, she started covering up the truth—as if she was afraid he might discover her secret. As long as he accepted the situation and went about his life without questioning it, everything was just fine. But he could no longer pretend to remember. It was driving him crazy. He was convinced she had done something, manipulated reality somehow, folded it around and inserted herself there in his life. Who was she, anyway? What was she? What sort of being had this ability to unravel and reweave the material of existence, working her way into it as if she had always been there?

“Stop looking at me like that,” she said. “I don’t appreciate it.”

“I just want to know how you did it,” he said. “I just want to know what you are.”

“God!” she said.

It occurred to him that what they were heading toward was the unmaking of what she had made in the first place. Past a certain point, it was inevitable. She would remove herself from his life. She would vanish as if she had never existed. First from the daily routine—she’d be gone from their home, gone from their bed, gone from the parties they had with their friends. Then she would absent herself from the photographs—first from whatever new ones he took, obviously, but then from the older ones as well. If he ever thought to go back through his files, he’d see nothing but photos of himself. When he asked his friends about her, they would look glum to see him filling the emptiness of his life with imaginary partners, and they’d say, “Who?”

Eventually he would have forgotten her completely, and all the evidence in the universe would indicate that she had never existed, and there would be no one to question it because he himself would have forgotten.

This was the way things were heading, and all because he had noticed. He wasn’t supposed to, he decided. He was supposed to have been oblivious, and just accept it. She must have done this before, but he was the first to have seen through it. Otherwise she would have done something different to make sure he remained unaware. She would have learned from prior mistakes, which meant he must be the first mistake. He was probably the only one who would see through her, because after this she would know what to do to remain undiscovered. In this way he felt privileged, special. He should feel fortunate that she had come to him, because it had allowed him to learn a very important truth about himself. From now on, even in his solitude, even when the memory of her had removed itself, he would own this bit of self-knowledge. He wouldn’t know how he had come by it, but he would cleave to it nonetheless. She had made him more whole, more truly himself. So there was a purpose to her being here after all.

Such were his thoughts on the last morning, as dawn crept into their bedroom, as the air grew bright and she grew dim, as the place where she was lying grew unlaid-in and the cats stretched out to fill it. But the thoughts were fleeting for he was already forgetting her, and he almost didn’t notice when, in the final moment, she woke and opened her eyes and turned and looked, but not at him, and said to no one but herself, “Why is this always happening to me?”

© 2012 Marc Laidlaw.

Marc Laidlaw is the author of six novels, including the International Horror Guild Award winner The 37th Mandala. His short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies since the 1970s. In 1997, he joined Valve Software as a writer and creator of Half-Life, which has become one of the most popular videogame series of all time. He is currently writing lore and tens of thousands of snappy one-liners for the heroes of Dota 2, and most recently authored the Dota 2 themed comic, “Tales From the Secret Shop: Are We Heroes Yet?” (with illustrator Jim Murray).

Domovoi
M.K. Hobson

“You’re a murderer and a rapist, and there may be no hope for you,” Winnie says to Ryan on a rainy afternoon at the end of the story. “But if there is, I will find it. I will remake you.”

Ryan doesn’t reply. He didn’t know he was a murderer and a rapist until very recently, so there is nothing to say. Nothing except the obvious words: It was only because I loved you, but Winnie would probably respond to that by breaking his arm, so he does not say it.

Instead, he stares at the rain dripping through a broken place in the roof. They are in an old warehouse down by the river, a place he bought yesterday. He paid for it with a check from his leather-covered checkbook, probably the last one they will let him write.

After buying the building, Ryan took the bucket of ashes out of the trunk of his green Lexus. With a shaking hand, he scattered them everywhere, over the floors, the walls, the windowsills. The ash rose up in great billowing clouds, choking him, mingling with his tears to make a gritty paste that he licked off his lips.

And now, after everything, he and Winnie are both stretched out on a stained mattress that they found by the back door, drinking from a bottle of vodka with a torn label. She looks just as she did when he first met her, immense ass and too-tight tank-top and all. Gone are the gray silk suit, the perfect teeth, the vacant stare. Now she just is what she is, nothing more or less. She has won.

This is where the story ends, but it is not where it begins.

The story begins on Ryan Ceres’ 40th birthday.

Ryan Ceres’ birthday is the 40th anniversary of what has been, and promises to continue to be, a perfect life.

He is a real-estate developer. He drives a green Lexus and he listens to adult contemporary rock. His fingernails are manicured and his hair is the color of fresh honey. His eyes are as blue as the sun shining through ice.

He is celebrating the anniversary of his birth with his fiancée, a slender redhead in a gray silk suit. They are having dinner at a restaurant on the top floor of the tallest building in town. His fiancée is staring down at a salad that is composed of two delicate leaves of arugula, a lump of herb-crusted goat cheese and a garnet-colored curl of shaved beet. She is heartbreakingly beautiful in a thoroughly banal way.

Ryan, however, has long since ceased to notice what she looks like. He is staring past her, out the tall black windows at the city below. Like jewels set in rich fabric, his buildings glow up at him. They beam up at him adoringly. They love him and he loves them. They are his real dinner partners. They are the ones with whom he is sharing his birthday dinner.

He raises his wineglass to the window, blowing them silent imaginary kisses.

At twenty, with a substantial endowment from a bachelor uncle who foresaw greatness in his young nephew’s cobalt blue eyes, Ryan started with old houses. Victorians, bungalows, foursquares, modernes; he fed on plaster dust and linseed oil. When he turned thirty, he went looking for a larger challenge and found it in the red-and-gold heart of Chinatown: the Gorham hotel, built in 1911. Eighty rooms of drunks and addicts. A wreck, a noble heap, a disaster with possibilities. He brought in his men, brutally efficient Russian laborers, and set them to work tearing the place apart.

In one room they found hundreds of empty methadone bottles wedged under a floorboard, and hundreds of old hypodermics quivering in the ceiling above, flung like the pencils of schoolchildren, a garden of upside-down glass flowers. In another room, a room that smelled of mothballs and old-man liniment, dozens of dust-crumbling girlie magazines had been stuffed behind the wall. Stuffed there to block a draft? To avoid embarrassment? It didn’t matter. His Russians burned them with all the rest of the moldering yellow insulation. They stripped away rotting lath and horsehair plaster and put in smooth fresh drywall and expensive bamboo flooring, and when they were finished, the Gorham Hotel featured eighty ultramodern studios with brushed metal refrigerators and cultured marble cooking islands. Only the best.

It made him his first million, a million that has expanded and contracted many times since, expanding with capital inflows, contracting to meet expenses, expanding and contracting, like a great beating heart, pushing new blood through old buildings.

The old bank that he turned into lawyer’s offices. The old department store that he turned into a mini-mall. The old brewery that he turned into a brewpub. And, most recently, the old flour mill, reclaimed from the dull-eyed clowder of Hispanic squatters living in her labyrinthine basements, that he turned into twenty-thousand square feet of quaint little shops selling arugula, herb-crusted goat cheese, and organic beets. The proprietors of these little shops will make good money. Ryan will make nothing. His net profit on the deal is a satisfyingly round figure. Zero.

Each building he takes on is a little bigger, each rehab a little more lovingly detailed, each project a little less profitable. There is a delicious purity in this that he relishes. It is not the money he desires. The money is nothing, only a tool to purchase goat-cheese and arugula for the empty-eyed cipher sitting across the table from him. The real satisfaction comes from the knowledge that he has made his buildings clean and pure, burned the filth of ages from their bones, scoured them of the unseen impurities time breeds. He has uncovered chimneys full of dead birds; the skeleton of a cat wedged between two wall studs; decaying piles of rat-shit in ancient ventilation ducts. He has exposed obscene secrets and expunged them.

Quite suddenly, Ryan feels extremely pleased with himself. An erotic charge of satisfaction surges through his body. He looks lustfully at his fiancée, somewhat surprised to find that she is still there.

Her hair shines, her face is perfect, her nails gleam, her skin is smooth as glass. The relationship between her and the curl of beet she is contemplating is entirely without entropy, a universe which has long since ceased to expand. She is as self-contained as an egg.

The electricity charging his nerves dissipates abruptly, and his sudden elation is replaced by an equally sudden feeling of irritation. He puts down his fork heavily. The sound of silver on porcelain makes her look up.

“Why would they put a curl of beet on the salad?” she sneers melodiously. “No one likes beets.”

“Some people obviously do,” he says, flashing her one of his sandpaper grins designed to smooth out rough patches.

He’s perfected these grins, he uses them often. It helps to grin, he’s noticed, even when you feel like tearing someone’s throat out.

Life has apparently taught her the same lesson. A polite, fleeting smile dances across her lips, replaced quickly by a pretty little frown as she returns to her contemplation of the despised curl of beet.

It is Ryan’s 40th birthday.

He gives his fiancée a good-night peck and doesn’t wait for the elevator doors to slide shut before he turns and walks away. His fiancée must be in bed by 11 p.m. precisely, for she must be at the gym early the next morning to exorcise any fatty demons the arugula and goat cheese may have introduced into her pure corpus. She is utterly composed of routine and habit; if she is not in bed by 11 p.m. precisely, she might start breaking things. The moment his lips leave the cold flesh of her cheek, he ceases to think about her. She ceases to exist.

He goes back into the restaurant, to its clean elegant bar filled with fresh-looking young people. The counter is made of zinc and there are cobalt-blue vases with yellow gerbera daisies in them. He sits, drinking steadily, the zinc cooling his elbows.

He thinks about his Russians, his agents of efficiency and order, who are currently working on a project for another developer. He misses them. They just wrapped the flour mill project a week ago, and already he misses them. He misses their sharp staccato conversations, their sublingual grunts, their smell of oniony sweat. They are remaking an old generic family chain restaurant (orange and brown) into a new generic family chain restaurant (brown and orange.) He contemplates going out to the job site the next day and visiting them. But the idea depresses him. The building they are working on has no life, no spark. He longs for the thrill of performing surgery on a kicking patient, not slogging through the dissection of a corpse.

Depressed, he leaves the restaurant, its zinc bar and gerbera daisies, and rides the elevator down to the street. The valet brings him the green Lexus and he turns on the adult contemporary rock. Loud.

It doesn’t help.

Later, lying on a dirty mattress and drinking vodka from a bottle, Ryan will dream of this night. He will dream of the wind rushing through his hair like warm fingers, of the ceaseless rhythm of crickets blowing past, of the smell of leather seats covered with dew. For this is the night that he finds her.

You will remake me, he whispers into her lap.

But that is later.

This night, he drives through the town, tapping a finger against his steering wheel, chewing on the inside of his cheek. He drives past many of his buildings, hoping that one will call out to him, invite him back, but none of them do. So he drives into an ugly part of town, a dangerous part of town, a part of town that wasn’t safe or savory even during its best years.

He drives until pink and gold dawn fingers the hills, until he begins to think that he should go somewhere, to an actual destination. To his fiancée’s home. She has bleached-oak floors in her entryway. She will serve him herbal tea with a shortbread cookie.

He takes a left. He will drive back and find the freeway.

Then his breath catches.

She rises and spreads before him, white stone walls stark in the peach colored dawn. Along her sides, thousands of tiny windows wink at him in the rising light. Some are broken; these stare at him, black and insane.

She is surrounded by tall weeds. Over the front door, the words “Windsor Machine Works” are spelled out in thin steel letters, stark and streamlined, lush with the tragedy of a brilliant, aborted future.

Below those letters, there are larger ones, painted on a warped sign nailed across her front door. The sign is old and battered, pocked with birdshot and curlicued with graffiti. But he can still read what it says.

It says, “For Sale.”

He parks slantways, jumps out of his car. He walks the cyclone fence surrounding until he finds a beaten down place; he tears the leg of his slacks climbing over it, carves an ugly gouge in his calf. No matter.

She is made of white limestone as supple and smooth as a virgin’s thighs. Her black twisting ironwork is crisp and devilish. The crumpled yellow newspapers crouching at her feet are supplicants satisfied by the simple blessing of her shadow; the glittering shards of broken glass bottles are like jewels, carelessly discarded.

He climbs onto a low crumbling wall beneath one of the windows. He presses his nose to the grimy glass like a child hoping to see elephants.

Inside, the building is a vast emptiness of square iron pillars and cement, thousands upon thousands of square feet of space. On the concrete floor, stagnant puddles glimmer, rainbowed with oil, reticulated with webs of settled dust. There are bolts in the cement where huge machines once anchored, straining against their own torque.

He stands, his cheek pressed up against the glass, closing his eyes. He imagines walls hiding unimaginable decay, steel beams crumbling to dust, tinder-dry insulation chambered with mouse nests, wires wrapped in fraying cloth. He can feel the sunlight as it pounds into her.

He’s in love. Again.

He buys the Windsor Machine Works building that day.

A birthday present for himself. It surprises the gals down at the County Assessor’s office to see Ryan Ceres camped on their doorstep when they open the doors. He is unshaven and there are shiny purple hollows under his eyes.

The gals in the County Assessor’s office tell Ryan that if the building is for sale, they can’t figure out who’s selling it; no one has paid taxes on it since 1963. It seems, in fact, to have no owner at all.

This greatly puzzles the gals, for they cannot conceive of such an odd thing. It is an offense to their unimaginative natures to think that anything can escape taxation for that long. They chatter about it amongst themselves as they prepare the paperwork.

Stop talking, he imagines screaming at them. Her secrets are not yours, they are mine, mine, mine . . .

He blinks, realizes that the gals are staring at him. They are staring at him so hard he wonders suddenly if he’s said something aloud that he didn’t mean to. He wipes a hand across his brow, flashes them his sandpaper smile. They wouldn’t understand.

Pulling out his leather-covered checkbook (which they understand completely), Ryan writes a check for the entire amount of back taxes, and just like that, the building is his.

As he’s driving back across town, he is joyful. He is in a state of transcendent bliss. The day is perfect blue, and he has the top down and his sunglasses on. The warm wind is snaking through his hair. Adult contemporary rock blasts out of his speakers. This moment is the absolute peak of his life.

A sudden thought strikes him. He flips open his tiny titanium phone and presses it to his ear. He calls Jose (his locksmith, always on the move) and arranges to meet him at the building.

Arrangements made, Ryan flips his phone closed and taps the steering wheel in time to a Celine Dion song.

When Ryan arrives back at the Windsor Machine Works, Jose is already there, bending over the open trunk of his always-breaking-down Justy. Jose is sorting through picks and tension tools and extractors. Choosing his implements carefully.

Ryan is flooded with inexplicable anger. The thought of another man sniffing around her doorstep enrages him. What if he’d decided to tamper with her before Ryan had got there? What if he’d decided to put his unkind picks into her unwilling locks?

“How long have you been here?” Ryan asks casually.

“Just got here,” Jose tosses off. “‘Bout to leave, though. Bad neighborhood. They shoot you for nothing around here.”

Ryan imagines punching him in the nose.

Jose doesn’t speak as he makes the key. When he is finished, he fits the bright new thing into the old door, and turns. The door swings open, releasing a smell of ancient oil and something else, strange and indefinable, like steel shavings rusting in honey.

“What the hell are you thinking, man?” Jose says. He stands with his hands on his hips, squinting into the gloom. He shakes his head as if trying to shake off raindrops of impending doom. “This place will finish you.”

Ryan snatches the key away from him with a growl.

“Get out,” Ryan says. “Get the fuck out.”

He does not watch or wave goodbye as the Justy clatters away.

He walks past the front desk, pushes open a creaking door, and he is on the manufacturing floor. The gals at the county assessor’s office say that their oldest records indicate that this building was used to manufacture machine parts during the First World War.

That whole area was really hopping during the war, one of the gals had said. Ryan imagines women in hobble-skirts, men in baggy canvas twill trousers, paunchy old managers in vests with watch-chains looped from button to pocket. All gone now.

The manufacturing floor smells like stale urine and pigeon shit. As Ryan walks through the wide door and into the building, the space swells around him, the filtered light through the dust-caked windows cool and blue, the cement floor vast and undulating, like a calm body of water.

His footsteps echo. On the floor there is a pile of repair manuals from the 30’s for a machine of indecipherable purpose. The manuals look as if they’ve been stored in a bucket of old oil. Blackberry vines thread through broken windowpanes. The iron pillars are cobwebbed with ribbons of rust.

He thinks about the dump trucks and caterpillar tractors that will soon line up outside. He thinks about how the weeds will be cut away and the rusted pillars pulled down, and the oil-slicked concrete cleaned with foaming buckets of tri-sodium phosphate. He thinks about multi-use dwellings, white space, windows. He thinks about how everything dirty will be made clean, antiseptic, new, smooth. He closes his eyes and spreads his arms and imagines himself expanding, expanding.

At the back of the room is a set of stairs. He moves over to them carefully, avoiding the puddles and piles of grimy debris. In the rafters overhead, he hears baby pigeons squeaking weakly, and the sound of wings.

The staircase is a jury-rigged affair. Ryan mounts the stairs, carefully feeling each board for soundness.

He stops after a few steps, looks back. The door is still open and the warm afternoon sunlight is inviting him back, calling him to come out. But it is hot out there, and in here it is cool. He notices the smell again, the strange smell of honey and steel. He looks up the stairs. At the top there is a hollow-core plywood door with a jagged-edged hole in the center. He imagines rotting construction, thin-walled offices and empty filing cabinets.

It is dark at the top of the stairs.

He keeps climbing.

The door opens onto a hallway, its linseed lineolum flooring warped and curled. Four doors open off the hallway, two on either side. He opens the first door. There is an office beyond, nothing in it but a mouse’s nest and some chewed-on newspapers.

He looks in the second office. It has a heavy metal desk in it. There is a window that looks over the factory floor, but it is covered with plywood.

There is a woman in the third office.

Ryan jumps when he sees her, slamming back against the door with a rattling thud. She is sitting with her back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling as if expecting it to do something. There is a look on her face, a look that is both empty and full, like she is thinking very deep thoughts about nothing.

“Jesus,” he whispers, his heart pounding in his throat. “Who the hell are you?”

She drops her oil-colored eyes and looks at him, not blinking. She is, Ryan notices, as far from beautiful as a woman can get. She is shaped like a bell; her ass is immense, her waist lumpy, her shoulders strangely narrow. Her breasts poke out through her too-tight tank-top, and they’re small and hard and probably sour, like unripe persimmons. Her arms are thick with muscle.

“Winnie,” she says, lifting a hand. In it, there is a bottle of vodka. She takes a swig of this and holds the bottle toward him.

Squatter, he thinks, with a mixture of disgust and glee. The first secret to be stripped, the first boil to be lanced. He knows how to deal with squatters.

“You’re going to have to leave.” His voice is firm and unshaking, full of money.

“No,” she says.

“I’ve bought this place. It’s mine now.”

Winnie does not move, but stares at him, a grim little smile playing over her lips.

“Yours, eh?” she says.

Ryan thinks about going for the police. But it is hot out there, burning and dry, and in here it is cool. So instead of leaving, he does something stupid. Something he knows he should not do. He reaches out and grabs the strange woman’s arms, tries to pull her to her feet. He halfway succeeds before she wrenches herself backward, pulling him off balance and sending him tumbling to the dirty floor.

She moves quickly, coming up over him. With a balled fist, she punches down viciously, catching his chin. He puts up his arms, shields his face. The world is a confusion of movement and pain as she hits him. Her fists find his softest spots, unerringly, hard. He closes his eyes.

“Yours, eh?” she shrieks again and again, until her voice finally retreats down a dark tunnel.

He wakes up choking.

The woman is pouring vodka down his throat.

He gags, shoving her hand aside. He is lying on the floor. He wants to jump up, but he cannot; he is stiff and sore. He can barely move. She is sitting next to him, legs stretched out before her. In her hand, she has a long heavy piece of wood that looks like it came out of a ruined place in the wall. She is tapping the wood gently against her knee.

He looks at her lap, stretched out beside him. It is vast, doughy, clad in worn-thin sweatpants. He tentatively reaches over a hand to touch it. It is warm, like pudding encased in a heating blanket. Winnie says nothing, but takes a drink of the vodka. Then she hands it to him. He takes his hand off her leg and takes the bottle, drinking from it delicately. She offers him a cigarette. He doesn’t smoke. But he watches as she puts one in her mouth, lights it carefully, exhales the smoke in a thin stream.

“Why are you here?” Winnie asks.

“This place is mine now,” Ryan says, his voice uncertain. “I bought it.”

“You bought it.” She says the words flatly, a statement, not a question. She seems to find them humorous, but she does not smile; instead, she flares her nostrils.

“Why?”

“To . . . to clean it. To make it new.”

“What if it doesn’t want to be?”

Ryan blinks at her, as lost as one of the gals at the assessor’s office.

“What are you talking about?”

“What if it just wants to be what it is? What it has become?”

This makes Ryan laugh, a loud barking laugh that echoes through the empty building.

Winnie snarls, her lip curling. She lifts the wood, brings it down hard.

He curls his arms around his head again, and again the world retreats in darkness.

When he wakes up, she is gone and he is alone.

He limps down the stairs and out of the building, down to where his green Lexus is waiting. It is night, a thick hot summer night. Where did the whole day go? He has the most horrific hangover he’s ever experienced, and he aches terribly.

Running his tongue over his lip, he can tell that it’s split. Touching fingers to his eyes, he can tell that they’re blackened.

When he gets to his green Lexus he looks at his reflection in the rear-view mirror. It’s worse than he thought. There’s a red welting crease over his cheekbone, and both his eyes are as purple and blue as overripe plums.

First, he uses his cell phone to call the police. He tells them about the crazy squatter in his building. He wants her cleared out. He is a man of substance, goddamn it! He has pumped millions into the local economy over the past decade. He is on a first-name basis with the mayor.

Yes, he is willing to press charges for assault. He wants her locked up for life. Maybe in an insane asylum.

Satisfied, he flips his phone shut. Then he drives to his fiancée’s condominium. She is wearing green silk pajamas, and she looks as smooth and beautiful as fresh plaster. She looks at him blankly, without interest, without surprise, without anything. She does not even comment on his battered face. In a flash of blackness, he shoves her to the ground and makes passionate, unpleasant love to her on the bleached oak floor of her entry hall.

Then, sitting naked on her distressed leather couch, her black portable phone pressed to his ear, he calls every contractor he knows. The most brutal, the most efficient, the most pragmatic, the most no-nonsense.

He makes appointments, sketches timelines, makes plans.

The first month, they clean.

Contractors tear out the old offices where Ryan was beaten, commenting on the drops of dried blood and the smell of spilt vodka.

The police find no squatter. They search the place thoroughly, come quickly to the conclusion that she has “moved on,” and happily wash their hands of the whole thing. Ryan, however, is not satisfied with this sanguine pronouncement. In fact, every now and again, Ryan is sure he sees Winnie’s lumpy figure out of the corner of his eye, rushing at him, the wood in her hand raised high. Her eyes are lit with hatred and anger.

But she is never really there, and the police can’t arrest someone they can’t see.

Ryan’s brutal and efficient men start to call him “twitchy,” for he is always involuntarily dodging blows.

After a month, the building is completely gutted and structural work can begin. It is then that Winnie really does reappear. Ryan is alone in a room one afternoon, looking at plans, when he smells honey and steel, sweet and fleeting.

He looks up, alarmed, expecting to see her bearing down on him with the wood. But she’s just standing, looking at him, her arms crossed behind her back. She seems to have lost weight. Her ass is smaller, and her legs seem skinnier. Her skin seems smoother.

He regards her for a while, assessing danger. She’s still and solid and sullen. He flashes her a sandpaper grin.

“You’re back?” he says.

“Never left,” she says. “Never will leave. Never.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” Ryan says. “The police . . .”

“The police won’t find me,” she says, looking at him. She looks paler, he notices. Slightly sick. There is a strange shimmer about her, as if he can see her bones superimposed upon her flesh, a luminous ghost-skeleton that moves as she moves. He blinks, trying to clear this odd vision from his eyes.

“What gives you the right?” she asks, softly. “What gives you the right to do this?”

His brow curdles. It is an insane question.

“I own this building,” he says slowly, reducing each word to inarguable finality.

“That is not an answer,” she says.

“What other answer is there?” Ryan blazes, sudden frustration firing him. He wants her to shut up, to do what she is told.

Winnie is silent for a few moments. She is standing at a place where a wall used to be. The wall is gone, only structural timbers remain. She stretches out a hand, strokes her fingers through the air that the wall used to occupy. He can see every bone in her hand set in angular contrast against the timbers and studs and beams. The stark intersecting lines are indescribably beautiful.

“I do not want to be what you want to make me,” she says.

Ryan says nothing, watches her stroke the ghost-wall. The moment of adoration passes, giving way to critical dissatisfaction. Her movements are crisp, clumsy, machinelike. Inelegant, he thinks. She needs curves, smooth clean curves that please the eye. He makes a mental note to work with the architect on some streamlined walls for the entrance.

“You have no right,” she gasps, and he realizes that she is crying. “You have no right to change something that does not want to be changed.”

He takes a step forward, then another, like an unwise park visitor approaching a seemingly tame bear. He reaches out a hand, and touches her face.

“There now,” he says, stroking her cheek. Her skin is smoother, he notices with satisfaction. “There now.”

Winnie reaches into her pocket for a cigarette. Her hand is trembling.

“No smoking,” Ryan says gently, prying the cigarette from between her fingers. With a ferocious snarl, she slaps his hand away. He jumps back, his heart thudding. A surprisingly pleasant thrill surges through him.

“It’s for your own good,” he adds, holding fists defensively before his chest, expecting her to rush him.

“Liar,” she spits at him, and in the time it takes him to blink she is gone.

Problems arise, one after another. Expensive problems. Seismic upgrades. Asbestos removal. Hazardous waste disposal from where old puddles of oil have polluted the ground.

It is easy to take out the first construction loan; Ryan’s bankers love him. They even love him enough to give him a second. But the third one is difficult. They shuffle their wingtips and cast glances back and forth. It is clear that they share some of Jose’s concerns.

We’re unclear on your vision here, Mr. Ceres.

The freeway’s a dozen blocks away.

To call the neighborhood transitional is being generous . . .

The infrastructure’s marginal . . . no retail component anywhere nearby . . .

Ryan bullies them and gets the third loan, but there will not be another. It should be enough. That, added to some liquidated longer-term investments . . . his broker will squeal that the money is for his future, but Ryan doesn’t care. She is his future.

The contractors finish the framing. The smell of fresh pine is one of the best smells Ryan knows. It’s the same smell that disinfectants have, and Ryan always associates new framing with cleanliness. Old ugly hidden things, invisible squirming vermin being scorched away, burned away, sterilized.

One of Ryan’s brutally efficient Russian workers, a framer, is named Sergei. He leaves behind a plate of bread and salt one night, which Ryan stumbles over. Ryan swears roughly at Sergei; while the Russian is much bigger than he is, it’s always good to look tough to one’s people.

“What the hell is this?” Ryan picks up the plate of bread and salt and shakes it in the big man’s face. “We got the rats cleared out of here months ago, you want them back?”

“This will not attract rats,” Sergei shrugs. “She will not let it.”

“She?” Ryan looks at him. “Who?”

“The building,” Sergei says. “The domovoi.” Seeing that Ryan does not understand, Sergei gently takes the plate of bread and salt from him and puts it down carefully.

“The domovoi is the spirit of the building. Its soul. This building’s soul is sad and in pain. I thought to comfort her.”

“Comfort her?” Ryan clenches his teeth, remembering Winnie bearing down on him with the wood. “I’m not paying you to comfort the goddamn building.” He kicks at the plate of bread and salt, sending it scattering across the plywood flooring.

Sergei shrugs, and turns to go. Ryan calls after him:

“Can they be killed?”

Sergei turns slowly, looks at him through narrowed eyes.

“Killed?” he says.

“Yes,” Ryan says curtly. “Killed. Eradicated. Exorcised.”

“I have heard that they can be moved,” Sergei says thoughtfully. “By carrying hearth coals to a new home. If the domovoi likes it there . . .”

“I didn’t say moved,” Ryan interrupts him sharply. “I said killed. Can they be killed?”

Sergei shrugs, looks around at the clean-smelling new pine framing.

“I suppose this is the way to do it,” he says.

Winnie does not show herself again until month four.

The contractors are putting in bamboo flooring and installing energy-efficient double-paned glass windows. The money is running thin, but Ryan will not cut corners. He runs up bills that he knows he will not pay. This does not concern him in the least.

Visitors from the bank begin showing up at the worksite, at odd hours of the day. Taking notes.

Ryan is in a room that will become the master bedroom of the most expensive loft, eight thousand square feet of exposed concrete and thick hewn beams. The room is large and airy, with wiring for a ceiling fan and arched windows that look out over the street. He’s looking down at the street, his hands clasped behind his back. On the street, there’s a man leaning against a blue Camaro, selling drugs.

“Please stop.” The words come from behind him. He turns slowly.

She looks much thinner now, her face sleek and shining. Her hair is smoothed back from a soft, placid face. She’s wearing a suit of grey silk. He looks her up and down, approvingly.

“It hurts,” she says. “Please stop.”

“I’m too far along now,” he says. The words make her wince visibly.

A vague premonition of worry crosses his mind. What is the pain in his chest, what is the ineffable regret? He doesn’t understand it; he dismisses it with a curt gesture of his hand.

“You’re just afraid of change,” he says, more harshly than he intends to.

“It hurts,” Winnie says again.

“Good things sometimes hurt,” Ryan says, careful to make his tone soft. He wants her to understand, he wants her to stop fighting. He wants her to let him have her, to give him access and permission. “Medicine hurts. It hurts, but it heals.”

“You are not healing me, you are killing me,” she whispers. “I don’t know what I am anymore.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I know what you are.”

“I hate you,” she whispers, tears gleaming slick in her oil-colored eyes.

Ryan smiles down at her sadly. She doesn’t hate him. He knows it, just knows it. She doesn’t hate him. She can’t hate him.

“You hate the idea of changing,” he says. “You hate the idea of being changed. You hate the idea of letting someone else help you.”

“I never asked for your help,” Winnie says.

“But you did. By decaying, by getting old, by letting yourself fall to ruin,” Ryan strokes her hair. “But I will make it better. I will take care of you.”

“It hurts,” Winnie says finally, and then she’s gone, and Ryan’s arms encircle nothing.

After six months, the renovation is complete. The Windsor Machine Works rehab is finished. It is clean, sterile, perfect. There are no secrets left.

Every item on the punch list has been checked off, and the Russians have been paid, even if there are other bills that never will be.

There are five vast condo lofts on the top floor, each with a prime view of the surrounding neighborhood. The ramshackle houses that haven’t been painted in years, the rusting cars in their driveways and side-yards, the drug dealers and prostitutes in their blue Camaros. Who said there wasn’t a viable retail component?

Ryan has had a dozen calls from the real-estate agency he usually uses to broker his properties. They’re trying to back out. They want nothing to do with marketing this one. He enjoys listening to the voice mails, how they get progressively screechier.

There is 15,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor, lease ready. The blonde wood floors and cool white lighting are perfect for the Starbucks and the Gap and the Old Navy that will never come.

Ryan takes one last walk through the building, but he does not enjoy it. He feels so strange. The familiar joy, the pride and feeling of completion, the post-orgasmic relaxation of tense energy pleasantly spent, is nowhere to be felt. Instead he feels keyed up, anxious and annoyed. Frustrated. Stifled. Twitchy.

He comes into the room where he last saw Winnie. This is the display model; it has been decorated so that perky sales agents can inspire prospective residents with visions of the kind of life their exorbitantly high mortgage can purchase for them. The walls have been painted a soothing shade of mint green. There is a comfortable arrangement of camel-colored suede furniture in one corner. One chair is draped with a fuzzy, avocado-hued chenille throw. Ryan tries to imagine getting comfortable in this room. He can’t. The thought gives him a headache.

There is also a large white bed, a cast-iron four-poster looped with gauze that (Ryan knows from experience) will have to be washed every goddamn week to keep from getting dusty. More meaningless garniture. More curls of shaved beet. He imagines making love to his fiancée in that bed, in that engulfing marshmallow-soft nest. Imagines her yielding body, her blank eyes staring up at him.

What is wrong with him? He presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose. These things sell. These are what people want. Why should they annoy him so? Why does he suddenly long for the smell of motor oil and rust and honey?

“Winnie!” he whispers loudly, looking wildly about the room. “Winnie, for God’s sake!”

Then, she is there. Sitting on the bed.

The transformation is complete. She is slender and sylphlike, with a delicate face and vacant eyes.

She looks, Ryan notices with sudden horror, exactly like his fiancée.

She is staring out the window, thinking unfathomable thoughts. Her hair shines, her face is perfect, her nails gleam, her skin is smooth as glass. She is perfect and perfectly self-contained.

“You know something strange?” she says distantly, her face wrinkling in a pretty frown. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

That night, Ryan burns it down.

Burns it all down; the bamboo flooring, the soothing mint-green walls, the new plaster. Everything. He storms through the dark virgin rooms with a five-gallon gasoline can. He lights the fire by putting a ripped piece of rag into the mouth of a bottle of vodka. Then he stands across the street and watches her burn, brilliant greens and oranges, deep mysterious flickers of blue, black billowing smoke that makes the sky weep.

He sits across the street, watching the fire trucks cluster around like busy insects. Dawn breaks, the sun rises, and no one notices him, no one knows who he is; he is just another man, sitting silently, watching something go up in flames.

He waits until the firemen have gone, leaving behind nothing but yellow tape and the smell of death and her gray, hulking, empty skeleton, charred and angular.

Crawling through the yellow tape, sneaking like an animal, he moves around at her feet, through her hot shadow. With a shaking hand, he fills a galvanized bucket with damp gray ash. There are pieces of wood mixed in with it; wood like bone.

He places both hands on the side of the bucket, closing his eyes. There is a warmth banked within, the warmth of pudding encased in a heating blanket, the warmth of rage and retribution and desire.

“Come with me,” he whispers, pleading. “Stay with me. Please.”

He puts the bucket into the trunk of his green Lexus.

He visits the gals at the County Assessor’s office. They are surprised again, because he smells like smoke and his face is streaked with ash and tears. But they take his check gladly and issue him a receipt with a formal red stamp on it.

And so he reclines with Winnie in the warehouse by the river. In the rain. On a stained mattress, drinking vodka from a bottle with a torn label.

Ryan’s appraising gaze shifts to the brick wall instinctively, out of habit. Once painted glossy white, now it’s grimy, smudged with old black handprints. How many layers of paint hide beneath there?

I should strip that paint, he thinks. Expose the brick. People like exposed brick.

As soon as the thought crosses his mind, pain sears through him, tearing his heart into little throbbing bits. He gasps for air.

“The secrets stay,” Winnie growls.

Ryan presses both palms flat against the sides of his head, as if he can press the pain out his ears.

“How did you . . .” he begins.

“You breathed in the ash when you were scattering it,” Winnie says, taking a drink from the vodka bottle. There is a long silence while she lets Ryan absorb the implications of what she has said. Then she looks at him with cool, unblinking, oil-colored eyes.

“You’re a murderer and a rapist,” she says again.

How could he not have seen it? It is a secret he kept from himself, only now brought into the light to be scoured away.

With a shaking hand, Ryan takes the bottle of vodka from her. He takes a long harsh swallow. He’s 40, rich and beautiful, and the ghosts of his victims will live within him for the rest of his life.

He lays his head on her soft, warm lap.

“You will remake me,” he says, closing his eyes. He will sleep. He will sleep for a long time. He will dream her dreams. He will remember what he never knew. He will savor the exquisite beauty of acceptance.

He feels her hand upon his head. She smoothes his hair carefully.

“There may be hope for you,” she says very softly, her voice sweet as honey.

© 2005 by M. K. Hobson.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

M.K. Hobson’s stories have recently appeared in the Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2011 and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Her Nebula-nominated debut novel—The Native Star—is available at fine retailers everywhere. She invites you to visit her website, http://www.demimonde.com.

The Steam Dancer (1896)
Caitlín R. Kiernan

1.

Missouri Banks lives in the great smoky city at the edge of the mountains, here where the endless yellow prairie laps gently with grassy waves and locust tides at the exposed bones of the world jutting suddenly up towards the western sky. She was not born here, but came to the city long ago, when she was still only a small child and her father traveled from town to town in one of Edison’s electric wagons selling his herbs and medicinals, his stinking poultices and elixirs. This is the city where her mother grew suddenly ill with miner’s fever and where all her father’s liniments and ministrations could not restore his wife’s failing health or spare her life. In his grief, he drank a vial of either antimony or arsenic a few days after the funeral, leaving his only daughter and only child to fend for herself. And so, she grew up here, an orphan, one of a thousand or so dispossessed urchins with sooty bare feet and sooty faces, filching coal with sooty hands to stay warm in winter, clothed in rags, and eating what could be found in trash barrels and what could be begged or stolen.

But these things are only her past, and she has a bit of paper torn from a lending-library book of old plays which reads What’s past is prologue, which she tacked up on the wall near her dressing mirror in the room she shares with the mechanic. Whenever the weight of Missouri’s past begins to press in upon her, she reads those words aloud to herself, once or twice or however many times is required, and usually it makes her feel at least a little better. It has been years since she was alone and on the streets. She has the mechanic, and he loves her, and most of the time she believes that she loves him, as well.

He found her when she was nineteen, living in a shanty on the edge of the colliers’ slum, hiding away in among the spoil piles and the rusting ruin of junked steam shovels and hydraulic pumps and bent bore-drill heads. He was out looking for salvage, and salvage is what he found, finding her when he lifted a broad sheet of corrugated tin, uncovering the squalid burrow where she lay slowly dying on a filthy mattress. She’d been badly bitten during a swarm of red-bellied bloatflies, and now the hungry white maggots were doing their work. It was not an uncommon fate for the likes of Missouri Banks, those caught out in the open during the spring swarms, those without safe houses to hide inside until the voracious flies had come and gone, moving on to bedevil other towns and cities and farms. By the time the mechanic chanced upon her, Missouri’s left leg, along with her right hand and forearm, was gangrenous, seething with the larvae. Her left eye was a pulpy, painful boil, and he carried her to the charity hospital on Arapahoe where he paid the surgeons who meticulously picked out the parasites and sliced away the rotten flesh and finally performed the necessary amputations. Afterwards, the mechanic nursed her back to health, and when she was well enough, he fashioned for her a new leg and a new arm. The eye was entirely beyond his expertise, but he knew a Chinaman in San Francisco who did nothing but eyes and ears, and it happened that the Chinaman owed the mechanic a favor. And in this way was Missouri Banks made whole again, after a fashion, and the mechanic took her as his lover and then as his wife, and they found a better, roomier room in an upscale boarding house near the Seventh Avenue irrigation works.

And today, which is the seventh day of July, she settles onto the little bench in front of the dressing-table mirror and reads aloud to herself the shred of paper.

“What’s past is prologue,” she says, and then sits looking at her face and the artificial eye and listening to the oppressive drone of cicadas outside the open window. The mechanic has promised that someday he will read her The Tempest by William Shakespeare, which he says is where the line was taken from. She can read it herself, she’s told him, because she isn’t illiterate. But the truth is she’d much prefer to hear him read, breathing out the words in his rough, soothing voice, and often he does read to her in the evenings.

She thinks that she has grown to be a very beautiful woman, and sometimes she believes the parts she wasn’t born with have only served to make her that much more so and not any the less. Missouri smiles and gazes back at her reflection, admiring the high cheekbones and full lips (which were her mother’s before her), the glistening beads of sweat on her chin and forehead and upper lip, the way her left eye pulses with a soft turquoise radiance. Afternoon light glints off the galvanized plating of her mechanical arm, the sculpted steel rods and struts, the well-oiled wheels and cogs, all the rivets and welds and perfectly fitted joints. For now, it hangs heavy and limp at her side, because she hasn’t yet cranked its tiny double-acting Trevithick engine. There’s only the noise of the cicadas and the traffic down on the street and the faint, familiar, comforting chug of her leg.

Other women are only whole, she thinks. Other women are only born, not made. I have been crafted.

With her living left hand, Missouri wipes some of the sweat from her face and then turns towards the small electric fan perched on the chifforobe. It hardly does more than stir the muggy summer air about, and she thinks how good it would be to go back to bed. How good to spend the whole damned day lying naked on cool sheets, dozing and dreaming and waiting for the mechanic to come home from the foundry. But she dances at Madam Ling’s place four days a week, and today is one of those days, so soon she’ll have to get dressed and start her arm, then make her way to the trolley and on down to the Asian Quarter. The mechanic didn’t want her to work, but she told him she owed him a great debt and it would be far kinder of him to allow her to repay it. And, being kind, he knew she was telling the truth. Sometimes, he even comes down to see, to sit among the Coolies and the pungent clouds of opium smoke and watch her on the stage.

2.

The shrewd old woman known in the city only as Madam Ling made the long crossing to America sometime in 1861, shortly after the end of the Second Opium War. Missouri has heard that she garnered a tidy fortune from smuggling and piracy, and maybe a bit of murder, too, but that she found Hong Kong considerably less amenable to her business ventures after the treaty that ended the war and legalized the import of opium to China. She came ashore in San Francisco and followed the railroads and airships east across the Rockies, and when she reached the city at the edge of the prairie, she went no farther. She opened a saloon and whorehouse, the Nine Dragons, on a muddy, unnamed thoroughfare, and the mechanic has explained to Missouri that in China nine is considered a very lucky number. The Nine Dragons is wedged in between a hotel and a gambling house, and no matter the time of day or night seems always just as busy. Madam Ling never wants for trade.

Missouri always undresses behind the curtain, before she takes the stage, and so presents herself to the sleepy-eyed men wearing only a fringed shawl of vermilion silk, her corset and sheer muslin shift, her white linen pantalettes. The shawl was a gift from Madam Ling, who told her in broken English that it came all the way from Beijing. Madam Ling of the Nine Dragons is not renowned for her generosity towards white women, or much of anyone else, and Missouri knows the gift was a reward for the men who come here just to watch her. She does not have many belongings, but she treasures the shawl as one of her most prized possessions and keeps it safe in a cedar chest at the foot of the bed she shares with the mechanic, and it always smells of the camphor-soaked cotton balls she uses to keep the moths at bay.

There is no applause, but she knows that most eyes have turned her way now. She stands sweating in the flickering gaslight glow, the open flames that ring the small stage, and listens to the men muttering in Mandarin amongst themselves and laying down mahjong tiles and sucking at their pipes. And then her music begins, the Negro piano player and the woman who plucks so proficiently at a guzheng’s twenty-five strings, the thin man at his xiao flute, and the burly Irishman who keeps the beat on a goatskin bodhrán and always takes his pay in Chinese whores. The smoky air fills with a peculiar, jangling rendition of the final aria of Verdi’s La traviata, because Madam Ling is a great admirer of Italian opera. The four musicians huddle together, occupying the space that has been set aside especially for them, crammed between the bar and the stage, and Missouri breathes in deeply, taking her cues as much from the reliable metronome rhythms of the engines that drive her metal leg and arm as from the music.

This is her time, her moment as truly as any moment will ever belong to Missouri Banks.

And her dance is not what men might see in the white saloons and dance halls and brothels strung out along Broadway and Lawrence, not the schottisches and waltzes of the ladies of the line, the uptown sporting women in their fine ruffled skirts made in New York and Chicago. No one has ever taught Missouri how to dance, and these are only the moves that come naturally to her, that she finds for herself. This is the interplay and synthesis of her body and the mechanic’s handiwork, of the music and her own secret dreams. Her clothes fall away in gentle, inevitable drifts, like the first snows of October. Steel toe to flesh-and-bone heel, the graceful arch of an iron calf and the clockwork motion of porcelain and nickel fingers across her sweaty belly and thighs. She spins and sways and dips, as lissome and sure of herself as anything that was ever only born of Nature. And there is such joy in the dance that she might almost offer prayers of thanks to her suicide father and the bloatfly maggots that took her leg and arm and eye. There is such joy in the dancing, it might almost match the delight and peace she’s found in the arms of the mechanic. There is such joy, and she thinks this is why some men and women turn to drink and laudanum, tinctures of morphine and Madam Ling’s black tar, because they cannot dance.

The music rises and falls, like the seas of grass rustling to themselves out beyond the edges of the city, and the delicate mechanisms of her prosthetics clank and hum and whine. And Missouri weaves herself through this landscape of sound with the easy dexterity of pronghorn antelope and deer fleeing the jaws of wolves or the hunters’ rifles, the long haunches and fleet paws of jackrabbits running out before a wildfire. For this moment, she is lost, and, for this moment, she wishes never to be found again. Soon, the air has begun to smell of the steam leaking from the exhaust ports in her leg and arm, an oily, hot sort of aroma that is as sweet to Missouri Banks as rosewater or honeysuckle blossoms. She closes her eyes—the one she was born with and the one from San Francisco—and feels no shame whatsoever at the lazy stares of the opium smokers. The piston rods in her left leg pump something more alive than blood, and the flywheels turn on their axels. She is muscle and skin, steel and artifice. She is the woman who was once a filthy, ragged guttersnipe, and she is Madam Ling’s special attraction, a wondrous child of Terpsichore and Industry. Once she overheard the piano player whispering to the Irishman, and he said, “You’d think she emerged outta her momma’s womb like that,” and then there was a joke about screwing automata. But, however it might have been meant, she took it as praise and confirmation.

Too soon the music ends, leaving her gasping and breathless, dripping sweat and an iridescent sheen of lubricant onto the boards, and she must sit in her room backstage and wait out another hour before her next dance.

3.

And after the mechanic has washed away the day’s share of grime and they’re finished with their modest supper of apple pie and beans with thick slices of bacon, after his evening cigar and her cup of strong black Indian tea, after all the little habits and rituals of their nights together are done, he follows her to bed. The mechanic sits down and the springs squeak like stepped-on mice; he leans back against the tarnished brass headboard, smiling his easy, disarming smile while she undresses. When she slips the stocking off her right leg, he sees the gauze bandage wrapped about her knee, and his smile fades to concern.

“Here,” he says. “What’s that? What happened there?” and he points at her leg.

“It’s nothing,” she tells him. “It’s nothing much.”

“That seems an awful lot of dressing for nothing much. Did you fall?”

“I didn’t fall,” she replies. “I never fall.”

“Of course not,” he says. “Only us mere mortal folk fall. Of course you didn’t fall. So what is it? It ain’t the latest goddamn fashion.”

Missouri drapes her stocking across the footboard, which is also brass, and turns her head to frown at him over her shoulder.

“A burn,” she says, “that’s all. One of Madam Ling’s girls patched it for me. It’s nothing to worry over.”

“How bad a burn?”

“I said it’s nothing, didn’t I?”

“You did,” says the mechanic and nods his head, looking not the least bit convinced. “But that secondary sliding valve’s leaking again, and that’s what did it. Am I right?”

Missouri turns back to her bandaged knee, wishing that there’d been some way to hide it from him, because she doesn’t feel like him fussing over her tonight. “It doesn’t hurt much at all. Madam Ling had a salve—”

“Haven’t I been telling you that seal needs to be replaced?”

“I know you have.”

“Well, you just stay in tomorrow, and I’ll take that leg with me to the shop, get it fixed up tip-top again. Have it back before you know it.”

“It’s fine. I already patched it. It’ll hold.”

“Until the next time,” he says, and she knows well enough from the tone of his voice that he doesn’t want to argue with her about this, that he’s losing patience. “You go and let that valve blow out, and you’ll be needing a good deal more doctoring than a chink whore can provide. There’s a lot of pressure builds up inside those pistons. You know that, Missouri.”

“Yeah, I know that,” she says.

“Sometimes you don’t act like you know it.”

“I can’t stay in tomorrow. But I’ll let you take it the next day, I swear. I’ll stay in Thursday, and you can take my leg then.”

“Thursday,” the mechanic grumbles. “And so I just gotta keep my fingers crossed until then?”

“It’ll be fine,” she tells him again, trying to sound reassuring and reasonable, trying not to let the bright rind of panic show in her voice. “I won’t push so hard. I’ll stick to the slow dances.”

And then a long and disagreeable sort of silence settles over the room, and for a time she sits there at the edge of the bed, staring at both her legs, at injured meat and treacherous, unreliable metal. Machines break down, she thinks, and the flesh is weak. Ain’t nothing yet conjured by God nor man won’t go and turn against you, sooner or later. Missouri sighs and lightly presses a porcelain thumb to the artificial leg’s green release switch; there’s a series of dull clicks and pops as it comes free of the bolts set directly into her pelvic bones.

“I’ll stay in tomorrow,” she says and sets her left leg into its stand near the foot of their bed. “I’ll send word to Madam Ling. She’ll understand.”

When the mechanic doesn’t tell her that it’s really for the best, when he doesn’t say anything at all, she looks and sees he’s dozed off sitting up, still wearing his trousers and suspenders and undershirt. “You,” she says quietly, then reaches for the release switch on her right arm.

4.

When she feels his hands on her, Missouri thinks at first that this is only some new direction her dream has taken, the rambling dream of her father’s medicine wagon and of buffalo, of rutted roads and a flaxen Nebraska sky filled with flocks of automatic birds chirping arias from La traviata. But there’s something substantial about the pale light of the waxing moon falling though the open window and the way the curtains move in the midnight breeze that convinces her she’s awake. Then he kisses her, and one hand wanders down across her breasts and stomach and lingers in the unruly thatch of hair between her legs.

“Unless maybe you got something better to be doing,” he mutters in her ear.

“Well, now that you mention it, I was dreaming,” she tells him, “before you woke me up,” and the mechanic laughs.

“Then maybe I should let you get back to it,” but when he starts to take his hand away from her privy parts, she takes hold of it and rubs his fingertips across her labia.

“So, what exactly were you dreaming about that’s got you in such a cooperative mood, Miss Missouri Banks?” he asks and kisses her again, the dark stubble on his cheeks scratching at her face.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” she says.

“I figure that’s likely why I inquired.”

His face is washed in the soft blue-green glow of her San Francisco eye, which switched on as soon as she awoke, and times like this it’s hard not to imagine all the ways her life might have gone but didn’t, how very unlikely that it went this way, instead. And she starts to tell him the truth, her dream of being a little girl and all the manufactured birds, the shaggy herds of bison, and how her father kept insisting he should give up peddling his herbs and remedies and settle down somewhere. But at the last, and for no particular reason, she changes her mind, and Missouri tells him another dream, just something she makes up off the top of her sleep-blurred head.

“You might not like it,” she says.

“Might not,” he agrees. “Then again, you never know,” and the first joint of an index finger slips inside her.

“Then again,” she whispers, and so she tells him a dream she’s never dreamt. How there was a terrible fire and before it was over and done with, the flames had claimed half the city, there where the grass ends and the mountains start. And at first, she tells him, it was an awful, awful dream, because she was trapped in the boarding house when it burned, and she could see him down on the street, calling for her, but, try as they may, they could not reach each other.

“Why you want to go and have a dream like that for?” he asks.

“You wanted to hear it. Now shut up and listen.”

So he does as he’s bidden, and she describes to him seeing an enormous airship hovering above the flames, spewing its load of water and sand into the ravenous inferno.

“There might have been a dragon,” she says. “Or it might have only been started by lightning.”

“A dragon,” he replies, working his finger in a little deeper. “Yes, I think it must definitely have been a dragon. They’re so ill-tempered this time of year.”

“Shut up. This is my dream,” she tells him, even though it isn’t. “I almost died, so much of me got burned away, and they had me scattered about in pieces in the Charity Hospital. But you went right to work, putting me back together again. You worked night and day at the shop, making me a pretty metal face and a tin heart, and you built my breasts—”

“—from sterling silver,” he says. “And your nipples I fashioned from pure gold.”

“And just how the sam hell did you know that?” she grins. Then Missouri reaches down and moves his hand, slowly pulling his finger out of her. Before he can protest, she’s laid his palm over the four bare bolts where her leg fits on. He smiles and licks at her nipples, then grips one of the bolts and gives it a very slight tug.

“Well, while you were sleeping,” he says, “I made a small window in your skull, only just large enough that I can see inside. So, no more secrets. But don’t you fret. I expect your hair will hide it quite completely. Madam Ling will never even notice, and nary a Chinaman will steal a glimpse of your sweet, darling brain.”

“Why, I never even felt a thing.”

“I was very careful not to wake you.”

“Until you did.”

And then the talk is done, without either of them acknowledging that the time has come, and there’s no more of her fiery, undreamt dreams or his glib comebacks. There’s only the mechanic’s busy, eager hands upon her, only her belly pressed against his, the grind of their hips after he has entered her, his fingertips lingering at the sensitive bolts where her prosthetics attach. She likes that best of all, that faint electric tingle, and she knows he knows, though she has never had to tell him so. Outside and far away, she thinks she hears an owl, but there are no owls in the city.

5.

And when she wakes again, the boarding-house room is filled with the dusty light of a summer morning. The mechanic is gone, and he’s taken her leg with him. Her crutches are leaned against the wall near her side of the bed. She stares at them for a while, wondering how long it has been since the last time she had to use them, then deciding it doesn’t really matter, because however long it’s been, it hasn’t been long enough. There’s a note, too, on her nightstand, and the mechanic says not to worry about Madam Ling, that he’ll send one of the boys from the foundry down to the Asian Quarter with the news. Take it easy, he says. Let that burn heal. Burns can be bad. Burns can scar, if you don’t look after them.

When the clanging steeple bells of St. Margaret of Castello’s have rung nine o’clock, she shuts her eyes and thinks about going back to sleep. St. Margaret, she recalls, is a patron saint of the crippled, an Italian woman who was born blind and hunchbacked, lame and malformed. Missouri envies the men and women who take comfort in those bells, who find in their tolling more than the time of day. She has never believed in the Catholic god or any other sort, unless perhaps it was some capricious heathen deity assigned to watch over starving, maggot-ridden guttersnipes. She imagines what form that god might assume, and it is a far more fearsome thing than any hunchbacked crone. A wolf, she thinks. Yes, an enormous black wolf—or coyote, perhaps—all ribs and mange and a distended, empty belly, crooked ivory fangs and burning eyes like smoldering embers glimpsed through a cast-iron grate. That would be her god, if ever she’d been blessed with such a thing. Her mother had come from Presbyterian stock somewhere back in Virginia, but her father believed in nothing more powerful than the hand of man, and he was not about to have his child’s head filled up with Protestant superstition and nonsense, not in a Modern age of science and enlightenment.

Missouri opens her eyes again, her green eye—all cornea and iris, aqueous and vitreous humors—and the ersatz one designed for her in San Francisco. The crutches are still right there, near enough that she could reach out and touch them. They have good sheepskin padding and the vulcanized rubber tips have pivots and are filled with some shock-absorbing gelatinous substance, the name of which she has been told and cannot recall. The mechanic ordered them for her special from a company in some faraway Prussian city, and she knows they cost more than he could rightly afford, but she hates them anyway. And lying on the sweat-damp sheets, smelling the hazy morning air rustling the gingham curtains, she wonders if she built a little shrine to the wolf god of all collier guttersnipes, if maybe he would come in the night and take the crutches away so she would never have to see them again.

“It’s not that simple, Missouri,” she says aloud, and she thinks that those could have been her father’s words, if the theosophists are right and the dead might ever speak through the mouths of the living.

“Leave me alone, old man” she says and sits up. “Go back to the grave you yearned for, and leave me be.”

Her arm is waiting for her at the foot of the bed, right where she left it the night before, reclining in its cradle, next to the empty space her leg ought to occupy. And the hot breeze through the window, the street- and coal smoke-scented breeze, causes the scrap of paper tacked up by her vanity mirror to flutter against the wall. Her proverb, her precious stolen scrap of Shakespeare. What’s past is prologue.

Missouri Banks considers how she can keep herself busy until the mechanic comes back to her—a torn shirt sleeve that needs mending, and she’s no slouch with a needle and thread. Her good stockings could use a rinsing. The dressing on her leg should be changed, and Madam Ling saw to it she had a small tin of the pungent salve to reapply when Missouri changed the bandages. Easily half a dozen such mundane tasks, any woman’s work, any woman who is not a dancer, and nothing that won’t wait until the bells of St. Margaret’s ring ten or eleven. And so she watches the window, the sunlight and flapping gingham, and it isn’t difficult to call up with almost perfect clarity the piano and the guzheng and the Irishman thumping his bodhrán, the exotic, festive trill of the xiao. And with the music swelling loudly inside her skull, she can then recall the dance. And she is not a cripple in need of patron saints or a guttersnipe praying to black wolf gods, but Madam Ling’s specialty, the steam- and blood-powered gem of the Nine Dragons. She moves across the boards, and men watch her with dark and drowsy eyes as she pirouettes and prances through grey opium clouds.

© 2007 by Caitlín R. Kiernan.

Originally published in Sirenia Digest.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Caitlín R. Kiernan has published seven novels, most recently The Red Tree, which has been nominated for the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards. Her short fiction has been collected into several volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; A is for Alien; and The Ammonite Violin & Others. In 2011, Subterranean Press released Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One). She studied geology and paleontology at the University of Alabama and the University of Colorado, and has published in several scientific journals, including the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. She’s currently working on her next novel. Kiernan lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her partner, Kathryn.

Ruminations in an Alien Tongue
Vandana Singh

Birha on the Doorstep

Sitting on the sun-warmed step at the end of her workday, Birha laid her hand on the dog’s neck and let her mind drift. Like a gyre-moth finding the center of its desire, her mind inevitably spiraled inward to the defining moment of her life. It must be something to do with growing old, she thought irritably, that all she did was revisit what had happened all those years ago. Yet her irritation subsided before the memory. She could still see it with the shocking clarity of yesterday: The great, closed eyelid set in the enormous alien stronghold, opening in response to her trick. The thick air of the valley, her breath caught in her throat, the orange-and-yellow uniforms of the waiting soldiers. She had gone up the ladder, stepped through the round opening. Darkness, her footsteps echoing in the enormous space, the light she carried casting a small, bobbing pool of illumination. This was the alien stronghold considered invincible by the human conquerors, to which the last denizens of a dying race had crawled in a war she had forgotten when she was young. She had expected to find their broken, decayed bodies, but instead there was a silence like the inside of a temple up in the mountains. Silence, a faint smell of dust, and a picture forever burned into her mind: In the light of her lamp, the missing soldier, thunderstruck before the great mass of machinery in the center.

That was the moment when everything changed. For her, and eventually for humankind. She had been young then.

 “Hah!” she said, a short, sharp sound—an old woman laughing at her foolishness. It felt good to sit here on the doorstep, although now it was turning a little cold. On this world, the sun didn’t set for seven years as counted on the planet where she had been born. She knew she would not live to see another sunset; her bones told her that, and the faint smell in her urine, and her mind, which was falling backward into a void of its own making.

But the clouds could not be ignored, nor the yellow dog at her knee, who wanted to go inside. There would be rain, and the trees would open their veined, translucent cups to the sky. There would be gyre-moths emerging from holes in the ground, flying in smooth, ever-smaller circles, at the center of which was a cup of perfumed rain—and there would be furred worms slithering up the branches to find the sweet moth-meat. In the rain under the trees, the air would quiver with blood and desire, and the human companion animals—the dogs and cats and ferrets—would run to their homes lest the sleehawks or a feral arboril catch them for their next meal. Yes, rain was a time of beauty and bloodshed, here at the edge of the great cloud forest, among the ruins of the university that had been her home for most of her life.

She got up, noting with a grim satisfaction that, in this universe, old knees creaked. She went in with the dog and shut the door and the windows against the siren-like calls of the foghorn-trees, and put some water on to boil. Rain drummed on the stone walls of her retreat, and she saw through the big window the familiar ruined curve of the university ramparts through a wall of falling water. Sometimes the sight still took her breath away. That high walk with the sheer, misty drop below was where she had first walked with Thirru.

A Very Short Rumination

When I was born my mother named me Birha, which means “separated” or “parted” in an ancient human language. This was because my mother was about to die.

Difficult Loves

Thirru was difficult and strange. He seemed eager to make Birha happy but was like a big, foolish child, unable to do so. A large, plump man, with hair that stood up on end, he liked to clap his hands loudly when he solved a difficult problem, startling everyone. His breath smelled of bitter herbs from the tea he drank all day. Even at their pairing ceremony he couldn’t stop talking and clapping his hands, which she had then thought only vaguely annoying and perhaps endearing. Later, her irritation at his strangeness, his genius, his imbecility, provoked her into doing some of her best work. It was almost as though, in the discomfort of his presence, she could be more herself.

One time, when she was annoyed with Thirru, she was tempted by another man. This man worked with her; his fingers were long and shapely over the simulator controls, and he leaned toward her when he spoke, always with a warmth that made her feel as though she was a creature of the sunlight, unfurling in the rays of morning. He made her feel younger than she was. She didn’t like him very much; she distrusted people with charm as a matter of principle, but he was more than charm. He was lean, and wore his dark hair long and loose, and every posture of his was insouciant, inviting, relaxed as a predatory animal; when he leaned toward her she felt the yearning, the current pulling her toward him. At these moments she was always stiff and polite with him; in privacy she cursed herself for her weakness. She avoided him, sought him out, avoided him, going on like this for days, until, quite suddenly, she broke through the barrier. She was no longer fascinated by him. It wasn’t that his charm had faded; it was only (she congratulated herself) the fact that she had practiced the art of resisting temptation until she had achieved some mastery. You practice and it becomes easier, just like the alien mathematics on which she was working at the time. Just like anything else.

This freedom from desiring this man was heady. It was also relaxing not to feel drawn to him all the time, to be able to joke and laugh with him, to converse without that terrible, adolescent self-consciousness. She could even let herself like him after that.

In this manner she carried herself through other temptations successfully. Even after Thirru’s own betrayal she wasn’t tempted into another relationship. After the reconciliation they stayed together for an entire cycle, some of which was marked by an easy contentment that she had never known before, a deep wellspring of happiness. When they parted, it was as friends.

But what he left behind, what all old loves left behind were the ghostly imprints of their presence. For her, Thirru came back whenever she looked up at the high walk where she had first walked with him. Thirru was the feel of damp stone, the vivid green of the moss between the rocks, the wet, verdant aroma of the mist. She didn’t have to go there anymore; just looking up at the stone arch against the clouds would bring back the feel of his hands.

After Thirru, she had had her share of companions, long and short term, but nobody had inspired her to love. And when the man happened along who came closest, she was unprepared for him. His name was Rudrak, and he was young.

What she loved about him was his earnestness, his delight in beautiful things, like the poeticas she had set up on the long table. He was an engineer, and his passion was experimental craft designed to explore stars. She loved his beautiful, androgynous face, how it was animated by thought and emotion, how quick his eyes were to smile, the way his brow furrowed in concentration. That crisp, black, curling hair, the brown arm flung out as he declaimed, dramatically, a line from a classic play she’d never heard of. When he came, always infrequently, unexpectedly, always on a quest for the woman Ubbiri, it was as though the sun had come out in the sky of her mind. Conversation with him could be a battle of wits, or the slow, easy, unhurried exchange of long-time lovers. She never asked him to stay for good (as though it were possible), never told him she loved him.

Now she was pottering about in her kitchen, listening to the rain, wondering if he would come one more time before she died. The last time he had come was a half-cycle ago (three and a half years on her birth planet, her mind translated out of habit). There was not much more than a half-cycle left to her. Would he come? Pouring her tea, she realized that despite the certainty with which she loved this man, there was something different about this love. She felt no need for him to reciprocate. Sometimes she would look at her arms, their brown, lean strength, the hands showing the signs of age, and remember what it was like to be touched, lovingly, and wonder what it would be like to caress Rudrak’s arm, to touch his face, his lips. But it was an abstract sort of wondering. Even if she could make him forget Ubbiri (and there was no reason for her to do that), she did not really want him too close to her. Her life was the way she liked it: The rising into early mornings, the work with the poeticas—which was a meditation in sunlight and sound—then the long trek up the hill to the now-abandoned laboratory. Returning in the early evening before the old bells rang sunset (although the sun wouldn’t set for half a cycle yet) into the tranquility of her little stone house, where the village girl entrusted with the task would have left her meal warming on the stove just the way she liked it. The peace of eating and reading by herself, watching the firelings outside her window, in the temporary, watery dark created by the frequent gathering of clouds. In those moments the universe seemed to open to her as much as it seemed shut to her during the long day. She would stare out at the silhouettes of trees and wonder if the answers she was seeking through her theories and equations weren’t instead waiting for her out there in the forest, amidst the ululations of the frenet-bird and the complex script of the fireling’s dance. In those moments it would seem to her as though all she had to do was to walk out into the verdure and pluck the answer from the air like fruit from trees; that it was in these moments of complete receptivity that the universe would be revealed to her, not in the hours at the simulators in the laboratory. That the equations would be like childish chatter compared to what was out there to know in its fullness.

She took her tea to her favorite chair to drink. On the way she let her fingers brush lightly over the wires of the poeticas that stood on wood frames on the long table. The musical notes sounded above the crash of the rain, speaking aloud her ruminations in the lost alien tongue. Rudrak had left his ghost behind here: The remembrance of his body leaning over the instruments, brushing them as he might, in some other universe, be brushing the hair from her face. Asking how this sequence of notes implied those words. Since she had walked into the alien stronghold so many years ago, since the time that everything had changed, Rudrak had visited her nine times. Each time he remembered nothing of his previous visits, not even who she was. Each time she had to explain to him that Ubbiri was dead, and that he should come in, and wouldn’t he like some tea? She went through the repetition as though it was the first time, every time, which in a way it was. A sacred ritual.

Rudrak.

Would he come?

A Rambling Rumination

Simply by virtue of being, we create ripples in the ever-giving cosmic tree, the kalpa-vriksh. Every branch is an entire universe. Even stars, as they are born and die, leave permanent marks in the shadow universe of their memory. Perhaps we are ghosts of our other selves in other universes.

It was not right for Ubbiri to die. There is a lack of symmetry there, a lack even of a proper symmetry breaking. Somewhere, somehow, Ubbiri’s meta-world-line and mine should connect in a shape that is pleasing to the mathematical eye. Sometimes I want to be Ubbiri, to know that a part of me did wander into another universe after all, and that separated, the two parts were joined together at last. There is something inelegant about Ubbiri’s return and subsequent death. Ubbiri should have shared consciousness with me. Then, when Rudrak asks: “I am looking for Ubbiri. Is she here?” for the umpteenth time, I, Birha, will say yes. She’s here.

Instead this is what I say:

“I’m sorry, Ubbiri passed away a long time ago. She told me about you when she died. Won’t you come in?”

What is the probability that I am Ubbiri? If so, am I dead or alive, or both?

Ubbiri is dead. I am Birha, and Birha is alone.

The Discovery

When Birha was neither young nor old, when Thirru had already moved off-planet, a young soldier volunteered to test-fly an alien flyer, one of two intact specimens. The flight went well until upon an impulse he decided to swoop by the alien ruins in the valley below the University. During the dive, he lost control of the flyer, which seemed to be heading straight for a round indentation like an eye in the side of an ancient dome. The indentation revealed itself to be a door, by opening and then closing behind the flyer.

When Birha was consulted about the problem, she suspected that the door worked on an acoustical switch. Calculating the frequency of sound emitted by the alien flyer at a certain speed in the close, thick air of the valley took some time. But when a sound wave of the requisite frequency was aimed at the door, it opened almost immediately, with a sigh as though of relief.

She volunteered to go alone into the chamber. They argued, but she had always been stubborn, and at the end they let her. She was the expert on the aliens after all.

The interior was vast, shrouded in darkness and her footsteps echoed musically. She saw the flyer, in some kind of docking bay, along with a dozen others. There were no decaying alien bodies, only silence. The young man stood in front of the great mass of machinery at the center of the room. In the light from her lamp (which flickered strangely) she saw a complexity of fine, fluted vanes, crystalline pipes as thin as her finger running in and out of lacy metalwork. The whole mass was covered in a translucent dome that gleamed red and blue, yellow and green, in the light from her lamp. There was a door in the side of the dome, which was ringed by pillars.

“My hand . . .” the soldier was staring at his hand. He looked at Birha at last. “My hand just went through that pillar . . .”

Birha felt a loosening of her body, as though her joints and tendons were coming apart, without pain. If she breathed out too hard, she might fling herself all over the cosmos. Her heart was beating in an unfamiliar rhythm. She put her hand in her pocket and took some coins out. Carefully she tossed each one in the air. Thirteen coins came down on the floor, all heads.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” she told the aviator. “It’s the machine. It’s an alien artifact that changes the probabilities of things. We’re standing in the leakage field. Look, just come with me. You’ll be all right.”

She led him into the light. The round door was propped open by a steel rod and there were crowds of people waiting at the foot of the ladder. The young man was still dazed.

“It tickled,” he said. “My hand. When it went through the pillar.”

A Rumination on the Aliens

What do we know about them? We know now they are not dead. They went through the great probability machine, the actualizer, to another place, a place we’ll never find. The old pictures show that they had pale brown, segmented bodies, with a skeletal frame that allowed them to stand upright. They were larger than us but not by much, and they had feelers on their heads and light-sensitive regions beneath the feelers, and several limbs. They knew time and space, and as their culture was centered around sound, so was their mathematics centered around probability. Their ancient cities are filled with ruined acoustical devices, enormous poeticas, windchimes, and Aeolian harps as large as a building. Their music is strange but pleasant to humans, although its frequency range goes beyond what we can hear. When I was just an acolyte at the university, I chose to study what scripts were left after the war. They were acoustical scripts, corresponding to the notes in a row of poeticas on the main streets of their cities. I was drunk with discovery, in love with the aliens, overcome with sorrow that they were, as we thought then, all dead. For the first time since I had come to this planet, I felt at home.

To understand the aliens I became a mathematician and a musician. After that, those three things are one thing in my mind: the aliens, the mathematics, the music.

Rudrak’s Story

A bristleship, Rudrak told Birha, is like no other craft. It burrows into the heart of a star, enduring temperatures beyond imagination, and comes out on the other side whole and full of data. The current model was improved by Rudrak in his universe, a branch of the cosmic tree not unlike this one. He did it for his partner, Ubbiri, who was writing a thesis on white dwarf stars. Ubbiri had loved white dwarf stars since a cousin taught her a nursery rhyme about them when Ubbiri was small:

Why are you a star so dim

In the night beyond the rim

Don’t you want someone to love?

In the starry skies above?

Ubbiri had to write a thesis on white dwarf stars. As dictated by academic custom in that culture, her thesis had to connect the six points of the Wheel of Knowing: Meta-networking, Undulant Theory, Fine-Jump Mathematics, Time-Bundles, Poetry, and Love. To enable her to achieve deep-knowing and to therefore truly love the star, she took a ride on the new bristleship with Rudrak. They discovered that when the ship went through the starry core, it entered another reality. This was later called the shadow universe of stars, where their existence and life history is recorded in patterns that no human has completely understood. Some poets call this reality the star’s memory-space, or its consciousness, but Ubbiri thought that was extending metaphor beyond sense. The data from the bristleship told her that this star, this love, had been a golden star in its youth and middle age, harboring six planets (two of which had hosted life), and much space debris. In the late season of its existence it had soared in largeness, dimming and reddening, swallowing its planetary children. Now it was content to bank its fires until death.

After this discovery, Rudrak said, the two of them lived quiet lives that were rich and full. But one day before he was due to take off for another test flight, Ubbiri noticed there was a crack on the heat shielded viewscreen of the bristleship. Rudrak tested it and repaired it, but Ubbiri was haunted by the possibility of the tiny crack spreading like a web across the viewscreen, and breaking up just as Rudrak was in the star’s heart.

Perhaps that was what she thought when Rudrak disappeared. Rudrak only knew that instead of passing through the shadow universe before coming out, the bristleship took him somewhere else, to a universe so close to his own that he did not know the difference until he had crashlanded on a planet (this planet) and been directed to people who knew the truth. They led him to Birha, who sheltered him for fifteen days, allowed him to mourn and to come slowly to life again. Each time, she sent him back to his universe, as protocol demanded, by way of the alien probability machine, the actualizer. Somehow he was caught in a time-loop that took him back to the day before the ill-fated expedition. He had returned to her in exactly the same way nine times. His return visits were not predictable, being apparently randomly spaced, and her current (and last) calculation was an attempt to predict when he would come next.

Each visit was the same and not the same. Surely he had had less gray hair the last time? And that healed cut on his hand—hadn’t that been from his last trip, when he was trying to help her cut fruit and the knife had slipped? And hadn’t his accent improved just a little bit since last time? They’d had to teach him the language each visit as though it was new, but perhaps it became just a hair’s breadth easier each time?

She tried to make each experience subtly different for him. She was afraid that too drastic a change might upset whatever delicate process was at work in the time-loop. He was like a leaf caught in an eddy—push too hard and the time stream might take him over a precipice. But a little tug here, a tug there, and perhaps he’d land safely on a shore, of this universe or that one.

So far nothing had worked. His bewilderment was the same, each time he appeared on her doorstep, and so was his grief. It was only these small, insignificant things that were different. One time he wore an embroidered collar, another time a plain one. Or the color of his shirt was different.

Birha worked on her calculations, but the kalpa-vriksh gave senseless, contradictory answers.

A Rumination on Timmar’s Rock

I remember when I first came to the University, I used to pass a flat-topped boulder on the way to class. There was a depression on the flat surface of the rock in the exact shape of the bottom of a water bowl. When I met Thirru, he told me that the great Timmar Rayan, who had founded the School of Wind and Water, had sat there in daily meditation for three entire cycles, placing his water bowl in the same spot every time. Over the years the depression had developed. I have always marveled that something as unyielding as rock can give way before sheer habit, or regularity, or persistence, whatever you might call it.

Practice, whether in mathematics or in love, changes things.

Sometimes.

Ubbiri’s arrival

It was one thing to realize that the alien device in the center of the chamber was some kind of probability-altering machine. That it was the fabled actualizer hinted at in alien manuscripts, which she had always thought of as myth, was quite another thing. This knowledge she owed to Ubbiri, who was discovered lying on the floor of the chamber not three days after Birha had first opened the round door. Ubbiri was immediately incarcerated for questioning and only after several ten-days, when her language had been deciphered and encrypted into a translation device, had Birha been allowed to speak to her. They said the old woman was mad, babbling about shadow universes and tearing at her silver hair, but Birha found her remarkably sane. Ubbiri told her that she had tired of waiting for her partner, who had disappeared during a flight through a certain white-dwarf star, and when he didn’t return, she had taken an old-model bristleship and dived into the heart of the star. When the ship passed through the core she defied its protestations and stepped out of it, seeking either him or death in the shadowy depths of the other reality. Instead she found herself lying on the floor of the chamber, aged beyond her years.

Over the course of four ten-days of conversation, Birha determined that the constants of nature were a hairs-breadth different where Ubbiri came from, so it was very likely another universe entirely. She realized then that the machine at the center of the room did not merely change probabilities. It was an actualizer: a probability wave interference machine, and the portal inside it led to whatever branch of the kalpa-vriksh you created by changing the parameters. But the portal only opened if you’d satisfied consistency checks and if (as far as the machine could tell) the universe was stable. Somehow the pathways to other universes intersected within the cores of stars, hence Ubbiri’s surprising arrival.

Not long after, Ubbiri died. She left a note stating that there were three things she was grateful for: her white dwarf star, Rudrak, and spending her last days with Birha.

A quarter-cycle after Ubbiri’s death, Rudrak came for the first time into Birha’s life.

A Rumination on Thirru, or Rudrak

There is a rift valley between us, a boundary that might separate two people or two universes. I’ve been exploring there, marveling at the tortured geometries of its sheer walls, the pits and chasms on its floor. Through them I’ve sometimes seen stars. So far I’ve avoided falling in, but who knows? One day maybe I’ll hurtle through the layer between this universe and that, and find myself a meteor, a shooting star falling into the gravity well of a far planet.

What if a meteor changed its mind about falling? Would the universe allow it? Only if the rock fell under the sway of another imperative that lifted it beyond gravity’s grasp. But where, in that endless sky, would it find the rift from which it had emerged? It would have to wander, searching, until the journey became an end in itself. And then, one day when the journey had changed it beyond recognition, it would find the rift and it would stand on the lip of it, wondering: Should I return?

But I am not a rock. I am a person, slowly ripening in the sun of this world, like a pear on a tree. I am not hard, I am not protected by rocky layers.

Still, I cannot soar through your sky without burning.

Theories of Probability

What the actualizer did was change probabilities. So sometimes things that were highly improbable, like walking through a wall, or tossing five thousand coins so that heads came up every time—all those things could become much more likely.

Birha thought that in some sense people had always known about the other branches of the kalpa-vriksh. So many of humankind’s fantasies about the magical and the impossible were simply imaginative leaps into different regions of the cosmic tree. But to go to the place of your imagining in the flesh . . . that wasn’t possible before the actualizer’s discovery. If you adjusted the parameters, the actualizer would tweak the probability amplitudes to make your fairytale universe. Or perhaps it only opened a portal to an already existing one. What’s the difference? So much for you, entropy, for heat death, for death. Make it more likely that you live from fatal cancer than an ant-bite . . .

But you couldn’t always predict how the amplitudes would work for complex systems like universes, and whether programming in coarse features you desired would give too much creative freedom to sub-systems, resulting in surprises beyond imagining, and not always pleasant ones. Thus a mythology had already grown around the actualizer, detailing the possible and impossible other universes and their dangers. One made-up story related how they put in the parameters, the universal physical constants and the wavefunction behavior in space and time, and there came to be an instability in the matter of that universe that made people explode like supernovas when they touched each other with love. It was a fanciful lie, but it made a great opera.

In her idle moments, Birha wondered whether there was a curtain through which she could slip to find the place that always stays still amid the shifting cosmi, like the eye of a storm. But the foghorn trees were calling in the rain, and she was nodding over a bowl of soup, like the old woman she was. She looked at the veins standing out on the backs of her hands and the thick-jointed fingers, and thought of the body, her universe, which was not a closed system at all. Was there any system that was completely closed? Not in this universe, at least, where the most insulated of systems must interact with its environment, if only very slowly. So was our universe completely disconnected from the others, or did they bleed into each other? Exchange something? Not energy in any form we recognized, perhaps, but something more subtle, like dreams. She wanted to know what connected the universes, she wanted to step back from it all and see the kalpa-vriksh in its entirety. But she was caught in it as surely as anyone else. A participant-observer who must deduce the grand structure of the cosmic tree from within it, who must work at it while being caught in it, a worm in a twig, a fly in amber, to feel the knowing, the learning, like a new intimacy, a love.

“All matter is wavelike in some sense,” she told the dog. “The actualizer generates waves, and through interference changes the probability amplitudes. The tiny bubble universe so formed then resonates with an existing universe with the same properties, and a doorway opens between them.”

The dog sighed, as though this was passé, which in a way it was, and wagged his tail.

A Rumination, Dozing in the Sun

One day I dreamed I was the light falling off the edge of a leaf, nice and straight, but for the lacy diffraction at the edge. At night I flew into the clouds, to the well of stars, and became a piece of the void, a bit of dark velvet stitched on to the sky. In the afternoon I am just an old woman dozing in the sun with a yellow dog sitting beside her, wondering about stars, worried about the universes. If I could be the tap of your shoe, the glance out of the corner of your eye when you see that man or this woman, if I could be the curled lip of the snarling arboril, or a mote in the eye of a dog. What would I be, if I were to be any of this?

I am myself and yet not so. I contain multitudes and am a part of something larger; I am a cell the size of a planet, swimming in the void of the night.

When They Left

After the actualizer’s discovery, it became a subject of study, a thing to explore, and ultimately an industry dealing in dreams. Streams of adventurers, dreamers, and would-be suicides, people dissatisfied with their lives, went through the actualizer to find the universe that suited them better. The actualizer became a wish-fulfillment machine, opening a path to a universe just like this one, but with your personal parameters adjusted ever so slightly, the complexity matrices shifted just so. (This was actually not possible: Manipulating individual meta-world-lines was technically an unsolved problem, but tell that to the dreamers.) Among the last to go were the people who had worked with Birha, her colleagues and students. They claimed not to be deceived by the dream-merchants; their excuse was academic, but they went like so many other people into the void. The exodus left certain towns and regions thinly populated, some planets abandoned. Imagine being dissatisfied enough to want to change not towns, or planets, but entire universes! It was all Birha could do in the early days to stand there and watch the insanity until finally her dear companions were sundered from her by space, time, and whatever boundary kept one universe from another. Some people came back but they were strangers, probably from other planets in her universe. She had discovered the infinite branches of the cosmic tree, but it was not hers to claim in any way. She was the only one who wouldn’t travel its endless ways.

Who knew how long her erstwhile companions would be gone, or in what shape they’d return, if they returned? She was too old to travel, and she liked the pleasures of small things, like tinkering with the tuning on the poeticas, designing and constructing new ones, and sipping the pale tea in the morning. She liked watching the yellow dog chase firelings. But also she was a prickly old woman, conservative as they come about universes and parameters, and she liked this one just fine, thank you. She liked the world on which she lived, with the seven-year day-cycle.

No, she wouldn’t go. She was too obstinate and she disapproved of this meddling with the natural unfolding of things. Besides there was the elegance of death. The neatness of it, the way nothing’s wasted after. It seemed as though only in this universe was death real. She liked to sit on the sunny doorstep and talk to the dog about it all. Dogs, she thought, don’t need other universes; they are already perfect for the one in which they exist. She wondered if humans were refugees from some lost other branch of the Tree, which is why we were so restless. Always dissatisfied, going from planet to planet, galaxy to galaxy, branch to branch of the Cosmic Tree, and maybe rewriting our own life-histories of what-has-been. But we are not all like that; there have always been people who are like the dog, like Birha, perfectly belonging in the worlds of this universe.

A Rumination on Poeticas

A poetica consists of a series of suspended rods or wires under tension, mounted vertically on a frame. A sounding stick run by an ingenious mechanism of gears and a winding mechanism not unlike an old-fashioned clock brushes over the rods at a varying speed, forward and backward. A series of levers controls which rod or wire is struck. While this instrument can be designed to be played by an adept, it can also be fully automated by the mechanism, which is built to last. The enormous ones on public display recount the histories and great epic poems of the people, and are made of wood and stone and metal. Some kinds are designed to be played by the wind, but in these instruments, the sounds, and therefore the meanings, are always new, and ambiguous.

It took me years to learn the musical language of the aliens, and more years to learn to build miniature poeticas.

To sound these ruminations, I have had to interpolate and invent new syllables, new chords and phrases, in order to tell my story. There are no words in their language for some of what I feel and think, and similarly there are sounds in their tongue I’ll never understand.

We call them aliens, but this is their world. We took it from them. We are the strangers, the interlopers, the aliens.

Birha’s Loves

So Birha waits, watching the clouds gather over the university ramparts, walking every day to the abandoned laboratory, where her calculations give her both frustration and pleasure. Following the probability distribution of a single meta-world-line is tremendously difficult. Through the skeins and threads of possibility that arc across the simulator’s three-dimensional result-space, she can discern several answers that fit the constraints. A problem with a multiplicity of answers as scattered as stars. Rudrak will be back in 0.3, or 0.87, or 4.6 cycles. Or in 0.0011, or 5.8, or 0.54 cycles. She is out of temper with herself and the meta-universe at large.

As she goes down the slope in the cloud-darkness that passes for evening, tripping a little bit because she wants to be in the stone house before the rain starts, it occurs to her that her irritation signifies love. For Thirru, for the man who temporarily attracted her, for the lesser loves of all the years after, for Rudrak, for all her long-gone colleagues and students, for the yellow dog who lives with her, for the village girl who brings the evening meal and cleans up in silence. For Timmar’s rock, for the aliens and their gift to her, for the cloud forest, for that ever-giving Tree, the cosmic kalpa-vriksh, and especially her branch of it. And for death, who waits for her as she waits for Rudrak.

As she thinks this, her impatience at Rudrak’s non-arrival dissipates the way the mist does when the sun comes out. In the stone house, she is out of breath; her chest hurts. There is an aroma of warm food and the yellow dog looks up from where he is lying and wags his tail lazily. She sits down to eat, dropping bits for the dog, sipping the pale tea. She thinks how it might be good for her to go out, when the time comes, into the deep forest and let her life be taken by a stinging death-vine, as is the custom among some of the natives. The vine brings a swift, painless death, wrapping the body in a shell of silken threads until all the juices are absorbed. The rest is released to become part of the rich humus of the forest floor. She feels like giving herself back to the world that gave her so much, even though she was not born here. It is comforting to think of dying in this way. The yellow dog will be happy enough with the village girl, and the old stone house will eventually be overcome by the forest. The wind will have to learn to play the poeticas, and then it will interpolate its own story with hers.

Only closed systems are lonely. And there is no such thing as a closed system.

Three days later, as the bell for morning tolls, there is a knock on the door. There is a man standing there. A stranger. No—it takes her a moment to recognize Rudrak, with his customary attitude of bewilderment and anxiety. The change is just enough to render him not quite familiar: More silver hairs, a shirt of a different fashion, in blue with an embroidered sash. He’s taller, stoops a little, and the face is different too, in a way that she can’t quite explain. In that long moment of recognition, the kalpa-vriksh speaks to her. The mistake she had made in her calculations was to assume that through all the changes between universes, through space and through time, Rudrak would be Rudrak, and Birha, Birha, and Ubbiri would always remain Ubbiri. But finally she’s seen it: Identity is neither invariant nor closed. No wonder the answers had so much scatter in them! The truth, as always, is more subtle and more beautiful. Birha takes a deep breath of gratitude, feels her death only a few ten-days away.

“I’m looking for Ubbiri,” says this almost-stranger, this new Rudrak. His accent is almost perfect. She ushers him in, and he looks around, at the pale sunlight falling on the long table with the poeticas, which are sounding softly. His look of anxiety fades for a moment, to be replaced by wonder. “This looks familiar,” he says. “Have I been here before?”

© 2012 Vandana Singh.

Vandana Singh is an Indian science fiction writer living in the U.S., where she also teaches physics full-time at a state university. She has published short stories in various anthologies and magazines, including Strange Horizons and TRSF, many of which have been reprinted in Year’s Best volumes. Her novella Distances (Aqueduct Press) won the 2008 Carl Brandon Parallax award. Most recently she has been a columnist for Strange Horizons, where her reflections on science and the environment can be found.

Nomad
Karin Lowachee

People in modern times don’t like to acknowledge that some of us Radicals are nomad. They interpret that as rogue and dangerous. If you think it’s hard for us now, it was much worse during the turf wars—especially if you weren’t integrated. When Tommy died I became uni—unintegrated—and that usually means nomad. I belonged to no Streak, had no chief and no Fuses to protect me. It wasn’t overnight.

For a month after Tommy died, my chief tried to convince me to integrate with another human. It’s not unheard of, though for many it is not desired. But since nomad Radicals have it hard against suspicious people, the majority of us capitulate and Fuse to a second, lesser human. Any human after your first is always lesser in some way. You have not grown with them; you have not shared memories from birth to death. Many Radicals who have lost their first human don’t last the year, Fused again or not; instead they voluntarily dismantle.

I was never one for suicide, though I have come close. But I don’t think it’s in my nature to cut myself short—I have the scars and dents on my armor to prove it. I spent too many years trying to keep myself and Tommy alive against rival Streaks, and he did the same. To dismantle myself, even if it’s my right, would be an insult to the Fuse I had lost when Tommy died.

Every Streak across the world thinks they know what went down when Tommy was killed, but they don’t know because everyone involved in that fracas, besides myself, was destroyed. (Human, Radical—the term “destruction” fits for both.) This was the beginning of my Streak’s suspicion of me and I suppose I can’t blame them. It is a hard thing to explain when your human dies and you survive. Tommy’s uncle was the chief, and the chief’s Radical was the only other Radical in our Streak that was older than me. We were possibly the oldest Radicals left in the world besides some beaten-down Copperpickers in the few mines left in the North. Anyway, Tommy had been the vice-chief. It is likely that once Tommy was dead and I was uni, Radical One calculated that I would want to take the primus position with a new human. But I had no such ambitions and still do not. Leading a Streak is not a simple thing and I’ve grown tired of the raids.

Maybe I have always been a little bit nomad in my programming. My generation model, they say, has some tragic flaws.

The day I decided to leave the Streak, the chief made one last effort to convince me to stay and reintegrate. I stood in the wreckhouse with the other Fuses, all of them doubles. I was the only single. We made thirteen, which is small for a modern Streak, but the chief didn’t agree with the corporate mentality that dictated there had to be at least twenty Fuses in a Streak. That was too much like a government army, and we were better beneath our own flag.

The armor of every Fuse is different. Our Streak wasn’t full of rainbow, like you find in the West, especially in Heo Eremiel. Their raids look ridiculous if you see them in your rearscan, like a flock of parrots who will talk you to death. We weren’t all about our looks, but our Tora Streak had some pride. Blacks, grays, blues, reds. When we raided up, we were a storm.

Radical One was a sheen of midnight blue integrated with the chief, covering him head to toe in a sleek armor husk. If you have never seen a Fuse it might be difficult to discern where human ends and Radical begins, but that is the point. Since we weren’t raided up, though, his faceplate was open, his gunports were shut, and I saw his hooded human eyes. Radical One’s red scanning eye on his forehead bent in regular beats across each of our faceplates and did not bend to the human eyes. I bent my eye back, but then ignored it to zero on the chief. He was old by human years, well into his gray period, but battle hardened in every line and vein.

“Why won’t you give Probie a chance?” Chief gestured with a gauntlet at the lone human who stood by the door of the wreckhouse. One of him and one of me. Even a first burst of a Radical could do that math out of the yards.

“I gave him a chance,” I said. “We won’t work.”

The probie had approached me the week before and said, “They don’t make your kind anymore, do they?” knowing very well that my model was discontinued twelve years ago. He’d taken two months to pluck up to me and that was the first thing out of his wet man-mouth.

“I wish I could say the same about you,” I’d told him. He’d taken offense, which wasn’t my problem. And he wasn’t going to be my problem now.

Deacon was his born name, but because he wasn’t Fused we all called him Probie. He did scut work around the house and the garage, and he had some skill with programming and basic Radical maintenance, not that I ever let him touch me. Mostly he did anything the chief wanted him to do for the Fuses, Radical and human alike. He had to learn that a Fuse wasn’t about the human. We weren’t cars he could flip a switch on and control out of the factory. I didn’t know why the chief made him a probie in the first place, because even if Deacon respected the Fuses, I saw that self-righteous gleam in his blue eyes. He reckoned he could stare down a Radical’s scan even though we never blinked. That kind of arrogance shares circuitry with stupidity. I’d rather dismantle than Fuse with that.

“So what’s your plan?” the chief said. “I hope you won’t kite off on a revenge mission.”

The payback on the bastard Fuses who had killed Tommy was not as complete as I would have liked. There had been much discussion in the Streak about the nature of this payback and the chief had his reasons for being careful about it. Keeping the peace between precarious towns; not wanting the locals to raise a paramilitary army to drive us out; not wanting more bloodshed when my murder of Tommy’s murderers could be seen as an even score. So many reasons and yet I would not have regretted more death.

But revenge wasn’t my reason for leaving.

“I’m going nomad,” I said.

All twelve Fuses made noises, human profanity and sharp Radical hums. Radical Five, who was called Steel, said that they would rather I stayed with the Streak as a uni than lose me to the grid. Steel was always dependable on my flank and its Fuse was now the vice-chief. His human Anatolia missed Tommy almost as much as I did. Once in a while they’d shared beds.

“I appreciate that,” I said, “but I think nomad is the direction for me. At least for now.”

“You will always have a place in Tora Streak,” the chief said. He wasn’t going to argue anymore. He’d given me enough outs in the past month and it was impossible to change my program once I’d set it.

Radical One’s eye bent and remained on my faceplate. Radical One didn’t have any other name, just the recognition number that every Radical possesses but none of us use in speech. It had never wanted to be more familiar to humans. Though the chief objected to my going and it was in the logs, Radical One never tried to make me stay. Without me around, its primus position would be fixed until dismantling or destruction through battle, since none of the other Fuses were close enough to take over unless for some reason the chief died independently. But Radical One was powerful, despite its age, and it did not lose in battle.

The chief said, “Radical Two is determined to be nomad. We won’t keep it here. Does everyone give their support to Radical Two?”

The consent was unanimous, if full of regret. I had some regret too, but not enough to keep me from leaving.

The chief said, “Then go with the wind, Mad.” And that was the first time he had ever called me by my chosen name.

It was the name Tommy had given me.

Humans don’t always name us. We name ourselves if we want such a familiar designation. But when Tommy was four he thought of Mad, not because I’m an angry Radical, he just didn’t want to call me Radical Two anymore. “That sounds so cold,” he said. “And you’re too warm inside.” When he melded to the hollow of my armor body, we created warmth.

I was also only four years out of the yards, we were four years integrated alloy and skin, and every time he shed me to be only human I felt an emptiness. I suppose that was where it all began.

We call it armor but the technical name is Trans-Developmental Biogenic Alloy. After the ratified Constitution that granted us rights and privileges as any sentient intelligent being, humans short-handed us to Radical Armor, and then just Radical. We are told that the name alludes to part of our chemical makeup; one of our origin scientists coined it. I have always found it a little sarcastic. Free radicals. Perhaps Dr. Gom had been a sarcastic man, as much as he had been a genius.

We grow with our humans, a second skin that can slip apart and exist away from the Fuse. The racists call us Silly Putty for our ability to morph, change constitution, and adapt. And we do adapt. We change. We integrate.

The Streaks are weapons grade Radical Armor.

First integration happens as close to birth as possible. It’s the only way you can be sure a Radical’s bioware adapts properly to a human, when the human’s mind isn’t fixed already. Once we’ve been through our first integration, we can integrate again, but it’s never as smooth as that first; when you’re new and your human’s new, slipping inside each other’s thoughts in that infant stage is like a synthesis of pure instinct or a predatory scent of blood.

I have memories of Tommy from five minutes after his first cry in this world, and before he died he had all of mine. Like the first time I opened my hand and saw my faint reflection in my perfect obsidian armor. Before the battle damage.

I remember the first time I set my hand over his and our grips locked together and became one. It took no thought to move our hand because the integration was more instinct than intellect. That is how you know that the fix is right. It is not artificial intelligence; it is intuitive intelligence.

It’s a need, those first memories. The first time he breathed the air, the first time he shut his eyes and saw instead through mine. The world is limitless when you’re Fused. It’s a hunger for experience and we spend all our lives in a hunt to fill it.

That’s what drives a Fuse. You, your human, and everything you can’t satisfy.

That is our biggest weakness too.

In our need to integrate with them, we adapted to human flaws.

The Fuses gathered around to bid me goodbye from the wreckhouse. Steel and Anatolia, Sol and Markie, Wyrm and Jasper, Giniro and Imori, Kikenna and Selene. The chief and Radical One only touched my shoulder and left first through the door. I scanned both human and Radical faces and it was a hard thing to know that I might never see them again.

They asked me where I was going but I didn’t tell them. I had plans to follow the road that would lead me away from the turf wars. I didn’t want to say out loud that I didn’t want to see any Radicals that I knew, or any Radicals at all. They would have considered this insane, because we all knew that in places where Radicals weren’t welcome, no law would protect me. Some humans did not acknowledge the Constitution, our rights, our sentience, our ability to choose not to kill them. Their fears were not completely unfounded, of course. But there are more murderous humans than there are murderous Radicals, and that will likely never change.

After Tommy’s death, I just wanted to be away. Vengeance could wait. Vengeance was bone without the marrow. Something else unknown and even dangerous matched the open spaces that were expanding through my inner wires and biogenic gyroscopes. I was being gutted the longer I remained in Tora Streak, racked to Tora thoughts.

The wreckhouse was where we all congregated when we weren’t launching raids. It catered to both humans and Radicals, with thick seats, docking spikes, and areas of play integration outlined by lights and nebular controls. Right now as I passed my eye over it in a wide beam, it looked and sounded skeletal beyond repair. The walls of the house reflected nothing and loomed empty and unlit, a dead alloy that could not change as its occupants did in their desires. The movements of the Fuses as they clasped my arms or bumped their heads to mine seemed to echo in hollow bass notes.

I said goodbye, made no promises to return, and stepped out the door into daylight.

The probie stood against the outer wall of the wreckhouse, smoking a cigarette.

“You’ll regret leaving,” he said, with my back to him.

“I won’t regret leaving you.” I had a blip of a thought to educate him about his attitude and why that would hinder his graduation from probie to full Fuse. But he wasn’t worth even that, so I kept walking toward the gate that surrounded Tora’s compound.

“Tommy wouldn’t want you to go,” he said to my back.

I turned my head around without moving the rest of my body, so my eye bent direct on his narrow little face. “You are determined to live a short human life.”

He flicked his cigarette away onto the pavement. “I think you should give me a second chance.”

“I have given you more chances than you realize.”

I watched as he approached, hands in his jacket pockets. He stopped right below my eye. He was shorter than Tommy, enough so that I had to tilt down my face to scan his features. The overlay showed me where all of his biodots were, a scatter of constellations in his brain. This might’ve been what made him such a sharp programmer. I did not know much about his past, only that he had come to the Streak from the town by recommendation of a human ally in the police department, and he had no living parents. The chief had done a thorough check on him and deemed him worthy of probie status. I didn’t ordinarily disagree with the chief, but if I could’ve taken back our vote before Tommy had died, seeing what I saw now, I would have—and jammed a bullet in this probie’s smirk while I was at it.

“I want to really talk with you,” he said. “But not here. If afterwards you still don’t think me worthy, then I’ll never bother you again.”

“You’ll never bother me again as soon as I walk through the gate.” I turned my head around and set myself in that direction.

“It’s about his death,” the probie said.

I circled back and snatched him up by the scruff of his neck. The gate opened at my signal and I walked on, holding the probie off the ground. He kicked and struggled but it is impossible for a human to break a Radical’s grip. He had a gun but he wouldn’t dare use it.

So I walked with him just like that down the road, away from Tora compound. I walked a full hour and then walked another, until the cars and other Radicals from Freemantown no longer passed us. None of them questioned me because they saw the orange and black Tora mark on my chest. I walked us out to the roads between towns, where yellow land stretched long and empty on either side. It was a cool day and I didn’t falter. I was well-maintained and topped up with energy, and could’ve moved faster if I adapted into road mode, but that would’ve required setting him on my back somehow. He fell limp in my grip eventually, weary from fighting and cursing at me.

But he woke up when I dumped him onto the side of the road.

“You bloody robot piece of shit!”

They continue to think “robot” is an insult.

I bent my blue eye to him and sent up the beam so it hit him on the forehead like a target. “Is this what you want to say to me?”

He was covered in dirt. He hauled himself to his feet and struggled to climb up the gravel embankment to face me toe to toe. I watched his gun hand. He was not generally that stupid, but he was angry, and humans have a tendency to be stupid in their anger.

“You think you know what happened to Tommy.” The probie spat at my feet. “But you don’t.”

“You think you know what happened to Tommy?” I too had guns. They were in-built.

“That ambush from the Gear Heart Streak.” He stared up at me with a blaze in his eyes. “When they raided up on you in Nuvo Nuriel. In the hotel. The chief sent you there to pat a deal with the Gears, but then they ended up turning on you? There was no deal, Mad, except to fuck you over. You and Tommy, ‘cause of what you were to each other.”

My scan overlay went red. I grabbed him up again by the collar and shook him hard.

His feet kicked. “Let go of me!”

I pitched him ten meters into the field. He fell with a dull thud and a cry. I bounded over to him in one leap from the road. My right foot almost nailed his chest, but he rolled away at the last second. I wanted to crush him. It would not have been difficult.

“I know you loved him!” the probie gasped, nearly winded. A true fear spread across his face. “I know it’s taboo. I don’t care about that; it’s wrong what they did. The chief set you up!” He began to cough.

I tangled my fingers in the front of his jacket and lifted him up so we were eye to eye. He kicked for a second out of reflex then stopped, just staring back. His arms hung long, all the arrogance slammed out of him. I calculated the option of killing him. Here in between towns it would take some time to find him. But then, many people from Freemantown had seen me walking with him.

“How do you know the chief set me up?” It was the most pertinent question. After I got my questions answered, maybe then I would send him back to town just so people could see him alive. Then I could circle back, hunt him down, and kill him.

“I read the chief of the Gear Heart Streak,” the probie said. “I read his Fuse.”

I scanned this probie’s biodots again. “With that in your head? There is nothing exceptional. You cannot scan a Radical with your limp brain.” Radical minds were fortresses.

He said, “I’m a wetthief. And the Gear Hearts are a bunch of second string Fuses and you know it.”

I did know it. Their ambush that had killed Tommy had only focused my hatred, but we had never liked them and their marauding spirits. They were not well-maintained, except in their wanton raids. Yet the chief had been bent on patting a deal “to cut down on the killings between the territories” where Tora and Gear tracks bisected the land. What could we have done? The votes went against us. Peace seemed a good avenue, but it was always more of a dark alley. Nobody had listened to Tommy on that score.

When they’d killed him, the chief had refused immediate payback. He’d said revenge had to come from thought, not impulse. The Streak had bowed to his level head.

I had burned. But he was my chief and my human was dead. I could not go up against the Gear Heart Streak alone. My actions were Tora’s actions.

Or would have been. Not anymore, as a nomad. And my need for vengeance had diminished in the days of loss. It was supposed to be simple, this leavetaking.

Now this probie claimed to know the mind of a Gear Heart Fuse? The chief and his Radical no less?

“I can prove it,” the probie said against my silence. “If you Fuse with me, I can show you.”

Wetthieves are notoriously reckless individuals. The government tries to deal with them, but to no real consequence. It is difficult to smash a thing that isn’t tangible, just as it is difficult to define an emotion. All the wily activity is through the mind. Yet I had never heard of a wetthief able to raid up on a Radical.

“Fuse with you?” That had been his intention all along, his eyes on my nexus. “I think you are a liar who wants to divide the Streak. How could a probie get close enough to the Gear Hearts to read their chief? Answer me.”

“The chief and Rad One sent me and Anatolia’s Fuse to Nuvo Nuriel two weeks ago for a parts run. You remember this. We saw the Gears on the corner. Before we split, I read them. I thought I could get intel for Tora and it’d help my case with you.” His jaw moved, stubborn overt confession that he wanted me for his Radical. “So I got intel.”

“And now you think it will help your case with me.” I would not address his other claim, what he thought he knew about me and Tommy. That would be a confirmation he had no right to nudge. Though I wondered how he did know, and if his mischievous man-mind had thieved in my nexus. Surely I would have felt it? I am deeply paranoid about my ware, as we all are.

The probie stared at me. I still held him above the ground. “If I had long enough, I could read you too. How do you think I know about you and Tommy? It was in the Gear Radical’s brain. It was in that chief’s. And they knew because your chief told them. You Radicals think you’re impenetrable, but you’re still a machine. And all machines have weaknesses.”

“You created us,” I said, and threw him very far.

He sailed through the air for more than ten meters. He hollered as he went. When he landed he stopped. I walked through the yellow grass and looked down at him. He seemed to be dead, lying in a heap, and it was a little bit of a concern that I might have killed him before I had all the answers. But only a little. It had felt good to toss him.

I scanned his vitals. His heart was beating and his brain showed activity—enough to be alive, though he was unconscious. Which was what I’d wanted. Unconscious, he couldn’t thieve.

I folded myself down beside him and waited. I didn’t care if it took hours for him to wake up. The field was quiet, except for random birds and the squeak of critters low to the ground. Mice. I watched a cricket bound across the black armor of my foot, pause there, and then disappear into the grass.

Tommy came to mind. It was inevitable. He was never long out of my thoughts, but now I played the images of him across my faceplate. He was tricky there and alive. It was true, I loved my human. It was also true that it was forbidden. You would think that if any clan of humans would understand an emotion forged in a Fuse, between human and Radical, it would be among the Streaks. But fundamentally there are still laws that surpass even science. There are deviations that go too far even for the Fuses in a Streak. Some things are universally wrong and some part of my programming understands that. I am, as the probie said, a machine. I can mold to human skin, to cover it and protect it and create a strength no human can reach on their own, but it is still only armor. I am still only armor, despite our integration with their minds.

Until my heart grew involved. Until my heart evolved. We call it a heart, but it is more like a central nervous system of programming. I believe it is the seat of our sentience but there is nothing to prove that. Humans think awareness comes from the brain.

I didn’t ask for this sentience. Unlike humans, my self-awareness was not born, but made. I was not the first Radical to achieve it (that one is long dismantled), but the template became in-built. Is it so difficult for people to believe that the next step in the evolution of sentience is love?

Tommy believed it the second I told him. We were Fused and sat in a field much like this one, at night, and I felt his fragile human body nested inside the spaces I had made for him since birth. The hollow of my chest, the tubes of my legs and arms. There he resided and every subtle thought sparked a response in mine, until we thought the same. We powered each other’s limbs in quiet movement. He ran his hand over the top of the grass blades and we both felt the tickle. My armor reflected the stars overhead, or as he liked to say, captured them. He was a killer—we both were—but he had a heart for the heavens.

I didn’t have to say the words. I only said, “We should go back to the wreckhouse, the chief will wonder.” Because we had been incommunicado for hours, and Tommy refused to reply to messages and I would not send signals on the sly. More often Tommy grew tired of the raids on the rival gangs, going from town to town, defending territory, controlling commerce. But I didn’t want him to get into trouble with the chief, so I said, “It’s very late.”

And he said, “Not yet, Mad.” And, “Just not yet.”

By and by, the probie awoke. Dusk sat new on the edges of the sky, dragging black overhead like a covering blanket. When I saw the probie’s eyes blink and focus, I said, “We are going to the Gear Heart Streak and we will discover if what you say is true.” My vengeance lay in wait. Now it could prowl again and my emptiness did not matter. It would be there regardless. I would wage war and did not care what humans got in my way.

The probie said, “What’s the point of going to the Gears? Right into enemy territory? You should go back to Tora and confront the chief.”

“I won’t accuse the chief and Radical One just because you say so. You say you thieved it from a Gear Heart mind, so we will go to the Gear Hearts. I will use you as a shield if you try my patience.”

“I did read them.” Even in the dim light of just stars and moon, I saw the steel insistence in his eyes. I needed no night scope for it.

“They are a bullshit Streak, those Gears,” I said. “So one way or another, we’ll get it out of them.”

He walked slowly, still dizzy-brained from the toss. I didn’t help him and I was in no hurry. I had to think of how to approach the Gears. Their territory was another few hours walk, even at a Radical stride. We would be there by dawn. Once, the probie suggested I let him ride me in road mode. I knocked him back to the gravel. He got up, swearing at me, but he didn’t ask again. At least he didn’t try to run. That would have been tedious to chase after him, to recapture him and shake him and put him under my arm so he couldn’t run again.

He must have truly wanted to Fuse with me to put up with my abuse. But I supposed that was natural. He was a probie; there was nothing more important to a probie than a Fuse.

So he said nothing else for the rest of the night. That was a single saving grace. The wetthief finally knew when to shut his damn mouth.

Across the street from the enemy compound I calculated the Gear Heart wreckhouse, the tracks I saw in the dirt, and informed the probie of my intent. We were going to hail them and speak with them. Once we were close enough, the probie would thieve from their nexus and load it to me. It was cumbersome to do so, not Fused, and might eat up precious time, but it was my strategy. I did not expect the Gear Hearts to tell me the truth. So I would put this wetthief to the test and if he wasn’t lying, I would destroy the Gear Hearts, every last one of them, and then I would go back to Tora Streak and kill the chief and Radical One for their betrayal.

The probie said, “You’re fucking insane.”

That was the true meaning of my name. No anger, just crazy. I said, “You will back me up.”

He had a gun and he was a good shot. I would defend him so long as I needed him. He knew it too.

He said, “You first.”

Since they’d killed Tommy, the Gear Hearts had not crossed into Tora territory. In fact they gave us a lot of room to do our deals and transport our goods: Guns, drugs, medical supplies to outlying paramilitaries. And we did not cross into theirs. It was an uneasy truce and now this probie made me wonder if it was one born from the blood of my Fuse.

The probie lurked behind me as I stood in front of the Gear Heart gate. I wanted to open my gunports, but such hostility would only provoke them to launch a few grenades our way. So I remained straight, sealed up, my eye ranging only so far as the south end of their rundown wreckhouse wall.

“This is Radical Two of the Tora Streak,” I sent loud toward them. Technically, I was nomad, but they didn’t need to know that. My voice cut through the early morning quiet. A graying hound loped in my peripheral vision, nosed at the dirt near old Radical footprints. I could not determine how old. “I will speak to your chief.”

The chief had not been in the ambush, so I had not killed him. Instead, I had killed his vice-chief’s Fuse and I had no doubt he held it against me. The truce could end right now if he was dumb enough to take offense at my presence. I itched to bloom open my epaulet gunports.

But the main door of the wreckhouse creaked open and a short dusty human poked his head out. He was not the chief, but some other member of the Streak. He had tattoos around his eyes like a red badger.

“The chief ain’t here,” he croaked.

“Then I will wait for him. When do you expect him back?”

“I dunno.”

“You may get him on signal or you can watch me sit in front of your gate with my Tora mark for the remainder of the day.”

“Or we can blow you off our stoop with a missile.”

“I know you Gear Hearts aren’t that accurate. You can recall I killed four of your Streak. I didn’t come here to fight, but my arsenal can take out your entire compound. Do you wish to gamble on your aim and my reflexes?”

The door shut with a blam. Behind me, the probie laughed, but I shoved him quiet. I scanned the compound with all of my senses. The wreckhouse was proofed against every kind of amplification, but I listened and looked for movement by the animals, the trees on the outer edges, the air between the buildings. All lay quiet, as if the Streak were still abed. But I knew they were awake and the chief was indeed behind this gate.

In two minutes, he emerged from the wreckhouse, Fused. His Radical was blood red, its eye a scathing white. Its gaze slammed on me like a spotlight so I had to adjust my intake view. The Fuse met me on the other side of the gate.

“What do you want?” said the Gear Heart chief.

I had only to make him talk long enough for the probie to thieve his nexus and shunt the intel to me. I wanted it live, not from memory where memory could be manufactured. I would not put trickery past the probie, so this was my strategy. This would tell the truth of all.

Then the probie shot the Gear Heart chief right in the face.

The large caliber, double impact heavy round went straight through the faceplate. Such weaponry is made to kill Fuses. Blood and bits of plate glass, bone, and brains smattered against my armor.

I had no time to shout at the probie. The chief was dead but his Radical wasn’t. With a shudder the Gear Heart Radical slipped from its human, a sound I knew only too well shattering the morning air. I had made such a noise when Tommy was killed. The dead human chief slumped over into the dirt and gravel, like a snail without a shell, and the Radical launched itself into the air with a cry, right over the gate.

Before it landed, its gunports spooled open and rained artillery down upon us.

There is much debate from scientists about whether a Radical is faster and stronger Fused with a human than alone without. These scientists will spend much time on tests and data collection, interviews and psychological exams. But it is no debate for any Radical who has been Fused. We are at optimum with our humans. A Fuse is stronger together than alone. It’s not about human reflexes and Radical synapses. When we are Fused, there is no separation. We become the best of our individual capabilities.

And for my model, our primary capability is killing.

The Gear Heart Radical, without its human, stood no chance. As I’ve said, the Gear Hearts are a bullshit Streak. They swagger, but without the skill. They defend their territory by spraying wide, like a machine gun in the hands of an untrained child. They are not snipers or assassins. They waste energy and movement.

In a snap, my heavier shields unfurled above my shoulders to take the artillery fire. I didn’t mark where the probie went. Beneath my shield I flung up a hand. It held my forearm weapon. Two shots blasted on the enemy Radical’s chest. The impact sent it back a step and stopped its flow of fire. I dropped my right shield and barraged the Radical with my epaulet guns and two rocket grenades from my hip. The Gear Heart went down spraying bullets, but down it went regardless. The rounds peppered my armor as I flung up my shield again. They made no lasting damage.

The probie crouched behind my left side, shooting toward the compound. The rest of the Streak—all ten of them—had come out battling. But they faltered when they saw the bodies on the ground.

“Your chief Fuse is destroyed!” I sent. They would not know for certain if the rest of Tora Streak was near. To them I wasn’t nomad. I saw the calculations in their hesitation. They were an impulsive Streak, but grounded in survival.

I thought that would be the end of it, that I could gather this probie and shake the reason for his shooting right out of him, before I stomped him under my heel.

But my rear sensors picked up the whine of movement behind me. My eye gauged the shift in beams on the Radical faces across the gate as something took their attention.

My torso swiveled just as Radical One’s rocket grenades exploded against my chest.

I learned later that before I went down, I launched the rest of my epaulet artillery. Reflex. The hail slammed into Radical One and my chief, but did not kill them. Down on my back, my body began to blow out. The fire from the Gear Heart Radical had weakened me, but not infringed on major systems. The storm from Radical One was another matter; its titanium-class artillery cut through me like a scythe. I do not remember this, there is only a gap in my files when nothing recorded.

Between the blackness and repowering, there was Tommy. From birth to death, his form returned to me, a ghost whispering through my circuits, my biocells, every part of me that was the Fuse of both.

His black hair, his amber brown eyes tilted toward the sky.

When he killed, he never took joy in the loss of life.

We separated and he nestled in my chest cavity on his side, just to lie there as in a womb. I touched him with a different freedom, one that held no feedback sensation. It was just my touches that I remembered, not how he felt them. Humans are so easy to injure, but he trusted my strength. He let my armored hand cover over his chest, and his heartbeat remained a steady calm rhythm. All of my nearly impenetrable angular edges seemed to fit to his soft human muscle and delicate human bones. Somehow this forged a stronger bond. We were Fused, but he was an individual and so was I. He loved that about us, and I did too.

Scientists say we cannot grieve. But we do.

This was the feeling that flowed through my darkness, until the probie took its place.

The probie climbed into my chest cavity and fit his legs into the hollows of mine, and his arms into the columns of mine. In my darkness, I thought of Tommy and my struggling armor wrapped around this probie, like a flower petal at the touch of a finger. My injuries opened out to him, seeking healant.

The probie set his head to my heart and so began the Fuse.

With his wetthief brain and biodots, he reached out to my nexus and tangled himself in it. We coiled and stretched, memory flow and actions past.

They say Radical Armor can feel no pain. Especially an old model like me, a previous generation no longer on the line.

But they are wrong.

Deacon had no living parents because his mother had shot his father and then shot herself. He was six and witnessed it.

He grew up in town, in the alleys and beneath the sidewalks, in the hands of a system that looked very much like a Radical assembly line. They plugged parts in and removed others, injected cells and livened proteins. All to make a boy work the best he could. He found a human gang. He stole the biodots and ran drugs long enough to make enough money to get them implanted. Then his world opened wide, with teeth. Suddenly there were no barriers he could not break down.

Tommy and I were the first Fuse he ever saw. He wanted that connection. He wanted an armor no one could break, a second skin to hide him from the sharper parts of the world, a second mind to push his own to broader expanses.

His forays into the brain, any brain, freed him from his own—where memories suctioned tight and strived to suffocate him.

So much blood. It had splattered onto his mouth, blood from his parents. It mingled with the memory of Tommy’s on my armor, my faceplate. Deacon’s cries were the same as my human’s, then overrode them in a wave as Tommy’s died out.

Tommy slipped from my body cavity because not even my armor could hold him anymore. My system rang with shock. Our hotel room was destruction, the smell of fire, smoke, and cinder.

Through Deacon I saw the chief and Radical One. They stood on a road halfway between Freemantown and Nuvo Nuriel. My chief said to the Gear Heart chief, Tommy’s heart isn’t in it anymore. He and his Radical protest us every step of the way. If you take care of Tommy it will force Radical Two to Fuse again. We don’t want to lose the Two, but Tommy’s heart has infected it. They take their bond too far. So take him out and we’ll ceasefire on your turf. We will leave you alone. Make it look good.

What about payback? Your Streak will demand it. Radical Two will seek it.

Leave it to me, the chief said.

All of this clipped in Radical One’s memory. All of it stolen by Deacon and kept in his.

I saw it all as if I were there. This is the power of a Fuse. It takes only a split second.

Memory is more than just a series of biochemical firing pins, a cascade of molecular events that result in specific encoding. Memory shapes us, both human and Radical.

And memory, we know, is the foundation of revenge.

It was Deacon that made me stand again. The power of his mind and the Fuse, not even fixed yet, precarious in connection but determined to rise. He willed my battered limbs to move, my form to sit, then pushed to stand. Pieces of me flapped free and clanked. Before I had the cognitive function to flick down my arm blade or move my heavy foot, he did it for me, alive and alert. His thoughts were jagged as they melded with mine, felt foreign like stitches on a wound, like one of Tommy’s flesh injuries.

He knew where I wanted to go. The chief and Radical One lay struggling in their own brokenness. Their shoulder armor shuddered open and back, like the twisted wing of a bird. Their chest spread with perforations and new scars.

We moved, Deacon and I, to stand over my chief. I barely discerned the Tora mark through the bullet holes. We slammed my heel onto the chief’s wrist, breaking it through the armor, and held there to block any flick of weapon.

He cursed at me. He reached for Deacon’s throat with his free hand, bolstered by Radical One’s remaining strength, but I grasped that too. We held there, a tableau of murder at an impasse, until Deacon brought up my right foot and slammed it into the joint where shoulder met neck. The chief’s arm went limp. It freed my own grip.

My artillery packs sat empty. My gun was cracked and useless. It took no thought, only will. As Radical One’s red eye swept over my severed faceplate I plunged my arm blade into the chief’s throat and twisted it. So fast it took his head halfway off his neck.

I inflicted the same on Radical One, with bare hands. Its injuries and momentary shock at the death of its human gave me and Deacon the advantage. I dismantled it right there on the road, a piece at a time. I bashed its circuits, gutted it of cables, twisted its desperate, reaching armor until the shapes made nothing, only hunched there like forgotten shards of frozen metal, the dregs of a factory assembly line.

What I did to it was a mercy. It did not have to mourn, as I did, for my Fuse.

The Gear Heart Streak, what was left of it, never interfered. Frightened of Tora retaliation, or too mindful of their own survival. Through Deacon’s mind I knew. My chief and Radical One had followed me from Tora’s wreckhouse, with every intention of dismantling me—and their chief and Radical had known. When they saw my destination at the Gear gate, furious signals flew between chiefs: dismantle me and kill Deacon, since we could not be controlled. I had disappointed my chief by not fusing again, going nomad. Deacon had disappointed the chief by coming to me first.

Now they were disappointed and destroyed, and that was all there was to that.

We lost the taste for blood, Deacon and I, and left the Gear Heart Streak to its decimation. I didn’t want to return to Tora and answer any questions, face any possible retaliation. I wasn’t Tora anymore; the destruction on my chest armor had wiped the Tora mark, one good result of that damage. Without a word of outloud consultation, Deacon and I set ourselves on the road out of Nuvo Nuriel. The direction was straight, but my steps fumbled and creaked. We would need to find a resting place, between towns, to heal ourselves. And to fix.

Where we were headed, it didn’t matter. We were nomad.

I didn’t pick this Fuse. Later Deacon would say, I picked you. Sometimes, I suppose, it works that way. It is not all about the human. But it isn’t all about the Radical either.

We sat in a field by an abandoned warehouse, letting the tendrils of the Fuse find one another until it was complete. We belonged to no Streak, but he cared less than I did. I hadn’t forgotten what it was like to hold a human inside my armor, but it was different with him. While Tommy had dreamed of the stars and peace, Deacon was a restless runner. Sometimes I would have to pull him back, but other times he would drive me on.

In this way we were Fused and in this way we would live.

In this way, through all the spaces between populations, both Radical and human, we are alive.

© 2012 Karin Lowachee.

Originally published in Armored, edited by John Joseph Adams.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Karin Lowachee was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. Her first novel, Warchild, won the 2001 Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. Both Warchild (2002) and her third novel, Cagebird (2005), were finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award. Cagebird won the Prix Aurora Award in 2006 for Best Long-Form Work in English, and the Spectrum Award, also in 2006. Her second novel, Burndive, debuted at #7 on the Locus Bestseller List. Her books have been translated into French, Hebrew, and Japanese. Her recent fantasy novel, The Gaslight Dogs, was published through Orbit Books USA.

Our Town
Kim Stanley Robinson

I found my friend Desmond Kean at the northeast corner of the penthouse viewing terrace, assembling a telescope with which to look at the world below. He took a metal cylinder holding a lens and screwed it into the side of the telescope, then put his eye to the lens, the picture of concentrated absorption. How often I had found him like this in recent months! It made me shiver a little; this new obsession of his, so much more intense than the handmade clocks, or the stuffed birds, or the geometric proofs, seemed to me a serious malady.

Clearing my throat did nothing to get his attention, so I ventured to say, “Desmond, you’re wanted inside.”

“Look at this,” he replied. “Just look at it!” He stepped back, and I put my eye to his device.

I have never understood how looking through two pieces of curved glass can bring close distant sights; doesn’t the same amount of light hit the first lens as would hit a plain circle of glass? And if so, what then could possibly be done to that amount of light within two lenses, to make it reveal so much more? Mystified, I looked down at the lush greenery of Tunisia. There in the shimmery circle of glass was a jumble of wood and thatch in a rice paddy, pale browns on light green. “Amazing,” I said.

I directed the telescope to the north. On certain days, as Desmond once explained to me, when the temperature gradients layer the atmosphere in the right way, light is curved through the air (and tell me how that works!) so that one can see farther over the horizon than usual. This was one of those strange days, and in the lens wavered a black dot, resting on top of a silver pin that stuck up over the horizon. The black dot was Rome, the silver pin was the top of the graceful spire that holds the Eternal City aloft. My heart leaped to know that I gazed from Carthage to Rome.

 “It’s beautiful,” I said.

“No, no,” Desmond exclaimed angrily. “Look down! Look what’s below!”

I did as he directed, even leaning a tiny bit over the railing to do so. Our new Carthage has a spire of its own, one every bit the equal of Rome’s, or that of any other of the great cities of the world. The spire seemed to the naked eye a silver rope, a thread, a strand of gossamer. But through the telescope I saw the massy base of the spire, a concrete block like an immense blind fortress.

“Stunning,” I said.

“No!” He seized the spyglass from me. “Look at the people camped there on the base! Look what they’re doing!”

I looked through the glass where he had aimed it. Smoky fires, huts of cardboard, ribs perfectly delineated under taut brown skin . . . “See,” Desmond hissed. “There where the bonfires are set. They keep the fires going for days, then pour water on the concrete. To crack it, do you see?”

I saw, there in the curved glass surface; it was just as he had said. “At that pace it will take them ten thousand years,” Desmond said bitterly.

I stood back from the railing. “Please, Desmond. The world has gotten itself into a sorry state, and it’s very distressing, but what can any one person do?”

He took the telescope, looked through it again. For a while I thought he wouldn’t answer. But then he said, “I . . . I’m not so sure, friend Roarick. It’s a good question, isn’t it? But I feel that someone with knowledge, with expertise, could make a bit of a difference. Heal the sick, or . . . give advice about agricultural practices. I’ve been studying upon that pretty hard. They’re wrecking their soil. Or . . . or just put one more shoulder to the wheel! Add one more hand to tend that fire! . . . I don’t know. I don’t know! Do we ever know, until we act?”

“But Desmond,” I said. “Do you mean down there?”

He looked up at me. “Of course.”

I shivered again. Up at our altitude the air stays pretty chill all the time, even in the sun. “Come back inside, Desmond,” I said, feeling sorry for him. These obsessions . . . “The exhibition is about to open, and if you’re not there for it Cleo will press for the full set of sanctions.”

“Now there’s something to fear,” he said nastily.

“Come on inside. Don’t give Cleo the chance. You can return here another day.”

With a grimace he put the telescope in the big duffel bag, picked it up and followed me in.

Inside the glass wall, jacaranda trees showered the giant curved greenhouse-gallery with purple flowers. All the tableaux of the exhibit were still covered by saffron sheets, but soon after we entered the sheets were raised, all at once. The human form was revealed in all its variety and beauty, frozen in place yet still pulsing with life. I noted a man loping, a pair of women fighting, a diver launched in air, four drunks playing cards, a couple stopped forever at orgasm. I felt the familiar opening-night quiver of excitement, caused partly by the force fields of the tableaux as they kept the living ectogenes stopped in place, but mostly by rapture, by a physical response to art and natural beauty. “At first glance it seems a good year,” I said. “I already see three or four pieces of merit.”

“Obscene travesties,” said Desmond.

“Now, now, it isn’t as bad as all that. Some imitation of last year, yes, but no more than usual.”

We walked down the hall to see how my entry had been placed. Like Desmond, before he quit sculpting, I was chiefly interested in finding and isolating moments of dance that revealed, by themselves, all the grace of the whole act. This year I had stopped a pair of ballet dancers at the end of a pas de deux, the ballerina just off the base of the display as her partner firmly but delicately returned her to the boards. How long I had worked with the breeders, to get ectogenes with these lean dancers’ bodies! How many hours I had spent, programming their unconscious education, and training and choreographing them in their brief waking hours! And then at the end, how very often I had had them dance on the tableau base, and stopped them in the force field, before I caught them in the exact moment that I had envisioned! Yes, I had spent a great deal of time in my sculpting chamber, this year; and now my statue stood before us like the epitome of all that is graceful in the human spirit. At a proper angle to the viewers, too, I was pleased to see, and under tolerable lighting. On the two faces were expressions that said that for these two, nothing existed but dance; and in this case it was almost literally true. Yes, it was satisfactory.

Desmond only shook his head. “No, Roarick. You don’t understand. We can’t keep doing this—”

“Desmond!” cried Cleo, flowing through the crowd of sculptors and their guests. Her smile was wide, her eyes bright with malice. “Come see my latest, dear absent one!”

Wordlessly Desmond followed her, his face so blank of expression that all his thoughts showed clear. A whole crew followed us discreetly, for Desmond and Cleo’s antipathy was legendary. How it had started none remembered, although some said they had once been lovers. If so, it was before I knew them. Others said Desmond hated Cleo for her success in the sculpture competitions, and some of the more sharp-tongued gossips said that this envy explained Desmond’s new, morbid interest in the world below—sour grapes, you know. But Desmond had always been interested in things no one else cared about—rediscovering little scientific truths and the like—and to me it was clear that his fascination was simply the result of his temperament, and of what his telescope had newly revealed to him. No, his and Cleo’s was a more fundamental hatred, a clash of contrary natures.

Now Desmond stared at Cleo’s new statue. It is undeniable that Cleo is a superb artist, especially in facial expressions, those utterly complex projections of unique emotional states; and this work displayed her usual brilliance in that most difficult medium. It was a solo piece: A red-haired young woman looked back over one shoulder with an expression of intense vulnerability and confusion, pierced by a sharp melancholy. It was exquisite.

The sight of this sculpture snapped some final restraint in Desmond Kean; I saw it happen. His eyes filled with pity and disgust; his lip curled, and he said loudly, “How did you do it, Cleo? What did you do to her in your little bubble world to get that expression out of her?”

Now, this was a question one simply didn’t ask. Each artist’s arcology was his or her own sovereign ground, a physical projection of the artist’s creative unconscious, an entirely private cosmos. What one did to one’s material there was one’s own business.

But the truth was no one had forgotten the unfortunate Arthur Magister, who had exhibited increasingly peculiar and morbid statues over a period of years, ending with one of a maiden who had had on her face such an expression that no one could bear to look at it. Though the rule of privacy was maintained, there were of course questions muttered; but no one would ever have found out the answers, if Arthur had not blown up himself and his arcology, revealing in the wreckage, among other things, a number of unpleasantly dismembered ectogenes.

So it was a sensitive issue; and when Desmond asked Cleo his brazen question, with its dark implication, she blanched, then reddened with anger. Disdainfully (though I sensed she was afraid, too) she refused to reply. Desmond stared fiercely at us all; were he an ectogene, I would have stopped him at just that instant.

“Little gods,” he snarled, and left the room.

That would cost him, in reputation if not in actual sanctions. But the rest of us forgot his distemper, relieved that we could now begin the exhibit’s opening reception in earnest. Down at the drink tables champagne corks were already bringing down a fresh shower of jacaranda blooms.

It was just a few hours later, when the reception was a riotous party, that I heard the news, passed from group to group instantly, that someone had broken the locks on the tableaux (this was supposed to be impossible) and turned their force fields off, letting most of the statues free. And it was while we rushed to the far end of the greenhouse-gallery, around the great curve of the perimeter of the penthouse, that I heard that Desmond Kean had been seen, leaving the gallery with Cleo’s red-headed ectogene.

Utter scandal. This would cost Desmond more than money; they would exile him to some tedious sector of the city, to scrub walls with robots or teach children or the like: They would make him pay in time. And Cleo! I groaned; he would never live to see the end of her wrath.

Well, a friend can only do so much, but while the rest were rounding up and pacifying the disoriented ectogenes (which included, alas, my two dancers, who were huddled in each other’s arms) I went in search of Desmond, to warn him that he had been seen. I knew his haunts well, having shared most of them, and I hurried to them through the uncrowded, vaguely Parisian boulevards of the penthouse’s northern quarter.

My first try was the broken planetaria near the baths; I opened the door with the key we had quietly reproduced years before. An indiscretion!—for Desmond and the young ectogene were making love on the dais in the middle of the chamber, Desmond on his back, the woman straddling him, arced as if all the energy of the great spire were flowing up into her . . . he was breaking all the taboos this night. Immediately I shut the door, but given the situation saw fit to pound loudly on it. “Desmond! It’s Roarick! They saw you with the girl, you’ve got to leave!”

Silence. What to do in such a situation? I had no precedent. After a good thirty seconds had passed I opened the door again. No Desmond, no girl.

I, however, was one of those who with Desmond had first discovered the other exit from the planetaria, and I hurried to the central ball of optical fibers, which even he could not fix, and pulled up the trap door beside it. Down the stairs and along the passageway, into one of the penthouse’s other infrastructures I ran.

I will not detail my long search, nor my desperate and ludicrous attempts to evade rival search parties. Despite my knowledge of Desmond’s ways and my anxious thoroughness, I did not find him until I thought of the place that should have occurred to me first. I returned to the northeast corner of the viewing terrace, right there outside the glass wall of the greenhouse-gallery, where (as it was now dusk) if the artists inside could have seen through their own reflections, they would have looked right at him.

He and the redhead were standing next to Desmond’s telescope, their elbows on the railing as they looked over the edge side by side. Desmond had his duffel bag at his feet. Something in their stance kept me from emerging from the shadows. They looked as though they had just finished the most casual and intimate of conversations—a talk about trivial, inessential things, the kind of talk lovers have together after years of companionship. Such calmness, such resignation . . . I could only look, at what seemed to me then an unbreakable, eternal tableau.

Desmond sighed and turned to look at her. He took a red curl of her hair between his fingers, watched the gold in it gleam in a band across the middle of the curl. “There are three kinds of red hair,” he said sadly. “Red black, red brown, and red gold. And the greatest of these is . . .”

“Black,” said the girl.

“Gold,” said Desmond. He fingered the curl . . .

The woman pointed. “What’s all that down there?”

Dusky world below, long since in night: vast dark Africa, the foliage like black fur, sparking with the sooty flares of a thousand bonfires, little pricks of light like yellow stars. “That’s the world,” Desmond said, voice tightened to a burr. “I suppose you don’t know a thing about it. Around those fires down there are people. They are slaves, they live lives even worse than yours, almost.”

But his words didn’t appear to touch the woman. She turned away, and lifted an empty glass left on the railing. On her face was an expression so . . . lost—a sudden echo of her expression as statue—that I shivered in the cold wind. She didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on.

“Damn,” she said. “I wish I’d remembered to bring another drink.”

A conversation from another world, resumed here. I saw Desmond Kean’s face then, and I know that I did right to interrupt at that moment. “Desmond!” I rushed forward and grasped his arm. “There’s no time, you really must get to one of our private rooms and hide! You don’t want to find out what sort of sentence they might hand down for this sort of thing!”

A long moment: I shudder to think of the tableau we three made. The world is a cruel sculptor.

“All right,” Desmond said at last. “Here, Roarick, take her and get her out of here.” He bent over to fumble in his bag. “They’ll put her down after all this if they catch her.”

“But—but where should I go?” I stammered.

“You know this city as well as I! Try the gallery’s service elevator, and get on the underfloor—you know,” he insisted, and yet he was about to give me further directions when the far greenhouse door burst open and a whole mob poured out. We were forced to run for it; I took the woman by the hand and sprinted for the closer greenhouse door. The last I saw of Desmond Kean, he was climbing over the railing. My God, I thought, he’s going to kill himself—but then I saw the purposefully rectangular package strapped to his back.

© 1986 by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Originally published in Omni.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Kim Stanley Robinson is the bestselling author of sixteen novels, including three series: the Mars trilogy, the Three Californias trilogy, and the Science in the Capitol trilogy. He is also the author of about seventy short stories, many of which have been collected in the retrospective volume The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson. He is the winner of two Hugos, two Nebulas, six Locus Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His latest novels are Galileo’s Dream and 2312.

Mother Ship
Caroline M. Yoachim

My mother was a colony ship. For one revolution of the galaxy, a quarter of a billion years, she carried her creators between the stars. At the end of that time, all the creators had died. My mother drifted aimlessly through space. After a hundred million years of traveling alone and empty, her drifting brought her to Earth.

My father was a team of several hundred humans who worked together to make a starseed. Humans are less advanced than the creators were, and prone to tinkering. My mother held all the information they needed to make a perfect seed, but they did not want a clone. They wanted a ship that was uniquely suited to themselves. My father-team was worried that the altered seed wouldn’t take, so they implanted seven, even though ships are meant to carry only one. My mother died giving birth. All my siblings died but me.

I am carrying thousands of colonists to a planet they have named Last Hope. This is my third trip, each time to a different colony. Humans are all I’ve ever known, and I love them, even though they killed my mother. Their tiny bodies ease my loneliness as I travel. I keep my tendrils wrapped around them to hold them in stasis. They do not feel the intimacy of the embrace, as I do. For them, the journey passes in a brief moment of sleep.

Ships need no sleep. I wonder what it must be like for humans, to close their eyes in one place and wake in another. Life is in the traveling, in the going. My life is continuous, with time marked only by the shifting of the stars. Their lives are interrupted, not only by their long sleep as we travel, but by smaller sleeps in their normal existence. I spend several centuries pondering such an existence. I would not choose sleep over consciousness, but what if the choice was between sleep and death?

I could live as they do, I think, if it was my only way to live.

Seven hundred fifty-eight of the colonists are pregnant.

I feel a special bond with these women, for I am pregnant too. The descendants of my father gave me only one starseed, not seven. Even so, it was a foolish thing to do. I am deformed. My mother was sleek and streamlined, but I am a jumbled mess of tissue, pocketed with stasis chambers that are arranged not in ordered rows but haphazard clusters. My shell is riddled with holes, and there is metal grafted to my body to compensate for what is missing. How could the humans possibly believe that I would produce a healthy child? My baby’s body is hopelessly misshapen. Only her mind is intact. His mind, I correct myself. We ships have always been female, but my child will be a boy.

Most of the pregnant colonists carry deformed babies. Humans are simpler creatures than ships, and as we travel, I repair the unborn children. Cleft palate, Down syndrome, conjoined twins—it pleases me to fix such maladies. My ability to heal is what drove these women to go to the colonies. Their lives will be hard, but their children will be whole. I cure unborn children with spina bifida, cerebral palsy, fetal alcohol syndrome. The stars drift slowly by as I continue on to our destination. I heal the adult colonists too, as best I can, for their bodies are not so pliable as the babies. Heart defects and cancers, schizophrenia and depression.

I wish there was a ship to carry me, a ship that could fix my own deformities and make me as sleek as my mother was. A being so advanced that it could repair my unborn child. I would sleep a billion years in such a ship, and miss the journey of my own life—but there is no healing ship for me. My hope rests in the humans, inferior though they may be.

One pregnant woman has a baby who is more deformed than all of the others. Hopelessly deformed. She was sobbing when she came aboard, and when I wrapped my tendrils around her, she whispered, as the women sometimes do, “Please, ship, save my baby.”

Her unborn boy has anencephaly, a neural tube defect where the brain stem forms but the cerebral cortex does not. The boy would never gain consciousness, not with so much neural tissue missing. Her child would not even sleep, he could not claim even the gaps that punctuate a human’s tiny life.

The boy is a body without a mind. If I heal him, can I claim his mind? The humans are my cargo, and I would never harm them. But I wouldn’t be taking a life, not even a mind. I would only be stealing a body.

My baby needs a body.

I wait for several thousand years, undecided. My poor deformed baby, cradled in the tendrils of my womb, grows weaker. I show her the patterns of the stars and share my memories of the vastness of space I have traveled across. She twines her tendrils with mine. She is dying. If I cannot bring myself to take the boy, I will lose my child. I can wait no longer.

It is only a body. Less than that, really, for without my help the boy will certainly die.

I heal the unborn boy and ease my baby’s mind into his newly perfect head. He will be more human than ship, for how could a ship exist in such a tiny and fragile body? His longest journeys will be across the surface of a single planet, and his life will be measured in the turnings of that planet, and not the rotations of the galaxy. He will sleep. But he will live, and when he looks at the stars perhaps he will have echoes of our memories, flashes of the maps in my mind. Perhaps when he looks up, he will remember me.

The colonists usually remain in stasis until the end of the voyage, but I couldn’t bear to let my son go without holding him. I took his pregnant mother out of stasis so that he could grow. I kept the woman in a deep and dreamless sleep. She’ll be a few months older when we arrive, but she’ll have a healthy child. Surely it’s a fair trade.

When I arrive at the colony world, I send her into labor. I don’t wake her for the birth. She will have my son for a lifetime, but these first moments are mine. He is tiny. Humans are small creatures—I can fit thousands inside my great bulk—but he is smaller still. I wrap him in my tendrils and keep him warm and close while I wake the other colonists. He cries, he sucks his thumb, he voids his bowels, and he hiccups. His hand flails out and his tiny fingers wrap around one of my tendrils.

I wake his mother last. She is so happy to see her baby, whole and healthy. She holds him against her chest and walks through my corridors to the shuttle that will take her down to the planet, Last Hope.

“Thank you,” she whispers, “for saving my baby.”

I almost stop her. I almost take him back. But his true body has died, and as a human he will be happier on a planet, not alone in space with me.

I let her take my baby.

He will never be a ship, but perhaps the stars will call to him. Perhaps he will create a new ship, and do a better job than my fathers did. Perhaps one day he will find me, out among the stars. Those are my foolish dreams, the hopes of an old and damaged mother ship.

It is more likely that my son will never leave that planet. It is more likely that he will not remember me.

I will remember for both of us.

© 2012 Caroline M. Yoachim.

Caroline M. Yoachim is a writer and photographer living in Seattle, Washington. She’s a graduate of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop, and her fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy Magazine, and Daily Science Fiction, among other places. Her novelette “Stone Wall Truth” was nominated for a Nebula Award and has since been reprinted in Chinese and Czech. For more about Caroline, check out her website at http://carolineyoachim.com.

Author Spotlight: C.C. Finlay
Gina Guadagnino

In your novella The Political Officer, you’ve created a far-future world in which theocracy and colonialism are ongoing issues. We usually associate those types of archaic institutions with the past—what prompted you to bring them into the future?

Ohio, where I live, holds the world’s largest concentration of the Amish. Here they are, 500 years after the original religious schism, and they’re holding on both stubbornly and creatively to an antiquated culture in a modern world. It made me wonder what a group determined to hold onto the 20th century would look like. They’re colonists just like the Amish, who had to abandon Europe to hold onto their faith. But that’s where the similarities stop.

The political climate of this world is extremely complex, which is what necessitates Max’s role as Political Officer in the first place. The reader only gets a taste of the dense—and deadly—politics of Jesusalem, but the theme of politically-motivated peril is woven throughout the novella. Which did you develop first, Max’s position as the Political Officer, or the world that would necessitate such a position?

Story always starts with character for me. I might have a hundred cool science fictional ideas, but if I don’t have a character to explore them, then I don’t have a story. And a great character will, for me, build up the world around them as I write.

Ensign Reedy is the only female character in this story. She makes a “safe” scapegoat for Max, who is banking on her past and reputation to eventually exonerate Reedy. How did weaving such gender disparity into the politics of Jesusalem inform your development of Reedy as a character?

Both Max and Reedy are outsiders in the ship’s culture. Max is a powerful outsider, above everyone else even though he’s apart from them, while Reedy is vulnerable and the lowest officer on the ship. Max is the old Jesusalem of secrets and assassinations, and Reedy is the new Jesusalem that wants to reward merit and talent. I hoped that the contrast, and even trust, that develops between them would reveal interesting facets of their character.

The reader gains gradual insight into Max’s character as the story develops, and we learn that the mysteries of his world are less mysterious to him than we originally assume. This almost noir approach is wonderfully integrated into the novella. As a writer, what does this mixing of genres allow you to accomplish?

The mixing of genres lets me tell a damn good story! It’s a means of finding fresh insights into characters and plots that we may have seen before.

You’ve gone on to write more about Max in The Political Prisoner. Are you planning on continuing to develop stories about this character and this world?

Six years passed between the first and second novellas. At that pace, I should be submitting The Political Refugee to someone in another year or so. A big chunk of it is written, but I’m still thinking deeply about Max’s arc. The third novella will contain Max’s first extended contact with the greater galactic culture—like an Amish farmer dropped in the middle of Las Vegas during a tech expo.

Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re writing now, and what your next project might entail?

I’m not quite ready to talk about my next novel project yet, but I think it’s going to be awesome.

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: Eric Gregory
Caleb Jordan Schulz

Your title character skulks at the borders of the imagination, between dreams and reality. Where did the inspiration for your story “The Sympathy” originate?

I’m really fascinated by the way certain myths transform or cross-pollinate over time—fairies and grey aliens are both little people from Elsewhere who abduct innocent folks for mysterious reasons. And the giant nerd in me really likes the idea that there’s a sort of ur-myth or ur-monster behind those stories, some old truth that different cultures articulate in different ways. So the Sympathy’s another iteration of that whole concept.

 You take particular care with describing the motels, diners, and roadside shops that the characters pass along their journey, and there seems to be a certain familiarity with the locations. Are these places you’ve seen and chosen to write about or are they just representations of an unglamorous slice of society?

They’re definitely places that interest me. But for this story in particular I thought it was important to ground the reader in an everyday-yet-liminal sort of landscape of Holiday Inns and truckstops, partly as a way to suggest Lauren’s emotional state, and partly to contrast that world with the weirder (or maybe just differently weird) one she encounters later.

In “The Sympathy” there are strong questions about god, faith, pain, and healing. How much of this was intentional and how much simply seeped out of the subconscious?

I didn’t sit down and decide to Say Something, but I wanted to portray a very specific emotional space, Lauren’s numb point of estrangement from her own life, and she’s asking (or avoiding) some of those questions. Hopefully she feels real enough that the questions ring true.

As a follow-up, when writing a story for the first time, do you prefer to write with a plan, or write with only a basic idea, and let it grow?

Depends on the story. I like George R.R. Martin’s idea that some writers are gardeners and others are architects, and I’d amend that to say that some stories are gardens and others are architectures. “The Sympathy” was definitely more of a garden. I knew who Lauren and Madison were from the start, and I knew I wanted to take some urban fantasy tropes and give them a sad, alien, wrongfooting feel, but that was about it. I didn’t have an outline or an endpoint in mind.

Labyrinths dot the literary landscape from Pliny the Elder to Jorge Luis Borges, with nearly every location imaginable. How did you come to decide on the Labyrinth existing in a treehouse?

The Crossville treehouse is a real place! I invented or embellished some details, but it’s one of those weird, wonderful true things that belongs in a fairytale. A maze in a tree. A divinely-inspired maze in a tree. It was too good to pass up.

Is there more to this universe—the Sympathy, its Kin, the Queen, the Folk on the other side—that you’d like to explore with other stories?

It could be interesting to spend some time in Madison’s head. I have a few ideas about how that would go—the whole voice and tone would be very different, and it might be fun to see the stranger side of this world through eyes that are more familiar with it. Maybe!

Caleb Jordan Schulz is a writer, illustrator, and nomad, currently finding himself in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His fiction can be found in Subversion, Scape, the Crossed Genres Year Two anthology, Ray Gun Revival, and Innsmouth Free Press. In between his work for Lightspeed Magazine, he’s a freelance editor, and blogs occasionally at: theright2write.blogspot.com.

Author Spotlight: Marc Laidlaw
Erin Stocks

Your short story “Forget You” is one of our original fantasy stories for this issue, but I found it a bit horrific, maybe because the mind is so powerful, and the idea of it being unreliable, or alternatively, so powerful that one can actually undo a memory, is chilling. Will you tell us about where this story came from?

It came entirely from the first image in the story: wondering how cats do that thing where they seem to edit reality and retroactively insert themselves in your lap after you’ve repeatedly tried to keep them out of it.

The opening of “Forget You” gives the impression that this might be a love story. Even after reading it, I think the main character really did love the woman, especially given his previous loneliness. Yet his obsession took his life, and hers, in a different direction. Why do you think he couldn’t let the origins of their relationship go?

Is he the main character? I think of it as her story, but told from his point of view.

You’re a computer game designer for Valve. How has working on games like Half-Life and more affected your writing speculative fiction?

The reader is a bit less of an abstraction now. I’m a little more aware of wanting to connect with readers—whether I want to be entertaining, or risk deliberately mystifying them. I deal with fans of our games, and have a better understanding of how different people are going to take away very different things from whatever I do. This isn’t just the result of working on games though . . . it’s partly a result of the fact that the internet currently allows a lot more direct interaction between creators and fans.

For that matter, which came first? The gaming or the writing? And have you always been drawn to speculative fiction?

I started writing when I was a kid. This was a couple decades before computer games existed. I read mainly fantasy, horror, and science fiction back then . . . it took a while for my horizons to broaden.

For our readers that are new to your work, where should they start first?

I like to think there’s no such thing as a typical Laidlaw story, but then I’m a little too close to myself. Easiest thing is to find stuff that is online: A near-future SF piece, “Sleepy Joe” is at Infinite Matrix; my Lovecraftian fungus story “Leng” was recently reprinted at the Weird Fiction Review; and a more realistic piece, “The Boy Who Followed Lovecraft,” is up at Subterranean. These are all very different types of stories, so . . . I guess that’s as good an overview as any. None of my novels are currently in print; I’m preparing ebook editions of all the ones to which I have rights.

Lightspeed Assistant Editor Erin Stocks’s fiction can be found in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth, Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Colored Lens. Follow her on Twitter @ErinStocks.

Author Spotlight: M.K. Hobson
Jennifer Konieczny

What inspired your story “Domovoi”?

Many elements of my life came together to become this story: my love of old buildings (of course) and my Russian heritage. Mostly, however, it came from the deep fear that the things around us, the things we live with every day and take for granted, are more conscious and sentient than we know. I blame stories like The Velveteen Rabbit and The Mouse and His Child for raising these uncertainties in my young mind.

Could you tell us about the process of writing it?

I have lived in Portland, Oregon most of my life, and I wrote “Domovoi” around the same time that Portland’s Pearl District (once a magnificently seedy industrial area chockablock with run-down warehouses) was being transmogrified into what it is today: a hoity-toity district of trendy nightspots, tony boutiques, and twee eateries. While designer cupcakes are nice and all, I kind of liked it better the way it was.

You’re “an American history buff.” What’s your favorite period in American architecture? Do you have a favorite building or neighborhood?

I don’t have a favorite period in American architecture, because what I love is not any building’s particular style, but how its style evokes the time in which it was built. I love any building—from a colonial fort to a grain mill to a warehouse to a skyscraper—that tells me a story about what America used to be and how we used to live and work. I love imagining how all those little stories fit into one big story.

What are your thoughts on gentrification?

That’s a hard question. I appreciate a good, sensitive, accurate historic restoration—but not every building has the significance to merit such attention. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s a beauty in graceful decay, but there’s only one end to that story and it’s the wrecking ball. Walking a middle path of “adaptive reuse” has quite a bit to recommend it—it is satisfying to see an old building continue to be used and loved—but unfortunately, that’s usually done in the context of rich folks swooping in to displace poor folks because the rich folks happen to like where the poor folks are living. And that’s appalling. So . . . yeah. Those are my thoughts. Thank goodness you didn’t specify that they had to be cogent or insightful.

Ryan enjoys having his buildings gutted, cleaned and remade, but the actual work is done by his team, who are the ones that understand the domovoi. Do you enjoy DIY renovations?

Absolutely not. Before I actually owned an old house, I used to watch “This Old House” on PBS. Norm and Bob made every project seem like a hootenanny of kicks and giggles capped off with a wine and cheese party at the end. It was because of those lying bastards that I actually bought an old house. I now believe that Norm and Bob are like the Toxoplasmosis parasite that cats give to rats, that make rats brains go all mushy so that it’s easier for cats to catch them. Old houses everywhere are infecting the brains of the unsuspecting through such vectors (we won’t even talk about HGTV).

Could you tell us about your home’s spirit?

Just as in the story, it turns out that my house (a 1916 bungalow) has remodeled me more than I’ve remodeled it. When I bought this house, I had lots of big plans—shore up the sagging corner of the foundation, remodel the kitchen, add a second bath . . . but these things never actually happened. The house apparently enjoyed inflicting inconvenience on us, and didn’t want it any other way. So my family and I have had to adapt to its quirks over the years. We’ve come to terms with the lack of a family room, the shoebox closets, and the solitary downstairs bathroom with no shower. We didn’t update the house; the house retrodated us.

What’s next for you?

My next book is a historical fantasy called The Warlock’s Curse that continues the series I began with The Native Star. It will be coming out at the end of October. I am experimenting with this crazy “new publishing” model that everyone’s so excited about; thus, I am funding it via Kickstarter. The campaign will launch in April 2012 (on Friday the 13th). Interested readers can find out more at my website, www.demimonde.com.

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: Caitlín R. Kiernan
Theodore Quester

In your story, “The Steam Dancer (1896),” there is an exoticism and eroticism in your main character’s organically incomplete body and its modification with mechanical prostheses. What prompted this unconventional portrait of the erotic and exotic?

That which any given person finds exotic or sexually unconventional, that’s not something that can be nailed down with a straightforward answer. These are things determined by the sum total of our life experiences, formative influences, particular cultures, etc. It so happens that I find cyborgs sexy, though I have no idea why. There’s a reason, or reasons, I’m certain, I just don’t dwell on what they might be. I sit down to write a story like this and I’m following unconscious impulse as much as conscious intention. But, there’s more here than what I find exotic and/or erotic. I’ve made a world that doesn’t exist. In that world, Missouri Banks—the eponymous “Steam Dancer”—she’s not unique. Unusual, maybe. Maybe even very rare. Still, there must be other alchemical marriages of machine and flesh in her world. The technology existed before her. What’s important is that she’s talented, and the way that she’s taken a terrible disability, being crippled, and turned it into this beautiful, amazing talent, that’s what makes her exotic and what makes her such an erotic creature. She thinks: Other women are only whole, she thinks. Other women are only born, not made. I have been crafted.

Authorial voice seems to play such a strong role in this story—a voice that allows the reader to suspend disbelief and accept a very fantastical premise. Did this voice come naturally to you, or did it require a lot of revision? Do you read your work out loud?

I always read my work aloud. As I’m writing it and afterwards. The sound of the words is as important to me as the story. I can’t really divide the one from the other, as the voice is the means by which I convey the story. But I didn’t craft a special or new voice to tell this story. My voice, my style, has evolved over about twenty years of writing, and whatever I’m writing at the moment is the current product of that ongoing evolution. I figure, if my style ever stops evolving, and if I ever stop caring about voice, it’s time to stop writing. As for revision, though few people ever believe me, I don’t revise. Almost without exception, what’s published is a “first draft.” Or maybe you can say I revise as I write. A sentence will be perfect, or as near as I can make it, before I proceed to the next. This is true of my short stories and novels. It’s the only way I know to write. And I find the idea of writing in drafts unutterably tedious. Then again, I’ve had people tell me how tedious my technique must be.

This story was originally published in Sirenia Digest. Do you find self-publishing your fiction gives you greater creative control? Do you rely on outside readers or editors who have more distance from your own work?

Though I write no less fiction for traditional publication—my novels and lots of the short stories—yes. Sirenia Digest, which began in December 2005, has allowed me to go places and experiment in ways that never would have been possible with the other markets open to me. As of the January 2012 issue, #74, I’ve written 105 stories and vignettes that originally appeared in Sirenia Digest, that were written for its subscribers. When I write these stories, I don’t have to be concerned with the likes and dislikes of readers, the needs of editors, or the fickle trends of the publishing industry. I just tell a story that occurs to me. I allow myself to go places I never would have been able to go before, both stylistically and thematically. A lot of it is erotica, but a lot of it isn’t. It’s whatever I feel like writing this month. I don’t have to stop and think, Yes, but where will I ever find a market for such a strange story? The digest’s readers seem to like this arrangement, which pleases me no end. They’ve given me this freedom, and I’m grateful for that. And having absolute creative control, that’s allowed my writing to evolve in ways I think it never would have, otherwise. I can explore literary territories often deemed taboo with no fear of having a story that won’t sell or that will be condemned by reviewers. I do always read the stories to Kathryn, my partner, and I might change some small thing, if she thinks I should. If I have a first reader, it’s her.

Your main character has mechanical and steam-based prostheses. What attracts you to this steampunk aesthetic? Is it a genre (or a time period) that interests you? Inspires you creatively?

I don’t think I am especially attracted to steampunk. Out of all the stories I’ve written, and we’re talking well over two-hundred short stories and eight novels, only four times have I done something that might be called steampunk—all set in Cherry Creek, same as “The Steam Dancer.” I have this idea that there’s a ten-piece story cycle here in Cherry Creek—my fictional Denver. The first would be take place in 1801, and the last in 1900. But, since 2007, I’ve only written four of these stories, so it’s anyone’s guess if I’ll ever write the other six. And, I’m not really answering the question. I am very much interested in blending the American West and various aspects of science fiction, which I think was my major concern in writing “The Steam Dancer.” I’m fine with it being thought of as steampunk. It’s just that I didn’t sit down and think, I’m going to write a steampunk story. I wanted to do something gritty, dusty, hot, filled with smoke and pistons, oil, muddy streets, and have all this come together into beauty. But, more than anything, this is a story about a woman. Not a story about an alternate past. Not a story about technology. This is a story about the life of Missouri Banks. It’s not gears and steam that matter. It’s character.

What projects do you have coming down the pipeline?

Right now, a lot. An awful lot. My next novel, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, will be released on March 6th. I’ve never been even half as happy with a book as I am with this one. Anyway, I have a new graphic-novel series, Alabaster, to be published by Dark Horse, and that begins in April. My next short-story collection, Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, will be released in May by Subterranean Press. I’ve finished another novel, a sort of spoof, subverting the whole “paranormal romance” thing, Blood Oranges. My agent just signed a deal for that book and two sequels. I expect Blood Oranges will be released in early 2013. I think that covers it. Mostly.

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: Vandana Singh
Caleb Jordan Schulz

In your story, “Ruminations in an Alien Tongue,” Birha spends her time ruminating, learning the musical languages of the aliens and their instruments, the poeticas, and working as a mathematician. Do you see a relationship between math, music, and memory?

I certainly do. Music is all about patterns, relationships and harmonies, and one can say that about mathematics too. I am not a mathematician, although physicists are related, intellectually speaking, but I have some training in Indian classical music. When I look back into my own past, I find music to be a significant trigger for memories.

Birha’s relationships play a deep role in this story—with Thirru, Rudrak, Ubbiri, and even the yellow dog. Which of these relationships did you find the most difficult to write?

I think it was Birha’s relationship with Rudrak, because unlike the others it is still forming, not yet defined, and Rudrak is not consistently Rudrak, right up to the end of the story. I wanted to make it clear that it was not a conventionally romantic relationship, but was nevertheless love. There are so many shades of love, most of which are ignored if they are not straightforward romantic. I wanted to explore the possibilities of one such relationship as it begins, again and again.

The structure of this story uses a lot of different conveyances—flashbacks, journal entries, poems, etc. Was this something that came together for you as you wrote, or was this all planned ahead of time?

I am one of those writers who can’t plan. I have a file on my computer for writing practice, where I give myself permission to write whatever comes to mind without regard to my internal editor. Some of the ruminations came about in this totally random way. Meanwhile I wanted to write a story about an old woman mathematician-scientist near the end of her life, and the bits and pieces seemed to come together quite naturally. It’s like stitching together odd scraps of fabric to discover that you’ve made something resembling a quilt, or a shirt, or a dress. Not at all planned!

There’s a familiar comfort in your prose when writing about stars, planets, and the cosmos. Did you find it necessary to do a lot of research in preparation for this story?

I did some digging around and some thinking. I am a physics professor at a small state university so I am used to thinking about the cosmos. There is of course a wildly speculative element to this story, but less obviously I wanted to play about with the idea of probability, which I find fascinating. How do chance and habit and the laws of nature play out on a grand scale? The origins of uncertainty in the macroscopic and microscopic realms are actually quite different, but in this story I’ve messed with that quite deliberately. I’ve also had to think about how we do science in the mundane world, including the unfortunate separation between what C. P. Snow called “the two cultures,” the humanities and the sciences. I wanted to come up with imaginative alternatives—because it is both important and interesting to think about alternatives for things we take for granted. Especially when one is writing speculative fiction.

If an actualizer existed and you could travel to another branch of the cosmic tree, would you step into that void, and use the actualizer?

Hmmm . . . I think I’d be rather like Birha. There is so much to discover right here, on our doorstep. I’ll leave the actualizer to the adventurers.

Finally, do you have any new projects you’d like to announce?

I have some short stories in first draft form that I look forward to working on this summer. My job is too intense to allow me to write during the semester, but it does generate plenty of ideas. Specifically I am planning to wrestle with a grand-scale space opera that’s been sitting on the shelf for some four or five years, and to work on a series of stories about global warming, continuing where my story “Indra’s Web” in the November issue of TRSF left off. I keep dreaming about a novel, but that won’t happen for a while.

Caleb Jordan Schulz is a writer, illustrator, and nomad, currently finding himself in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His fiction can be found in Subversion, Scape, the Crossed Genres Year Two anthology, Ray Gun Revival, and Innsmouth Free Press. In between his work for Lightspeed Magazine, he’s a freelance editor, and blogs occasionally at: theright2write.blogspot.com.

Author Spotlight: Karin Lowachee
John Joseph Adams

Your story, “Nomad,” first appeared in my anthology Armored, which just came out from Baen. What was the genesis of the story?

I wanted to write an intimate sort of story because that would contrast with the idea of future armor and its possible use, which is usually in war. But I didn’t want to write about battle armor in a war context, so I thought about how else these pieces of technology might be used. I was watching the TV show Sons of Anarchy and a documentary on the Hell’s Angels, and realized that the relationship between a man and his motorcycle is kind of mythic, and it would be interesting and fun for me to explore that kind of context with future armor, except from the armor’s point-of-view. I was reading True Grit at the time, as well, and that just confirmed for me that I wanted this story entrenched in the armor’s voice. What if the motorcycle could talk and think for itself? So then my armor was born.

Was this story a particularly challenging one to write? If so, how?

The most challenging part was finding Mad’s voice. The whole story would hinge on how effective that was, and how it conveyed itself, its thoughts, and its world. Since Mad is sentient, I wanted it to have a personality, but for it to be specific and somehow alluding to its own development. Once I hit on that, the rest of the story flowed pretty easily. I was conscious of it being a short story, so I couldn’t go into novel-depth about the world—details had to be alluded to, when Mad’s world itself is quite expansive and there’s a lot of history.

Most authors say all their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way was this story personal to you?

Mad makes a decision to strike out on its own after something tragic happens. It questions its existence and role in the world and how others perceive its existence. I think those are pretty universal issues that are at the same time personal. Those kinds of questions are at the foundation of self-awareness.

What kind of research did you have to do for the story?

I wanted Mad’s world to make internal sense, so I did do some research on motorcycle gangs, but it was admittedly pretty light. I wanted this world to be its own world, and not directly or wholly taken from a modern context. I also did some reading on biotechnology, and I’ve always been interested in future wars and the technology that might be used, so I’d run across articles here and there through the years about future armor and what that might entail. So I slipped some details in there. But I’m not a hard science fiction writer and Mad wasn’t going to navel gaze about its own construction—that wasn’t what the story was about. So I didn’t go into heavy detail about exactly how the armor’s constructed or exactly how it looks down to the minutiae. Instead I treated Mad’s “body” and makeup as I would any human character. It described things in the way people would describe each other’s eye or hair color or clothing. But it didn’t go into all of the internal workings of the organs, etc.

What is the appeal of power armor/mecha? Why do so many writers—or you yourself—write about it? Why do you think readers/viewers/gamers love it so much?

I think it’s just damn cool to look at. It’s raw power built to smash and blow things up. There’s an aesthetic appeal, too, and a lot of variation on how that can come about—either more brute, more graceful, or more robotic in appearance. The idea that you can add extensions to your own body, in a way, and become an arsenal is probably attractive to people on all sorts of levels. There’s that idea of indestructability.

What are some of your favorite examples of power armor/mecha (in any media), and what makes them your favorites?

I grew up on Robotech/Macross, so there’s a fondness for that and all the Japanese mecha, like in Gundam. I enjoy playing Halo (though I don’t play very often) and really dig Master Chief’s look. Radical Comics’ Shrapnel series uses battle armor and it’s beautifully rendered. Cinematically, I’m most looking forward to Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim kaiju vs. mecha film. I’m going to be the first in line to see what a visionary like del Toro will do with the idea of big robot armor, and I have a strong feeling I won’t be disappointed.

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. He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Forthcoming anthologies include: Other Worlds Than These (July 2012, Night Shade Books), Epic (Fall 2012, Tachyon), and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor Books). Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Author Spotlight: Kim Stanley Robinson
Erin Stocks

In your story “Our Town,” Desmond and Roarick are sculptors of something a bit unusual. Will you tell us a little about the origins of this story?

The story derives from a single image, a kind of Pygmalion variant. My wife and I traveled in Asia on our way to Switzerland, in 1985, which was the first time I had ever been in the developing world. I wrote the first half of the story on a night train between Bangkok and Kohsamui, and the second half on a night train between Cairo and Luxor.

Why do you think Desmond changes his opinion of their lifestyle while Roarick clearly does not?

I don’t like to speculate about questions like these. Different people see things differently.

Ectogenesis is a volatile subject these days. Do you see this as becoming a reality any time soon?

No, the complexity of mother-child interactions in utero are so many, and there are surely unknown interactions as well, that it would be extremely dangerous to try to grow humans in a vat. It could only happen in a distant future, with different and more careless values.

What’s keeping you busy these days?

In May of 2012, Orbit will publish my novel 2312. By coincidence, this novel has a bit of a relationship to “Our Town,” in that one of its protagonists is an artist, but instead of the expensive and exploitative art form described in “Our Town,” my character Swan Er Hong practices landscape art and body art, in both cases using “found materials” to make art that speaks to her time. These new art forms are based on the current work of the landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy, and the performance artist Marina Abramovic. They are in effect inventing, or vastly expanding, new genres. This is interesting in itself, a great pleasure to watch, and also extremely suggestive for a science fiction writer. So I guess I’ve come back to a question that “Our Town” explored, as well as my novel The Memory of Whiteness: What will new art forms of the future be like?

Lightspeed Assistant Editor Erin Stocks’s fiction can be found in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth, Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Colored Lens. Follow her on Twitter @ErinStocks.

Author Spotlight: Caroline M. Yoachim
Robyn Lupo

Your story “Mother Ship” has a particular voice, a peculiar narrator, and yet the primary focus is almost quintessentially the human experience. How did this story arise for you?

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I had a lot of weird nightmares that stemmed from the knowledge that newborns have very wobbly heads. In some of the dreams, I would pick up a baby and its head would fall off. There was even one where I accidentally ate a baby’s head. A full size baby head, in one bite! In the dream this was both completely possible and extremely distressing.

For some reason, these nightmares prompted me to read up on anencephaly. I got it into my head that I wanted to use it in a story, but didn’t know quite how. Then my daughter was born and I didn’t get much writing done for a while.

About a year later, I got a writing prompt that said “Write about a person who’s cut off contact with his/her former life and assumed an entirely new identity.” This led me to one of the key ideas for “Mother Ship”—using a healed anencephalic baby as a vessel for someone else’s mind.

There is some indication that the colonists recognize the ship as having some consciousness. What’s the story in the background here, with the ship gaining sentience?

When I was thinking about these colony ships, a couple of the key features were (1) that they were designed to interface with their cargo, and (2) they had enormous lifespans. It seemed natural to me that a complex organic entity that interacted with humans for thousands of years would develop consciousness.

I loosely modeled the colonists’ interactions with the ship on people’s relationships with their dogs—the colonists expect the ship to understand them, even if she doesn’t answer. Similarly, the ship has developed a dog-like fondness for her humans, even if she thinks they are a little strange.

Can you tell us what a day in your writing life is like?

I have two kinds of writing days. The first is when I get hit by an idea that I really like, and I sit down at my computer and words gush out. This is my preferred kind of writing, and was what happened with “Mother Ship.”

The second kind of writing day is when I’m stuck on a project and/or not feeling particularly inspired. If I have a story that needs revisions, I work on that. If not, I spend a little time sending out submissions or writing up critiques—anything that is vaguely productive but not actually writing. If I run out of other things to work on and still have time, I force myself to write something, even if it’s just a scene or two.

How is writing a story like composing a photograph?

Photography has changed a lot with the advent of digital cameras. Gone are the days where you take a limited number of carefully pre-planned shots and then wait for the film to develop before seeing your results. It’s not unusual for me to go out with my digital camera and take 400 shots in an afternoon, which gives me the freedom to make a lot of mistakes and try out pretty much any random idea that occurs to me during the shoot. Then I can pick out the best two or ten or fifty shots, and discard all the others.

I wish there was a digital photography equivalent for writing. I’d love to have the freedom to compose a story fifty different ways in an afternoon and then pick out the best one and submit it. Instead, writing is more like film photography, slower and more carefully planned.

That said, I do think there are some similar variables to play with in photography and in writing. Perspective is one. Approaching a familiar subject from an unusual angle can work well in either medium. Framing is important too—where should your story start, and where should it end? How much of the background do you need to include?

I could go on, but rather than focus on specific rules of photo composition, I think I’ll end with a broader parallel—if there is a subject you want to photograph, or a topic you want to write, there are an almost limitless number of approaches you can take and still get an interesting end result. I think that’s actually very important, given how much is out there that has already been done (and often done very well). It makes me feel like I can still contribute something.

What’s next for you?

I’ve read a lot of picture books since my daughter was born, so lately I’ve been trying my hand at writing books for preschool and early-grade kids. The one I’m most fond of is How Far is the Moon, the story of a little girl who wants to go to the moon, but doesn’t understand how far away it really is.

I’m working my way though several short stories in various states of completion and revision. Tina Connolly and I recently finished “Flash Bang Remember,” a collaboration that’s set to appear in an upcoming issue of Lightspeed. We had a lot of fun with it, and now we’re working on a second joint effort.

My natural comfort zone is short stories, but I’ve had a few ideas lately that seem better suited to YA novels, so that may be on my horizon as well.

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.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in May, in Lightspeed . . .

We’ll have original science fiction by Linda Nagata (“Nightside on Callisto”) and C. C. Finlay (“The Cross-Time Accountants Fail To Kill Hitler Because Chuck Berry Does The Twist”) and SF reprints by Nicola Griffith (“Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese”) and David Langford (“Different Kinds of Darkness”).

We’ll also have original fantasy by Dale Bailey (“The Children of Hamelin”) and Melanie Rawn (“Mother of All Russiya”), along with fantasy reprints by Catherynne M. Valente (“A Hole to China”) and the late Kage Baker (“The Ruby Incomparable”).

And for our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive is not a novella, but the first part of a two-part serial novel: The Cosmology of the Wider World by Jeffrey Ford. Look for the second and final part in our June issue.

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!