Editorial, May 2012
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue twenty-four of Lightspeed!

In case you missed the news last month, Lightspeed has again been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine, and your humble editor is again up for the Hugo Award for Best Editor (Short Form). We’re all very excited to be nominated again, and we’re hugely honored to be so recognized. Thanks so much to all of you who nominated us, and congratulations to all of the other nominees.

In other news, we’re having a bit of a sale on our older ebooks; we currently have all of our 2010 issues on sale for just 99 cents. So if you haven’t already got the whole set, now would be a great time to pick up those 2010 back issues.

This month, we 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 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, in our ebook edition, we’ll also have an excerpt of Paolo Bacigalupi’s new young adult novel The Drowned Cities, plus . . .

Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. Look for 2312, the new novel by visionary SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson, available in bookstores everywhere on May 22. (You can also read the prologue to the novel in this very issue!) 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 Armored, 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: Other Worlds Than These (Night Shade, July 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 Cosmology of the Wider World
Jeffrey Ford

Beneath a yellow sky that fizzed like quinine, staring out to sea from the crenellated tower of his own construction, stood Belius, the Minotaur, shedding globes of water from his eyes. Life germinated inside these transparent spheres, civilizations rose and fell in clouds of war, colors of love grew vibrant and then washed away. A million seasons raced round within the see-through boundaries, until, rolling off his snout, they smashed against the ledge and shattered.

He lowed in a tone more of creature than man, and that sound flew out toward the horizon. Upon losing speed, it dropped with a splash into the deep ocean and sank, frightening lamprey, scattering herds of sea horses, to eventually settle on the sandy bottom. As Belius wiped his eyes clear, the egg of a bubble his voice had made cracked open, giving birth to the exact sound that had formed it. The sad moan vibrated in every atom of green water for miles around.

Pezimote, the tortoise, was awakened by the racket from his slumber beneath the mud. He struggled up out of sleep, out of the warm ooze, and started slowly swimming toward shore. His shell was orange and black, and he snapped his beak peevishly, because his anatomy did not allow for grumbling. “I am coming, Belius,” he thought, and Belius knew instantly that he was coming.

Shuffling and tapping from human foot to hoof, across the cobblestones of the turret, the Minotaur reached the side that gave a view of the woods. He rested wearily on the ledge for a moment, but when the frustration that gripped his heart became too much to stand, he struck his horns against the facade, drawing sparks from the cold stone. Another cry went out, this one splitting the sky above the distant trees. Only Vashti, the owl, knew what the strange call meant. She lighted from her branch with graceful wing thrusts that roiled the leaves. “I am coming, Belius,” she screeched. Once above the trees, she used her lantern eyes to pinpoint the Minotaur’s lonely figure on the tower.

After summoning his friends, he took the winding stairway down inside the tall structure. He dressed in formal attire; swallowtail jacket and striped pants. In the kitchen, he brewed cinnamon tea and prepared finger sandwiches with his hooves. He put his books away, rolled up his charts and maps and shooed his pet cat from the study. The niceties he performed for his guests’ arrival were all done rather out of habit than conscience. Since the first pang of his malady, nothing made sense; no task seemed worth the effort.

Pezimote sat on the divan because the chairs would not accommodate his giant shell. Having no articulated digits, for every finger sandwich he ate, it was necessary to utilize both of his stumpy appendages. Vashti, perched on the marble bust of Belius, swooped down every now and then and snatched a dainty off the silver platter. Cinnamon tea was not to her liking, so instead Belius had broken into his private liquor cabinet and poured her a glass of dandelion wine. He then stuffed his pipe with the dried petals of the digitalis and lit it. A sweet blue cloud grew around the company. He coughed with vigor and passed the smoldering drug to his companion from the sea. The owl could not take the blue smoke directly. The first and only time she’d tried it, she went stiff as a stone and dropped to the floor. It was enough for her just to breathe their exhalations.

When the group “tuned down,” as they had grown to call the state of intoxication the flower gave them, Belius uncrossed his legs and sat forward.

“I’m poisoned,” he told them, waiting for their reactions.

Their silence was a lure to draw him out.

“My heart is a snowball, my mind a cracked peach pit,” said the Minotaur, leaning further forward, his heavy head sinking down as if in exhaustion.

“I see,” said Pezimote. “And to what do you attribute this malady?”

“I’m poisoned. I feel as if I am soon going to . . .”

“To what?” asked Vashti, who was now perched on the huge globe of the wider world.

“To perish, of course,” Belius cried, losing his patience. At the utterance of these words, three large volumes jumped off the bookshelf across the room and fell to the floor.

“Now, now,” said Vashti, her feathers ruffled by the physical implications of his anger.

“Who, may I ask, has poisoned you?” said the tortoise, reaching for a deviled ostrich egg the size of a cantaloupe.

Belius shook his head.

“Perhaps you suspect one of us?” said Vashti.

“No, no. You’re my closest friends.”

“Who then?” asked Pezimote.

“Maybe,” said Belius, “it’s someone who doesn’t want me to complete my Cosmology.”

“You’ve been working on that book, Belius, for years and years. Why now? Most creatures have little interest in reading books and less faith in their messages.” The tortoise feared this revelation might wound his friend’s pride, so he leaned across the coffee table and stumped him lightly on the knee.

“Look to yourself,” said Vashti. “You’ve poisoned yourself somehow.”

“What?” said Belius, straightening up in his chair with a look that as much as said, Absurd! “I’m no weeping willow, Vashti. If I don’t mind saying, this tower we sit in was built by these two hooves alone. Each block of coral, I cut myself from the barrier reef and placed with an exactitude that nearly made this chaotic universe reel.”

“Yourself,” said Vashti, “look to yourself.”

“I must agree, Belius,” said Pezimote, finishing off the last morsel of egg and eyeing up another. “Your condition reminds me of my wife’s, Chelonia’s, unfounded lamentations when the children don’t visit for a time.”

“Chelonia has other reasons for lamenting, Pezimote,” said Vashti, turning her head 180 degrees to face away from the tortoise.

“A cruel cut,” said Pezimote, feigning astonishment in the face of the subtle charge.

“So you agree,” said Belius. He hoisted himself out of his chair and crossed the room to where a full-length mirror was mounted on the wall. Staring into it, he searched for clues to his own undoing. All looked as it ever had, except for the heavy rings beneath his eyes. His color was good; a creamy, speckled blue that showed no blush of fever, nor pallor of weakness. His horns were sharp. His snout was firm; his teeth, white and strong. Sticking out his tongue, he inspected every foot of it with great care. He then turned profile to the glass and peered from the corner of his left eye. “Nothing but handsome,” he thought.

“I see nothing wrong,” said the Minotaur. But then his eye looked deeply into itself and something toppled his confidence. “And then again . . .” he said and drew closer to the reflection. All was silent but for the sound of Pezimote munching. “And then again . . .” In the dark iris at the center of his left eye there was a minute but conspicuous absence. The light of the lamps did not produce a gleam there as they should have. There was a tiny mote of darker darkness that seemed to consume the light instead of offering it back to the world.

“Wait,” said Belius, “I see a black spot within me.”

Vashti flew off the globe and came to rest on the Minotaur’s shoulder. Pezimote rose from the divan and sidled up next to his friend, draping an arm around his wide back. Together they looked into the mirror, into the eye, into the dot of definite nothing.

For the hundredth time that day, the tears came from Belius; big and round as soap bubbles. A moan escaped from somewhere in his third stomach and the sharp self-pity of the sound cracked the glass suddenly as if it had been hit by a rock. The three jumped back. A rough wind entered the room and swirled the smoke of the digitalis into a visible cyclone. Papers were caught up in the storm. Furniture was tilted over. The tray of food flipped onto the floor. The three companions huddled together as books and knick-knacks, fossils and teacups, flew through the air. The tighter the group held onto each other, the weaker became the power of the gale. When at last they had each other in a knot of strangle holds, the danger dissipated into a light breeze. They broke apart, and Belius stumbled backward against the wall, clutching his head with both hooves.

“Time to be going,” said Pezimote, bringing his head slowly out from within his shell. He spoke as he moved toward the door, his voice, as well as his leathery skin, quivering with fear. “I suggest that tomorrow, bright and early, we pay a visit to the ape. Your condition is serious . . . not to mention dangerous.”

“Agreed,” said Vashti.

Belius nodded, unable to speak for the throbbing behind his eyes.

“Get some sleep,” said his visitors in unison. Then Vashti flew through the open window and Pezimote ambled out the door and down the winding steps.

As soon as he was alone, Belius reached for the bottle of dandelion wine. With one mythic gulp, he drained it. His headache lay stunned, barely able to breathe. Packing his pipe with a bolus dose of petals, he lit it. The digitalis was a stake through the heart of his pain. Its frustrated life eased away as he sat back in his chair puffing, too tired to think of sleep. From where he sat, he could see his whole figure in the cracked mirror. He smoked and stared, studying the queer mosaic.

Phantom thoughts skittered through the Minotaur’s mind, conjuring no real images or memories and leaving only the vaguest of impressions that he had been thinking at all. From the time his friends had left at dusk, he had remained in his half-stupor, staring straight on and breathing deeply to keep the anguish to a dull ache.

In the mean time, night had come to that hemisphere of the Wider World. As the first waves of darkness rolled across the forest, Siftus the mole put on his snakeskin vest and took up his walking stick. He nosed his way up out of the burrow, which had been his home from birth, and sniffed with delight the rising tide of shadows. He set forth that evening to dine on grubs and the dewdrop liqueur of honey suckle.

The raccoon brothers stole, as they always did, into Belius’ garden, but when he was not there to toss rocks at them, they lost their appetites and made off, each with only one ear of corn. After dipping their heist in the ocean for seasoning, and gnawing through a few rows of kernels, they agreed that the ears’ mealy taste meant something was wrong with the Minotaur.

The ants that lived among the stones of the tower bedded down with atoms of bread crust and pinprick dreams. The moths flapped out of the bushes and went to work on the cloth of Belius’ old coat, which, for the past few months, had been the new personality of the garden scarecrow. Creepers sang a magnificat in a round of ten thousand voices, while bats flew toward fruit they could hear ripening. The fox, the lynx, the weasel, each came awake, as all of the creatures of daylight drew toward sleep.

Belius’ cat, Bonita, slipped away from her master’s feet, taking the spiral staircase to the wine cellar, where it was a certainty that some rodent would have been dabbling in the stream of a leaky cask and would be too drunk to run. And way off, in the middle of the forest, perched on the uppermost branch of the tallest, most ancient tree, sat Vashti. “Who?” she asked, and as always there was no reply. She flapped her wings and a breeze rolled outward to rustle leaves, bend flowers and push a firefly through the open window of Belius’ study.

The insect perched on the tip of the Minotaur’s snout and worked its electro-chemical trick because it didn’t know how not to. Belius was dragged out of his daze by the tiny flash, believing it to be the lost gleam returning to fill the void in his iris. Soon enough, he saw his mistake and brushed the impostor into flight. He rose from his chair with great effort and looked around at the mess his manifest bad feeling had caused. He would have groaned had he not been so weary. Instead, he sighed heavily, causing a hairline fracture in the last unbroken tea cup of the service. Waving his hooves at the shambles, he decided to straighten up in the morning. With hoof-tap and foot-slap, he made his way up the spiral staircase to his bedroom.

He sloughed the swallowtail jacket and striped pants, letting them drop to the floor where he stood. He chose from his armoire the green silk pajamas. All of his sleeping apparel had a good size rock sewn into the collar, which kept him off his back while he slept. Without the rock there, he would roll over, flat out, and begin snoring so ferociously that even the solid structure of his tower was in danger of caving in.

He passed up the book that lay at the foot of his bed, a treatise written by the Sphinx, entitled, “Riddling Men For Glory and Sport.” The fact that he had paid out three casks of his oldest dandelion wine for it meant nothing to him now. He pulled back the quilt of his bed; a massive four-poster, its headboard scarred from the violence of his horns due to recent nightmares. He blew out the candle and then lay down on his side. Trying to corral his thoughts so they would not wander wastefully as they had all day, he concentrated on the bright sliver of moon that hung outside his window. Sleep, he knew, would not come, so he snagged his memory on that hook of a satellite and thought back and back to his earliest days in the lesser world, searching for some insignificant incident that might have planted the seed which had latently germinated and blossomed into the evil flower of his present discontent.

When Belius was born, his father didn’t know whether to send him to the barn or swaddle him in blankets and put him in the crib that had been built for his arrival. His mother demanded that he stay in the house. After a lengthy spell of weeping and arguing, his father finally relented, but made one demand, and that, to fill the crib with straw instead of comforters.

The doctor present at the blessed event told his patient that he had seen stranger anomalies of birth in his years as physician to the surrounding farm community. “Once, I saw a little girl born with feathers and wings. She was a darling,” he said and rubbed the new mother’s back, hoping his anecdote had been a comfort. Later, after he had done all he could, and the mother and child were resting peacefully, he whispered to the father that these types of mixed up births never survived for more than a few days.

“How could it have happened?” asked Belius’ father, his head filled with wild accusations toward his wife.

“Your wife told me that six months ago she was out in the field, over by the swimming pond, picking daisies for the supper table, when she was chased by your prize bull. Do you recall the incident?”

“Yeah, the bull broke from its pen and had wandered out there. She was real upset. It chased her down to the house, almost got her too.”

“Not being a university scientist, and not having one within a hundred miles to consult, I would say that the fright of that incident stayed in her mind, imprinting the image of a bull, so that when the child was forming, part of its growth was arrested in the evolutionary state of bovinity and did not make it all the way to becoming human.”

Belius’ father looked skeptically at the old man. The doctor raised his hands and shrugged his shoulders.

“You could say it was god’s work if you like,” he said, and then prescribed a good-sized dose of alcohol for the younger man and a larger one for himself.

The child was to have been named as his father’s junior, but when it came from the womb with the promise of horns and hooves, a different name was promptly chosen. “Belius” had been an ancestor on the mother’s side; a personage of antiquity whom no member of the family had any recollection of nor memorable stories to tell about. It was the oldest name recorded in the family Bible, a progenitor to that race of farmers that had taken to tilling the soil of the valley.

Once given a name, the little beast began to take on a definite personality. It did not die as the learned doctor had promised, but thrived under the care of a mother who had waited many years to have a child. She’d had to watch with mixed emotions of jealousy and regret as her sisters of the community grew heavy with joy time and again.

When Belius was born, she hardly noticed his strangeness. She saw past his robin’s egg complexion, his blunt snout, to his essence, which was child, and hers at that. She lavished affection on him, treating him as if he were the rarest gem of humanity. His exceptions became the rules by which she judged other children. Her neighbors’ little ones were sadly lacking a tail and could not keep the flies off themselves in summer.

Before long, Belius’ father almost came around to feeling true affection for the creature that was his son, not exactly loving it, but instead loving his wife’s love for it. The three of them made a family and that was what satisfied him most. It gave him a greater reason to work hard and that pleasure took him a long way.

In order to clear things with the community, so that when the time came to take Belius out in public, he would not cause an uproar, his mother, a short time after giving birth, asked permission to speak in front of the congregation after the Sunday service one week. She told about the birth, explained her love for the child and asked that her neighbors accept him as they would any new baby. The members of the parish took the news stoically, with only a modicum of murmuring. There was one extremely old woman who fainted, unable to believe that something could happen that she had never heard of happening before. The reason for the reverent silence of the event was not due to the parishioners being charitable at heart but more to the confinement of the church, for many wore their charity to mass each week the way they wore a Sunday hat. Later, in their homes, a majority of them laughed, others felt threatened, and some confused scorn for pity.

At first, the new mother believed that her son could enjoy a normal life, but the barely audible whispering and the fear that glazed people’s eyes on the few occasions she was to bring Belius to town brought her around to a realistic view of the situation. Finally, she was forced to admit his difference to herself. From that time on, she decided that he would spend his young life away from that spirit of ignorance. The young Minotaur grew up believing that there was no other existence than that of the fields and surrounding woods, and that there were no other inhabitants of the universe but himself and his parents.

From the time he could first walk, he was lord and master of the farm, allowed to run wild, most anywhere he pleased. The only place that was forbidden to him was the stable in which the bull and two cows were kept. He was strictly told by both mother and father, never to enter that building. On more than one occasion, he would ask what was in there. Then his father would grab him by the horns, spin him around until they were both dizzy and let the boy fly off to land in the dirt.

“That’s what’s in there,” the rough old farmer would say.

Because Belius did not continue to ask did not mean that discovering the secret was not always on his mind. He made many a daring attempt to get inside, but was always caught just as he was pulling back the big red doors, revealing the huge darkness and foul aroma. Each time he was apprehended the punishment was a stiff whipping with a leather belt, the smell of which disturbed him more than the sting.

The cows and bull were sent out to graze at night so that Belius had no chance of coming across them in the fields during his daily adventures. His mother and father lived in fear that he would somehow discover the brutish aspect of his affliction and be shocked out of his learned human traits. The first time he recognized himself in a mirror, it took them hours of lying to make him think that his features were a developmental stage that every child went through. To further this whole charade, his mother gave up eating beef, and, although he could not bring himself to make that sacrifice, his father did vow to take these “cannibalistic” meals in the kitchen, away from his wife and son.

The only time his parents regretted not having told the truth from the beginning was the night on which little Belius first heard the sound of the cows lowing in the field.

“Father, what’s that noise?” he asked, running from his bedroom.

His mother and father looked at each other. Being caught unprepared, his father, not a man of quick wit, said, “It’s a ghost—spirits of the dead, complaining.”

“No it isn’t, dear,” said his mother. She thought for a short time before she came up with, “It’s simply the wind. Your father is trying to frighten you.”

“It’s no more the wind than a wind from my ass. It’s ghosts!” he repeated.

“The wind,” she said.

Belius left them to quarrel. Back in his room, he noticed that not a leaf of the tree outside his window so much as stirred. From then on, when he heard the strange noise, he would crawl under his bed and cry with fear, his sobs almost identical to the sounds that sent him into hiding.

When Belius grew old enough to do more than just charge through the corn rows or ram, with his horns, the old door his father had set up for him against the weeping willow, his mother started him working for a few hours each morning in her garden. This early experience led to him always keeping a garden for himself. He turned out to have a special affinity for understanding the needs of vegetables and flowers. She had no idea that he would benefit her small crop so much. In fact, she thought his ungraceful movements and unbounded energy would leave the neat rows in chaos.

By initiating this work period, she hoped to bring Belius around to the point where he could help his father with the daily chores of the farm. She knew that her husband had always wanted a son who could share with him the summer’s hard work and the satisfaction at harvest time. He never thought that Belius might be capable of more than just frolicking in the fields. She had told him to try the boy at some small tasks, that it would make him feel good to be more useful now that he was older. To this, her husband replied by shaking his head in reproach as if she were making a cruel joke.

By way of the perfect order and prodigious output of the garden, the farmer realized that the genetic mishap had not stolen his son’s ability to work. In a solemn voice, he told his wife, “I think it’s time Belius learned to farm.”

Belius did as well in the fields as he had in the garden. After a relatively short time, he gradually grew less talkative and more thoughtful. He ignored the old door that leaned against the willow, and, when he entered the cornfield, he went about with reserve, not charging blindly, but instead keeping his eyes trained on the stalks for signs of blight or pests. All of the thousands of questions he had been in the habit of asking were now no longer spoken. Instead of haranguing his father for answers, he watched for them in silence. The earth, sky, rain and wind gave the most satisfying replies. He grew stronger with the heavy work, his muscles taking on real definition. His parents knew it was not possible, but to both it seemed that he had grown a whole foot taller in just the first month of farming.

When he and his father would spot each other on the opposite boundaries of a two-acre expanse of alfalfa and wave “hello,” that is when both felt most content at being partners. As long as there was a fair distance between them they were the greatest of friends. It was only when they were forced into close quarters, forced to speak, that the father panicked as if he were trapped in a broom closet with an actual bull.

At noon, when they took their lunch break behind the barn, they would sit on bales of hay, facing each other. The old man would lean forward with his elbows resting on his knees, a sprig of hay jutting from the corner of his mouth, and drawl forth a strange mixture of simple wisdom and complex ignorance. Belius hardly ever uttered a sound during these sessions, except when his father told one of his obtuse jokes concerning the stupidity of people who lived in towns. Only then would the son force a laugh because he did not want to disappoint his mentor. His father would stay silent for some time out of a sense of false modesty but eventually would join in and react to his own joke. For only a moment, he would feel a closeness to Belius that was even stronger than the one they shared from each side of a wide field. Then he would forget and look up so they were face to face. To see that snout raised toward the sun, to see the large gleaming eyes filled with intelligence and hear the deep animal laugh was more than he could bear. His laughter would stop abruptly, and, whether it was two minutes or twenty into the break, he would return to work.

Belius had begun to be treated more like an adult by his parents. At night, though, he was still forced to stay inside as the cows and bulls were let out and led to pasture. When he heard their eerie moans now, he discounted his previous belief in ghosts and decided it must be the wind. What forced this change in thinking was not so much that he had lost all his childish fear, but more that he had grown so large that he no longer fit under his bed.

One morning in autumn when the leaves in the woods were at the meridian of color between bright yellow and that final blaze of red, Belius’ father screamed for him. At the moment the Minotaur first heard the voice, he was sitting on the ground beneath the weeping willow, his horns aching, his head spinning from having just taken a charge at the old door. The result was that nothing remained of the target. He had run at it this time with his new strength and weight, and his points went through the solid oak as if it were paper. When his thick skull made contact, the entire barrier seemed to disintegrate like a dream meeting daylight. At first, he thought that his father’s wild yell was the audible groaning of the willow, since he had deeply scarred its trunk. When the call came again, though, his head was clearer and he understood. He got off the ground and ran through the stubbled cornfield, picking splinters from his arms and chest.

Belius had no idea where his father was calling him from until, rounding the side of the barn, he heard echoing within, a sudden riot of thuds and screams. From the opposite side of the field, he had not recognized the thick vein of agony pulsing through the cry. As he made his way to the entrance, all of the commotion inside grew still and his father’s voice fell silent.

The usually secured doors were thrown open wide. From where he stood, bathed in the brightness of the morning sun, he could only make out the vaguest of shadows. Past rebukes from his parents leaped up in his memory and repelled him with a force equal to that of the attraction. He might have stood there for a very long time if his father hadn’t again called in a weak gurgle, “Belius, help.”

“Father, you want me to enter?”

There was no reply.

Like a traveler trying to make headway against a storm, he leaned forward and took his first step. He continued past the dividing line between day and night and plunged into the shadow. As he waited for his eyes to adjust to the new surroundings, he noticed an unusual aroma permeating the atmosphere. It was an earthy smell, a ripe vegetal smell, but closed in and made stale by the confinement of the wooden walls. It was as if a mound of earth had risen up and taken on the properties of life. He thought it similar to the odor of the plough horse, but it was not as gentle. When he took it into his lungs, it made his facial hair bristle and drew planting rows of bumps from the human flesh of his chest and stomach.

“Belius,” his father whispered from somewhere at the back of the barn, “be careful.”

“I’m here,” Belius called out. He was about to travel down the dark aisle when he heard the unmistakable sounds of the night ghosts. Again, he was unable to move. “They’re in the barn,” he thought. The distance that he had always felt separating him from his father suddenly disappeared. He put his head down and charged up the aisle between the stalls.

It happened so quickly, as if a mirror had magically appeared in front of him. The bone and horns of Belius’ head made contact with what seemed to be a double of themselves. There was a jarring impact. He was lifted off his feet and thrown onto his back. His vision was blurred, but he could, for the first time, make out the enormous figure of what he took to be one of the ghosts. It backed away from him, recoiling for another confrontation. Belius pulled himself up using the stall next to him for support. The monster bellowed, kicked holes in the planks at its feet, and lowered its head, preparing to charge.

This time Belius didn’t bring his head down for protection. He was so dizzy from the first encounter that he knew if he leaned forward, he would continue on to the floor. He stood upright, making himself an easy target. The monster smashed a hole in the back wall of the barn and daylight rushed in around it. As if the sunlight hitting its flank were fire, it lunged forward. Belius waited until the moment when the long, sharp horns of his opponent were only inches from his chest. With all the speed and strength of an animal, and not a single thought in his head, he raised his right arm and brought it down like a sledge hammer on the crown of the enemy’s brow, directly between the horns. There was the fleeting sound of a great egg cracking open, and the monster stopped dead in its tracks. It reared onto its hind legs and then fell to the floor with such force that the vibration knocked Belius to his knees.

Blood seeped out of its ears and snout and gushed from the crater in its head. Its eyes were wild. Belius could feel the fear in them. Its jaw moved and it filled the barn with deep raspy squeals—death sounds that rose and fell in a strange rhythm. With each interval, they went through a transformation that brought them closer to speech. Belius listened as if to some piece of music his mother might play on the upright piano in the parlor. Slowly, the sounds evolved into words. “I wanted to see the sun,” the monster said to Belius. For the first time, the Minotaur realized that the head of his victim was much like his own and that the hooves that carried its massive weight were identical to his and that, whereas neither his mother nor his father had horns, this thing did.

“Speak to me again,” Belius pleaded, but the bull was dead.

In the farthest left hand stall, across from the one that held two more creatures similar to the one he had just killed, Belius found his father’s body. The horns had passed directly through the stomach and chest. He lifted the limp form in his arms. As he stepped back over the bull on the way out, its two hornless sisters cried, “Murderer, murderer.”

Belius took his father into the house and laid him in his bed. Then he sat down in the chair next to the headboard. Until his mother returned from town later that afternoon, he did not move or speak but for the entire time felt the dizziness he would experience when, as a child, the farmer would answer by grabbing his horns and spinning him round.

He sat next to the corpse in the parlor, watching a parade of strange faces pass by the open coffin. His father’s old friends and their families spent more time staring at him than they did at the dead man. After the first hour, their whispers had consumed every aspect of reverence the ceremony had originally held.

One man came forward to where Belius was sitting, patted him on the head and fed him a sugar cube. The rest kept their distance but eyed his horns suspiciously after seeing the condition of their neighbor’s body. He heard their words, but they did not think he was capable of understanding.

Two hours before the wake was to be over, he motioned to his mother who was in the back of the room, speaking to a distant cousin. His mother came up close to him and leaned over, putting her ear to his snout as if the sound of his voice might frighten the mourners.

“Get rid of them, mother. I’ve had enough,” he said.

“A few more hours, Belius.”

With this, he reached up and ripped off his tie, flinging it to the floor.

“Please be calm,” she said.

He settled down when he saw the look of embarrassment in his mother’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, sitting back in his seat. It was too late, though. They’d heard him speak and seen that he was angry. Women and children were ushered out with great haste. The men looked over their shoulders with contempt but could barely restrain themselves from running.

The night of the wake, after hammering the lid on the coffin and carrying it into the living room, Belius left his mother sitting at the kitchen table and went outside to the barn. He opened the big doors and stepped inside. Although the neighbors had dragged away the carcass and buried it, the smell of the dead bull still hung in the air. It sent a shiver through his human flank and raised the hackles behind his ears. He walked slowly down the center aisle, reliving in his mind the battle that seemed as if it had taken place only minutes before. The fit of dizziness finally passed, and he opened the stalls that held the two cows. They pushed back against the wall in fear.

“Out with you both,” he bellowed, thinking that it was necessary to scream when dealing with animals. When they would not budge, he lifted his hoof in the air and reenacted the crushing blow he had dealt the bull. This signal was all that was needed to spur them to action. They left their cubicles and brushed quickly by him, mooing messages of fright to each other. Once out beneath the moon, they calmed down, slowing from a trot to a lazy amble. They led Belius to their usual grazing area between the cornfield and the boundary of the woods. The night was unusually warm for autumn. A pleasant breeze blew dead leaves out of the nearby stands of trees and into the pasture. The stars were everywhere in the sky, leaving so little to darkness. After wandering around the field for a little while, the cows found a previously undiscovered thatch of clover and settled down to munching. Belius took off his jacket and sat, crossing human over beastly leg.

“First,” he told himself, “I must find out whatever else has been kept secret from me. Then, as soon as father is buried, I must begin preparing the farm for winter. When the chores are caught up on, I will then show myself in town, take the abuse that is coming to me for being different and make them so used to the sight of me that I can come and go as I need to get groceries and supplies. I must be a friend to my mother and not punish her for trying to shelter me from my own horrible self. Last, I will learn how to read and write and cipher so that because I resemble an animal, no man or woman can say that I’m stupid.”

“But face it, you’re a freak,” said a voice, drawing Belius’ attention from his plans. He looked up in astonishment to see that the cows had sidled up closer to him. Instantly, he remembered the words of the dying bull. Before speaking, he shot a glance over his shoulder, making sure there was no one else there.

“Did you speak to me?” he asked.

“Do you see any other freaks around?” said the cow, standing directly in front of him. “Plension, here, is all cow, as am I. You are the only halfling present.”

“How is it possible?” said Belius.

“Just listen to yourself,” said the cow. “Say your name and listen.”

“Belius,” said the Minotaur, but heard nothing strange in the pronunciation.

“Again,” said the cow.

“Belius, Belius, Belius . . .” He said his own name twenty times, listening with horror as the sound of it melted from human language into a prolonged animal bleating. Though he could hear the change in it, he still understood the word to be his name.

“You see, you’re a monster for sure. There is enough human in you to murder and still enough bull in you to understand the language of your victim. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of such a thing. Have you, Plension?”

“Most certainly not,” answered the other cow. “I wouldn’t hear of it.”

“What do you mean by monster?” asked Belius.

“Calm yourself, I’m only trying to help you. You’re partially one of us, remember?”

“No I’m not,” he said weakly.

“I won’t even answer to that foolishness while I’m standing here conversing with you,” said the cow.

“How do you think you’re helping me?” he asked.

“I want you to understand a very important thing that your parents failed to mention to you. Perhaps you’re already beginning to see it for yourself?”

“You mean that I won’t be accepted by people?”

“Precisely.”

“I may be part something else, but I’m also part human, and I have devised a plan for myself.”

“Did you hear that, Plension? He has a plan.”

For the first time ever, Belius heard a cow laugh.

“Do you remember the bull you killed?”

Belius nodded.

“He also had a plan. He was going to escape, because he couldn’t stand living in the shadows anymore. It’s all right to live in the dark if you have never seen the sunlight, but, without sunlight, after a while, the eyes dim, the coat loses its sheen, the muscles ache for warmth and the mind goes mushy. We don’t like the dark either, but we’ve learned to adjust a little better. Now if you were to make us go out into the sunlight, we’d probably go crazy. Is that true, Plension?”

“Stark raving mad,” said the other cow.

“The bull I killed was trying to get back to the light. That’s what it said before it died.”

“Yes, you smashed our husband’s head pretty handily and that was the end of all his plans. Take it as a lesson.”

“It was my fault the bull was kept in the barn all day,” said Belius. “It was my fault that he had to try to escape, that he killed my father.”

“One could say,” lowed Plension, taking the initiative for the first time.

“Do you hate me?” Belius asked.

“We hate the world that men have made. There’s no obvious good in the species. Wouldn’t you know they’d be the ones to run things.”

Belius shook his head, realizing that perhaps the cow was right. The society that would be from that day forward his “yes” and “no” was comprised of frightened, dangerous creatures. “What’s the use?” he asked.

“Just like a two legger,” said Plension, moving closer. Her spots, like her sister’s, seemed continents of black in a milky ocean. Her face was more gentle, but her disposition more severe. “Everything has to be either one way or the other. If things don’t go well, then one might as well give up. There’s a way, Belius. There’s a place you could go to and not be lost as you are here.”

“Shhh!” cautioned the other cow.

“Now, Austina, we might as well tell him.”

“Tell me. What place is this?”

Plension pounded the earth with her right front hoof, deciding how best to explain. She looked to Austina for help. Austina dipped her massive head and said, “Pay attention, Belius. I’m only going to tell you about this once. You’re a halfling, so it isn’t exactly treason, but if the pond toads find out we told, or the field mice catch wind of this, we’ll never hear the end of it. There’s a place that can be gotten to, where, unlike here in the lesser world of men, every creature accepts every other creature. The fox converses with the quail, the condor with the spider, the whale with the wild dog. Language is used there to communicate. It’s the Wider World. I can tell you how to get there. It’s right next door to here, right over there, right under this field, just at the top of that tree. If I were you, I’d pack up and go. Don’t look back.” When she finished, both cows looked around to see if anything were crawling or creeping or flying close by.

“I’ve never heard of such a place,” said Belius.

Both cows laughed.

“If it’s so wonderful, then why haven’t you two gone there?” he asked.

“We’re old now and set in our ways,” said Austina. “We haven’t the strength.”

“What about my mother?” asked Belius. “She’s sitting right now in the kitchen, crying. I can’t leave her. Who’ll run the farm?”

“Do as you like, Belius, but when you’ve been beaten and ridiculed to the point where you’d gladly trade places with your father, don’t say we didn’t try to help you. That’s all the talking that Plension and I will do for tonight. There’s still some healthy thistle that the frost hasn’t yet bitten.” Austina turned her huge body and, with a swish of her tail, walked off to another part of the field.

“Where’s this place?” Belius asked Plension. “How do I get to the Wider World?”

The cow slowly closed her eyes, shook her head and made the eerie noise that in years gone by would have made Belius duck for cover.

“Tell me,” he demanded, but she moved off to join her sister. The confusion caused by what they’d told him created an unbearable pressure inside Belius’ skull. He knew that it demanded release or his head would pop like a bubble on the surface of the pond. Having cried on and off for the past forty-eight hours, his tear ducts were barren, so instead the building spirit of destruction escaped in a bellowing laugh.

“The Wider World,” he managed to say amidst fits of hysteria. The jostling his ribs took made them ache. Clasping his arms tightly around his middle, he rolled from the sitting position onto his side, drawing his legs up toward his chest and his snout down toward his knees.

After his madness had diminished to giggles and then to silence, he lay there in the field, listening to pine cones dropping to the ground in the nearby woods. In the distance, he heard the storm door of the kitchen open. His mother’s voice came drifting out over the pasture.

“Belius, Belius,” she called.

“Yes, mother,” he shouted from his place on the ground.

“What was that terrible noise? It sounded as if one of the cows was dying. Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” he called back. The sound of the storm door closing came to him where he lay, and then the darkness moved in around him. In sleep, his plans came back to him disguised in the mask of perfection. That night he began the habit of snoring, and the sonic force that rolled from his snout uprooted the willow tree and made the neighbors a mile off think a storm was on the way.

Belius woke suddenly, a few hours before daybreak. Seeing as he hadn’t moved his position through the entire night, straightening his body out to its full length was a grim task. When finally he had loosened his knees with continued rubbing from his forearms, he crunched them a few times as a test and then stood up. He looked around to see if the cows were still nearby, but they’d returned to the warmth of their stalls.

On his way back to the house, he noticed that the willow tree had been knocked over during the night. At first the sight saddened and puzzled him, but when he remembered that his father was to be buried that day and that he was responsible for digging the grave, he saw the gaping hole as an omen of good fortune.

He found his mother still sitting in the kitchen, asleep, her head resting upon the table. With one burly arm, he lifted her bodily and carried her to the couch in the parlor, where he threw a blanket over her and tucked the edges in around her chin and shoulders. He sat next to her for a time, remembering his conversation with the two cows. Nothing he had ever learned while working the fields or wandering in the woods had prepared him for the events of the past few days.

Without thinking, he lifted his father’s pipe from where it sat on the end table next to his chair. He stoked the bowl from the open tin that lay next to it. Lifting the matches, he struggled to light one. His first draw made him light headed. His second made him sick. Before he could worry about the nausea, though, his eyes fixed on the serpentine trail of smoke as it grew like a vine toward the ceiling. The shifting patterns that it drew in the half-light of dawn set his imagination in gear, and he began to think about what the Wider World must be like.

Doctor Grey, the physician who had delivered Belius, was the only person who attended the burial. He was a man who liked to see all projects through to their completion. Since he had delivered Belius’ father many years before, in the time when his face was smooth and his hands trembled from uncertainty rather than alcohol, he felt it his duty to be present at the ceremony. In his gruff voice, he read a passage from the Bible—the first three or so pages of Genesis. The reading had no closure, it just sort of trailed off and ended when he felt as if he had given God his due.

Belius’ mother leaned against the Minotaur’s sturdy side, weeping into the rumpled cloth of his only suit. The day was cold and clear in a show of arrogance toward their grief. Then the doctor cleared his throat, signaling that it was time to lower the coffin. Belius tilted his mother to a standing position and stepped forward. He wrapped his arms around the coffin, his hooves meeting beneath it with a distinct click. With no more than a sigh, he lifted the box, walked over to the pit and cautiously lowered it down. He leaned as far forward as he could without falling in, but it was still four feet from the bottom. “Good-bye,” he said to the wooden lid that pressed against his snout and then opened his arms and let the weight drop with a thud. Doctor Grey led his mother back to the house.

Instead of simply filling the grave in with dirt, he propped the willow, which lay nearby, back to an upright posture and filled in around it with dirt.

By the time Belius had returned to the house, the doctor had given his mother a sedative and put her to bed. With flask in hand, the old man sat on the steps of the front porch, indulging in a quiet cry of his own.

“Thank you for coming,” Belius said from a distance, not to let Grey think he was spying.

“It’s my job,” said the doctor.

“How’s my mother?”

“She’ll be all right in a couple of days. I haven’t seen much of her in the past few years. Both her and your father shied away from us neighbors after she had you, but if she’s anything like her old self, I believe she’ll have the gumption to press on.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know it won’t be easy. You’re old enough to understand that.”

“I have plans.”

“Good man. You have the farm to take care of now. Remember, be tolerant of others. I have never seen intolerance work as a successful cure for itself.”

“I am going to start learning things. My father didn’t think I was capable of learning from books, just like he never thought I would be capable of farming. That doesn’t matter now, as I see it.”

“You’ll do well if you can keep that attitude,” said the doctor, capping his flask and standing. “I’ve got to get on my way. There’s a girl that lives over the hill there who broke her arm last week. I have to pay a visit and see how it’s mending. Why don’t you walk me to my carriage, I’ve got something in there that might help you out.”

The uneven pair strolled out to the road where the horse and rig stood tied to a fence post. Doctor Grey assessed Belius’ development out of the corner of his eye. He could hardly believe how strong and healthy such an aberration of nature had grown. The way the boy thrived was as much a miracle to the shriveled healer as was the peculiar birth.

As they drew up next to the rig, the doctor turned to Belius and said, “I owe you something. I swore when you were born, you wouldn’t live as long as a week. But here you are, bigger than life. Now I must pay up.” He reached into the carriage and retrieved something from off the seat. “Here,” he said, handing Belius a book. “I picked this out for you from my library this morning. I want you to have it. Have your mother help you with it. It’ll keep you out of trouble for a good long time.”

“Thank you,” said Belius, accepting the gift.

“Tell me what you think of it when you learn to read,” Grey said and hoisted himself up into the seat of the carriage.

“What’s the name of this book?” Belius asked.

“Inferno,” said the doctor. Then lifting his whip, he lashed viciously at the horse’s rump and was on his way.

Pezimote thought he was hurrying, but any creature that measures its life in centuries knows only a lumbering imitation of haste. The gnat that is born, lives out all its years and dies in a matter of forty-eight hours would never perceive the old reptile as having life, but would have passed him in a blur, noting only a large, oddly colored boulder.

“Your gait is kin to a yawn, Pezimote,” Belius would tease on their walks along the violet beach.

“I’ll make it up to you,” the tortoise would hiss in reply. “I’ll hurry to your funeral the day they bury you.”

Pezimote had been sluggishly creeping about for more than two hundred years. Because of his marvelous age, he was considered by many to be a reliable historian. In reality, his memory was as riddled with holes as a dried honeycomb. This deficiency never prevented him from fabricating past events to please his friends and rankle his foes.

He paddled slowly through the water, heading up the coast toward the spit of land that held Belius’ tower. The blue sun was rising out of the sea to the west and, just as Nosthemus, the sperm whale, had prophesied for him on the way home the previous night, it was going to be a clear, yellow day with crisscrossing channels of warm air and plenty of fizz.

“Poor Belius,” he muttered as he went, taking a beak full of saltwater for his sympathy. “Such an inquisitive fellow—always wanting to know the ‘why’ of things and always returning, sadly, to himself.” He hoped that their trip to the ape would result in a cure for his friend’s suffering. His pity was truly felt, but before he had paddled over the next two waves, he let the Minotaur slip from his thoughts. The warm water, the vanishing constellations, brought to mind instead the young female tortoise he had been sneaking around with lately in the early hours of the morning. Unlike Chelonia’s, her shell was free of barnacles, her skin almost smooth. She had wondrous orange eyes and flashy markings of red and gold. Counting the diamond shaped quadrants on her underside while swimming with her in the lagoon, he discovered that she was a hundred and fifty years his junior. Contrary to what the prowling night creatures of sea and forest were gossiping, though, he had not yet made love to her. The union was coming soon, he was certain, because he often dreamed of it during the day while catching up on his sleep. They had met one night in the mango grove, not far from the stand of palm trees that he and Chelonia called home. He had been restless in his sleep for the past decade and had gotten into the practice of waking a few hours before sunrise and wandering out in search of a snack. His vast experience had lulled his innocence, leaving him an insomniac. He was not one to moan and fret like Belius. Usually an abalone or a dozen oysters would quell his empty feeling and send him back home tired enough to sleep until dawn.

His wandering in the dark eventually took on the aspects of a ritual. He would wake suddenly from a nightmare involving sharks to the sound of Chelonia’s heavy breathing. After making an attempt to get back to sleep, he would try to initiate a round of love-making, which would invariably be met by hissing and beak snapping. When this sedative was not forthcoming, he would pat his wife lightly on the shell to send her back to sleep and then strike out in search of food.

No more than a month ago, he had awoken as usual and decided seafood would not do, but that something sweet was needed. Scuttling inland past the stand of lime trees, beneath the flitting of the fruit bats, he arrived at the mango grove. He gathered together a half dozen of the twisted trees’ prize droppings and began eating away at his restlessness. Just as he was digging into the third piece of fruit, he heard the shrill cry of a young tortoise. “Wolves,” he immediately thought, and only hesitating long enough to impale one of the mangos on his beak, he turned around with every intention of stumping back home as fast as possible.

Whereas others might have rushed to the aid of their brethren, Pezimote was no hero. He had not lived so long in the crazy world to end as a delicacy for four legged heathens. Of course, he felt a prick of remorse for what had sounded to be the scream of a young female of the species and also a smaller measure of the same emotion for his own cowardice.

So he charged away at the dazzling rate of a yard a minute. The cries of pain lasted not much longer than the time it took for him to make up his mind to flee. “Soon they’ll be done with the hapless child and come sniffing for more,” he told himself, but his retreat ended as abruptly as it had begun when he heard a rummaging in the stand of bushes that bounded the sandy path to his right.

“No, they’re upon me!” he thought. He stood still, his fear paralyzing any will to escape. Snapping jaws and sharp teeth, claws and stinking fur was the beast that swirled in his imagination. “This can’t be,” he cried in the storm of his thoughts as the noise in the bushes drew dangerously close. The mango still impaled on his beak, he shivered in the moonlight, waiting for death.

He would later be grateful that the mosquitoes that swarmed on her body had not missed her eyelids. When she crashed through the underbrush and onto the path, she was completely blind. She could, however, tell by way of scent that a male tortoise was standing close enough to hear her. “Help me, they’re draining my blood,” she whimpered.

Pezimote dropped his mango and thanked fate for having materialized a tortoise instead of a predator. He was so relieved; he didn’t now hesitate to come to her rescue.

“I heard you call out,” he said to her writhing form. “My first thought was that you were being attacked by tortoise eaters. Of course, I was rushing to your aid.” In this instance, his wide experience did prove an asset. Scuttling to a nearby aloe plant, he broke off a large stem with his beak. “Hold still now,” he said when he was again at her side. Placing the plant between his two front stumps, he squeezed its clear sap out onto her head. With gentle strokes, he rubbed the puddle in widening circles over her face and neck, then on each of her legs. The mosquitoes, drunk from the sweetness of her blood, flew slowly away.

Pezimote gazed down upon the young female. Her red and gold markings stood out in contrast to the overall darkness of the rest of her shell, whose lack of barnacles made its surface shine in the light of circling fireflies. He caught a shadowy reflection of his face in the sheen, and, in that moment, he knew that he would eventually have to ride the ocean swells upon her back . . .

Pezimote looked up from his paddling to see Belius’ tower looming in the distance. To calm the boiling of his usually cold blood, he brought to mind the vicious sharks that were forever invading his dreams. A hungry hammerhead swam now from ear to ear, circling in his skull. He did such a good job of conjuring the image that not only did it shrink his desire, but he actually began looking back over his shoulder in fear. This specter forced him to increase his speed, and, in record time, he landed on the beach not far from the tower, heaving and wheezing like a hippo trying to climb a palm tree.

As the tortoise crawled up the violet beach toward the path, Belius had just then, in his recollections, reached the point where he was sitting at his father’s wake.

Pezimote dallied for a quarter of an hour in the garden, nibbling strawberries off the vine and gorging himself on squash. He entered into a discussion about the weather with Siftus, who was passing by on his way home from the limestone cliffs, having spent much of the night searching for choice hunks of rock to chisel into art. Finally remembering the reason he had traveled to his friend’s home, Pezimote rushed off in mid-sentence, leaving the mole bewildered.

As always, when entering the tower, he was compelled to rise up on his back legs and walk the way Belius did. He usually kept the strange posture until he was out of sight of his friend. He told himself that he did it out of respect for the Minotaur, but it had more to do with envy. Stumbling up the winding stairway to the study, he found only Bonita there, sitting amidst the mess of the day before. The cat was paging through an old volume brought by her master from the lesser world. Shaking her head, she perused the nonsense of humans and giggled quietly to herself. Pezimote took to the stairs again, climbing up to Belius’ bedroom. As the tortoise stumped on the solid wooden door and called, “Belius, are you awake?” Belius was reliving the instant in which Doctor Grey told him, “Inferno.” The doctor then lashed his horse’s rump and the cracking of the whip brought Belius to his senses.

“Belius, are we going to see the ape?” Pezimote called from the landing.

“Yes, yes, a moment,” he answered. He tried to roll his massive body out of bed but found that searching through the past had caused him slowly, over the course of the night, to drive his horns right through the headboard and into the stone wall behind it.

“Come in, Pezimote. I need your help. I’m trapped.”

Together they worked out an escape for the Minotaur which involved the tortoise pulling at his legs and Belius using his hooves to push out of the predicament. It ended, after a prolonged bout of grunting and cursing, with the horns sliding free and Pezimote stumbling backward against the opposite wall.

“Have you eaten yet?” asked Belius, helping his companion off the floor.

“Not a morsel, I’m famished,” said Pezimote.

They ate a light breakfast of clover soufflé and barley broth, smoked a quick bowl of the petals and then left the tower, taking the path through the woods that led to Shebeb’s cave.

Shebeb the wise, the merciful, the healer—all of these appellations had been bestowed upon the ape who lived in a cave amidst the thicket of blabbering trees. There wasn’t a creature within miles that didn’t, itself, or a member of its immediate family, owe its health, and in many cases its life, to the primate’s potions, poultices, or scalpel. To all, he was an enemy of pain, a friend to life. Sometimes, merely a rough touch of his hairy fingers could mend a broken wing or draw the fever from a victim of disease. He knew how the ants breathed and why the bees had to dance or die of starvation. With his pink ear against a patient’s arm, he could hear the rush of blood. Only because of his monthly treatments of herbal compresses could Siftus’ failing eyes still distinguish between sunlight and shadow.

Mosier, the patriarch of the crane clan, after being attacked by an alligator, could be seen in the shallows, resting blithely on a prosthesis Shebeb had whittled from an elm branch. He set bones, removed thorns, counseled the mad, and, when death was inevitable, would administer his secret potion that hastened the end but eliminated the fear and pain. For all his services, he asked nothing in return. Some said that he did it because it offered a steady string of subjects to observe and study. Others believed that his empathy was so great, he could feel the distress of each victim and was unable to rest himself until things were set right. Whatever the reason, no one was ever sure because he spoke very little and never left his cave unless he had to.

In stature, he was almost as tall as Belius, but his shoulders were much wider. His stomach hung out in front of him like a destination the rest of his body was traveling to. Long grey hair covered almost every inch of him, save his palms and soles and ears. His gaze was placid, as was his demeanor. The only time he ever showed emotion was when, during a difficult operation, he would be momentarily uncertain of an incision and put his scalpel down to think. Then he would step outside the cave, leap up and grab a low hanging branch of one of the blabbering trees and swing and screech and pound his chest with his free hand until the answer came to him. Although he looked suspiciously like a man to many of the creatures who had seen them, he didn’t wear any article of clothing, with the exception of a golden tasseled fez that Belius had given him for once having dislodged a mouse bone from Bonita’s throat.

For one as quiet and contemplative as the ape was, it was a mystery to all why he chose to live amidst the clamor of the blabbering trees. Distant cousins to the cypress of the lesser world, these trees were notorious for their twaddle. They murmured and whispered and mumbled all day long, never making any sense. What his neighbors did not realize was that he used strands of the long stringy moss that was indigenous to them for his sutures when sewing up patients after an operation.

All of his instruments and medicines were adapted from nature. His scalpels were razor thin slivers of onyx he hammered from off the wall in a far-flung passage of his cave. To check temperatures, he utilized an unopened bud of the telmis bush. If a warm-blooded animal’s temperature exceeded the danger point, the heat from their body, as they clenched the stem between their teeth, would cut the bud’s gestation period to only a few minutes, resulting in a beautiful pink bloom of a warning.

The medicinal herbs he administered were grown by Belius in the garden near the tower. Other useful items (toadstools, snake venom, etc.) were gathered from the wild during a journey that he took early each spring. The cadavers he studied with exquisite patience were donated by their former owners, who, having once been treated by the ape, appreciated his work and hoped that their mortal coils would benefit his future efforts.

When Belius and Pezimote entered the cave, they found the ape sitting at his huge granite desk on a tree stump chair, gazing at a mess of shrew brains laid out before him on a palm leaf. With one hand he held a half-eaten banana, and, with the other, he scratched his head beneath the brim of his fez.

Belius hated to interrupt the physician at his studies, knowing the aggravation he, himself, felt when friends would drop in just as he was penning a crucial passage of The Cosmology.

The Minotaur cleared his throat as a gentle attempt to draw the ape’s attention.

Shebeb slowly tore his gaze from the labyrinth of convolutions sitting before him and looked over his shoulder. “Please come in,” he muttered.

“How are you, Shebeb?” asked Belius.

“I’m well.”

Pezimote nodded but gave no greeting. He was wary of the ape ever since Shebeb had asked him if he would consider donating his carcass to the medical cause when he died. “I refuse to die,” were Pezimote’s last words to him four years earlier.

“What is it, Belius?” asked the ape.

“I’m sick.”

“Explain.”

“Well, there’s a darkness inside of me I can’t get rid of. It’s as if my worst enemy were sharing my body with me. I can’t concentrate. I sit for hours and stare. I sleep too much.”

“Headaches?” asked the healer, rising from his chair and shuffling up to grasp Belius’ wrist.

Pezimote backed away from the two, taking a seat in the waiting area near the entrance.

“Headaches, eyeaches, heartaches,” said Belius.

“Bowel movements?” asked the ape.

“Scanty and hard as diamonds.”

“Have you been eating?”

“Light meals.”

“Are you still smoking the digitalis every day?”

“I’ve cut down considerably,” said the Minotaur.

Pezimote drew his head inside his shell, but the laugh escaped and echoed throughout the cave.

“I see,” said Shebeb with a frown. He took his hand off Belius’ wrist and laid it across his forehead between the horns. “Nausea, vomiting, dizziness?”

“No . . . but my anger—I’m angry a lot lately—my anger and my sadness manifest themselves sometimes in physical ways.”

“So you feel frustrated. Am I right?” asked the ape, nodding as if he already knew the answer.

“Yes.”

“I see, I see. Not surprising. Do you have the day free?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’m going to have to do exploratory surgery. Take off your jacket and roll up your sleeve. Wait over there, I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

“What’s the verdict?” Pezimote asked. He could see from Belius’ heavy breathing that the Minotaur was shaken.

“He’s going to cut me,” Belius answered, sitting down next to his friend.

“Does he have to remove something?”

“No, exploratory surgery.”

“Sounds serious,” said Pezimote.

“Where’s Vashti? I thought she’d be here,” said Belius, leaning his head back and nervously tapping his horns against the wall behind him.

“I haven’t seen her today. But for Vashti not to keep an appointment, it must be something terribly important.”

“Yes, yes,” Belius grumbled.

Shebeb was busy moving around the cave, cleaning his instruments and lighting extra torches to make the work area brighter. After a considerable time of preparation, he called Belius over next to the flat slab of marble that was his operating table. Although he hated the sight of any creature’s blood, especially that of his friends, Pezimote followed in order to offer moral support. Now he also wished Vashti were there, she being much better at such things, knowing just what to say to instill courage.

The ape left them standing near the table and went to a more distant part of the cave. When he returned a few minutes later, he was carrying, in the palm of one hand, a small wooden replica of a castle. The tiny building was no more than four inches high and three wide. He set it down on the marble slab. Belius and Pezimote leaned over it, marveling at the minute detail of lattice and turret and cupola.

“I want you to meet my assistant,” said Shebeb to Belius. Reaching up, he pulled a hair out of his head. With the end of the stout grey strand, he tapped on the gates of the diminutive structure. “Thip, come out,” he called in a rough whisper. “We have work.”

Almost instantly, the gate came down on microscopic strands, like a drawbridge opening. An insignificant speck of black hopped out of the palace and into view.

“Thip, the flea,” said Shebeb as an introduction and waved his hand in the direction of the dark atom.

“What’s he do?” asked Belius.

“He’s an explorer,” answered the ape. “He has made more than two dozen voyages in the name of medicine. I make a cut in your arm and insert him and his raft into your system. He will travel the rivers and channels of your bloodstream, taking notes in an attempt to give me an idea as to what’s wrong with you.”

“One cut?” asked Belius.

“That’s all. One cut and you won’t feel a thing. I’ll administer the hepbane and nightshade mist before I begin.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” said Belius, looking over his shoulder to Pezimote for encouragement. Pezimote could only shrug.

“It must be done, Belius,” said the ape. “Your problem is an internal one, I’m sure.”

“Well, if it must be done. How long will it take?” asked the Minotaur.

“No more than two hours. When the operation is done, though, you must donate ten drops of your blood to him. That’s his price. Do you agree?”

“A small price if it will lead to a cure,” said Belius.

Shebeb slid Thip’s home out of the way. “Get up on the table now and lie on your back,” he said.

At his work area, Shebeb measured out the right amount of leaves of each of the plants that would combine to form the anesthetic. He then crumbled them into the bottom portion of a halved, hollowed out coconut shell and set them on fire with a piece of kindling he lit off of the torch burning directly above him. An orange mist began to swirl up from the burning concoction. So as not to imbibe any of it himself, he quickly fit the top section of the coconut over the bottom. He set this down on a tray along with a scalpel, a monocle made from the cornea of an eagle’s eye and a pair of delicate tweezers that were a cat’s whisker bent in half. “Please, you must now retire to the waiting area,” Shebeb told Pezimote.

The tortoise stumped Belius on the shoulder and then dragged himself away, wishing he had packed a lunch with which to pass the time.

Belius looked up from where he lay to see that almost his entire field of vision was eclipsed by the ape’s huge head. He hoped for at least one confident smile from the jutting jaw but none was forthcoming.

“Belius, when I open this coconut in your face, I want you to breathe in as deeply as possible. Ready?”

Belius nodded, too nervous to speak.

Shebeb lifted the coconut off the tray and opened it just a sliver beneath Belius’ snout. “Breathe in and hold it as long as you can.” The orange vapor seeped out of what looked like the laughing mouth of a coconut head. Belius inhaled deeply, taking the full dose in one breath. He held it in like a diver with a hundred fathoms left to ascend.

“Don’t let it out yet,” ordered Shebeb. “I have one more thing to tell you. When you release the smoke, you will pass out. But, while you are under its influence, your spirit will have the ability to roam around outside your body for the next two hours. You can do whatever you like. Don’t worry, nothing can harm you. When the drug wears off, you will be instantly called back to yourself. Do you understand?”

Belius shook his head “no,” but it was too late. He felt the hot mist surging up from his lungs. Only as it escaped did he taste its sweetness. There was no tingling or rapid increase in drowsiness; the change came all at once. The last thing he was able to focus on was the voluminous folds of skin beneath Shebeb’s sagging chest.

The ape worked quickly now, setting down the coconut and taking up his scalpel. On the underside of Belius’ forearm, two inches above the hoof, he made a quarter inch incision. He knew that because the cut was clean, it would not begin to bleed for a few seconds. In this time, he fitted the eagle cornea into his own eye and carefully lifted the delicate tweezers.

Through the magnification of the powerful monocle, he could see that Thip was ready and waiting. The flea stood on his raft, The Sanguinaire. The sail of the vessel was sewn from a scrap of moth wing. There was a rudder at the back and a small cabin bolted to mid-deck. The explorer was dressed in a long shaggy coat woven from a single dog hair, and, on his head, he wore a helmet tooled from the armor plating of a beetle’s back. To either side of his stout middle thorax hung one of a pair of infant bee stingers that he could easily reach with any one of his four hands. A master at the art of dueling, he used these weapons on more than one voyage when surrounded by marauding phagocytes.

He was handsome as fleas go, with an aquiline frontal notch and unexaggerated antenna grooves. The males of his species respected him for his unusual extra set of maxillae: the broad sword mouthparts that puncture flesh. The females grew light-headed in his presence for that swaggering gleam that shone from every one of a thousand optical facets on either side of his robust head.

When not journeying for his benefactor through the organs of some alien body, he lived a quiet life with his family in the castle he had paid handsomely for some artisan termites to chew to specifications from a block of mahogany. His wife and three daughters thought the world of him and were always saddened and frightened when he was summoned by the big voice to set sail again. In the peace of his study, he’d spent many hours composing sonnets on the subject of his secret desire to be as gigantic in stature as the patients he explored. This daydream filled most of his time when he was landlocked. While taking the pet tapeworms for a stroll around the grounds, he would let his mind wander, picturing himself an equal in height and girth to Shebeb, straddling his hairy legs across an insect empire. Only a good long voyage could ease these notions and allow him to think clearly for a time. There was nothing he loved more than to be making twenty knots up a wide aorta, heading for the echoing caverns of the heart.

“Thip, pay attention now, we haven’t much time,” said Shebeb. “You’ll proceed north through the vein of the left arm of the Minotaur, around the cape of his shoulder and then in a southerly direction as far as the scrotum, making stops at all the major organs along the way to investigate for signs of possible infection, disease, or spiritual distress. After circumnavigating the inner-globes of both right and left testicles, you will sail again in a northerly direction through the duodenum, each of the three stomachs and solar plexus, directly to his heart, where, it is my supposition, the problem lies. After thoroughly investigating the condition of each of the chambers of this muscle, the last leg of the journey will take you to the extreme northern pole, to the brain, to check for the healthy lightning of synapse gaps and to roam through as much of the vast sea of memory as possible, keeping a sharp eye out for aberrations. Finally, when this course has been completed, you are to exit the system through the snout by causing a sneeze. Do you understand?” The flea nodded emphatically, although only having half listened to the instructions. Instead, he had been visualizing himself carving his name in the smooth, white calcium of a rib as he was wont to do on all voyages through creatures that possessed them. It was his calling card. He liked to think that perhaps some day a young flea, rooting around in the sand on some distant shore, might happen upon the decaying corpse of a creature, and while dipping stupidly into a remaining bit of bloodless grizzle, the youngster would see his name, “Thip,” scratched into the curving bone and marvel at the sight of it.

Shebeb had the greatest confidence in his microscopic assistant, knowing he did not have to repeat the procedure. Using the fine tweezer, he lifted Thip and his craft. There was a quick trip through space in which the flea held on tight, his legs and arms wrapped around the rudder. Then the craft set down in the widening pool of blood on Belius’ forearm. The flea took the tiller and set a course for the open wound that lay dead ahead, like a tunnel through the heart of a mountain. The light from the torches of Shebeb’s cave receded in the distance as The Sanguinaire sailed out of sight into the hidden universe.

Belius yawned, opened his eyes and sat up. “Is it over?” he asked Shebeb, who was once again sitting at his granite table hunched over the palm leaf full of brains. The ape didn’t turn around but continued poking playfully at the medulla with his pinky.

“Shebeb, can I get up?”

Again there was no response.

Belius lifted himself off the table and walked over to where the healer was sitting.

“Excuse me, Shebeb, I . . .” Belius could not finish his sentence. The hoof he had meant to tap the hairy shoulder with, instead, passed right through it. He jumped backward. He spun around quickly and gave a tight scream. Lying on the marble slab a few feet away, he saw himself. He rushed over to his sleeping form, wanting to crawl back inside. “Your spirit will leave your body and wander,” Shebeb had warned him. Although he found the experience more than a little disturbing, he also now recalled the fact that “no harm could come to him,” and his anxiety slowly subsided. He stood quietly for a few minutes, studying himself in detail. The silence of the cave and only the barest burbling of the blabbering trees sifting in from outside gave the whole event a strange aura.

“You poor thing,” he said, thinking back on his last few days of torment.

Dragging himself along, weighed down by an unusually strong fatigue, he passed by Pezimote, who was slumped over in the chair, sleeping off his dalliance of the night before.

“A more concerned friend, no Minotaur could ask for,” he whispered, still as yet not fully aware that he could scream like a peacock and go unheard.

The sunlight, swooping birds, dandelion fuzz on the breeze, and the invective of the thicket shot through his transparent being as he trod heavily down the path toward home. “Actually, being nothing is not much different for me than being something these days,” he thought to himself. “The world passes through me and I clutch at it with all my might, but I can’t retain the merest particle.”

Though there were a million places he could have gone and seen anew from an invisible perspective, he had decided the second he left the cave to go home and catch up on his work. For two days he had been unable to write a word. The Cosmology, as if it were a child that could do nothing for itself, cried out to him.

Belius sat at his desk in the corner of the tower study. Before him lay the weight of The Cosmology of the Wider World, a stack of parchment that rose up like a paper mountain. The high plateau of the forbidding manuscript rested a little below eye level. He leaned forward and looked down on the title page. From the day he had begun work on the project, he had never gone back to read over what he had written.

With the patience of a glacier, the fortitude of a bubble rising in honey, he had added sheet after sheet to the edifice. Usually at night, when the louder creatures had gone to sleep, he would sit at the desk and, through his pen, drain the reservoir behind his eyes. Daily, that cranial basin would fill with observations and studies, and, by the hour when the blue sun would descend below the eastern horizon, the backup of ideas would threaten to overflow. So he had gone on and on with the book, like Time, with nowhere to go but forward. Only now, in his incorporeal state, with nothing about him for gravity to draw on, did he consider looking over what he had done. For once, memory could not frighten him. He was on equal, invisible terms with it.

Without thinking, he lifted his left hoof and made to turn over the title page. For all the effect he had on the top sheet of parchment, he might just as well have tried to budge the Wider World itself. After numerous attempts to get to page one, each motion of the hoof yielding another goad to his frustration, he tried to blow the page off the stack. He huffed and blew, inhaling and exhaling in a rage of spittle and silent groans, but the manuscript remained intact, fast as a tombstone in frozen earth.

“Locked out of my own damn book,” he finally screamed and that spark of annoyance ignited his ability to manifest his emotions in physical force. The page flew straight up off the stack and brushed against the ceiling. Before it had floated down to land on the arm of the divan across the room, he had begun reading. He went through it slowly, mulling over each word he could not remember his original intent for having used, aware that when he reached the last line on the page, he would again have to work himself into a rage to continue. Halfway through the second paragraph of the preface, he lifted his phantom snout and muttered, “What a pile of shit.”

Preface

I am not of this world I call my home. I am a refugee from a place where I was no more than a refugee. The future blows cold against me from my own North Sea. My memory pursues me with the persistence with which tomorrow will chase today into the past. My years are all blizzard gale and blindness, all shouting in a deaf ear. Buried to the neck in sand, I cannot keep from drifting, wandering, searching for the millionth part of a moment’s rest. Half man, half bull. Where the one begins and the other ends is still a mystery after hours of tracing the dividing lines between flesh and hide. The man sneers at the bull and the bull has no respect for the man. I wear the finest clothes and when wearing them gore tree trunks with my horns. I sip tea from china cups and exchange discourse with tortoises and owls and moles.

I have read the wisdom of the wisest men and found it to be so much foolishness. There is more sense in a dog eating its own vomit. Although I scorn these other writers, I realize that they project such confidence only because they are trying to convince themselves that they too are not refugees. With words and ideas they build around themselves a place to call home. Lighting torches on the lightning of certainty, they warm themselves. Chairs and beds of sturdy self-assurance give comfort. They grow fat on feasts of delusions and drink heavily of dreams. “Who are you?” they are often asked, as I often ask myself. The difference is that they can hand you a book that is the place they have built and say, “This is me.” The asker reads, and if the writer has known in the building the full power of his original uncertainty, then the reader will be drawn into orbit and become another point to fix a position on.

I see no other way to find a place. You cannot know who you are if you don’t know where you are. I want to know, so I begin this work. Go ahead, tell me it’s false, it’s not reality, while you are whirled and blown ragged in your own unknowing. Out of pity for you, I will include a moral that agrees with your position, and then I will laugh as I sit in the warmth of my study, sipping tea from china cups, watching out the window as you circle in the storm, whimpering.

Creation

In the beginning there was everything and just a small bit of nothing. The everything was full of itself; a jigsaw puzzle of interlocking entities composed of all the possible forms that matter ever could or would take. The everything was almost everywhere, spreading out and out to and filling the very limits of the universe, filling even the dreams of the dreaming minds trapped in the tight jumble.

The nothing, being of itself, singular, was considered by the everything to be the center of existence. It was no bigger than an eyeball; almost round and almost transparent. The everything wrapped around it like the fruit around its seed. Although the everything had great potential to exist, it could not because it had nowhere to go. It had been frozen fast for that inconceivable duration that was before time.

There would not have been a problem if the everything was not aware of the nothing, but it was, and that which was closest to the pearl of what it was not felt great envy. The current of this emotion traveled fast through the connected pieces of the puzzle, eventually reaching the limits and awakening the outer things with a spark of jealousy that brought with it consciousness. Each of the individual components of the everything agreed that the barrier that separated them from the nothing should be smashed so that what was not would seep out and there would be room for them to become what they were, apart from each other.

The barrier that came between the everything and the nothing was something though, and, try as they might to exert their unified weight, they could not crack it. All they could do was stare through the misty glass and hope that the things inside the jewel might eventually make a mistake, crack the barrier, and let the universe begin.

Inside the jewel there lived a male and a female. They lived contentedly together, sharing everything they had. They had freedom to roam through the forests and deserts and think and feel whatever they wanted. Each had experienced eons of life and neither of them was bored after having seen and done all that they did. What kept them always interested were the discussions they had. In these dialogues they would each tell what they thought or felt about a particular thing or subject. They hardly ever agreed or saw things in the same exact way, but instead of this causing a problem, it fired their respective interests. The next time they saw or did something they had discussed, it would always be colored anew by the opinion of the other. Their lives were perfection; ever changing and vital. It was the strength of their need for each other that made the boundary between the nothing and the everything impenetrable. Every time the everything would look in and see them conversing, it would feel like shouting, but it could not because there was no room for the shout to be born.

Whereas the everything could not penetrate the jewel of nothing with the pressure of its ultimate mass, its jealousy was another matter. After the voltage of that frustrated emotion had traveled out to the limits of the universe, it slammed against the steel walls of the boundary and made its way back toward the center. It did not deflect off the shell of the nothing but passed through at all points as easily as sunlight slips through clear water. The unknown emotion now had free rein where it had never been before and eventually infected both the male and the female.

The effects of the disease made a radical change in both their dispositions. It started slowly, with each of them hoarding little items that they admired. Soon it grew to the point where each wanted every object the other was using. Eventually what they wanted more than anything was the other’s thoughts and feelings. “Give me yourself,” they each screamed and then ran together to take what they wanted. A great battle ensued that lasted longer than the blue sun will burn or the sky will fizz. After clawing and battering, they put their arms around each other and squeezed with all their strength. They strangled each other’s bodies with such force that life had to leave them. Together, at the same instant, they fell dead, each having become, from the pressure, part of the other. Time’s wind blew dirt over them. The forests dropped their leaves and the waters froze. Snow fell heavily.

Eventually, spring came and a plant grew up from the spot where the two had fallen dead. The plant, having had their bodies to feed on all winter and spring and summer, grew strong and straight. At the end of the summer, an enormous bud formed at the top of the stem. The bud swelled from within with a living weight and finally it broke from the stem and fell to the earth. When it hit the ground it cracked open and a bird flew out. It was an ugly little bird without eyes or feathers. There was no color to it and it made no sound. It flew up into the air and kept flying night and day until it reached the shell. With one tiny tap of its beak it pecked a hole through into the everything and the universe was begun.

Siftus rolled over on his stone bed and opened his eyes as wide as possible.

“Who’s there?” he called, straining to make out some presence in the weak light that seeped in at the opening to his burrow. He sniffed once and the matrix of aromas precipitated out into afternoon, clear weather, low tide, the death of a sparrow, the sprouting of foxglove, and the last few remaining atoms of a song sung by the Raccoon brothers the previous night. All of this took but an instant to discern, after which he clawed that stale air away from him, pushing it aside with his long curving nails as if it were a pile of dirt blocking his passage through the underground. He drew in a fresh breath to see who had come to visit. Of course, many of the same ingredients were inherent in this new conglomeration, but this time there was an element that, when analyzed out, totally astounded him.

“It isn’t you, is it?” he asked. “How absurd, a bird below ground.”

“I’m afraid it’s me,” said Vashti.

Whereas most other creatures would have moved out into the light to hold their conversation, the owl and the mole stayed right where they were. Vashti had the ability to see field mice move through tall grass from the top of a tree on a moonless night. The lighting conditions underground did not disturb her. What bothered her was the closeness of the place. For one accustomed to flight, an overwhelming aroma of dirt can be paralyzing.

“Come, let’s move into the expanse,” said Siftus, hastily dressing in his snakeskin vest for decency’s sake. He reached for his walking stick and then led the way from the side of his bed, past his kitchen and living rooms, down a long passageway. Vashti followed close behind the mole, jumping every now and then, trying to spread her wings for flight each time a pebble or clod of earth would dislodge itself from the ceiling of the tunnel and fall on her.

“Cave in,” she screamed once without thinking and Siftus, usually the most understanding of individuals, laughed sardonically at her. Birds usually did not have a kind word for those of the burrowing persuasion: the badger, the possum, the mole. They were both literally and figuratively looked down upon by the feathered race. “Dirt eaters” was the term applied.

The “expanse,” as he called it, was the huge underground studio where he sculpted his smaller works—busts, statues, and figurines. It had taken him a solid year of working every night to clear enough dirt out of the area to create the underground cavern.

Once inside the large vault, Vashti’s rapid breathing decreased to a normal rate. There was enough room there, even with the crowd of stone animals that crouched and perched in all phases of completion. She surmised that the expanse had another entrance, one large enough to accommodate the considerable blocks of granite and limestone that Siftus cut from the cliffs and dragged beneath the earth to work on.

“What can I do for you, Vashti?” asked the mole, taking a tobacco leaf from his vest pocket. With one quick motion of his left paw, he somehow rolled the tawny leaf into a cigarette.

She looked around her at the silent, staring forms and thought it better to whisper. “Belius is sick.”

Siftus reached into his pocket for a flint. Striking the end of the jagged rock against the side of one of his creations, a spark jumped to life. With the agility of a frog’s tongue seizing a circling fly, he sniffed out the trajectory of the spark and lunged forward, catching it neatly on the tip of the cigarette. He drew in, deeply inhaling the smoke. As he exhaled, all of his playful antagonism toward the owl left him and he was filled with concern for his friend and patron. “Is it bad?” he asked.

“Pezimote has gone with him to Shebeb’s cave today.”

“Is there hope?”

“There is if you are willing to help me.”

“What then?”

She flapped her wings to clear the smoke from around her and blinked her wide eyes to punctuate the importance of what she was to say. “Shebeb, granted, is a great healer. I’d go to him if I had a broken wing or a dislocated talon, but for what is wrong with Belius, the ape has no potion or remedy that can cure it. When Shebeb has thoroughly examined Belius, he will tell him he’s perfectly healthy, perhaps a little depressed from working too hard on The Cosmology without getting the proper exercise. He will blame much of our friend’s problem on the digitalis and after giving him an herb to take that will turn his stools to pudding for a week, that will be it. Shebeb is too practical to see the problem. Belius is lonely.”

“Well then, let’s plan a party for him,” said Siftus, finishing his cigarette and throwing it to the floor. With the tip of his cane he buried it beneath the soft earth.

“When I say lonely, I’m not talking about the loneliness of sitting by yourself on a rainy day when friends can’t get out to visit. This is a profound loneliness that he suffers from. He needs someone to love; a mate. We other creatures don’t have this problem. There are no other Minotaurs in the Wider World, and from what I gather, they are even rare in the lesser world, one being born only as a freak, every thousand years or so. Do you see the problem?”

“I never considered this when thinking of Belius,” Siftus said. “Since I’ve known him, he’s always seemed content to live by himself in the tower and work on his book.”

“Yes, but all that studying and writing is only an excuse to pass the time. The book doesn’t share secrets with him. He may be able to take it to bed, but it cannot love him. It will not bear him children. He needs a wife; another Minotaur to understand his halfling nature. If there were another, he would not see himself as such an outcast.”

The mole was nodding in agreement now. He leaned back against the base of the sculpture he had struck his flint against, a scaled down representation of Nosthemus, breaking the ocean surface. “You say that there are no other Minotaurs, so what is there for us to do?”

“That’s why I came to you. You’re a remarkable artist, and I am said to have a certain wisdom when it comes to affairs of the heart. Yes, there are no other Minotaurs, but what I’ve come to suggest to you is that we create one.”

The focused frustration that had lifted the first pages of The Cosmology still performed that task, but the further he delved into the manuscript, the accumulated idiocy of what he had spent so many nights penning made this once useful anger now rage out of control and the discarded pages flew wildly about the study like a blizzard in a paperweight. They flew through his ghostly form as he continued reading, cutting him again and again with their inadequacy as his sight passed over fresh embarrassments on each newly revealed page.

“How could it be so bad?” he asked, without the power to stop himself from devouring yet more of it. “One would think that in this many words, by the law of averages, with no conscious mind behind the moving pen, there should still be, at least, one moderately successful line. It’s a work of negative genius—drivel purer than a flawless diamond.”

He read from the work aloud now, his phantom ear listening to the sounds of his silent voice. “The planet that is the Wider World, suspended in space, is a sentient being, an organism with a mind that contemplates the stars but sees them wrongly because of the interfering void of the yellow atmosphere. In that it knows more than we creatures who live like parasites on its generous crust, because it is larger and can imagine greater things, its seeing wrongly as a result of the distortion of the atmosphere is in direct ratio to our own wrong seeing caused by the veiling atmosphere of each individual creature’s desire for immortality. Hence, though it sees more, it is more greatly mistaken in what it sees, and is, therefore, in all its grandeur, no more wise than the most insignificant ladybug, living on the leaf of a giant spruce—one of its nose hairs.”

With the suggestion of nose hairs, Belius’ own transparent snout began to itch from within. For the first time since sitting down to read, his thoughts were now distracted. His eyes began to water spiritually as the unseen irritation of his nasal passage drew his full attention. Although he left off his reading, the confusion of discarded pages still swirled and flapped in the room. The itch built to an unbearable crescendo, and just as he was frantically trying to lift his corporeal quill off the desk to insert the feathered end up his incorporeal snout, he let go a sneeze so full of manifest disgust that it lifted the remainder of the manuscript to the ceiling and dumped it on his head. He screamed with the fear of being buried alive and then awoke on the operating table in Shebeb’s cave.

The roar unleashed by Belius as he rejoined his body yanked Pezimote from a lascivious daydream and sent him sprawling off the edge of his seat in the waiting area. Shebeb put his arm around Belius’ shoulders and, like a mother trying to calm a frightened child, said into his ear, “Shhh, it’s over. You’re fine. You’re fine. It’s over.”

“Is he cured?” asked Pezimote, who had drawn closer, forgetting that he wasn’t on speaking terms with the ape.

“This was to be merely a diagnosis,” said Shebeb.

“How long until we know what’s wrong with me?” asked Belius, now breathing more easily, sitting with his legs dangling off the side of the table.

“No time,” said Shebeb. “As soon as Thip jumps up into my ear and begins telling me what he encountered, I’ll relate to you the condition of your inner being. Only then can I prescribe a treatment. You see him there?” he asked and pointed to what looked like a speck of dust on the marble surface next to Belius. “When you sneezed, he landed on your leg.”

The tiny black dot moved in one great leap to the edge of the table. From there, it jumped down onto the top of Pezimote’s head and then vaulted up to rest on the facial hair beneath Shebeb’s left eye. The tortoise and the Minotaur both leaned a little in the direction of the ape to watch the flea blaze a trail toward the left ear. They lost the progress of his path for a moment and then found him on the ear lobe a split second before he crawled over the hill of cartilage at the entrance to the auditory canal and disappeared inside.

“We are ready now,” said Shebeb. “Thip will speak a sentence to me and pause as I relate the same information to you.” The ape closed his droopy lids. His lips parted to show yellow teeth fiercely clenched. His left ear wiggled slightly with concentration. Shebeb took a deep breath and then began. The words, when they came, rushed quickly from his mouth, screeching as they passed through his clamped teeth. The silences in between seemed measured and, in conjunction with the sounds, gave the recounting of the flea’s journey the eerie aspect of a lone, thin-throated toad chanting for rain.

“Greetings to you, Minotaur. I commend and envy you for the greatness of your frame, the dazzling rush of blood through your arteries and veins, the enormous weight of brain matter resting between your ears, the ball lightning of impulse traveling your spine. In The Sanguinaire, I journeyed the length and breadth of you, finding much to marvel at and very little to call to the good physician’s attention. It’s a shame now that I must concentrate on speaking to you only of the problems I encountered, because the delights far outweighed them.

“The circulatory system is rapid moving and rife with protecting, although vicious to me, white corpuscles to ward off invaders. Your major organs, with the exclusion of your heart, seem to be performing each like a virtuoso. Your small and large intestines are clear of blockage and debris and offer the traveler a unique enchantment with their million twists and turns like some elastic network of catacombs. Your ribs, one of which holds my signature, are hard as rock and sharp as bird beaks. For that matter, your entire skeletal system, including your backbone, is a wonderment of architecture. To have one’s structure inside the body is a grace I will never know. Your stomachs are intact. Your colon, clean as a whistle.

“Now, I’m afraid, we come to the problems. I encountered a minor problem in your lungs. A few of the small alveoli on the outskirts of those windy chambers are mucked up quite beyond hope by some sticky blue substance. When I passed these diseased sacs, I experienced light-headedness and a sensation of euphoria.

“Next, we must travel south to your testicles, wherein, while circumnavigating them, I noticed a dangerous overcrowding by the indigenous race. It seems that to keep order there among such a runaway population, the more powerful of the society have turned both globes into prisons, enforcing a penal system that offers no escape and has its inmates constantly swimming in circles in order for them to have something to do. I’m not a physician, but I suggest that this problem be taken in hand as soon as possible.

“The third, and last of your problems, the greatest problem you have, is centered in your heart. I have never seen anything like the queer conditions existing in each of the chambers of this vital organ. When I began traversing these quadrants, I was full of vigor, but as I passed from one to the other, a general atmosphere of despair wore me down to the point that, when I exited to head for your brain, I wept for the length of your neck.

“One chamber held within it a desert: hot sand and no drop of water. Another was racked by a great storm: typhoons within tornados within hurricanes. I barely escaped with my life, so buffeted was I by the ill winds. The next was a polar region of snow and ice. Even the air in this winterscape was so cold, I had to push it aside with my arms to make any progress. I remember that as I stood in the center of it, listening to the overall booming of the great muscle, the chill brought premonitions of death, and, for a second, I believed I had actually died. Gladly leaving this frozen chamber behind, I entered the last, which was as empty of warmth and spirit as the previous three. A cavern of black, so dark that not the tiniest particle of the light of your life shone there. I only walked in a few paces, tying myself by a rope to the mast of The Sanguinaire, for fear that I would lose myself in the wicked pitch and never find the entrance again.

“That’s all I have to report. By the way, I lost one of my swords in a skirmish with a dormant virus hiding in the osseous labyrinth of your right ear as I exited that side of your brain, so my payment will be increased to eleven drops of blood. Forgive the extra cost, but this type of work has its hazards. Now I’m quite done. May the Wider World preserve us both.”

“What did you encounter in the regions of the memory?” Shebeb asked, inhaling the words as he spoke them so that they would hit against the back of his throat and be heard by the flea.

There was a considerable pause, and then the answer came, the ape speaking it to his patient, “Nothing unusual.”

With the eagle cornea inserted in his eye, Shebeb found The Sanguinaire in the breast pocket of Belius’ shirt and returned the raft, along with its owner, to the mahogany castle and the welcoming party of Thip’s wife, daughters, and faithful tapeworms. Belius pricked himself with a splinter of wood and made his offering for the services rendered, adding a twelfth drop for his admiration of the insect’s courage. With these particulars out of the way, Shebeb made his diagnosis and suggested a treatment.

“There is an emptiness in your heart, Belius. You must get out of your study more and get daily exercise. All of that reading is turning you upon yourself. I would also suggest, for the third time this year, that you quit the digitalis. To fight off your feelings of sluggishness, I will give you a mixture of herbs to be liberally sprinkled on your dinner every night. In conjunction with all of these things, you must get plenty of sleep and try very hard to see that life is a beautiful thing.”

Belius nodded to everything said and accepted the mixture of herbs with a promise that he would use them, but when he and Pezimote left the healer’s cave and were passing through the thicket of blabbering trees, he confided to the tortoise that he felt, if anything, somewhat worse.

Pezimote took the bag of herbs from Belius’ hand and threw them in the stream. The Minotaur made a weak protest, but he couldn’t argue with his friend’s reasoning. “All this stuff will do is make you crap your pants. I say you have to figure your own way out of this funk.”

“Do you think I should quit the digitalis?” asked Belius.

“Don’t be a fool. If you do, you’ll be as dull as one of these inane trees. Shebeb means well, but he’s missing the point of the whole thing. Just stop taking yourself so damn seriously. You could drop over tomorrow, but this universe you consider to be yours will keep right on doing the same nothing it has always done.”

Belius and Pezimote walked in silence the rest of the way to the tower. They didn’t even speak when they parted but simply waved. As soon as the Minotaur was inside and climbing the spiral staircase to his study, Pezimote gave up his erect posture and returned to the normal all fours of his kind. He moved tortuously to the edge of the green ocean and, as he slipped into the cool waters, thought about his friend’s problems and muttered, “Such pretensions,” shook his head and swam down the coast toward home.

The study was just as Belius’ spirit had left it—The Cosmology scattered everywhere, covering everything like the fallout of ash from some volcanic book. Still out of breath from climbing the stairs, he moved lethargically around the room, gathering the sheets of manuscript, paying no attention to the page numbers. When he had every sheet of it again piled on his desk, he picked it up whole and walked to the fireplace. Leaning over, he placed the pages down on the charred remains of the last fire from early spring. Then he plodded to the small end table next to the divan and, lifting his pipe, filled it from his stash of digitalis, which lay heaped in a hollowed out chunk of pumice. With the primitive stone and flint lighter of his own invention, he lit a piece of kindling and set to puffing the petals into smoke. He did not, as usual, flick his hoof back and forth to put out the kindling, but walked over to the fireplace with it upright to keep the twig burning.

The top page of The Cosmology, in its disorder, was the title page of the chapter dealing with the inherent attraction of all physical objects, “Satellites of Love.” He bent over and set the edge of this page on fire. The manuscript went up as if its original purpose was to someday burn. He moved back away from the heat and positioned his chair so he could sit and watch the flames devour the work of all his nights in the Wider World.

The black smoke of the fire climbed up the chimney and out into the sky above the facade of the tower. It did not disperse in the late afternoon breeze blowing in off the ocean, but hovered there, turning in a great ball until every page in the fireplace was consumed. Then it gathered itself up into a two-legged creature of considerable size. When its form had completely cohered, it floated down to the ground and, with a smooth but frightened stride, made its way through the garden toward the woods.

That night the rain drove in hard from off the ocean, turning the ground to mud and swamping the byways. Lightning sizzled down the sky with long fingers of instantaneous day, striking without conscience at trees and the peaks of high rocky places. The thunder did not roll in the distance, but ripped everywhere, as if the Wider World itself had gone mad and were tearing out great clumps of its own hair. Much to the delight of the younger ants and to the annoyance of the older ones, the armies moved everyone, for their own safety, into the farthest nesting areas of the tunnels that ran throughout the masonry of the tower. The downpour washed away scent, and the moonless sky threw a second cloak of darkness over the landscape, making it a perfect night for predators.

Deep below ground, in the protective quiet of the expanse, Siftus was lost to his work. As unaware of the storm as of the hour, he drew, with one of his long claws, sketches for Belius’ mate in the dirt of the cavern floor. As soon as he was finished with one, he would sniff at it, and, upon finding a disproportion, would brush the whole image away and begin again. Out in the ocean, Nosthemus, the whale, dove to the very depths of the sea, where phosphorescent creatures ignorant of sunlight presented a scene of bright stars in a clear black sky. He swam lazily through this cosmos, making believe that he was flying to the moon. He hummed as he went, the songs of his super brain. From beneath wind-bent saplings, scaly things slithered out of hiding to play in the newly formed pools. Up the coast, in the familiar stand of palms, Chelonia snored and Pezimote opened his beak to the fresh rainwater dripping down from the broad leaves that were his roof. He wondered to himself where butterflies slept on stormy nights.

The raccoon brothers, Obadai and Mez, upon sensing the approaching rain had decided to stay in their hollow tree for the night, not bothering to raid the garden. They spent the first few hours of the storm drinking the intoxicating sap of rotting fruit and trading insults. Eventually they sufficiently infuriated each other and began wrestling. When the match was over, and Obadai, the bigger of the two, had his brother’s snout pressed down into the dirt, the thought of a nice ripe tomato came to each of them at the same instant.

“What do you think?” asked Mez. “Should we chance it?”

“Why not?” his brother answered and kicked him once in the back of the head before letting him up.

They left the hollow tree and went out into the rain. Giddy from the fruit wine and the fear of being attacked, they laughed as they ran blindly through the woods, bumping into each other and stumbling in ruts. Having made the same raid every night for as long as they could remember, light was not needed to find the tomato patch. Once there, they made their way in amidst the plants and sniffed closely for the largest, unblighted fruit they could find.

“Here it is,” cried Mez to his brother who was working another row, “a genius of a tomato. You’ve got to see it. If I weren’t going to eat it, I’d marry it.” His sinewy black fingers could barely fit around the prize. Just as he was about to yank it from the stem, he heard his brother right next to him.

“Wait, don’t do it. There’s something going on here,” said Obadai.

“Something going on, like you want to steal my dinner,” his brother answered.

“No, no, come here, I’m serious.”

Mez could sense his brother’s fright and became frightened himself. Moving up close, they made their way cautiously through the garden toward the tower. As they broke into the clearing of the path that ran down the center of the planted rows, Obadai grabbed his brother by the scruff of the neck and pointed his head toward where the scarecrow had stood. In the light issuing from the open door of the tower, they saw that Belius’ coat was missing, leaving the figure just a wooden cross, devoid of personality.

“This is bad,” said Mez. “Something’s wrong.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

Now the wind blew cold against them and they felt its sting. The rain beating on the earth made all manner of odd sounds, causing them constantly to start and turn around in expectation of an attack. They didn’t run, but inched their way back toward the hollow tree. Just inside the cover of the woods, they heard a noise that no amount of falling rain could have produced. It was a prolonged moaning, both high and low, and the suffering that was at the heart of it they imagined to have teeth. The weird sound entered them through their ears and worked as an instant antidote to the fruit wine. Without speaking, they moved forward an inch at a time, so close to one another they seemed to be one creature. The sound grew louder as if they were walking into it.

Creeping up behind an oak tree, they peered around its trunk into the clearing their place sat on the other side of. It was too dark to see what it was, but they could hear that the thing was only a few feet from them. Lightning walked the sky and, in that bright spark, they saw Belius, kneeling down on all fours, naked, ripping a clump of grass out of the muddy ground with his teeth. Just before the dark turned on again, he lifted his head, his maw chewing away at dirt and grass and stones, and they saw his eyes, each as huge and deeply hollow as their home.

“Get Vashti,” said Mez to his brother. “Belius has lost his mind.”

Not worrying any longer about the darkness or the storm, Obadai took off for the center of the woods, for the giant ash where the owl nested.

Instead of staying on the ground, easy prey to whatever night demon happened along, Mez climbed the tree in front of him and nestled down upon a thick, low branch right next to the trunk. He wrapped his full tail around himself to offer some protection against the high wind and rain.

Each time the lightning would strike and give a clear view of Belius below, swaying and madly chewing, Mez would cover the black mask of his face so as not to see the ugly condition of his friend. He waited for an hour for Obadai to return with help, but, when none was forthcoming, he decided to take matters into his own hands. “This can’t go on all night,” he said to himself. Gathering a handful of acorns, he inched his way along the limb, which jutted out over the clearing until he was directly above Belius. His plan was to pop him between the horns with the tiny seed-nuts and wake him from his unnatural trance.

Grasping the limb with both feet and one hand, he leaned down and waited for the lightning. With the next flash of white, he aimed quickly and fired. There was no way of his seeing if he had hit the mark because the dark returned within a second. The instant the light went out, he heard a roar from below, and, the next thing he knew, something jarred the trunk of the tree he was in. He wrapped his arms tightly around the branch as the oak trembled again and again with what he saw, in subsequent bursts of light, to be Belius ramming its base with his horns.

When he had sufficiently battered the tree that Mez was in, he moved on to the next one that helped to define the clearing and gave it a dozen whacks with his hard points. From there, he traveled the circle of the clearing, blindly goring the base of each tree and recoiling to strike the next. The rain did not come quickly enough to wash away the froth forming on his mouth. Jets of steam poured from his nostrils, and water glistened on the scratches that the rough bark had cut on his human chest and leg.

By the time Obadai returned with help, the storm had moved on, leaving the sky perfectly clear and the air fresh and cool. Dawn was showing a light yellow in the clearing. Belius lay flat out on his back, unconscious, having knocked himself out, and, although his mind knew nothing, his mouth still chewed mechanically at the cud he had ripped from the earth. Shebeb, dressed in his fez for protection against the rain, stood over the Minotaur’s body, shaking his big head. Vashti had flown down to perch on Belius’ right horn, and the raccoon brothers stood with one arm around the others’ shoulders, staring on in disbelief and waiting for the two wiser creatures to make a decision.

“Let’s get him to the tower,” said Vashti.

“Yes,” said the ape, who leaned over and, with great effort, picked Belius up in his arms. “I guarantee he did not follow my advice,” Shebeb added as they headed for the tower.

“He’s not himself,” said Vashti, flying low overhead. “Or should I say, he’s too much himself. In either case, it’s not your fault Shebeb, you did your best. Don’t worry, though; I, myself, have a plan to cure him and the medicine I prescribe doesn’t grow on bushes.”

As the entourage made its way to the edge of the woods, the yellow day increasingly gathered in the sky. The atmosphere began to fizz and the storm was all but forgotten save for the wet grass and dripping leaves. The raccoon brothers brought up the rear. Even though a pall of seriousness weighed heavily on account of Belius’ condition, they tried to trip each other as they went. Watching the whole procession through a distant thicket of sticker bushes was a misty figure, like a human storm cloud, wrapped in a tattered overcoat.

After Belius’ friends dressed him in his green silk pajamas with the rock sewn in behind the neck and put him to bed, he remained in a deep sleep for two full days. During this time he had a nightmare in which his father was teaching him how to tie a special kind of knot. Although the farmer’s hands moved slowly, Belius could not follow the sequence. The tying of it consisted of a thousand loop-de-loops, a hundred hitches, and one part of it resembled a noose.

“I can’t get it, Father,” said Belius, poking ineffectually at it with his hooves.

His father grabbed it from him and, with one quick pull of a loop, had the entire mess undone and again in the form of a length of cord. For what seemed like the tenth time, the Minotaur watched as the farmer’s crooked fingers flew to their task and were done almost before they started.

“Look, Belius,” his father said, “you don’t have to be able to tie it. All you have to be able to do is undo it. It’s a cinch. If you can figure it out, your hooves will turn into human hands.”

Again the farmer tossed him the tangle of cord. Belius worked at it with such intensity that he could feel the veins popping out from his neck and sweat running down his back. “I can’t,” he finally shouted in frustration. “Tell me the secret.” He looked up from the stubborn knot and saw that his father had vanished.

Days later, when he came out of sleep and opened his eyes, he was standing two feet from the bed with his head lowered, his horns readied for the attack. That morning he began a habit of dissolution and despondency. The only efforts he made were to take the stairs into the basement for fresh bottles of dandelion wine and to stoke the bowl of his pipe. He sat in his chair in the study, doing nothing but tipping a wine bottle to his lips and smoking himself into fits of hallucination. During this time, he didn’t even put himself to bed at night but stayed in the study, unaware of the hour. His chair became his entire universe, and he was loath to leave it for trips to the bathroom or cellar. Dust collected on the volumes of his library. The garden was overrun with weeds.

Once he tried to lift his writing quill off the desk, but the nearer his hoof moved to it, the more the range of his sight diminished into a black tunnel, so that he believed if he were to touch it, he would go blind. He grew very weak and thin and his mind was filled to brimming with a noisome clamor of nothing. Occasionally, he tried to concentrate on this battle of ghosts in his head, but concentration became something that he could never remember having had the ability for. For the entire duration of his breakdown, whether he be dozing off or just staring, his mouth continued to chew on a nonexistent cud.

His friends came to visit him, but he gave no response to their questions. Vashti made an attempt to feed him some broth, but he would not hold it in his mouth. When she inserted the spoon, he would chew on it and the weak soup would dribble down his chin and chest and stain his pajama top. The other creatures agreed that there should be someone there to sit with him most of the time for fear that he might try to do harm to himself.

Pezimote was chosen to watch over the invalid Minotaur, being the one who knew him best and the most likely to get him speaking again. The tortoise’s disposition was not well suited for the job. He had never been much for fetching food for anyone except himself. He swam to the tower every morning to wait on Belius. For the first few days he was very attentive. He sat across from his patient and spoke to him for hours about anything that came into his head until he thought he would go mad himself. He made enormous breakfasts and lunches, brunches, dinners, snacks, suppers, but usually ended up eating both his own and Belius’ share as well.

Days passed and there was no change in the Minotaur. His hours were all chewing with a few feeble moos mixed in. When he wasn’t cooking, Pezimote played gin rummy with Bonita. If the cat won, the tortoise would have to scratch her back with Belius’ sharp letter opener. There was never a question as to what the tortoise would get if he took the hand because he never did.

The days of card playing lasted no longer than the first few of conscientious care. Near the end of the second week, Pezimote would start the day with a bottle of dandelion wine and then move on to successive bowls of digitalis. He would sit across from Belius and interchangeably pass the bottle and then the pipe.

It was on the fourteenth day of his vigil that he caught himself, after having consumed the better part of three quarts of wine, making a chewing motion with his beak. “That does it,” he said in a rage, throwing the half empty bottle out the window. “This is insane. I am wasting my days here, watching you crawl deeper and deeper into yourself. I can’t go to meet my nubile at night, because now I sleep like a log, so tired from all my chores and the drinking and smoking. Chelonia is complaining that I’m never home. Look, Belius, the world is passing us by out there.” He pointed to the window. “Last night there was a meteor shower and you missed it. Think of how it would have looked through your telescope. And just yesterday, Nosthemus predicted that in our own lifetimes, a creature would come from the lesser world and cause a great ruckus, but you weren’t there to write down his words. Now we’ll all forget, and, when it happens, no one who is born after today will believe, when it happens, that the whale really did predict it.”

Belius kept chewing, and Pezimote walked up to where he was sitting to look into the dark pupil of his right eye. “Wake up, damn you,” he yelled. Belius stared straight through the tortoise. “Enough!” said Pezimote. He wheeled halfway round and then came back, smacking the Minotaur as hard as he could on the snout with his thick stump. Belius’ head jerked back and hit the chair. He stopped chewing. Pezimote saw a glimmer of recognition in his friend’s eye and hit him again. “Where? What? Where?” Belius mumbled. When the tortoise heard him speak, he did not assess the situation but proceeded without a thought. With a nasty snap of his beak, he bit down on the Minotaur’s human, left nipple, choosing that site because it looked like it would hurt more than any other.

Belius’ scream flew out the window with the velocity of an arrow shot from a bow. It traveled the wind that swept over the treetops of the woods, then dove down through a thicket of elms and slipped into the opening to Siftus’ burrow. It passed his stone bed and the peg on which he hung his snake skin vest and continued down the series of tunnels, ricocheting back and forth off the close walls, to the expanse, where it smashed into the mole’s elbow, jarring his paw which held his drawing stick, causing him to, in one fluid motion, add a pair of human female breasts to his dirt drawing when all the time he had been planning to depict an udder on the lower abdomen.

Being the artist he was, he scrutinized the mistake to see if it was something worthwhile, as he had found slips of the stick or chisel to sometimes be in the past. He backed away from the finished picture, the hundredth he had done that day, possibly the millionth he had done since beginning the project, and sniffed the lines to judge their symmetry, their feeling of “rightness.” The aroma of the new drawing appealed to him greatly. He rolled a cigarette and smoked, every now and then taking another whiff of his creation. Although he had never seen or smelled a pair of human female breasts before in his life, he thought the configuration of the drawing to be ingenious.

“Why not?” he said, feeling a little crazy himself with all the sleepless hours of toil on the design of the creature. “This will be my signature,” he thought. He stood and smoked, leaning against one of his sculptures, basking in the feeling of accomplishment. “I will call her . . . Soffea . . . yes,” he said to the darkness, the name coming to him suddenly. He repeated it many times until his cigarette burned down and singed his paw.

That evening, just after sunset, all of Belius’ friends made their way through the woods toward Vashti’s ash tree. Two dozen sparrows had combed the land at the owl’s behest, carrying invitations to a council that had as its only purpose to gather resources with which to effect the cure of the Minotaur.

Vashti sat on the lowest branch of her enormous home, watching the gathering grow beneath her. What was yet more incredible than a bird below ground was that Siftus, a dirt eater, sat next to her on the branch. He tried to hide his fear of heights so that it would seem only natural that a member of his race should be at home in the sky, but, when he rolled a cigarette while already having one lit in his mouth, Vashti could not help but pay him back for his leading her deep below the earth the day she went to see him.

“Cave-in,” she said in a whisper.

“Touché,” answered Siftus, now with two cigarettes in his mouth, his body in a subtle but constant motion to find the position of ultimate safety on the never-thick-enough branch.

Below them, the clearing filled with every manner of creature that slithered or crawled or flew or swung through the treetops on vines. Inconvenienced by a mere million years of evolution that had robbed him of legs, Nosthemus the whale sent word with Pezimote that he would be psychically present and would transfer the proceedings to other interested members of the sea. The raccoon brothers arrived early, passing the time before things got started by chewing on big wads of tree gum and then throwing them on the ground for others to step in. Shebeb had shown, although he had earlier told Vashti that Belius’ problems should be handled by a trained physician. Chelonia came with her husband.

The ants from the tower sent a contingent atop the backs of dragonflies. Bats hung upside down from surrounding trees like wet leather gloves set out to dry. The beaver clan was there in force, from Weeber, the elder, to his great-grandson.

The Sphinx, hearing through the unbroken web of living things that there was to be a meeting to help her friend and fellow writer, sent, from half a world away, her swiftest emissary, a giant golden condor, to represent her. The powerful wings of this creature carried him across the ocean in no time. He gladly recounted stories from the exotic West and made a big hit with those present when, at Vashti’s request, he lifted Siftus into the tree.

When it seemed as if the crowd could grow no larger, Vashti screeched above the racket of squeaks and barks and chirps and glugs in order to bring everyone to attention. “Here, here,” she called out, and, slowly, the gathering quieted down. Of course, once it was perfectly silent, Mez had to fake a monstrous sneeze, which made Hilry, the old anaconda, literally jump out of her skin. The owl turned her piercing yellow eyes on the raccoon brothers, and they immediately took seats on the ground. “Now, thank you for leaving off your hunting or sleeping tonight to come to this meeting. I would not have called you here had it not been a matter of the gravest importance. Our good friend, Belius, is sick. Not a creature here would deny that he would try to help us if we were in the same condition.”

“What’s the problem?” asked the porcupine.

“It’s simple. He needs a mate.”

The company nodded its collective head and “ahhed” with affirmation, never having thought of Belius before in terms of needing anything.

“A need of the greatest kind,” Chelonia said.

“The utmost, my dear,” the tortoise said to his wife and caressed her shell.

Vashti continued, “I have discussed the problem with Siftus, and we see that it would be easy to solve it, but there are no other Minotaurs in the Wider World. So, not giving in to failure, especially when our friend’s very life might be at stake, we’ve decided to create a female Minotaur.”

The silence below broke into a confusion of murmuring and shouts. Some didn’t think they’d heard correctly and were questioning those next to them. Others heard perfectly well and were now raising all kinds of questions to the pair in the tree. Both Pezimote and Shebeb shook their heads, each for different reasons.

“Shhhh!” hissed Vashti. “Let me explain. We’ve worked the project out to its most minute detail, and the work has already begun.”

The creatures quelled their objections and questions and let her continue, having faith in her capacity to reason.

“Luckily enough, we have Siftus to help us. He has already done a drawing from which we will build her. If I may say, even though it is not one of his great monuments cut from limestone or granite and is no more than a scratching in the dirt, it probably is his greatest creation to date. It’s ingenious. It’s beautiful.”

The mole, normally a modest creature, was infected by the height of his present position and took a bow. In this motion, though, he lost his balance and toppled forward. The crowd gasped, but Vashti, in one swift lunge, caught him by the collar of his vest with her nearest talon and dragged him back onto the branch.

“Listen carefully, now. Here’s the plan,” the owl said, continuing her speech with Siftus still in her grasp. “Think to yourselves if there is anything you can do to help. Think if there is any way we can make it better. The form of the body will be molded from river clay, slapped into shape by Weeber and his family. The body will have, running through it, a network of green saplings so that it can move its limbs pliantly. When the form of it is near completion, Siftus will carve the finishing touches onto it—the expression, the beauty marks, and enough wrinkles to make it seem real. The horns will be fashioned from teak branches. The teeth will be pearls from fresh water oysters. The hair on its flanks and neck and whatever other creaturely parts will be donated by whomever can spare a tuft or two. Her tongue will be a single leaf from the blabbering trees, so that she might converse with her mate. The hooves will be cylindrical cuts of branch from my own ash tree, tapped into the appropriate shapes by woodpeckers.

“Our friend from the West, the Condor, has already promised me that the Sphinx can donate a human foot; one of the body parts she brought with her from her days in the lesser world. He says that it will come with the toenails painted, as is the custom among humans. The breasts will be fish bladders filled with liquid to give them the correct give and will be set high on the chest in the manner they appeared to Siftus in a fit of inspiration. To animate this lovely there will be a dried gourd of bees inserted into the chest cavity, and in their commotion they will initiate locomotion. As for the brain, a mosquito will be trapped in the dried clay behind the eyes and between the ears, filling our sister’s head with the sweet buzz of consciousness.”

The ants applauded loudly to see the insect community so well represented, when usually they were unknowingly trod underfoot. All the other creatures joined in, considering the planning behind the project nothing less than marvelous. No one could see any reason why it wouldn’t work.

“The only thing that we have not decided on is what to make the eyes from. Given their importance as the organ of communication in the language of love, just anything will not do. Rack your brains, help us to find a solution while we prepare the rest of this female.”

“Excuse me,” said a quiet voice amidst the celebration. Shebeb stood up and faced the branch on which the owl and mole were perched. The creatures all around him fell silent, waiting for him to speak his mind. “Vashti, I can appreciate the reason behind your plan, but I’ve studied the inner workings of creatures for years and it’s not a handful of bees that gives them life. Not one of you has a mosquito in your head. Our tongues are not leaves; our teeth, not pearls. What you propose is beyond our capacity to produce. I hold that what Belius needs is exercise, fresh air, and abstinence from the digitalis. Only these things will clear his mind so that he can think through his problems on his own. You know that I would not try to dissuade you if there was the slightest possibility of success . . .”

Before the crowd could consider the ape’s opinion, Siftus opened his snout and interrupted. “Wait, Shebeb, you mustn’t work against this plan. Belius is our friend. We love him as we do ourselves. You, as a physician, are more apt than we are to give in to what’s natural, because you know more than we ever will the obstacles we will face. But I don’t hold with what is, with what must be. I don’t care how many times my heart beats a minute or why my eyes are failing me. I live through my imagination and intuition. Don’t tell me that what I see so clearly in my dreams I can’t create. If I believed you, I would jump from this tree right now and kill myself. If I agreed, then it would mean I was already dead and what would be the loss? I’m very much alive, though, and so is my vision of the creature I will call Soffea.”

The vehemence with which the mole spoke his mind startled nearly everyone. He had always been an enigma to the other creatures, in that he so ardently pursued a path called sculpture, which had no natural place in the Wider World. Belius had originally interested him in the art and, through trial and error and years of laborious work, he had created some pieces that were so beautiful even the unfeeling sharks would swim up close to shore and beach themselves trying to get closer to them.

Another round of cheers went up, drowning out Shebeb’s protests. The ape turned and shuffled back toward his cave, shaking his head the way he might over the corpse of a centipede who had not responded to his treatments. That left only one dissenter amidst the throng of different species, and he was not one to open his mouth to make any statements that would challenge the foolishness of others—he had lived too long.

Away in the tower study, Belius heard the distant clamor of the meeting beneath the ash, but put it off to a delusion caused by his weakened state. His jaw had given up chewing the nonexistent cud, and he had bathed and had some dinner. He dressed himself and performed a few incidental chores that evening to reacquaint himself with those mundanities of life he had left behind for the two weeks he was in shock.

Now he sat at his desk, reading from his copy of Dante’s Inferno that had been given to him so many years before by Doctor Grey. His first impulse after dinner was to pick up his quill and begin writing, but he knew that if he wanted to keep his sanity, even at its tenuous status quo, he had better find something more relaxing to do. His reading had gone along quite well, keeping thoughts of the destroyed Cosmology in abeyance. He was almost even enjoying himself, the book bringing back many memories of his childhood from when he had taught himself how to read. Then he reached a certain section of the epic that made him feel uneasy and he went for his pipe. The part that upset him involved the scene when Virgil and the pilgrim meet the Minotaur in hell. His reading of the depiction of the mindless, snorting monster came in conjunction with the final round of applause given to Siftus’ speech. The muffled shouts seemed to him to be the cries of those tortured by the beast in the seventh bowl of damnation. As he puffed the digitalis, he stared out the window of the study and surveyed, by way of the moonlight, the ravages of his garden. “I think I’ll go out into the rows and work all day tomorrow—work till I sweat, till my muscles ache. If I can just get my crops back in order, perhaps that will set me more at ease. At least I will sleep more soundly for the toil.” These thoughts pleased him as those of the Inferno had not. The drug began to work on him, and he felt light-headed and tingle bodied.

“Definitely a walk with Pezimote along the beach at lunch,” he decided and felt the heat of the sun and practiced with his heightened imagination the dialogue with which he would amuse his friend. The scenario seemed so real that now he even heard what he believed to be his friend, calling his name, probably to signal him to slacken his speed and wait up.

From the scene on the beach, Belius’ imagination moved on to contemplate just how pleasant the future could be without his having to sit down every night and write. He began to move away from the window, noticing at the last moment that his coat was missing from the cross that had been the backbone and arms of the garden scarecrow. As he sat down, wondering what had become of it, he heard the tiny voice, calling his name again. “Must have blown off in the storm that night,” he thought.

“Belius, Belius,” he heard again, but now realized that the sound was centered in his left ear only.

“Who’s calling me?” he cried out and spun around in the chair to look over his shoulder, no longer convinced the voice was a remnant from his daydream of well-being.

“It’s me, Belius, I’m sitting in your ear. It’s Thip, the flea. Excuse me for calling so late at night, but I wanted to get you while you were alone.”

“Ahh, Thip, I remember you, Shebeb’s assistant. What can I do for you?” he asked, cocking his head to its left side as if he were putting his ear closer to a speaker his own size.

“Belius, I’m enamored of your blood. It’s so rich in all good things and has had a marvelous effect on me. Shebeb has said it is the unfamiliar human part that makes it so special.”

“Thank you,” said Belius.

“Yes, it’s made me grow a considerable amount. I can no longer fit in my old armor. None of my pants fit me and my swords that had always felt of adequate size in my grasp now seem no more than toys.”

“So, you’re growing bigger from it? I hope this will not ruin your ability to go on journeys.”

“I don’t care if it does. What I want is more. What I want is to grow.”

“What are you saying, Thip?” asked Belius, setting his smoldering pipe down on the table next to his chair.

“I’m saying that I want your blood, as much of it as I can get.”

Belius heard a change of tone in the small voice. “Well, I’d like to help you out, but I need every drop of blood I’ve got.”

“Minotaur, you will give me your blood. I’ll come every day at noon, and you’ll let me suck your blood for five minutes.”

“Impossible,” said Belius. “I think you’d best get back to your castle. I’m not in a good mood these days.”

“You’ll give it when you hear what I have to tell you.”

“I doubt that very much.”

“If you don’t, I’ll tell all of your friends about your past.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When I was sailing through the ocean of your memory, I happened to be looking over the side into the clear water, as I do, to see what types of reminiscences are swimming about in the patient’s head, things that might have some bearing on the subject’s illness. In the reflection, I saw you kill, with your horns, a two legged creature, I suspect to be a man.”

Belius instantly straightened up in his seat. “That was no memory; that was a dream.”

“I can already tell you are lying by the way your pulse just quickened. Let’s not have any of this denial now. If you don’t comply, I’ll surely tell and you’ll be an outcast. You know the law concerning murder. I’m sure you didn’t kill that human for food.”

All of the air left Belius at once, and he slumped in his chair. “No,” he admitted, “I didn’t. I killed out of anger, out of revenge. I . . .”

“Personally, I couldn’t care less what your reasons were. I just know it happened, and I’m glad it did. With your blood, I’ll become a giant. Now, should I tell them?”

“No, don’t tell,” Belius shouted. “I’ll give you what you want.”

“I knew that you would. Lay your arm out on the arm of the chair, exposing its underside. I will bite you where the bicep and forearm meet. Come now, do as I say.”

Belius used his right hoof to push the sleeve of his shirt up well above his elbow. He laid down his arm on the arm of the chair as he had been instructed.

“Very good of you,” he heard in his ear and then felt the insect on the move. The feel of Thip crawling through his facial hair at other times might have gone unnoticed, but now it itched to the point of burning. The flea leaped from the Minotaur’s lower jaw, landed on his left knee and jumped again, coming to rest in the crook of his elbow. Belius looked down in horror to see Thip, much bigger now than when he had first met him, waving three of his miniscule arms. The insignificant figure bent over, grabbed onto the flesh of the arm, and with a thrust of his disproportionate head, sunk his maxillae into the closest artery. A whimper escaped from Belius’ snout. The itch the insect had caused by traipsing across his face was a mere tickle in comparison to that which now tortured his inner arm.

Pezimote could tell by the sound of the breakers that high tide was quickly approaching. He gently tapped Chelonia’s back with his beak to see if she was awake. There was no reply from inside the shell, to where she had withdrawn her head and legs earlier when they bedded down beneath the palms. The excitement of the council for Belius had worn her out. He had not seen her so animated in recent years as she had been, making plans and discussing the situation with the other creatures. It made his usual twinge of guilt more pronounced as he made his way toward the shore, away from her sleeping form.

The night was warmed by a tropical breeze, much like the heat that billowed at times from the fireplace in Belius’ tower. Above, the constellation of the magpie was resplendent, each of its thirty jewel-like stars sharp as pinpricks, with the night bird’s eye as red as blood. The Minotaur had explained once, on a walk along the shore, that the reason for its color was that it was actually a giant red star, a thousand times larger than the globe of the Wider World. Pezimote put this fact out of his mind as he slipped into the surf, not wanting to concentrate on anything but love. He’d had to put off his rendezvous for two weeks while tending to his ailing friend. “I’ll not think of Belius once tonight,” he told himself.

He swam quickly in the direction of the barrier reef, where he was to meet his young mistress. In the commotion of the gathering earlier that evening he had whispered a message in his mind to Nosthemus. Pezimote knew that he could count on the leviathan to get word to her that she was to meet him at the barrier reef. In the waters beneath the coral outcropping was a huge facsimile of a shark fin. “I wouldn’t,” the whale said to him in his mind.

It had become nearly impossible for him to meet Mala anywhere on land. Chelonia had too many friends among the night creatures. They had not come right out and told her yet, but they were hinting as gossips love to do for a while before displaying their fools’ gold. At dinner not but three nights before, over one of her special man o’ war pies, she said to him, “So, I hear you’ve been rummaging late at night, dear.”

“Who’s brought you this stupendous news?” he asked.

“I forget,” she said.

“You know my restlessness at night. I go out to have a snack of mangos or what not. It helps me get back to sleep.”

“I hear that you were seen with one of our people on different occasions. A young tortoise.”

“Oh . . . she’s just a child. Sometimes I chat with her on my way to and from the grove, that’s all. She’s young enough to be my granddaughter. Don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

“No, I’m not jealous. But if you ever go beyond chatting with her, I’ll know. I’ve been with you for a hundred and fifty years now. If you betray me with someone else, I’ll know instantly by the look in your eye the next time you face me.”

“What do you mean exactly by betray?” he asked.

She said nothing.

Pezimote tried to laugh at her, but it came out a choking sound. “Do be serious,” he said.

“I am serious. That’s all, now eat your pie.” She had cut him a huge slice, as was the custom, but for the first time in his entire life, he had lost his appetite. Each piece of it stuck in his throat for a minute before it went down. It was the most bitter man o’ war pie he had ever had.

As he spotted the shark fin marker, he heard the familiar sounds of Nosthemus and his chorus of dolphins welling up from beneath the water. He paddled to within a few yards of the reef and was now deep in the shadow of the fin. Almost immediately, Mala surfaced from beneath the water. Droplets rolled off her smooth shell as she swam toward him. He noticed that she had a triangular piece of mother-of- pearl pressed into the soft flesh of her forehead. She called his name as she approached, but that was all he heard before the chorus began; the overwhelming sound of the opening note drowned out the rest of what she said. She swam right up to him and bit him playfully on the neck. Pezimote’s mind went blank with the nip, all his thoughts moving through his body. They didn’t bother to speak but set about instantly rubbing stumps and softly pounding each other’s shells. The old tortoise trembled with excitement, and the young female with both that and fear. The warm breeze that blew down along the surface of the water grew warmer, as did the sea around them, attracting a school of minnows. A frenzy of tiny fish stirred up the plankton, causing it to glow phosphorescent against the night.

The next morning, even before sunrise, work was begun on the body of Soffea. Down by the riverbank, the raccoon brothers and a troop of possums and badgers excavated the special blue clay that would be the substance of the figure, while the lode that had already been mined was being slapped into shape by the wide flat tails of Weeber and his family. Siftus stood close by the beavers, instructing them on each curve of the leg they were presently working on. He now had his drawing well-memorized, and he would stoop over the appendage from time to time in order to sniff the progress of its creation. Lemurs had gathered thin green branches from the surrounding trees and stripped the bark off them. Before the mole would put the finishing touches on the leg, these saplings were to be inserted through the length of it.

Off in the woods, other creatures gathered necessary items; the teak branches from which the horns would be cut, the most blathering of leaves from the blabbering trees, tufts of hair from passing creatures who were interested in supporting the project but who had no ready skill. The ants of the tower sent out their famous warrior, Duc-Sin, riding a darning needle, from which he was to lasso as big a mosquito as possible to ignite Soffea’s mind. The bees of the honey tree held a lottery to see which of their hive would receive the honor of filling the heart. An otter cracked fresh water oysters against a rock, searching for the most beautiful pearls. As all this commotion went on below, Vashti flew to and fro, giving orders, rejecting or accepting parts for the new Minotaur and generally rallying the morale of her work force.

Belius rose early that morning. After a light breakfast, he went down into the cellar and gathered his gardening tools. With rake and hoe and shovel over his shoulder, he went out into the rows. He worked like a maniac, weeding and harvesting. The sweat poured off of his back, and, before ten o’clock, he had to remove his white shirt. Not once did he rest, for fear that if he had a moment to himself with nothing to do he would again begin to relive the horrible events that the flea had accused him of. By eleven, he was looking over his shoulder every now and then to see if Pezimote was coming. The tortoise never showed up, which was unusual. Then it struck him that none of his friends had come to visit. He began to wonder if Thip had already told on him.

When the sundial cast a shadow at five before noon, he put down his rake and went back into the tower. He climbed the stairs to his study, sat down in his chair and put out his arm. As if out of nowhere, Thip appeared on the table in front of him. The flea was almost three times as large as the night before. Belius could make out his blackmailer’s face now and could discern a silk hat and cape. The flea spent no time on amenities but jumped right onto the arm and sunk his spikes into the welt he had made the night before. The grown maxillae were now as big as dull pins, and, when they entered the scar, it was pain on top of pain. Thip drank deeply for five minutes. When finished, he stood up, wiped the blood from his mouth, tipped his hat and leaped to the windowsill.

“Till tomorrow,” he cried, and because of his prodigious growth, Belius could hear him. Then he jumped out the window, the cape flying up behind him, and was gone.

Late that afternoon, Belius went down to the sea to look for Pezimote, but could not find him anywhere. He sat down on the sand and watched the sun sink into the water. “If I could just talk to my friend, I would tell him what I’d done. I know he wouldn’t forsake me. He would have some plan as to how I could clear myself and make everything right.” When darkness had nearly taken over, though, he knew the tortoise would not be coming that day, and he stood up and headed home.

On his way along the beach, he happened to glance at the tree line of the woods, which came nearly to the ocean’s edge. Just at that second, something moved from behind one tree to a position behind another, making a flapping sound like a bird frightened into flight. He stopped and stared now into the darkening woods. For a long time he waited, and then it moved again. What he saw made him clear his eyes with the backs of his wrists. Standing a few yards off, trying to hide behind a tree that was too small for that purpose, was his old overcoat. It appeared as if it were being worn, but he couldn’t make out a face or pair of legs.

“I see you spying on me,” he yelled. The coat turned and ran. Belius stood in quiet puzzlement for a minute before fear broke out all over him like a rash, and he hurried back to the tower. That night, once again, sleep was sacrificed to memory.

[END OF PART ONE]

© 2005 by Jeffrey Ford.

Originally published by PS Publishing.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life.

From The Drowned Cities
Paolo Bacigalupi

(An excerpt from the forthcoming novel to be published by Little, Brown, May 2012.)

Chapter 1

Chains clanked in the darkness of the holding cells.

The reek of urine from the latrines and the miasma of sweat and fear twined with the sweet stench of rotting straw. Water dripped, trickling down ancient marble work, blackening what was once fine with mosses and algae.

Humidity and heat. The whiff of the sea, far off, a cruel, tormenting scent that told the prisoners they would never taste freedom again. Sometimes a prisoner, a Deepwater Christian or a Rust Saint devotee, would call out, praying, but mostly the prisoners waited in silence, saving their energy.

A rattling from the outer gates told them someone was coming. The tramp of many feet.

A few prisoners looked up, surprised. There was no stamping of the crowd, no soldiers shouting for blood sport coming from above. And yet the prison gate was being opened. A puzzle. They waited, hoping the puzzle wouldn’t touch them. Hoping that they might survive another day.

The guards came as a group, using one another for their courage, urging each other forward, jostling their way down the cramped passageway to the last rusty cell. A few had pistols. One carried a stun stick, sparking and cracking, the tool of a trainer, even though he had none of its mastery.

All of them carried the reek of terror.

The keymaster peered through the bars. Just another dim, sweltering lockup, straw strewn and molding, but in the far corner, something else. A huge shadow, puddled.

“Get up, dog-face,” the keymaster said. “You’re wanted.”

No response came from the mountain of shadow.

“Get up!”

But still there was no response. In the neighboring cell, someone coughed wetly, a sound heavy with tuberculosis. One of the guards muttered, “It’s dead. Finally. Has to be.”

“No. These things never die.” The keymaster pulled out his baton and rattled it against the iron bars. “Get up now, or it will be worse for you. We’ll use the electricity. See how you like that.”

The mounded shadow showed no sign of hearing. No sign of life. They waited. Minutes passed. More minutes.

Finally, another guard said, “It’s not breathing. Not a bit.”

“It’s done for,” agreed another. “The panthers did the job.”

“Took long enough.”

“I lost a hundred Red Chinese on that. When the Colonel said it would go up against six swamp panthers . . .” The guard shook his head ruefully. “Should have been easy money.”

“You never seen these monsters fight up north, on the border.”

“If I had, I would’ve bet on the dog-face.”

They all stared at the dead mass. “Well, it’s maggot meat now,” the first guard said. “The Colonel won’t be happy to hear it. Give me the keys.”

“No,” the keymaster rasped. “Don’t believe it. Dog-faces are demon spawn. The beginning of the cleansing. Saint Olmos saw them coming. They won’t die until the final flood.”

“Just give me the keys, old man.”

“Don’t go near it.”

The guard looked at him with disgust. “It’s no demon. Just meat and bone, same as us, even if it is an augment. You tear it up, you shoot it enough, it dies. It’s no more immortal than the warboys who fight for the Army of God. Get the Harvesters down here. See if they want its organs. We can sell the blood, at least. Augments have clean blood.”

He jammed the key into the lock. Reinforced steel squealed aside, an entire grate specially designed to hold the monster. And then, a second set of locks for the original rusting bars that had been good enough for a man, but not enough to hold this terrifying mix of science and war.

The door scraped back.

The guard started for the corpse. Despite himself, he felt his skin prickling with fear. Even dead, the creature harbored momentous terror. The guard had seen those massive fists crush a man’s skull into blood and bone fragments. He’d seen the monster leap twenty feet to sink fangs into a panther’s jugular.

In death, it had curled in on itself, but still it was huge. In life, it had been a giant, towering over all, but its size hadn’t been what made it deadly. The blood of a dozen predators pumped in its veins, a DNA cocktail of killing—tiger and dog and hyena, and Fates knew what else. A perfect creature, designed from the blood up to hunt and war and kill.

Though it had walked like a man, when it bared its teeth, tiger fangs showed, and when it pricked up its ears, a jackal’s ears listened, and when it sniffed the air, a bloodhound’s nose scented. The soldier had seen it fight in the ring enough times to know that he would rather face a dozen men with machetes rather than this hurricane of slaughter.

The guard stood over it for a long time, looking at it. Not a breath. No hint of movement or life. Where the dog-face had once been strong and vital and deadly, it was now nothing but meat for the Harvesters.

Dead at last.

He knelt and ran his hand through the monster’s short fur. “Pity. You were a moneymaker. Would have liked to see you fight the coywolv we was lining up. Would have made good ring.”

A golden eye flared in the darkness, full of malevolence.

“A pity, indeed,” the monster growled.

“Get out!” the keymaster shouted, but it was too late.

A shadow exploded into motion. The guard slammed into the wall and crumpled to the floor like a sack of mud.

“Close the gate!”

The monster roared and the bars clanged shut. The keymaster frantically tried to relock the cell, then leaped back as the monster hurled itself against the cage, snarling, tiger teeth bared.

Iron bars bent. The guards yanked electrical prods from their belts. Blue sparks showered as they beat at the creature and the bars, trying to keep it away while the keymaster fought to close the reinforced second gate. They fumbled for pistols, hardened killers reduced to gibbering terror by the monster’s snarl. The creature slammed against the bars again. Rusted iron cracked and bent.

“It won’t hold! Run!”

But the keymaster held steady, reworking the locks of the more powerful cage. “I almost got it!”

The monster ripped a rusty bar free of its mooring and lashed through the gap. Iron smashed into the keymaster’s skull. The man collapsed. The other guards fled, plunging down the corridor, screaming for help.

The monster tore more bars free, working methodically. The rest of the prisoners were all screaming now, shouting for help and mercy. Their cries echoed in the prison like trapped birds.

The first layer of bars gave way, allowing the monster access to the second cage. It tested the gate. Locked. Growling, the creature crouched and slid one huge fist through the bars, reaching, stretching for the keymaster’s foot. It dragged the man close.

In another moment, the monster had the key in its hand and the key in the lock. With a click it opened. The gate screeched aside.

Carrying the iron bar of his prison, the creature called Tool limped down the cellblock to the stairs, and climbed into the light.

Chapter 2

Tool covered miles. He was built to do so, and even wounded, he moved with a speed that would have exhausted a human being within minutes. He forded algae-thick canals and limped through bean fields and soaked rice paddies. He passed farmers with wide broad hats who stared up from their sweating work and fled in fear. He circled and doubled back through bomb-shattered buildings, confusing trail and scent. Always, he moved farther from the Drowned Cities, and always the soldiers pursued.

At first, he had hoped his pursuers would give up. Colonel Glenn Stern and his patriotic army had more than enough enemies to keep them occupied; the Drowned Cities were full of fighting factions, perpetually tearing at one another’s throats. A single escaped augment might not be worth the Colonel’s attention. But then the panthers had caught up with Tool, and he’d known that the Colonel would not let his prized fighting monster slip free so easily.

Pain lanced through Tool’s body as he limped onward, but he ignored it. So what if he’d torn his shoulder from its socket in his mad attack on the bars? So what if the hunting panthers had laid long, deep gashes down his back? So what if his one eye was blind? He was moving and free, and he was trained to ignore pain.

Pain held no terror for him. Pain was, if not friend, then family, something he had grown up with in his crèche, learning to respect but never yield to. Pain was simply a message, telling him which limbs he could still use to slaughter his enemies, how far he could still run, and what his chances were in the next battle.

Behind him, the hounds began to bay, picking up his scent.

Tool growled in irritation, unconsciously baring teeth as cousin creatures called for his blood.

The hounds were perfect killers, just as he. They would throw themselves mindlessly into the fight again and again until they were torn to pieces, and they would die content, knowing that they had done their duty for their masters. Tool’s dog nature—spliced into his genes by scientific design—knew their mastiff urges. They would never stop until they were dead, or he was.

Tool didn’t blame them. He, too, had been loyal and obedient once.

Tool reached a new thicket of jungle and plunged into its shadows, tearing through tangling vines. He moved like an elephant through the vegetation, crashing and crackling. He knew he was leaving a trail that even a stupid human being could follow, but it was all he could do to keep moving.

Well-fed, with all his limbs working, he could have run these sad dogs and soldiers for days, doubling back and destroying them one by one in the jungle, whittling dogs and humans down to a huddled fearful tribe around a solitary campfire. Now, he doubted he could kill more than a few. Worse, after the last ambush he had set, they had become clever to his ways. They understood—now—how easily their bones snapped.

Tool stopped, panting, his tongue lolling from his mouth, chest heaving. He sniffed the humid air.

Salt breezes.

The sea.

Somewhere north there was an inlet. If he could make the sea, he might escape them still, might dive into the ocean and become one with the marine world. He could swim. It would hurt, but he could do it.

He turned north and east, pushing on by force of will. Behind him, the dogs followed.

Tool almost wanted to laugh. They were such good dogs, and because of it, many of them would die. Tool, on the other hand, was a very bad dog. His masters had told him so many times as they beat him and trained him and molded his will to match their own. They had forged him into a killer and then fit him into the killing machine that had been his pack. A platoon of slaughter. For a little while, he had been a good dog, and obedient.

Platoon. Pack. Company. Battalion. Tool remembered the Red Standard of General Caroa, waving in the breezes above his encampment in the Kolkata Delta when the Tiger Guard came down on them.

Bad dog.

Tool had been such a bad dog that he still lived. He should have been dead on those muddy tidal flats outside of Kolkata, where the waters of the river Ganges met the warmth of the Indian Ocean, and where blood and bodies floated in salt waves as red as General Caroa’s flag. He should have been dead in wars on foreign shores. He should have been dead a thousand times over. And yet always he had survived to fight again.

Tool paused, chest heaving, and scanned the forest tangles. Iridescent butterflies flitted through beams of reddening evening sunlight. The forest canopy was turning dark, emerald leaves becoming muddy as night came on. The black tropics, some people called this place, for its winter darkness. A sweltering humid environment where pythons and panthers and coywolv stalked at will. Killers all. It galled Tool that he was now prey, and weakening.

The guards had been starving him for weeks, and his untreated wounds oozed pus. Only his massive immune system kept him on his feet at all. Any other creature would have succumbed weeks ago to the superbacteria that coursed through his veins and seethed in his wounds, but his time was running out.

When he had been a good dog, an owned dog, a loyal dog, his masters would have stitched and treated wounds like these. General Caroa would have worked hard to protect his battle investment, showering Tool with trauma care so that he could once again become the apotheosis of slaughter. Good dogs had masters, and masters kept good dogs close.

Behind him, the hounds bayed again. Closer.

Tool stumbled forward, counting the steps until he would fall, knowing that flight was hopeless. A final stand, then. One last battle. At least he could say that he had fought. When he met his brothers and sisters on the far side of death, he would tell them that he had not yielded. He might have betrayed everything that they had been bred for, but he had never yielded . . .

Salt swamps opened abruptly before him. Tool sloshed into the water. Huge snakes slithered away in ripples, pythons and cottonmouths recognizing that they wanted no traffic with a creature like him. He waded farther and suddenly found unexpected beckoning depths. The swamps here were deep, many meters deep. A welcome surprise. This landscape hid sinkholes of water.

With a sigh, Tool sank into the swamp, feeling bubbles forming around him.

Down.

The slits of his nostrils tightened, sealing in his breath. A translucent membrane slid across his remaining eye’s iris, protecting his vision as he sank into the depths of the swamp, down amongst crawdads and mangrove roots.

Let them hunt me now.

Above, soldiers came crashing close. The voices of men, and others, younger. Some of them small enough that Tool could easily eat one in a day. But all of them armed and all of them adrenalized by the hunt. They shouted and called, their voices twining with the barking and stampeding of their dogs, all of it filtering down through the waters to Tool’s listening ears.

Splashes in the shallows. Dogs swimming about, their legs windmilling above him, baying in confusion, trying to find Tool’s direction. He could see them up there, canine shanks cycling madly. He could swim up and yank them down, one by one . . .

Tool resisted the urge to hunt.

“Where the hell did it go?”

“Shhhhh! Hear anything?”

“Shut your dogs, Clay!”

Silence fell. At least as much silence as pathetic human beings and dogs could summon. Even through the waters, Tool could hear their attempts at stealthy breathing, but they were trying, in their childlike way, to hunt.

“No spoor,” one of them muttered as footsteps stalked through the grasses. “Tell the LT, we got no spoor.”

Tool could imagine them all on the edge of the swamps, staring out at black waters. Listening to the pulse and scratch of insects and the far cry of a wild panther.

They were hunters. But now, as night closed in on them, and the swamp became black and hot and close, they were becoming prey.

Tool again shook off the urge to hunt. He must still think like prey and take advantage of their failures. He could lie below the surface for as long as twenty minutes, slowing his heart rate, slowing his bulk so that he needed almost nothing at all.

Without exertion, he might even be able to lie there longer, but twenty minutes, he knew for certain—much as he knew that he could run for five miles without rest amongst the high passes of Tibet, or for three days without pause across the blistering sands of North Africa’s Sahara.

He counted slowly.

The hounds paddled and circled as the soldiers tried to figure out what to do.

“You think it doubled back again?”

“Could be. It’s crafty. Ocho can take a squad—”

“Ocho’s all ripped up.”

“Van and Soa, then! Go back along the trail. Spread out.”

“In the dark?”

“You questioning me, Gutty?”

“Where the hell’s the LT?”

The ripple and bubble of the swamp flowed into Tool’s finely tuned ears. He let them spread wide like fans, cupping the waters. Listening.

The flash of tiny pike. The skitter of crawdads. The distant womblike slosh and surge of salt water as it blended with cousin waters on the shore, where swampland and surf smashed together and sought ever higher tide lines.

“It’ll head for the ocean,” one of the soldiers said. “We should put another squad up on the north side.”

“No, it will hide here, in the swamps. It’ll stay right here. Safe enough.”

“Maybe the coywolv will get it.”

“Not likely. You saw how it did those panthers when it fought in the ring.”

“There’s a lot more coywolv out here.”

Deep in the waters, something dark and hungry stirred.

Tool startled, then froze.

A monster was easing through the waters, vast and silent, a shadow of death. Tool stifled a growl as it passed, fighting to keep the rhythms of his heart slow, fighting to save precious oxygen. Meters and meters of leathery hide slid past him, a great king of a reptile. The creature was bigger than the largest Komodo dragons of the equator. A massive horror of an alligator, tail and legs moving easy, propelling it through darkening waters with a predatory grace.

It circled, attracted by the frenetic hounds and their foolish splashing.

The first dog sank before it could yelp. The next went under in a snap. Blood filled the water.

The soldiers yelled and gunshots flashed. Automatic weapons. Shotguns. Sparks of fear as the soldiers peppered the water with their bullets.

“Get it! Get it!”

Heavy impact. A sharp pain blossomed in Tool’s shoulder. He flinched at the bad luck but held still. He’d been shot before; this was not the worst. The bullet had smashed into the meat of his body. He could survive the wound.

“It’s not the dog-face! It’s a damn gator!” The soldiers unloaded more angry shots into the water. Whistled back their hounds. “Heel!”

Blood smoked from Tool’s shoulder. He pressed his fist to the wound, trying to staunch the flow. There was enough blood in the water that Tool’s own blood might not be the bait that it would have been, but he smelled of wounded sickness.

The soldiers remained at the edge of the pool, shooting at whatever moved and cursing the alligator. The monster circled in the water, finishing the remains of the hounds, unperturbed by the powerless soldiers above.

Tool watched the alligator, measuring this new variable in the equation of his survival. He felt no brotherhood with this beast. Reptiles, if they were any part of his blood design, were deeply buried in the helixes of his DNA. This creature was nothing other than an enemy.

Above, the soldiers’ voices finally faded, seeking their prey in other places.

Trapped in the deepening darkness, Tool continued to study the alligator. If he moved, the monster would sense him, and now his lungs were beginning to heave, demanding air.

Tool clenched his jaws and waited, hoping that the alligator might still move off.

Instead, the lizard sank to the bottom of the pool, sated.

If Tool was fast, he might make it out of the pool in time, but he would have to be quick. He knew that he had only two hundred heartbeats of air before he became too weak to fight. The blood thudded in Tool’s ears, counting down his death. He could slow the beat of his heart, but he could not stop it.

Tool reached up and took hold of a thick mangrove root, preparing to propel himself upward.

The alligator whipped about. Tool had been about to kick for the surface, but now, if he let himself float free, he would be easy bait. The alligator flashed toward him, jagged mouth hungering. Tool levered himself aside, using the roots to maneuver. Teeth snapped, missing.

The alligator came around. Its tail slammed Tool into the mangrove roots. Tool’s vision went bloody. The alligator arrowed in again, and Tool grabbed for a weapon. He tore at the mangrove roots, but the wood ripped free with only a stub.

The alligator’s maw gaped wide. Vast oblivion.

Tool lunged for the monster, the chunk of splintered root clenched in his fist. With a silent roar, Tool rammed his fist into the monster’s mouth. The alligator’s jaws snapped shut. Its teeth crushed Tool’s shoulder, piercing flesh. Pain like lightning.

The monster rolled and dove, dragging Tool with it. Instinctively, the alligator knew it needed only to suck the air from its enemy. It was born for this fight, and in its decades of life, none had ever bested it. It would drown Tool, as it had drowned so many other unwary beasts, and then it would feed well.

Tool struggled, trying to pry open the monster’s mouth, but even the half-man’s strength was no match for the alligator’s bite. The teeth were clamped like a vise. The alligator rolled, slamming Tool into the mud, pressing him down.

Panic swept through Tool. He was drowning. He barely fought off the instinct to breathe water. Again he pried at the lizard’s jaws, knowing it was pointless, but unable to surrender.

The reptile is not your enemy. It is nothing but a beast. You are its better.

A foolish stray thought, and small comfort—killed by something with a brain the size of a walnut. Tool’s teeth showed in a rictus of contempt as the alligator plowed him through more weeds and mud.

This dumb beast is not your enemy.

Tool was not some brute animal, able to think only in terms of attack or flight. He was better than that. He hadn’t survived this long by thinking like an animal. Panic and mindlessness were his only enemy, as always. Not bullets or teeth or machetes or claws. Not bombs or whips or razor wire.

And not this dumb beast. Panic only.

He could never break free of the alligator’s jaws. They were perfect clamps, evolved to lock down and never release. No one pried free of an alligator’s bite. Not even something as strong as Tool. So he would no longer try.

Instead, Tool lashed his free arm around the beast’s head, locking it in a bear hug, and squeezed. His grip forced the alligator’s jaws tighter around his own arm and shoulder. Its teeth pierced deep. More of Tool’s blood clouded the water.

In the dim recesses of its tiny brain, perhaps the alligator was pleased to have its teeth sink deeper into enemy flesh. But Tool’s other arm, engulfed in the monster’s maw, was free to work. Not from the outside, but from within.

Tool turned the shattered chunk of mangrove root and began methodically ramming it into the roof of the monster’s mouth. Ripping through flesh, driving the wood deeper and deeper.

The alligator, sensing something was wrong, feeling the tearing within itself, tried to open its jaws, but Tool, instead of letting go, now clamped the monster tighter.

Do not run away,he thought. I have you where I want you.

Blood misted from Tool’s shoulder, but battle fury strengthened him. He had the advantage. He might be running out of air and life, but this ancient reptile was his. The alligator’s bite was deadly, but it had its own weakness: It lacked the muscle strength to open its mouth easily.

The mangrove root ground to dust, but Tool continued, using his claws, ripping deeper and deeper.

The alligator thrashed wildly, trying to shake free. Decades of easy killing had never prepared it for a creature like Tool, something more primal and terrifying than even itself. It writhed and rolled, shaking Tool the way a dog shook a rat. Stars swam in Tool’s vision, but he held on and tore deeper. His air ran out. His fist found bone.

With one final heave, Tool rammed his claws through the lizard’s skull and tore into its brain.

The monster began to shudder and die.

Did it understand that it had always been outmatched? That it was dying because it had never evolved to face a creature such as Tool?

Tool’s fist crushed the lizard’s brain to pulp.

The great reptile’s life drained away, victim to a monster that should never have existed, an unholy perfection of killing, built in laboratories and honed across a thousand battlefields.

Tool’s claws carved out the last of the brain meat of the ancient lizard, and the alligator fell limp.

A rush of primal satisfaction flooded Tool as his opponent surrendered to death. Blackness swamped Tool’s vision, and he let go.

He had conquered.

Even as he died, he conquered.

Chapter 3

“That’s enough, Mahlia.” Doctor Mahfouz straightened with a sigh. “We’ve done all we can. Let her rest.”

Mahlia sat back on her heels and wiped her lips of Tani’s dying spit, giving up on breathing for the girl who had already stopped breathing for herself. Before her, the young woman lay still, empty blue eyes staring up at the bamboo spars of the squat’s ceiling.

Blood covered everything: the doctor and Mahlia, Tani, the floor, old Mr. Salvatore. Ten pints, the doctor had taught Mahlia in her studies; that was what filled a human being. And from the look of it, all of it was out of their patient. Bright and red. Rich with oxygen. Not blue like the placental sac, but red. Red as rubies.

What a mess.

The squat stank. Burned vegetable oil from the lamp, the iron spike of blood, the rank, sweaty smell of desperate people. The smell of pain.

Sunlight speared through cracks in the bamboo walls of the squat, molten blades of day. Doctor Mahfouz had asked if Tani and Mr. Salvatore preferred to do the birth outside, where it would be cooler and they’d have better air and light, but Mr. Salvatore was traditional and wanted privacy for his daughter, even if she’d been anything but private in her love life. Now it felt as though they were swaddled in the smell of death.

In the corner of the squat, tucked under a pile of stained blankets, Tani’s killer lay quiet. The infant had nursed for a second, and Mahlia had been surprised at how happy she’d been for Tani that her little wrinkled baby was healthy and that the birth hadn’t been as long as she had expected.

And then Tani’s eyes had rolled back and the doctor said, “Mahlia, come here, please” in the way that told her something was really bad but he didn’t want to scare the patient.

Mahlia had come down to the doctor where he knelt between Tani’s legs and she’d seen the blood, more and more of it, his hands covered with it, and the doctor had wanted pressure on her belly, and then he’d wanted to cut.

But they didn’t have any drugs to knock Tani out, to make the cutting easy, nothing with them but his last black market needle’s worth of heroin, and then he’d had his scalpel out and Tani was gasping and asking what was wrong, and the doctor had said, “I need you to hold still, dear.”

Of course, Tani panicked. Doctor Mahfouz called for her father, and Mr. Salvatore climbed up the ladder into the squat, and when he saw the blood he shouted, demanding to know what was wrong, and of course he panicked Tani even more.

The doctor ordered him to her head, to hold her shoulders while he sat on her legs, and then he asked Mahlia to help him even though all Mahlia had was a right hand stump and her lucky left—which didn’t seem so lucky when she needed both hands to get the job done.

The doctor set to work by the flicker of the single vegetable-oil lamp and the burn of candles, and Mahlia was forced to lean close, using her eyes to tell the older man where to set the scalpel. With her guiding voice, she helped him make the bikini cuts low across Tani’s belly. The cuts that he’d taught her from his medical books, because he couldn’t see so well, with Mahlia handing him the implements as quick as she could with her one good hand until they were in Tani’s belly and found where the blood was coming from.

By then Tani’s struggles had stilled. And after that, she was gone, with her belly cut open like a pig’s, and old Salvatore holding his daughter’s limp shoulders, and blood all over the squat.

“That’s enough, Mahlia,” the doctor said, and Mahlia straightened from trying to rescue-breathe for the poor dead girl.

Salvatore was looking at them, accusation in his eyes. “You killed her.”

“No one killed her,” Doctor Mahfouz said. “Birth is always uncertain.”

“That one. That one killed her.” Salvatore pointed at Mahlia. “You should never have let her anywhere near my girl.”

At the man’s accusation, Mahlia palmed a bloody scalpel into her good hand, but didn’t show anything on her face as she turned to face him. If Salvatore made a move, she’d be ready.

“Mahlia . . .” The doctor’s voice held warning. He always knew what she was thinking. But Mahlia didn’t put down the scalpel. Better safe than sorry.

“Castoffs like her are bad luck. Got the Fates Eye on them,” Salvatore ranted. “We should have run her off when we had the chance.”

“Mr. Salvatore, please.” Doctor Mahfouz was trying to get the man to calm down. Mahlia didn’t think it would work. The man’s daughter was dead on the table with her belly cut wide and there Mahlia was, standing right in front of him, the perfect target for blame.

“Bad luck and death,” he said. “You were a fool to take that one in, Doctor.”

“Please, Salvatore. Even Saint Olmos calls for charity.”

“She kills things,” Salvatore said. “Everywhere she goes. Nothing but blood and death.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“She put the Fates Eye on Alejandro’s goats,” Salvatore pointed out.

“I didn’t touch them,” Mahlia retorted. “Coywolv got them, and everyone knows it. I didn’t touch them.”

“Alejandro saw you looking at them.”

“I’m looking at you,” Mahlia said. “That mean you’re dead, too?”

“Mahlia!”

She flinched at the doctor’s shocked remonstration. “I didn’t do nothing to your girl,” Mahlia said. “Or any goats.” She looked at the grieving father. “I’m sorry about your girl. Wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

She began picking up the stained medical implements while the doctor kept trying to soothe Salvatore. Mahfouz was good at that. He knew how to talk people down. In all her life, Mahlia had never seen someone who was so good at making people stop bickering, sit down, talk, and listen.

Doctor Mahfouz was gentle and calm in an argument, where most people went off and started shouting. He brought out the good. If it hadn’t been for him, Banyan Town would have run her off long ago. They might have let Mouse stay, even though he was a war maggot, too. But a castoff like her? No way. Not without the doctor talking words like charity and kindness and compassion.

Doctor Mahfouz liked to say that everyone wanted to be good. They just sometimes needed help finding their way to it. That was when he’d first taken her and Mouse in. He’d said it even as he was sprinkling sulfa powder over Mahlia’s bloody stump of a hand, like he couldn’t see what was happening right in front of him. The Drowned Cities were busy tearing themselves apart once again, but here the doctor was, still talking about how people wanted to be kind and good.

Mahlia and Mouse had just looked at each other, and didn’t say anything. If the doctor was fool enough to let them stay, he could babble whatever crazy talk he wanted.

Doctor Mahfouz gathered up Tani’s baby and poured it into the grieving grandfather’s arms.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Salvatore demanded. “I’m no woman. How will I feed it?”

“‘It’ is a ‘him,’” the doctor said. “Name him. Give your grandson a name. We’ll help you with the rest. You are not alone. None of us are alone.”

“Easy for you to say.” Salvatore’s gaze went to Mahlia again. “If she had two hands, you could have saved her.”

“Nothing could have saved Tani. We might wish otherwise, but the truth is that sometimes we are powerless.”

“I thought you knew all the peacekeeper medicine.”

“Knowing all and having the necessary tools are two different things. This is hardly a hospital. We make do with what we have, and none of that is Mahlia’s fault. Tani is the victim of many evils, but Mahlia is not the beginning of that chain, nor the end. I am responsible, if anyone is.”

“If your nurse had two hands, it would’ve helped,” Salvatore insisted.

Mahlia could feel the man’s gaze on her back as she dropped the last of the clamps and scalpels into Mahfouz’s bag. She’d have to boil everything when she got back to Mahfouz’s squat, but at least she could get out of here.

She snapped the bag closed, using the stump of her right hand to stabilize it while she worked the clasps with the fingers of her lucky left.

The bag’s leather was stamped with the Chinese characters of the peacekeeper hospital where Doctor Mahfouz had trained before the war started up again. “Huashengdun Mei Zhong Youyi Yiyuan.”

“Huashengdun” was an Accelerated Age word for the Drowned Cities. “Zhong” was for China. And she could pick out other characters as well: friendship and surgery, the character for courtyard.

Roughly translated, it meant “friendship hospital.” One of those places that the Chinese peacekeepers had created when they’d first shown up to try to stop the war. A place with sterile boiled sheets and good lighting and blood packs and saline for transfusions, and the thousand other things that a real doctor was supposed to have.

These days, their hospital was wherever Doctor Mahfouz set his medical bag, all that was left of the wonderful hospital that the Chinese had donated, except for a few rehydration packets still stamped with the words, With wishes for peace and well-being from the people of Beijing.

Mahlia could imagine all those Chinese people in their far-off country donating to the war victims of the Drowned Cities. All of them rich enough to send things like rice and clothes and rehydration packets all the way over the pole on fast-sailing clipper ships. All of them rich enough to meddle where they didn’t belong.

Mahlia avoided looking at Tani as she got the medical bag closed. Sometimes, if there was a blanket, you could pull it over the body to make a shroud, but they’d used all the bedding for the new baby.

Mahlia wondered if she was supposed to feel something at seeing Tani’s corpse. She’d seen plenty of dead, but Tani was different. Her death was just bad luck. Not like most of the deaths she’d seen, where someone died because a soldier boy didn’t like the way you talked, or wanted something you had, or didn’t like the shape of your eyes.

The doctor interrupted her thoughts. “Mahlia, why don’t you take the baby over to Amaya’s house while I speak with Mr. Salvatore. She’ll be able to nurse the child.”

Mahlia eyed Salvatore uncertainly. The man looked like he wasn’t going to give the baby over. “I don’t think he wants me near.”

Doctor Mahfouz counseled Salvatore. “You’re distraught. Let Mahlia take the infant. At least for a little while. We still must arrange for your daughter. She’ll need your rites to send her on. I don’t know the Deepwater prayers.”

The man continued glaring at Mahlia, but some of the rage was draining away. Maybe later, he’d have some fight, but now, he was just sad.

“Here.” Mahlia inched forward and eased the baby from his hands, not looking him in the eye, not challenging him. When the baby was in her arms, she bundled it up. With a last glance back at the dead girl, Mahlia hustled the baby down through the trapdoor in the floor.

There was a whole crowd waiting below.

People backed away as Mahlia came down the bamboo ladder using her left hand to catch the rungs while she cradled the baby in her right arm. Minsok and Auntie Selima, and Reg and Tua and Betty Fan, Delilah and Bobby Cross, and a bunch more, all of them caught in the act of lingering, heads cocked up and listening to the tragedy taking place above.

“Tani’s dead,” Mahlia said as she reached the bottom of the ladder. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”

Everyone except Auntie Selima looked at her as if it were her fault. A ripple of warding went through the crowd, people touching blue glass Fates Eyes, or kissing green prayer beads, lots of motions to push off bad luck. Mahlia pretended she didn’t see. She folded a triangle of blanket over the infant’s face to shade it, and pushed through the crowd.

Out from under the squat, the sun glared down on her. Mahlia made her way down a weedy trail, heading for Amaya’s place. Crumbled buildings loomed on either side of her, cracked sentries robed in jungle growth. Trees sprouted from their crowns and kudzu draped over their slumped shoulders. Birds clustered in the heights, making mud nests, flying out of empty window eyes, chattering and fluttering, sending down droppings on the unwary.

From amongst the green and leafy faces, more people peered out, watching Mahlia pass, families who lived on the old buildings’ upper floors while they kept the ground for chickens and ducks and goats that ran wild during the day and were penned at night, keeping coywolv and panthers from getting at them.

All along the lower walls of the buildings, the tags and colors of various warlord factions were splashed, painted scrawls competing with one another—Army of God, Tulane Company, Freedom Militia—evidence of the armies that had controlled and taxed and recruited in Banyan Town over the years.

Mahlia didn’t like any of them, but then, since most soldier boys would kill her on sight, the feeling was mutual. But the villagers held on to the illusion that they could assuage the soldiers who warred around them, so they still hung the patriotic flags of whatever faction was currently in power, and hoped that it would be enough.

This year, rags of blue dangled in upper windows signaling support for Colonel Glenn Stern’s United Patriot Front, but Mahlia knew the townspeople also kept red stars close, in case the Army of God regained the upper hand and took back this territory. A few buildings still showed the stars and bars of Tulane, all chipped and peeled and defaced and mostly covered over, but not many anymore. No one had seen Tulane soldiers for years. Rumor had it that they’d been pushed into the swamps, and had turned to fishing and crawdad hunting and eels because they didn’t have enough bullets to keep fighting. Either that, or else they’d made a desperate run north and their bones were now being picked clean by the army of corporate half-men who patrolled the northern borders and let no one pass.

Mahlia’s father used to spit whenever he said any of the warlords’ army names. It didn’t matter if it was Army of God or Freedom Militia or the United Patriot Front. There wasn’t a single one of them that was worth anything. A bunch of zhi laohu, “paper tigers.” They liked to roar, but they blew away like paper in the face of the slightest breath of real combat. Whenever her father’s troops showed up, they ran like rats or died like flies.

Mahlia’s father had always talked about the ancient Chinese general called Sun Tzu and his strategies, and how all the paper tiger warlords had no strategy at all—he used to joke about what garbage they were as soldiers.

Laji, he’d said. “Garbage.” Every one of them.

But in the end, the warlords had won, and her father had left with the rest of China’s peacekeeper army while the paper tigers roared their victories from the rooftops of the Drowned Cities.

Sweat dripped down Mahlia’s back, soaking her tank as she walked. Being out in the middle of the day was crazy. The humidity and heat made doing everything more miserable. She should have been hunkered down in the shade, instead of sweating her way across town with blood all over her and a baby in her arms.

Mahlia passed the shop where Auntie Selima sold black market soap and cigarettes hauled from Moss Landing, along with whatever junk she could scavenge from the suburban ruins that surrounded them. Old cups made of glass that hadn’t shattered in the fighting. Rubber tubing for moving irrigation water. Rusty wire for binding together bamboo into fences. All kinds of things.

A couple of Chinese-made sheet-metal stoves were stacked in a corner, from when the peacekeepers had been around, trying to make friends. For all Mahlia knew, her own father’s battalion might have been the ones who’d delivered the stoves out here, showing people how they burned better and hotter than an open campfire. Trying to do all that peacekeeper outreach that was supposed to make Drowned Cities people who fought one another all the time focus instead on taking care of themselves. Soft power, her father had called it, the winning of hearts and minds that was just as important as the peacekeeper ability to smash the local militias’ combat units.

Ahead, Amaya’s squat waited. It was small, scabbed into the second story of an old brick building that had tumbled in on itself. On the ground floor, Amaya and her husband had restacked the crumbled bricks to form a strong pen for their goats.

Mahlia ducked into the shade of the open ground floor. Amaya’s ladder was painted blue, and little ragged UPF talismans hung like prayer flags to Kali-Mary Mercy, thin offerings meant to keep Glenn Stern’s soldier boys at bay.

When Mahlia first saw Banyan Town, she hadn’t understood why everyone lived in the upper stories. Mouse had laughed at that, calling her a swank city girl for not knowing about the panthers and coywolv that stalked the night. Mouse’s family had grown soybeans on a farm way out in the suburban collapse of the Drowned Cities, so he had known all about living in the middle of nowhere, but Mahlia had had to learn everything from scratch.

“Amaya?” Mahlia called.

The woman appeared from behind her goat pen. One of her licebiters was slung on her back, a tiny snotty-faced creature. Another kid peeked down from the squat above, dark eyes and brown skin almost as dark as Mahlia’s, peering down the ladder, serious.

At the sight of Mahlia covered with blood and carrying the baby, Amaya’s eyes widened. She made a sign of warding, putting the Fates Eye on Mahlia, who pretended not to notice.

Mahlia held up her bundle. “It’s Tani’s.”

“How is she?” Amaya asked.

“She’s dead. The doctor wants you to take care of her baby. For Mr. Salvatore, since you’re nursing anyway. Until he can take care of it on his own.”

Amaya didn’t extend her arms to take the bundle. “I told her those soldier boys weren’t any good for her.”

Mahlia still held out the baby. “The doctor says you’ll nurse it.”

“He does, does he?”

The woman was a brick wall. Mahlia wished the doctor had come instead. He could have convinced her, easy. Amaya didn’t want the baby, and if Mahlia was honest, Mahlia didn’t blame her. She didn’t want it, either.

“We aren’t doing it any favors,” Amaya said finally. “No one needs another mouth.”

Mahlia just waited. She was good at that. When you were a castoff, it didn’t do any good trying to talk to people, but sometimes, if you just kind of waited them out, people would get uncomfortable and feel like they had to do something.

Amaya wasn’t really complaining about more mouths, exactly. She was talking about orphans. And when she said that, she really meant war maggots. Orphans like Mahlia, who had shown up in Banyan Town with a chopped-off right hand, bleeding, dying for help. No one wanted a war maggot in their midst. It meant they had to decide one way or another about a peacekeeper’s castoff, lying in the dirt in the middle of their town. Most people had decided one way; Doctor Mahfouz decided different.

Mahlia said, “You don’t need to worry about the extra mouth. Salvatore’s going to take it back as soon as it can eat on its own. And Doctor’s going to send you more food for your trouble.”

“What’s that man see in a one-handed nurse?” Amaya asked. “Is that why Tani’s dead? Because you got no hand?”

“Wasn’t my fault she got herself pregnant.”

“No. But she didn’t need a useless crippled China girl for a nurse.”

Mahlia bristled. “I ain’t Chinese.”

Amaya just looked at her.

“I ain’t,” Mahlia repeated.

“You got the blood right there on your face. China castoff, through and through.” She turned away, then stopped. Looked back at Mahlia.

“The thing I keep wondering about is what was wrong with you, girl? How come the peacekeepers didn’t want you? If the peacekeepers didn’t care enough to take you when they went back to China, why in the name of the Fates would we want you, either?”

Mahlia fought to keep down the anger that was starting to bubble in her. “Well, this one ain’t Chinese, and it ain’t castoff. It’s Banyan Town’s. You want it? Or am I telling the doctor you dumped it?”

Amaya looked at Mahlia like she was a sack of goat guts, but she finally took the infant.

As soon as the baby was in Amaya’s hands, Mahlia pressed close. Right in Amaya’s face, as eye to eye as she could make it with a grown woman. Mahlia was a little surprised to find that she almost had the height. Amaya backed up against the ladder of the squat, clutching the baby as Mahlia pushed closer.

“You call me castoff,” Mahlia said, “Chinese throwaway, whatever.” Amaya was trying to look away, but Mahlia had her pinned, kept her eye to eye. “My old man might have been peacekeeper, but my mom was pure Drowned Cities. You want to war like that, I’m all in.” Mahlia lifted the scarred stump of her right hand, shoved it up in Amaya’s face. “Maybe I cut you the way the Army of God cut me. See how you do with just a lucky left. How’d you like that?”

Amaya’s eyes filled with horror. For a second, Mahlia had the satisfaction of at least getting respect. Yeah. You see me now, all right. Before I was just another castoff, but you see me now.

“Mahlia! What are you doing?”

It was Doctor Mahfouz, hurrying toward them. Mahlia backed off. “Nothing,” she said, but Doctor Mahfouz was staring at her with dismay, as if she were some kind of animal gone wild.

“What’s going on here, Mahlia?”

Mahlia scowled. “She called me Chinese.”

Mahfouz threw up his hands. “You are Chinese! There’s no shame in that!”

Amaya broke in. “She threatened me!” she said. “That animal threatened me.” She was furious now that she had backup from Doctor Mahfouz. Angry that she’d been scared by a castoff war maggot. Mahlia braced for the tongue-lashing, but before Amaya could get going, the doctor took Mahlia’s shoulder.

“Go home, Mahlia,” he said.

To Mahlia’s surprise, he wasn’t mean when he said it, or mad. Just . . . tired. “Go see if you can find Mouse,” he said. “We’ll need to gather extra food to help Amaya with this new child.”

Mahlia hesitated, but there was no point sticking around. “Sorry,” she said, not sure if she was saying it to the doctor, or Amaya, or herself, or who. “Sorry,” she said again, and turned away.

Mahfouz was always telling her to stand down, to let the insults roll off, and here she was, picking fights she didn’t have to. She could practically hear his voice in her head as she plodded back toward the doctor’s squat and her friend Mouse: “A harmless war orphan is something they may not love, but still, they can empathize. But if you seem violent, they’ll see you the same way they see coywolv.”

Which meant they’d leave her alone as long as she looked soft. But if she stood up, they’d put her down right quick.

Sun Tzu said that you had to pick your battles and fight only when you knew what victory was supposed to look like. Victory came to people who knew when to attack and when to avoid, and now Mahlia suspected that she’d just done something stupid. She’d let the enemy goad her into exposing herself.

Her father would have laughed at that. A hasty temper was one of the greatest faults a general could have, and people who were provoked by insults were easy to defeat. Mahlia had done what Drowned Cities people always did: She’d fought without thinking.

Her father would have called her an animal for that.

[End Excerpt]

From the book The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Copyright © 2012 by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY.

All rights reserved.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s debut young adult novel, Ship Breaker, was a Michael L. Printz Award winner, a National Book Award finalist, and a Locus Award winner. His debut adult novel, The Windup Girl, was named by Time Magazine as one of the ten best novels of 2009, and won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards. His short story collection, Pump Six and Other Stories, was a 2008 Locus Award winner for Best Collection and was also named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. He lives in western Colorado with his wife and son.

From 2312
Kim Stanley Robinson

(An excerpt from the forthcoming novel to be published by Orbit Books, May 2012.)

Prologue

The sun is always just about to rise. Mercury rotates so slowly that you can walk fast enough over its rocky surface to stay ahead of the dawn; and so many people do. Many have made this a way of life. They walk roughly westward, staying always ahead of the stupendous day. Some of them hurry from location to location, pausing to look in cracks they earlier inoculated with bioleaching metallophytes, quickly scraping free any accumulated residues of gold or tungsten or uranium. But most of them are out there to catch glimpses of the sun.

Mercury’s ancient face is so battered and irregular that the planet’s terminator, the zone of the breaking dawn, is a broad chiaroscuro of black and white—charcoal hollows pricked here and there by brilliant white high points, which grow and grow until all the land is as bright as molten glass, and the long day begun. This mixed zone of sun and shadow is often as much as thirty kilometers wide, even though on a level plain the horizon is only a few kilometers off. But so little of Mercury is level. All the old bangs are still there, and some long cliffs from when the planet first cooled and shrank. In a landscape so rumpled the light can suddenly jump the eastern horizon and leap west to strike some distant prominence. Everyone walking the land has to attend to this possibility, know when and where the longest sunreaches occur—and where they can run for shade if they happen to be caught out.

Or if they stay on purpose. Because many of them pause in their walkabouts on certain cliffs and crater rims, at places marked by stupas, cairns, petroglyphs, inuksuit, mirrors, walls, goldsworthies. The sunwalkers stand by these, facing east, waiting.

The horizon they watch is black space over black rock. The superthin neon-argon atmosphere, created by sunlight smashing rock, holds only the faintest predawn glow. But the sunwalkers know the time, so they wait and watch—until—
a flick of orange fire dolphins over the horizon
and their blood leaps inside them. More brief banners follow, flicking up, arcing in loops, breaking off and floating free in the sky. Star oh star, about to break on them! Already their faceplates have darkened and polarized to protect their eyes.

The orange banners diverge left and right from the point of first appearance, as if a fire set just over the horizon is spreading north and south. Then a paring of the photosphere, the actual surface of the sun, blinks and stays, spills slowly to the sides. Depending on the filters deployed in one’s faceplate, the star’s actual surface can appear as anything from a blue maelstrom to an orange pulsing mass to a simple white circle. The spill to left and right keeps spreading, farther than seems possible, until it is very obvious one stands on a pebble next to a star.

Time to turn and run! But by the time some of the sunwalkers manage to jerk themselves free, they are stunned—trip and fall—get up and dash west, in a panic like no other.

Before that—one last look at sunrise on Mercury. In the ultraviolet it’s a perpetual blue snarl of hot and hotter. With the disk of the photosphere blacked out, the fantastic dance of the corona becomes clearer, all the magnetized arcs and short circuits, the masses of burning hydrogen pitched out at the night. Alternatively you can block the corona, and look only at the sun’s photosphere, and even magnify your view of it, until the burning tops of the convection cells are revealed in their squiggling thousands, each a thunderhead of fire burning furiously, all together torching five million tons of hydrogen a second—at which rate the star will burn another four billion years. All these long spicules of flame dance in circular patterns around the little black circles that are the sunspots—shifting whirlpools in the storms of burning. Masses of spicules flow together like kelp beds threshed by a tide. There are nonbiological explanations for all this convoluted motion—different gases moving at different speeds, magnetic fields fluxing constantly, shaping the endless whirlpools of fire—all mere physics, nothing more—but in fact it looks alive, more alive than many a living thing. Looking at it in the apocalypse of the Mercurial dawn, it’s impossible to believe it’s not alive. It roars in your ears, it speaks to you.

Most of the sunwalkers over time try all the various viewing filters, and then make choices to suit themselves. Particular filters or sequences of filters become forms of worship, rituals either personal or shared. It’s very easy to get lost in these rituals; as the sunwalkers stand on their points and watch, it’s not uncommon for devotees to become entranced by something in the sight, some pattern never seen before, something in the pulse and flow that snags the mind; suddenly the sizzle of the fiery cilia becomes audible, a turbulent roaring—that’s your own blood, rushing through your ears, but in those moments it sounds just like the sun burning. And so people stay too long. Some have their retinas burned; some are blinded; others are killed outright, betrayed by an overwhelmed spacesuit. Some are cooked in groups of a dozen or more.

Do you imagine they must have been fools? Do you think you would never make such a mistake? Don’t you be so sure. Really you have no idea. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. You may think you are inured, that nothing outside the mind can really interest you anymore, as sophisticated and knowledgeable as you are. But you would be wrong. You are a creature of the sun. The beauty and terror of it seen from so close can empty any mind, thrust anyone into a trance. It’s like seeing the face of God, some people say, and it is true that the sun powers all living creatures in the solar system, and in that sense is our god. The sight of it can strike thought clean out of your head. People seek it out precisely for that.

So there is reason to worry about Swan Er Hong, a person more inclined than most to try things just to see. She often goes sunwalking, and when she does she skirts the edge of safety, and sometimes stays too long in the light. The immense Jacob’s ladders, the granulated pulsing, the spicules flowing . . . she has fallen in love with the sun. She worships it; she keeps a shrine to Sol Invictus in her room, performs the pratahsamdhya ceremony, the salute to the sun, every morning when she wakes in town. Much of her landscape and performance art is devoted to it, and these days she spends most of her time making goldsworthies and abramovics on the land and her body. So the sun is part of her art.

Now it is her solace too, for she is out there grieving. Now, if one were standing on the promenade topping the city Terminator’s great Dawn Wall, one would spot her there to the south, out near the horizon. She needs to hurry. The city is gliding on its tracks across the bottom of a giant dimple between Hesiod and Kurasawa, and a flood of sunlight will soon pour far to the west. Swan needs to get into town before that happens, yet she still stands there. From the top of the Dawn Wall she looks like a silver toy. Her spacesuit has a big round clear helmet. Her boots look big, and are black with dust. A little booted silver ant, standing there grieving when she should be hustling back to the boarding platform west of town. The other sunwalkers out there are already hustling back to town. Some pull little carts or wheeled travois, hauling their supplies or even their sleeping companions. They’ve timed their returns closely, as the city is very predictable. It cannot deviate from its schedule; the heat of coming day expands the tracks, and the city’s undercarriage is tightly sleeved over them; so sunlight drives the city west.

The returning sunwalkers crowd onto the loading platform as the city nears it. Some have been out for weeks, or even the months it would take to make a full circumambulation. When the city slides by, its lock doors will open and they will step right in.

That is soon to occur, and Swan should be there too. Yet still she stands on her promontory. More than once she has required retinal repair, and often she has been forced to run like a rabbit or die. Now it will have to happen again. She is directly south of the city, and fully lit by horizontal rays, like a silver flaw in one’s vision. One can’t help shouting at such rashness, useless though it is. Swan, you fool! Alex is dead—nothing to be done about it! Run for your life!

And then she does. Life over death—the urge to live—she turns and flies. Mercury’s gravity, almost exactly the same as Mars’s, is often called the perfect g for speed, because people who are used to it can careen across the land in giant leaps, flailing their arms for balance as they bound along. In just that way Swan leaps and flails—once catches a boot and falls flat on her face—jumps up and leaps forward again. She needs to get to the platform while the city is still next to it; the next platform is ten kilometers farther west.

She reaches the platform stairs, grabs the rail and vaults up, leaps from the far edge of the platform, forward into the lock as it is halfway closed.

[End Excerpt]

From the book 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Copyright © 2012 by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Reprinted by permission of Orbit Books. All rights reserved.

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, much of which has 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.

Interview: Michael Chabon
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Michael Chabon is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Gentlemen of the Road, and Wonder Boys, among other novels. His alternate history novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, won the Hugo, Nebula, and Sidewise awards. His next novel is Telegraph Avenue, due out in September.

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

How did you first encounter the John Carter books, and what sort of an impact did they have on you?

I first encountered them in Page One Books in Columbia, Maryland, in about 1973, I guess, whenever Ballantine Books reissued them with those stunning Gino D’Achille covers. They appeared somewhat magically, like the Monolith in 2001, in a cardboard display dump in the bookstore, this beautiful display with a big piece of artwork on the top of it, and then I guess maybe all fifteen books in this display, each with this stunning cover, and it had a sense of obvious cultural importance, at least to me at age ten or eleven. It inspired this immediate desire in me to know more, to visit, to go there, and see what this was about. What was this thing, who was John Carter, and what was going on with these green guys, and red-skinned beautiful princesses, and flying boats, and everything I was seeing on the covers of these books?

And I bought the first one, and I loved it, and I went back and bought the next one, and then I discovered that the Science Fiction Book Club was publishing them with equally arresting covers by Frank Frazetta, in double editions, two books in one. So I started to get those, because I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club, and then not long after that Marvel Comics, of which I was also a great devotee, started doing a comic book version of the same character, and that just kind of cemented it all in my mind. So I was having a multimedia experience with the character of John Carter and the world of Barsoom, and I branched out pretty quickly into the Tarzan books and Pellucidar, everything Burroughs wrote. Edgar Rice Burroughs was one of my first fan crushes as a writer. He was one of my first favorite writers, and I read a biography of him that was published around then that my public library had, this giant hardcover biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I used to sign my name “Mike Burroughs Chabon.” I was obsessed.

I did read my children A Princess of Mars when they were younger, you know. I had kept in touch with those books, I had re-acquired the Marvel comic book versions of them, and then in the mid-’90s I wrote an original screenplay called The Martian Agent that was a kind of steampunk thing, before the term steampunk was really in wide circulation, and I drew very heavily on my memories of Barsoom and of reading those books in creating the Mars in that screenplay, which also had canals, and savage tribesmen, and weird creatures, and all of that. So I never lost touch with that material, it always remained very important to me, and it was in part because of my experience writing that screenplay that I ended up coming onto the radar screen of Andrew Stanton.

With the John Carter screenplay, how did you balance staying true to the source material versus the needs of the current project?

Andrew Stanton and Mark Andrews, his collaborator, had already made a lot of the hard decisions about what to keep and what to let go. They had already analyzed the multiple characters . . . say, there are three evil Thark chieftains, and we really only need one evil Thark chieftain, we don’t need three. Burroughs introduces the idea of telepathy, everyone on Barsoom is telepathic. It’s a terrible idea, and Burroughs realizes that very quickly, and completely abandons it eventually, because it makes storytelling impossible. If everybody can read everyone else’s mind, you can’t have secret plans, you can’t have hidden agendas, and those are the meat and potatoes of storytelling. So even Edgar Rice Burroughs betrayed his own story, so in a sense we had his imprimatur. Another example is the fact that John Carter is immortal when we first meet him in the first book. It’s this really bizarre element that Burroughs apparently derived from a popular novel of the time, and it has nothing to do with anything, it’s completely irrelevant, and again he very quickly just . . . he doesn’t even abandon it, it just withers away and never returns.

As I said, they had already made a lot of those choices, they had already made a lot of those decisions. They had also made I think the very key decision to take material from the first three novels, and to consider those first three novels in the series as a whole, and then to look at the entire matter of those three novels as potentially the matter for three films. Each of those films would be conceived independently to tell its own discrete story separate from the others, so that if you didn’t see the first film and you only saw the second one, you wouldn’t be lost, you would be able to follow what was going on, and it would present you with a satisfying experience on its own, and so there are elements in the first film, the one that we’re talking about today, that don’t actually appear in the novels until the second book. And I think again, with all due respect to Edgar Rice Burroughs, who as I’ve already said is one of my great literary gods going back to the age of eleven, but he was making it up as he was going along. He was writing by the seat of his pants, he was writing for money, he was writing very quickly, he was being paid half a cent a word. A Princess of Mars was the first thing he ever wrote, ever. He didn’t really know what he was doing yet, as none of us would, as none of us did when we wrote the first thing that we ever wrote.

And clearly he was remarkably gifted, that he was able to do such a good job on the first time out, but he got better. By the time you get to the fifth book, Chessmen of Mars, that’s actually a really good book written by an experienced professional writer with a lot of words under his belt. Like any pulp writer of his time, there wasn’t time to go back and ask yourself, “Does it really make sense for all of my characters’ names to begin either with an ‘S’ or a ‘TH’?” No, it’s a terrible idea, it’s really confusing. It was confusing to me as a kid. I had a hard time distinguishing Sarkoja, and Sola, and Tars Tarkas, and Tardos Mors, and Tharks, and Therns, and Thoats. I think if Burroughs had had a little more time, or he had an editor who had a little more time, they probably would have gone over those things and straightened it out a little bit, and clarified it. We were saddled to a certain degree with things that could not be changed, like the names of the most important characters, for example, but boy did we wish we could change them.

Your ultimate goal is to create a good movie, or even a great movie. Your ultimate goal is not to literally transcribe the action of the book onto film, which would ultimately I think be doing a dishonor to the book, because you would be able to capture none of the rich, strange magic of that book in so doing, and therefore you’re ultimately betraying the book.

In your memoir Manhood for Amateurs, John Carter actually comes up during a conversation about whether or not to circumcise your son. Could you talk about that?

[Laughs] Well, it was in the context of discussing with my wife the argument that many opponents of circumcision put forward that having a foreskin increases a man’s sexual pleasure, and it’s a tantalizing argument for a circumcised man to contemplate, but then it also involves a certain amount of impossibility, of failure of imagination, because, I mean, for one thing, how much more pleasurable do I need sex to be? It’s already pretty awesome, and furthermore, what would that be? I can’t even begin to imagine it, and in trying to imagine the unimaginable, whenever I’m confronted with a problem of, you know, irrational numbers, or string theory, anything that’s asking you to imagine the unimaginable—for example, greater sexual pleasure, in this case—I always come back to the nine rays of the Barsoomian spectrum, the nine colors of the Barsoomian spectrum, where we are told by Burroughs that there are nine colors, and as a kid I just would try to imagine what other colors there could be besides the seven basic colors, and what they would look like, and how you would even know that’s what they were if you had earthly eyes, and so on. And so that’s how Barsoom worked its way into that particular discussion.

You’ve said that you started out wanting to be a fantasy and science fiction writer. How did you end up writing books like Wonder Boys instead?

Well, it’s not that I wanted to be a fantasy and science fiction writer, it’s that I wanted to be a writer, and when I imagined the kinds of books that I wanted to write, they were the kind of books that I loved to read, so at any given moment in my life from the point that I decided to be a writer forward, which was around this time—I discovered Burroughs and then Arthur Conan Doyle right around the same time, and those were kind of my first two crushes—I would imagine writing books that I loved to read. When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write.

And just as I got older and read more, and read more widely, those imagined books changed along with my readerly diet, although I never stopped reading—and I still to this day have never stopped reading—fantasy and science fiction. I just started re-reading Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, which I haven’t read in about thirty years, and I’m a big Iain Banks fan. I never abandoned genre fiction as a reader at all, and what happened, you know, after The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys, the book you mentioned, and the short stories that I wrote at the beginning of my career as a published writer, is it presented me eventually with this puzzle to myself of “What happened to that idea of writing the kinds of books that you love to read?” And yes, the books that I was writing were modeled to some degree or another on other books that I loved, but my diet as a reader had never abandoned things that my output as a writer was just clearly not reflecting, and I wondered about that, like, “Why? Why does my backlist look so monochromatic, when the spectrum of my reading is so multicolored?”

And I didn’t really have a good answer. I had a lot of shameful, cowardly answers for that question. Like, I had been taught early on in college and graduate school that I wouldn’t be taken seriously if I wrote genre fiction, and not only would I not be taken seriously, but people just really didn’t want to read it, like, my workshop mates and my workshop leaders. I had workshop leaders who just out-and-out said, “Please do not turn science fiction in to this workshop.” That was discouraging, obviously, and if I had had more courage and more integrity, I might have stood up to it more than I did, but I wanted to be read, and I wanted to receive whatever benefits there were to be received from the people I was in workshop with, and the teachers I was studying from, and, you know, I wasn’t looking for a fight, and it wasn’t like I don’t love F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov, and Eudora Welty, and all those people. I love their work just as much—if not more, in some cases—as Arthur C. Clarke, or Frank Herbert, or whoever it might have been. So I had just sort of allowed myself to fall into this channel as a writer that at some point I realized I didn’t want to be limited to anymore.

You also edited two anthologies from McSweeney’s with the aim of exposing readers to a wider range of genres and making it okay for short stories to have a plot. How successful would you say that was, and why did the project stop after two books?

I don’t know. I would like to know how successful the project was. I mean, in terms of the short story, I don’t think it worked. If you take a quick look at the—I’m always going to put this term in quotes, maybe we can just have this be understood—but at the so-called “literary” outlets for short fiction, I don’t see a whole lot of ghost stories, and sea stories, and pirate tales being presented in the literary context. What I was really trying to do was rekindle my own interest in the short story form, which had abated quite a lot when I first began to contemplate what emerged as that first McSweeney’s issue #10. I mean, I’ve written very little in the way of short fiction since then, so even on a personal level it didn’t really work. But when you turn to the novel, you look at the most recent novels by Colson Whitehead, Gary Shteyngart, Rick Moody, Cormac McCarthy. There are so many examples, there’s almost been a little floodlet of so-called “literary” writers either embracing or circling around clear literary genres.

You wrote this great Lovecraftian horror story called “The God of Dark Laughter.” How did that story come about, and were you surprised to see it appear in The New Yorker?

Well, that was actually sort of my second foray. I created this fictional character in the novel Wonder Boys of August Van Zorn, who we’re told is a writer of Lovecraftian horror fiction who had an early influence on the main character of that book, and at some point I just got the idea to try to write an August Van Zorn story. You know, the pseudonym has always existed as a way to protect the quote-unquote “serious literary writer” from the taint of genre fiction, and that’s how August Van Zorn used it. In the book, his real name is Albert Vetch, and he writes under the name of August Van Zorn because he’s a professor of literature, and he has to use a pseudonym for that kind of sordid fare that he’s cranking out, and that pseudonym was there for me as a kind of fig leaf too, to just imagine writing a straight piece of horror fiction that wasn’t “meta” or playing with the tropes of horror fiction in a literary way. I just wanted to write a straight-out story about awful goings-on in this small western Pennsylvania town that turned out to be rooted in some ancient cult of the Elder Ones, just straight ahead Lovecraftian Mythos kind of stuff, and I guess I felt when I did that that I had to protect myself under that pseudonym of August Van Zorn that I had created—it was a double fiction at that point.

And I wrote a story that was called “In the Black Mill,” and when I finished it I thought it came out well. I believe my agent sent it to The New Yorker, who wouldn’t even—I mean, it spent a very brief period of time on the editorial desk there before re-emerging with its dignity somewhat in tatters, and then she sent it to Playboy, to a great fiction editor who used to be at Playboy named Alice Turner, who was a great champion of all kinds of genre writing in the literary context, and she took it and wanted to publish it, but she insisted that I publish it under my own name. And god bless her, because that was right. I wrote that story, and if I want to write a piece of Lovecraftian horror fiction, I not only have the freedom to do so, but I also ought to be proud of it, and put my name on it, and let it just go out there along with everything else that I’ve written. So that was published in Playboy, and it got a little bit of attention from the horror fiction crowd, and it got included in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, the Datlow anthology, and that encouraged me.

And so at some point a little idea popped into my head about clowns, and what if clowns really looked that way, and it wasn’t make-up at all. And there’s something really horrifying to me in that thought. I mean, “coulrophobia” has a name because a lot of people think clowns are terrifying and creepy, it’s not just John Wayne Gacy’s fault. There’s something about a clown in the abstract, with the white skin and the red mouth and all that. It’s bizarre anybody could have ever thought it was anything but horrifying, in my opinion. But in any case, just trying to get at that, and wonder about clowns, and why they look the way they do, and in trying to answer that question, the answer occurred to me in the form of a horror story, and this time I just wrote it without any monkey business about it being by August Van Zorn or any of that, but I set it in the same fictional Van Zornian universe of Plunkettsburg, which is the western Pennsylvania town that he set all his fiction in, as we’re told in Wonder Boys. That was more for my own pleasure, it had nothing to do with wanting to wear a fig leaf of respectability anymore. That time, and maybe it’s proof that something had changed, because my agent sent that one first to The New Yorker, and they took it, and maybe part of the reason for that is because it was a little more thinkable, a little less unacceptable, for them to publish a piece of straight genre fiction, and the fact that they’ve published Stephen King since then suggests that there has been a change.

And that’s as it should be, because that’s where it all comes from. One of the points I was trying to make in those McSweeney’s anthologies, and in the introductions I wrote for those, is that it was not even 100 years ago—and certainly as long ago as 150 years ago—when all kinds of incredibly important work was being done by writers in France, and England, and Russia, and Germany. The great European literary 19th-century tradition is a genre tradition, and it’s unmistakably, unashamedly, unabashedly in the works of the greatest writers of the 19th century. You find sea stories, and ghost stories, and adventure stories, and early forms of proto-science fiction and fantasy, across the board. And that kind of boundarylessness, or literary realms where the boundaries are very porous and indistinct, and can be reconfigured at will, is much more interesting and appealing to me as a writer than a world where the categories are really set and really distinct, and the boundaries are really high, and people have to stay where they start, and can’t move out of those categories. I mean, that’s just inherently deathly. And the reasons why it changed are bad reasons, they’re economic and financial and marketing kinds of reasons, and they have to do with snobbery and academic laziness. I mean, there are almost no good reasons involved for that change that took place since writers like Dickens, who wrote crime fiction and supernatural fiction as easily as social realist fiction, and often all in the same story.

You also just had a short story in The New Yorker called “Citizen Conn.” Could you say what made you want to go back to the theme of comic book creators?

That was actually a story I had started a while ago and had abandoned because I couldn’t figure out how to finish it, and I stumbled across it and reread it, and suddenly it was clear to me how it needed to be resolved, and I rewrote it, and so in a way I returned very literally to a fictional world I had left behind, because I started that story a while after Kavalier & Clay, but not so long after Kavalier & Clay. You know, I think some stories just take that long, that one took a decade to write, and I’ve had that experience before with returning to a short story that I wasn’t able to finish, and after many years suddenly having it clear to me what needs to be done. I think it’s just part of the process sometimes. But it wasn’t like I made any kind of deliberate decision of “Oh, now it’s time to go back to comics” at all. I truly just was going through my hard drive looking for something, and I saw that file, and I opened it up, and I was like, “Oh my god, I forgot about this story. Wow, this is actually kind of a good beginning, you know, why did I stop working on this?” And then I got to the point where I had left off and thought, “Oh, I remember now. I couldn’t figure out what to do. And now what about this?” It was just an accident.

Are there any other new or upcoming projects that you’d like to mention?

Well, I have a novel coming out in September from HarperCollins called Telegraph Avenue. That’s the main thing, that’s the only for-certain thing. I’m working on a project at Disney right now, a film called Magic Kingdom. I’m doing a revision of a pre-existing script, working with Jon Favreau, but that’s still in the pretty early stages. And then my wife and I are developing a TV series for HBO with strong genre connections, which is called Hobgoblin, and it’s about a team of con artists and stage magicians and various charlatans who are assembled by British intelligence during World War II to fight against German spies, and we’re having a lot of fun with that one, but again that’s also a long way away from any kind of certainty.

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

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Armored, 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: Other Worlds Than These (July, Night Shade), Epic (Fall, Tachyon), and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor). Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

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

Interview: Vernor Vinge
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Vernor Vinge is the author of many novels, including Hugo Award-winners A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, and Rainbows End, as well as acclaimed novels The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime. His latest novel is The Children of the Sky.

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

You’re famous for coining the phrase “The Technological Singularity.” How did you first come up with that?

I used that term first, I think, at an artificial intelligence conference in 1982. Actually, it was a conference with Marvin Minsky, the famous A.I. researcher, and several science fiction writers were on the panel—Robert Sheckley and Jim Hogan. I made the observation that if we got human-level artificial intelligence, that would certainly be a world-shaking event, and if we got superhuman-level intelligence, then what happened afterward would be fundamentally unintelligible. In the past, when some new invention came along, it generally made all sorts of unexpected consequences, but those consequences could be understood. The example I like to use is that if you had a magical time machine and you could bring Mark Twain forward into the 21st century, you could explain our world to him and he would understand it quite quickly. He’d come up to speed in a day or two, and he would probably have a very good time with it. On the other hand, if you tried to do that explanatory experiment with a goldfish, there’s no way you could explain our world to a goldfish in a way that would be meaningful, as it is to us humans.

That is a consequence of this particular type of progress—that is, in making creatures that are smarter than humans. And I think it was probably even as I was talking on this panel, it occurred to me that the term for that was a little bit like with a black hole. There are only a few types of information you can get out of a black hole—in general relativity—and this was sort of a social or a technological example of the same sort of thing. Now, the particular idea of super-intelligence—not just A.I., but superhuman intelligence A.I.—is intrinsic in stuff that had been going on back at least to the ’50s, and the notion that it would be something that would not be understandable was probably lurking out there too. I think the only thing I said on that panel that made a special difference was the term, which I think highlighted the situation.

What are some of the scenarios for how the Singularity might unfold?

I think there are all sorts of different paths to the Singularity, at least five pretty different paths. I think they’re going to be all mixed together, but it still helps to think about them separately because it makes them easier to track. For instance, there’s classical artificial intelligence. You just build a big machine and hope you can figure out some way to make it very, very smart. Or really one that is very much I think in a lot of people’s minds now is simply that the internet plus the people on the internet—so the internet, its computers, its support software, its server farms, and then billions of human beings—those together could come to constitute a superhuman entity that would qualify as giving us a Singularity.

Another path to the Singularity that in many ways is the most attractive—and actually was also the topic of the first science fiction story I ever wrote that sold—is the notion of “intelligence amplification,” which is that we get user interfaces with computers that are so transparent to us that it’s like the computer is what David Brin calls our “neo-neocortex.” What’s nice about that is that we actually get to be direct participants, and in that particular case, when I say that the post-Singularity world is unintelligible, well, yeah, it is unintelligible to the likes of you and me, but it would not be unintelligible to the participants that are using intelligence amplification. I have a friend in robotics that I brought this up with long, long ago, and he said, “Well, Vernor, I really don’t have any argument with the claims you’re making about what’s going to happen, except this business about it being unintelligible—it’s not unintelligible if you are riding the curve of increasing intelligence.” And then he smiled and said, “And I intend to ride that curve.”

There are at least two other possibilities. One is simply bio-science raising human intelligence by enhancing our memory and enhancing our ability to think clearly, and then I think there’s one that is becoming more evident but is sort of off-stage, and that is the notion of a “Digital Gaia,” a sort of internet under the internet that consists of all the networked embedded microprocessors in the world, and the Digital Gaia is certainly the most alien of the different possibilities. In fact, I sort of like to trot it out to give an example of something that’s pretty obviously very strange and hard to understand. If you could imagine something like where the world becomes its own database, where reality itself wakes up. Actually, more than anything else it looks like some sort of implementation of animism. So that particular possibility, Digital Gaia, to me is certainly the most alien and in some ways the most nervous-making, because if the world woke up, then a lot of our common sense about the world is not valid anymore. Karl Schroeder had a great book that discussed this sort of possibility, and that was his novel Ventus.

Which works of science fiction do you think have featured the best treatment of the Singularity?

Probably the most courageous walkthrough into the Singularity was Accelerando by Charles Stross. He actually follows the development from, I think, the 2010s through the 2070s. He also said that by the time they got to the 2070s, he’s no longer seriously claiming that what he’s describing would be like the post-Singular world. I suspect that comment was related to the notion that after several decades of this, things would be seriously beyond what a writer could understand in our era, and what the readers of our era would understand.

As a retired math professor, how useful do you think mathematical models are for predicting the future?

There are a lot of different things that go under the name “mathematical models.” Moore’s Law is an observation about the past that’s turned around as an extrapolation about the future. There are a lot of different things that are mathematical models, and my attitude toward them is very cautious. I think one of the most important nonfiction books so far this century is Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan. But I fear that what’s happening with that book is a lot of people give it lip service. “Oh, yeah, Taleb really has a good point in The Black Swan about not trusting certain sorts of models.” The thing is, there are mathematical models that are so seductively attractive that even though people recognize that they are not workable, they still go and use them because they’re so easy to use and they give such definite answers. So that’s a book I recommend for everybody to read, and it illustrates fundamental problems with dealing with models when you’re also dealing with people.

Ray Kurzweil has gotten a lot of attention recently for his optimism about extending human life spans. What do you think about his predictions?

First of all, I’m all for human life extension. In The Singularity is Near, I think, he has a nice discussion of the situation that a lot of essayists have, where they say, “Oh, we really don’t want that. A wise and philosophical person realizes that life needs be limited, and that’s a good thing.” He does a good job of criticizing that point of view, and I certainly agree with that. Furthermore, I think that a human lifespan of a thousand years with post-Singularity technology is easily doable. I think a lifespan of a thousand years would actually—Singularity aside—do human society and human nature a great deal of good, and I don’t think it is that difficult, it probably can even be achieved without having a Technological Singularity.

Life spans of 10,000 to 100,000 years, then you begin to look at what’s involved, the humans that are involved, and how capable a human mind is of absorbing variety. Larry Niven had a story many years ago called “The Ethics of Madness,” in which—it’s not the main point of the story, I don’t think, the main point of the action—but the story includes the notion of a person who lives to be 100,000 or 200,000 years old. It is really scary what they are like in the last 100,000 years or so. It raises some questions about what it means to be alive. It’s really not what you would want. This is a different sort of complaint than the complaint of all these people that say, “Oh, humans were not meant to live more than a hundred years or so.”

The complaint or the criticism here is that the human mind has a certain level of ability to handle different sorts of complexity, and if you believe that you could go 100,000 years and not be turned into a repeating tape loop, well, then let’s talk about a longer period of time. How about a billion years, or a hundred billion years? At a hundred billion years, you’re out there re-engineering the universe. The age of the universe becomes your chief longevity problem. But there’s still the issue of, what would it be like to be you after that? This raises the point, which actually I’m sure is also on Ray’s mind, that if you’re going to last that long, you have to become something greater, and the Singularity is ideally set up to supply that. So [for] the people who are into the intelligence amplification mode of looking at these things, this all fits. And I’m not saying that in a critical and negative way, it does all fit, and it puts you in a situation where you are talking realistically about living very long periods of time, perhaps so long that you have to re-engineer the universe because the universe is not long-lived enough. At the same time, you have to be growing and growing and growing. I mean, intellectually growing.

Now, if you look at that situation, it ultimately gets you, I think, to a very interesting philosophical point, which really I don’t think was within the horizon of what people normally thought about two or three or four hundred years ago. And that is, if you did grow intellectually, would you be the same person? Well, most of us would argue that we are pretty much the same person as far back as we can remember. You know, we have changes in viewpoint, but what you were when you were five and what you are now, there is certainly a community of self-interest there, and it probably doesn’t bother most people too much. They feel good about what they know now, and they feel sympathetic to what they were then.

Now, compare yourself to the zygote that became you. It’s a little bit more of an empathetic stretch necessary there. I’m sure that I understand my zygote as well as it ever understood itself, but I bet you that it doesn’t understand me very well. In fact, the amount of it that’s still in me is at a very low level, even in terms of the genes. There’s what’s happened in terms of epigenetic things since that zygote began to grow. Push that further, and the little part of this story that actually is you becomes more and more diluted. So if you really are serious about talking about living forever, not just living for a thousand years or a hundred thousand years, if you’re really serious about that, you come face to face with the same general issues that the Singularity raises, and that is issues of identity and mind.

I don’t mean this as pessimistic, and I certainly don’t mean it to put down the idea of living for a very long time, but it just raises the issue that, in a very cool way, we have come to a point where we can talk with some realism about getting the things that humans have always wanted so much, and actually facing that up close and seeing that we can do it, it pushes optimism to the point where it is, not unreasonably, something that makes people nervous.

I listened to a talk where you mentioned that one of the drawbacks of the space program is that it would give a lot more people what amounts to WMD capability. Could you talk about that?

If you google my name and the phrase “What if the Singularity does not happen?” that was in that talk. And I’m very proud of that talk, partly because I think that for scenario planners and science fiction writers in general, it’s always good that if you have some idea about what the future’s going to be like, that you also work out a scenario where it doesn’t happen, and try to explain plausibly why it might not happen. And actually, one doesn’t have to scratch that talk very deeply to see that it’s the background for my novel A Deepness in the Sky. Most of the latter part of the talk is how important space travel is for human survival, but there is also the fact that, in the short term at least, when all our eggs are still in one basket, namely on the surface of the Earth, that to be able to get something up to orbital speeds gives it a lot of kinetic energy, and those levels of kinetic energy are—depending on the mass involved—comparable to some pretty serious weapons that could do us grief at least at a city level.

So I think actually, as with all technologies, there are dangers and downsides. I would say these are relatively mild. Probably if we do get space flight there’s going to be rules of the road for anything inside cislunar space. And there’s going to be people watching pretty carefully, especially objects that are very massive. Anybody who sends an asteroid into cislunar space I think is going to be watched very, very carefully, because there you’re getting up to a level of kinetic energy weapon that would do serious damage to everybody on Earth. I have a small theory that this is one reason why space travel development has gone slowly, in that it gives a military advantage in an unclear way, and the top players were not interested in poking that particular gorilla, so they just settled for very much slower progress. I think we are entering an era now where we will see a renaissance in space flight. I hope it’s not a military renaissance, which would do the job but would probably raise the risks of the sort of threat that you are talking about. And ultimately, of course, having self-sufficient settlements off Earth is one of the most important insurance policies that the human race can have. Since we don’t know about any life anywhere else in the universe, one could also regard it as a life insurance policy for life itself in the universe.

Another thing in that lecture that really struck me is that you seemed fairly optimistic about the potential for human civilization to rebuild itself following a complete collapse. I’d always imagined that since we’ve already extracted all the easily obtainable oil and coal and so on, that would be very difficult. Could you talk about the issues with that?

That’s a really important point, how difficult it is to come back from a civilizational collapse. I’m going to say some optimistic things here, and I don’t mean them to trivialize what happens if you had a civilizational collapse. I mean, if we had a civilizational collapse, even a fairly mild one, you and I would almost certainly be dead. And a serious collapse that involved most of the people dying would obviously do that to most of the human race. It’s just absolutely ghastly. On the other hand, I think that coming back would actually be a very big surprise. The difference between us and us, say, 10,000 years ago . . . there are obvious differences, like the level of our technology. But there’s another, more important difference, and that is, we know it can be done. I think the human race wandered around for tens of thousands of years sort of bouncing from one stupid, mean-spirited solution to another, because we had no idea what could be done.

Now, one aspect that you brought up was how we’ve mined all the easily accessible stuff. I disagree with that, with one exception—fossil fuels. I agree when it comes to fossil fuels. But almost every other resource—well, actually, I should also say that if we had a really bad collapse and managed to destroy the ecosphere, that’s another resource that would be hard to get back. But the stuff that we mine otherwise, we have concentrated that. I imagine that ruins of cities are richer ore fields than most of the natural ore fields that we have used historically. And not only at the level of ore, but at the level of all sorts of technological things. Just pre-built steel beams in large cities are all over the place, and they’re quite hard to make. If you really got knocked back a long way, they’re quite hard to make. With higher sorts of technology, it becomes more and more debatable whether it would still be working, but it’s obvious that a lot of bulk technology is just there for the picking up. And this would make things go very, very fast when combined with the notion that we’d know what’s going on. Depending on how far we got knocked back, we’d have lots of detailed knowledge, even humans that remembered what things were like. Although technology built from scratch by people who not only had no idea about technology but no idea that it could even be done, in a world where there were no ruined cities . . . yeah, that would be something that would be very problematical to happen in any near-term sort of way.

I had a very interesting chat with [science fiction author] David Weber a few years ago. We were wandering around the American Library Association dealer’s floor, chatting about this exact issue, and I found that actually David Weber had a point of view that I have come to subscribe to, which is even more optimistic. His assertion was that human population could be a long time coming back, just because of human biology, but he felt that if we did not get wiped out, if there were humans left afterward, that there would be areas on Earth at 1800 to 1900 levels of technology within one human lifetime of the crash, and I’ve thought about that a lot, and I can see how it fits with the rest of the argument that I was peddling but that I didn’t have quite that much optimism for. Now, having said all that, I am afraid that it might lead some people to the conclusion that I’m saying, “Oh, there will be a bad day or two, but don’t worry about those disasters, you know, we’ll muddle through and be back as good as new before you can say ‘Jack Robinson,’” and I am not saying that. First of all, there are disasters that could kill everybody, and there’s also just the level of destruction that we are talking about, and the level of human tragedy, and the tragedy for the earth. Looking at the universe as a whole, furthermore, it is entirely plausible that there are disasters that nobody ever climbs out of. And so I would say that I am just as concerned about disasters as anyone. I have this region of the problem that I am more optimistic about than some people, but overall, avoiding existential threats is at the top of my to-do list.

Within the science fiction field, two of the concepts you’re best known for are the idea of the “zones of thought” and the idea of the “gestalt-sentient species.” How did you come up with those ideas?

Both the zones of thought and the Tines group mind critters started out in the same milieu. The zones of thought were my attempt to get around the limitations that it seems to me the Technological Singularity imposes on us science fiction writers. And the magical assumption—and it is a magical assumption—about the zones of thought is that superhuman intelligence is simply impossible in certain parts of the galaxy. And then, as sort of a fillip, I added two other zones. One was an intermediate zone in which superhuman intelligence was not possible but faster-than-light drives were. So in one universe I was able to have three or four different subgenres of hard science fiction. One is about the Technological Singularity, one is about faster-than-light travel, and one is where faster-than-light travel is not possible. Then there was a fourth zone, which is essentially intractable, and that is where even human-level intelligence is not possible, and that’s the Unthinking Depths. So that gave me a nice single universe that I could have accomplished otherwise only by doing it as a progression in time, as technology improved, different things becoming possible.

The Tines were not really to solve a problem like the zones were. The Tines grew out of my idea box—as ideas occur to me I write them down, and one observation that I made a long time ago, when I read science fictions stories, I noticed that there were all sorts of science fiction stories about group minds. The Borg was not the first such. They go back to probably the beginning of the 20th century, and they were very big in Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. But one thing I noticed is that these group minds usually involved very large numbers of members. The individual members might be of human intelligence or they might only be of animal intelligence, but the ensemble was actually a very large group, and I noticed there were hardly ever any group minds where there were three or four or five members. It definitely had been done—for instance, Poul Anderson had a novel, I think in the Flandry series, that involved a race where each individual is actually from a different species. There was an avian type, and an herbivore type, and I think there was an ape type, and it took the three of them to make a single person.

That may be the only such story that I remember, at least at the time I made the observation, so that had been lying around in my idea box for a long time, and I decided to use it, and I think the great piece of good luck—from a purely writer standpoint in using the idea—was I decided to make the group members from a species that was at least vaguely doglike. So that meant that I had a lot of leverage with what we humans are already familiar with. We’re familiar with dealing with dogs as individuals, and we’re familiar—less familiar, but somewhat familiar—with dealing with dogs as part of pack-like groups. So an awful lot of stuff sort of came along with that idea, and I did not have to further explain those sorts of things. They were sort of already rooted in the consciousness of most readers. So adding the notion that the pack itself was intelligent meant that a whole lot of things were very, very easy to do, and lots of language was easy to use in terms of packs and in terms of group behavior.

Your latest novel is called The Children of the Sky. What’s it about?

The Children of the Sky is a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, and when I say “sequel,” I mean sequel as that term is understood by most people nowadays. I’ve sort of made a career of writing strange sequels, like sequels that take place 50 million years later, or sequels that take place 10,000 years earlier, and things like that. This is really a canonical sequel—it takes place two to ten years after the end of A Fire Upon the Deep. It has many of the surviving characters from A Fire Upon the Deep, and it follows along with their problems. It’s not giving anything away, but one disappointing thing about it is that it really doesn’t get into space. It’s all on Tines World, and it’s about the travails of the refugee children, who have now all been revived—almost all the survivors have been revived from the refugee ship in A Fire Upon the Deep, and so it follows their adventures along with these pack-minded creatures called the Tines.

Are there any other new or upcoming projects you’d like to mention?

I’m trying to decide what is the right next thing to write. I’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback from people who want the sequel to the sequel, that is, the sequel to The Children of the Sky, and I do have ideas for that. I also have ideas for near future things on Earth, which tie in more to the sort of things that we’ve been talking about earlier in this interview. Every time I turn around now, you know, it’s 2012! We are going into the middle of things, and maybe it’s my imagination, but I think there are all sorts of things that are visible now that were not so visible before, and I think that there’s all sorts of really cool science fiction that folks could write, and I hope to be one of those folks.

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

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Armored, 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: Other Worlds Than These (July, Night Shade), Epic (Fall, Tachyon), and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor). Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

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

Artist Gallery
Mikhail Rakhmatullin

Artist Showcase: Mikhail Rakhmatullin
J. T. Glover

Mikhail Rakhmatullin is a Russian artist who lives in Moscow. Most of his work these days is created digitally, though he also has training in traditional media. His paintings range from concept landscapes to character portraits to scenes of high tension. Some of his paintings are crisp and contour-focused, and others are rendered in a looser, more painterly style. Like many F/SF artists, Rakhmatullin has done illustration work for computer games, including the mobile-based game Keltika, and he’s entered various competitions for gaming artists, including Dominance War.

Rakhmatullin’s characters often confront the viewer head-on, whether the subject is an alien with skin as variegated as an artist’s palette, or a mechanic who is, beneath all of the technology, aging, grizzled, and subject to the wear and tear of time. The environments he creates range from the nearly abstract to the thoroughly-realized worlds of his concept landscapes and battle scenes. The best of his work, however, comes when he draws the viewer’s eye toward the painting’s center of interest and allows the rest of the work to stay vague, or at least partially unrendered. “Goddess of Rebirth” is a fine example of this, with the painting’s subject depicted in evocative, jewel-like detail, and much of the rest of the picture left to the viewer’s imagination.

While many fantasy and science fiction artists gravitate toward one kind of subject, or at least to either fantasy or science fiction, Rakhmatullin is equally adept with a variety of subjects. Whether painting a monstrous portrait or the iconic man with a gun, facing down the oncoming zombies, his paintings have a quiet, confident serenity about them that conveys the reality of the worlds he depicts. Just as effective at conveying a sense of reality about his unrealities is the sense of mingled pathos and humor that shows in many of his paintings, like “Hedgehog” or “Snow Girl.” Mikhail Rakhmatullin appears willing to let a work be what it wants to be, and one can only hope that this trend will continue as his art develops.

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.

Nightside on Callisto
Linda Nagata

A faint, steady vibration carried through the igloo’s massive ice walls—a vibration that shouldn’t have been there. Jayne heard it in her sleep. Age had not dulled her soldier’s reflexes, honed by decades spent on watch against incursions of the Red. Her eyes snapped open. She held her breath. The vibration hummed in the walls, in the bed frame, in the mattress, perceivable even over Carly’s raspy breathing.

Jayne reminded herself that the Red was far, far away, its existence bound to Earth, where it bled through every aspect of life—a relentless tide of information and influence shepherding the thoughts and actions of billions along paths determined by its unknowable goals. Whether the Red was alive, or aware, Jayne couldn’t say, and she had no opinion either on its virtue. She only wanted to keep it out of the Shell Cities. Most of her life had gone to the long defense of their growing union, an association of scattered orbital habitats determined to stay free of the Red. But in retirement, Jayne had found new opportunities.

Less than twenty-four hours ago, her team of four had touched down on Callisto, Jupiter’s outermost Galilean moon and the only one that lay beyond the gas giant’s killing radiation belts. A raft of construction equipment had preceded them, including a gang of ten small mechs that had assembled a sprawling igloo in time for them to move in. It was the team’s task to establish a prototype ice-mining station to supply the expansion of the Shell Cities.

Maybe the vibration was generated by some new construction activity at the launch rail? Probably that was it. But “probably” never was a sufficient explanation. Jayne slipped out from under the shared blanket, careful not to wake Carly, who’d crawled into bed just an hour ago. Each team member worked a staggered, twelve-hour shift. Jayne had taken the first rotation, and her night was almost through.

The air-skin membrane lining the walls and the ceiling sensed her movement and responded with a glimmer of vague gray illumination. Jayne stood up slowly on sleep-stiffened limbs. A century of existence had left her thin and tough and inclined to feel cold, so over a foundation of thermal underwear she added insulated slacks, a pullover of the same material, thin gloves for her hands, and cozy house boots for her feet—one more layer in the cocoon that protected them from the cold and vacuum beyond the igloo’s walls.

Jayne knew with utter certainty that they were alone in Jupiter system. The Red could not be here—the lightspeed lag in information flow kept it confined near Earth—and no other expedition had ventured so far in years. So their team was on its own, with no backup if something went wrong—which was why the four of them had been awarded this project: They were each experienced, competent, and expendable.

The bedchamber was sealed off from the rest of the igloo by an air-skin lock. Jayne touched the membrane. It felt smooth and hard beneath her gloved hand, but when she swept her fingers across it, the skin lock responded, pulling aside in neat, glassy ripples.

Massive blocks of ancient ice made up the igloo’s walls and ceiling, insulating the interior spaces from background radiation, but it was the air-skin that made the igloo habitable. A semi-intelligent, quasi-living tissue, the skin lined every chamber, locking in pressure, and providing heat and fresh air. If perforated, it would self-seal, and its motility allowed it to repair even major tears.

Jayne stepped past the plastic-panel door into a central alcove with toilets and showers on either side. Two steps ahead, a lock on the right stood open to the easy room with its cushy inflatable furnishings, food stores, and oven, while on the left, another open lock hooked up to HQ, where the work was done. Jayne heard Berit speaking. She couldn’t make out the words, but Berit’s sharp, angry tone confirmed Jayne’s first suspicion: Something had gone wrong.

Jayne resisted the impulse to sprint into HQ. Age and experience had taught her to always attend to basics, so she slipped into the toilet first, and only when that necessity was out of the way did she trot around the corner.

Berit heard her coming and greeted her with a scowl. She was ninety-nine, an age that could be seen in the translucence of her brown skin, in the drape of tissue around her stern eyes, and in the thinning of her bright white hair. Like Jayne, Berit had lived most of her life as a soldier in the defense force and, like Jayne, she’d been lucky, surviving to tell the tale. The two women had partnered on more assignments than either cared to remember. “What woke you up?” Berit snapped.

“The smell of trouble. Why am I hearing tones of displeasure in your voice?”

“Because I am not pleased.”

Lorelei was their civilian engineer, a petite, soft-spoken woman who, at a hundred-and-three, was older even than Jayne. She provided more details without turning away from a 3D model of the station. “Our mechs are tainted. Something’s gotten into them and they aren’t accepting commands.”

“The Red followed us here,” Berit added, with fatalistic certainty.

When Jayne joined them, they made a circle around the model. “How?”

Lorelei looked up, her deep blue eyes nestled in the folds and rough texture of her dark skin. Her hair was brilliant white and still thick despite the years, confined in a heavy braid at her shoulder. She opened her mouth to speak—and a high-pitched whistle screamed through the igloo. Jayne’s ears popped. The air-skin lock rustled shut, sealing HQ from the rest of the station and muting the whistle, but Jayne could still hear a distant wail of escaping air.

“Pressure suits!” she barked. “Now! Go!”

The suits hung ready on the wall beside the external lock. Jayne had taken only two steps toward them when a faint pop! put an end to the whistle. The igloo shuddered as massive ice blocks groaned against each other. Goddamnit, Jayne thought, grabbing two suits and tossing them to Berit and Lorelei. Goddamnit, if the roof comes down . . .

They’d celebrated when they’d won this mission, knowing they’d gotten it because it was risky and because they were old. Medical technologists in the Shell Cities had learned to minimize the deterioration of old age so that hale and healthy lifespans stretched past a century, but inevitable, catastrophic failure still loomed: a blood vessel bursting in the brain, a heart chamber undergoing sudden collapse, a lung growing irreparably brittle. The cold fact was, none of them had much time left. If they didn’t survive this mission, well, only a handful of unlived years would be lost. But in the meantime they were privileged to set foot on one of Jupiter’s moons and to have the chance of leaving the Shell Cities just a little more secure.

And the goddamned roof was not going to come down. Not if Jayne could help it.

She grabbed a third pressure suit and stepped into it, pulling the edges together to let it seal.

A pressure suit was just another form of air-skin, made to wrap around the body. An inch thick in most places, it was powered by slender, flexible fuel cells embedded across the back. Robotic carbon-fiber hands at the sleeve ends exactly mimicked every twitch of Jayne’s own fingers, which remained safe and warm within the sleeves.

Using an artificial hand, Jayne reached up and grabbed her hood, preventing it from sealing. Lorelei and Berit were still wrapping their suits on. “Lorelei, stay here and get those mechs in order. Berit, get outside and figure out what the hell just happened. I’m going after Carly.”

She released her hood, not waiting for an answer. It rolled across her face, where it sealed, shaped, and hardened.

The air-skin lock to the central alcove had sealed, but the color-coded indicator glowed green, confirming full pressure beyond. Jayne passed through, carrying Carly’s suit with her. The lock sealed again behind her.

A glance around the alcove confirmed all the locks had closed. Those to HQ, the easy room, and the toilets, showed green, but the indicator beside the bedchamber flashed in calamitous red.

Jayne bit down on the inside of her lip, remembering Carly’s warmth and her good humor. “Berit?”

“I’m heading out now,” she answered over the suit radio. Then, “Oh.” A single word, the pain in it as sharp as shattered ice. “I see what you’re looking at.”

“I’m going in.” Jayne brushed her fingers across the skin lock. Her suit stiffened as air was evacuated from the alcove, and for a moment she couldn’t move. Then the suit’s crosslinked cells adapted to the pressure change, and once again sensors picked up the motion of her body and echoed it, moving as she moved, tripling her strength—though if the power unit ever ran down, the pressure suit would become her diamond coffin.

She still held onto Carly’s suit, for all the good it would do.

The air-skin opened. Light that didn’t belong illuminated the bedchamber with a faint glow. Their station was sited away from Jupiter and the Sun was too far away to make a difference, but a small measure of starlight spilled in through a ragged hole, three-feet wide and slanting up through a massive block of ice. The light wasn’t enough to make out any details until the suit’s faceplate switched to nightvision. Then Berit’s voice sighed over the com. “Oh, Carly. Blood-red piss! She was trying to get to the lock!”

Carly’s body lay face down against the floor, her legs and hips crushed beneath the ice that had fallen from the ceiling. Her fate had been set the moment Jayne decided to leave her sleeping—while Jayne’s own bitter luck still held.

She forced herself to look away from the body, to look up. The air-skin had been ripped open around the deep, ragged hole in the ice roof. Its tattered edges writhed, questing blindly for each other. More and more of it peeled away from the low ceiling, from the walls. It would keep peeling, until the torn edges could reach each other, and then it would seal. All this, Jayne took in at a glance—and then she noticed movement, just outside the hole: a mech, outlined against the stars.

All ten of the station mechs were the same model. They had a core carapace in the shape of a disk and roughly the size of a seat cushion, mounted on three highly flexible, telescoping legs. Each hemisphere of the carapace had a working arm. The upper half could swivel, so that the two arms could be positioned at any angle to one another. Most often, though, the arms were combined into a single limb for additional strength. By default, mechs stood with their legs at full extension, making them roughly waist high. Half-inch circles of cold blue light dotted their legs and made a glowing belt around their carapaces.

The mech on the igloo’s roof had a subordinate drill unit set up at the edge of the hole. The drill was just a tool with no onboard intelligence. Its cylindrical column waited motionless, while the mech paced around it in what looked like frantic indecision. Jayne felt her skin crawl, watching it. Mechs should not behave that way. She wondered what directive had brought it to the igloo’s roof.

“Lorelei?”

“Here.” Lorelei’s voice was a choked whisper.

“Tell me that mech showed up to repair the damage.”

“I don’t know why it’s there. I can’t know. Its directives have been changed. I can’t get any data out of it. I can’t get any instructions in. The mechs are talking to each other, but they won’t communicate with me.”

Mechs possessed a limited machine intelligence. Though they could learn by experience, they weren’t remotely self-aware, and still . . . the directives that guided them could result in behavior that imitated volition in a truly unsettling way.

As Jayne watched, one of the mech’s arms darted under its belly, then flashed out again, dropping a finger-sized cylinder through the hole. The cylinder fell in slow motion, bouncing off the mound of fallen ice before tumbling to the floor. A bang rod, Jayne realized—a small explosive used by the mechs to quarry the granite-hard ice at Callisto’s surface.

“Get down!” Berit screamed over the suit’s com system. Jayne was already moving, diving behind the bed just before the bang rod exploded with a brilliant flash. The floor jumped, a flash of heat washed past, and then Jayne rolled, the suit providing a smooth muscle-assist to get her to her feet again.

Ice flakes and frozen flecks of blood dropped like snow, blanketing a shallow crater, and the raw, red, frozen mass that had been Carly’s body.

“Lorelei,” Jayne asked in a steely voice, “did that mech just try to blow me up?”

Lorelei’s mind was on other things. She spoke in breathy excitement. “I just found a record of a transmission from the landing pod, right before everything fell apart—”

“What are you talking about? The landing pod’s sitting empty outside our front door. It’s powered down.”

“Power’s back on,” Lorelei said, her voice breaking. “There’s some device in it we didn’t know about. We’re at war, Jayne—”

“I goddamn well know that!”

“—and we’ve just been hit! Whatever was in the pod pumped tainted directives into the mechs and changed their access codes. God knows what they’re programmed to do now—”

“They’re programmed to sabotage this mission,” Berit growled over the com. “Because the Red doesn’t want us growing. We should have seen this coming.”

Jayne watched the mech reach out with a mechanical hand, disconnecting the tether that tied it to the drill subordinate. A second mech appeared, and immediately hopped down through the hole, dropping into the bedchamber with dreamlike lethargy. It was still falling when a six-inch jet of tightly focused blue flame spat from a torch gripped in its mechanical arm. Jayne fell back as it landed in the blast crater. Its telescoping legs flexed to absorb the impact, and then flexed again as it launched itself at her.

Screams filled the com, but Jayne ducked nimbly aside. The mech’s carapace spun around as it landed, its arm extended as it tried to rake her with the torch. But it had been built for construction, not battle. Jayne was faster.

Dodging the flame, she threw herself on top of it, landing chest-first on its carapace. To her surprise, its legs collapsed under her weight. She rode it to the floor, using the suit’s mechanical hands to hold onto its arm, forcing the fiery torch away from her face. With the suit’s muscle-assist, she had as much strength as the mech, and to her astonishment, it stopped struggling after just a few seconds. Its torch switched off.

“What just happened?” Jayne whispered.

Lorelei answered over the com. “It summoned a crane to get the weight off its back. Logical response to baseline directive: ‘Don’t damage yourself.’ Now shut it down.”

“How?”

“There’s a panel on the carapace. Don’t shift your weight. Just feel for it.”

Jayne scowled. She was holding the mech’s arm with both her mechanical hands, but now, cautiously, she let one go. As her carbon-fiber fingers slid around the carapace, the suit replicated the texture for her organic fingers. She found the panel, popped the release, slipped her hand inside.

“This is a whole keypad! What am I supposed to do?”

“Lower two corners. Top center. Press them all at once. Hold them down.”

Jayne did it, suddenly aware of a faint vibration within the mech, only because it ceased.

“That’s it,” Lorelei said grimly. “One down. Nine to go.”

But the mech didn’t look like it had been shut down. The lights on its legs and carapace still glowed. “Lorelei, why are the lights still on?”

“They’re self-powered. Ever tried finding a quiescent mech in the dark?”

Jayne snorted. “So that’s it? That’s all there is to it? We just switch them off? This is going to be—”

“Lorelei!” Berit’s voice cut across the com, edged in panic. “Get outside now! Mechs are above you, drilling on the roof. Jayne—”

“On my way.”

First, though, Jayne took the torch from the switched-off mech and used it to cut a five-foot length out of the twisted remains of the plastic bed frame. Steel would have been better, but at least now she had a weapon with better reach than the torch.

The torn air-skin had continued to peel off the wall, rolling down so far that it was writhing around her, its raw edges beginning to seal. Jayne took a giant step to get on top of it. Then she lobbed her plastic rod through the hole in the roof, vaulting after it with a powerful muscle-assist from the suit.

Under Callisto’s low gravity, she shot up through the hole. Her mechanical fingers hooked over the rim of ice and she hauled herself out onto the roof.

The igloo’s ice blocks had been quarried from beneath the dusty regolith. Impurities in the ice infused it with a gray, piebald cast that gleamed only faintly under the star-spangled sky. The land around was even darker: a gray, granular plane that rolled away to low, encircling hills with steep profiles that rose in black outline against the stars. Frost glimmered faintly, looking like a mist laid across the rounded peaks.

The construction site was a half-mile away, on flat ground, where steel bars for the launch rail were piled up into their own small hill. The mechs should have been at work on the rail bed, but Jayne saw nothing moving out there. Closer in, the landing pod crouched on bent legs, sparkling like gold foil. Jayne spotted two mechs loitering near it. Then she turned, to look across the flat roof.

The blast hole was close to one end. In the open area beyond it, Berit chased a retreating mech. Another circled around to where three drill units bored into the ice above HQ, each one sending up a plume of frost that glittered in the starlight. Jayne imagined the mechs’ simple logic: drills bore holes into ice; bang rods drop into holes; heavy, ice-insulated roofs get blown asunder.

The third mech on the roof was the one that had dropped the bang rod. It skittered toward her around the edge of the blast hole, but it didn’t have a torch and it had already used its explosive. Jayne didn’t see how it could be dangerous, so she circled the hole to meet it.

It saw her move, and hesitated.

Jayne didn’t. Taking two long strides, she threw herself at it, just as she had with the other—but this mech anticipated her. Its legs flexed and it jumped out of reach. Jayne slammed against the roof, sliding several feet past the hole, only remembering to dig in with her mechanical fingers a moment before she went hurtling over the roof’s edge.

Over the com, Berit’s breath came fast and heavy. “Guess what, Jaynie? The mechs have figured out that move. I can’t get near them.”

Jayne groaned—“Thanks for letting me know”—and got back onto her feet.

The mech stood, unmoving, a few meters away. “It looks confused,” Jayne muttered. Maybe it didn’t know what to do next; maybe its directives didn’t include all the necessary details of murder when the first assault had failed.

Unlike the mech, Jayne could come up with alternatives.

An image of the blood-red pulp of Carly’s body flashed across her mind. Returning to the hole, she grabbed the abandoned drill unit. The tool probably massed as much as she did, but this was low-grav Callisto and Jayne was wearing a powered suit. It was no problem at all to hurl the drill straight at the mech’s carapace.

The mech ducked by collapsing its telescoping legs. It dropped with astonishing speed and the drill shot harmlessly past it, spinning away in a trajectory that took it beyond the roof and far out over the gray flats. So. Projectiles weren’t going to work. Jayne bent to retrieve her plastic staff, determined to give that a try. As she straightened up again, the two mechs from below vaulted onto the roof above HQ.

One at a time, Jaynie, she reminded herself, and with an overhead stroke she brought the rod down hard against the first mech’s carapace. The staff snapped in two. The mech took no damage at all. Jayne flung away the remnant in disgust. So much for that idea—and now they had to contend with four mechs on the roof instead of just two.

The drills were unattended, but they continued to work, boring ever deeper into the igloo. Jayne turned her attention to them. There was no way she was going to let another chamber get blown. She bounded past the blast hole, toward the nearest drill. Ice flakes showered her as she reached it.

The drill stood thigh high, a slender cylinder hot enough to turn the falling flakes to vapor. Jayne grabbed it with her mechanical hand and yanked—but bolts locked it to the ice. She crouched, searching the drill for a panel like the one on the mech, but she couldn’t find one.

“Lorelei, you still alive?”

“So far.”

“How do I shut off a drill?”

“You don’t unless you know how to send drill codes.”

“Fine, then. Berit? Watch my back.” Flicking on the torch she’d taken from the mech, Jayne started cutting. The drill shook when she sliced away the first bolt holding it to the ice. It bucked when she cut the second. And then it shut down. Safety override?

Two other drills were running. With Berit standing guard, she cut bolts on both of them, and when they unbalanced, they shut down too.

“Nice,” Berit said. “But we still have nine hostile mechs to contend with.” She was standing a few feet away, jumping at any mech that dared to come close.

“Lorelei,” Jayne asked, “where are you?”

“In the landing pod.”

Jayne glanced at the gold-foil dome resting on the regolith below. The door was closed. “Okay, stay there. Berit, let’s get out to the construction site, pick up some explosives and maybe a rebar or two to smash these Red traitors.”

“Jayne, no!” Lorelei snapped. “Do not damage the mechs!”

“Oh,” Berit said. “I guess you didn’t see her hurl that drill unit.”

“What?” Lorelei sounded outraged. “Jayne, we need the mechs. Every one of them, or this project fails.”

“We’ve already lost the mechs,” Jayne shot back. She longed to get her mechanical hands around a steel rebar and test that against a carapace, maybe find out what a mech was made of inside. “Carly is dead and this project has failed.”

“Carly is dead,” Lorelei agreed, speaking softly now, hurriedly. “But we’re still here and the Shell Cities are still going to need every crystal of water we can send them and we’re not going to be able to send even one drop without mechs to build the launch rail. I am not lifting off from here until that rail is built.”

“Goddamn it, Lorelei. You’re the expert on the mechs, and you said you can’t communicate with them, you can’t override their rogue programming—”

“I can’t! Not until they’re shut down. Manually shut down, each and every one of them, just like that mech in the bedchamber.” Her voice softened again. “Then they can be reset to factory specs. They won’t know how to build anymore, but we can teach them that.”

Jayne turned to Berit. Her faceplate was black in the dim light, but her bitter mood came through in her voice. “You hear that, Jaynie? The first rule of this little battle is ‘do no harm.’ You better give me that torch before the rule slips your mind.”

Lorelei wanted to close off the honey hole.

The mechs had a hybrid, bio-mechanical architecture that required them to resupply and re-power every twelve hours or so inside the honey hole—an excavated ice cave out by the construction site, stocked with fuel cells and organic supplies.

Jayne, though, wasn’t willing to leave four functioning mechs on the roof. Three of them probably still had bang rods. Why didn’t they use them? Maybe they didn’t know how. Without a drill hole to stuff them into or a blast hole to toss them down, their simple behavioral algorithms might be stymied.

They could learn, though. They’d watched Jayne take down a mech and now they retreated if Jayne or Berit approached them. But if the women turned their backs, the mechs approached, carrying torches and saws in their mechanical hands like a pod of metallic zombies.

“Hey,” Jayne said. “I’m going to walk away. If one starts to follow, you fall in behind. Push it close to me.”

Berit nodded. “Go.”

Jayne set off at a slow pace across the roof.

Berit hissed. “All four are behind you.”

Jayne didn’t turn to look. Instead, she picked up the feed from Berit’s helmet and watched the mechs coming after her at a disturbingly fast pace. They were eight meters away, seven, six—one walked in front, two followed, and the fourth came behind. Berit trailed them, several steps back.

“I’ll take the one closest to me,” Jayne said.

“I’ll get the laggard.”

“Three, two, one, now.”

Jayne turned and jumped. The mech she’d targeted jumped too, but not fast enough. They hit in midair. She spilled over its back, but managed a clawed grip on its carapace, hauling it down with her. It had a torch. She scrambled on top of it, holding its arm down with her foot. Flame touched ice, vapor roiled up, turning almost instantly into snow, while beneath her weight the mech went still. Jayne popped open its panel and slammed mechanical fingers down on the three keys, but she was breathing too hard to feel the mech’s faint vibrations; she couldn’t tell if the vibrations had stopped. “Did it shut down?” she panted. “Did it?”

“Move!” Berit shouted.

Jayne saw the bright blue light of another torch darting toward her face. She rolled. A line of heat seared her forearm, followed by a blade of cold. A muscle-assist popped her back onto her feet as two torches jabbed toward her. She jumped back, pursued by a pair of mechs, each with a torch in one hand, a saw in the other. Pain like a vice gripped her forearm.

She glanced at the wound. The torch had cut a line in her suit, but it had not cut quite through. She pinched the burnt edges together, helping the suit’s healthy tissue to meet and seal. Then she jumped again to avoid the oncoming mechs. With chagrin, she realized they’d learned to work together in their attack—doubtless from the very recent example of cooperative assault that she and Berit had shown them.

“Okay, Jaynie?” Berit asked.

“So far.”

They’d brought down one mech each, but there were still two more on the roof. Both pursued Jayne, torches out in a coordinated rush—until Berit tackled one from behind. It went down. Berit slapped open the panel, decommissioned it, and was up again in seconds, while Jayne led the last one on a merry chase.

A column of snow marked every dropped torch. Jayne wove between them to distract the mech, while Berit stood still, trying to go unnoticed in the mech’s busy visual field. Jayne slipped past her, the mech followed, and Berit pounced. Her breathing came ragged over the com. “That’s five down, five to go.”

Jayne made a quick circuit of the roof, gathering up the torches and switching them off before they could melt all the way down to the membrane. “Now we take care of the honey hole.”

Berit was still pulling hard for air. “I hope you’re planning to help out a little more this time.”

Jayne snorted. “I thought it was very noble of me, to be the bait.”

They jumped down from the roof. Lorelei came out of the gold-foil dome of the pod. She held up a rectangular wafer for them to see. It was no more than one by two inches, thin as foil. “Light a torch,” she said.

Jayne complied. The blue flame was a needle in the dark. “That’s it, then? That’s the source of the rogue code? And it’s the only one?”

“It’s the only one I could find.” Lorelei laid the wafer down on the ice and stepped back. “Burn it.”

Jayne did. Then she ground it with her boot and burned the remnants again.

As they crossed the dusty regolith to the construction site, Jayne spotted a flock of tiny lights a few hundred yards away. “The mechs,” she announced. If not for the glowing circles dotting their legs and carapaces, they might have come unseen. “They must have been recharging in the honey hole.”

“No,” Berit said grimly. “I think they were taking notes.”

Lorelei stopped. “I don’t understand. Why are they hauling rebars?”

The mechs’ legs flashed as they stepped swiftly through the dust and after a few seconds Jayne saw what Berit and Lorelei had spotted first: Three of the mechs were armed with long steel rebars from the construction site.

“Dammit, Jayne!” Berit groused. “They saw you hit that mech with a rod.”

Lorelei turned. Jayne couldn’t see her face, but her voice sounded scandalized. “You hit a mech? I told you—”

“This was before you told me.”

“Did you damage it?”

Jayne snorted. “Sadly, no. I used a plastic rod. The mechs have improved my example. They’ve got steel.”

“We aren’t going to be able to get close to them,” Berit warned.

By this time, the mechs were hardly a hundred yards away, and moving fast.

“We could just walk out on the ice,” Lorelei said in a small voice. “Lead them away until they run out of power.”

“If they’ve just come out of the honey hole they’ve got twelve hours. Our suits won’t last that long, and besides, I don’t want to give them a chance to blow the rest of the igloo.”

“Then what do we do?”

Jayne touched the seam that marked the healed tear in the forearm of her suit. A pressure suit was just another form of air-skin. Without power, both turned into diamond-hard crystal. “We need to incapacitate the mechs without harming them.”

“Right,” Berit said with sharp impatience. “And how do we do that?”

“Let’s go back to the igloo. I have an idea.”

Jayne took everyone up to the roof. With a muscle-assist from the suits, the jump was easy.

“There are two ways we can lose this battle,” Jayne reminded. “We lose if the mechs kill us and we lose if we kill the mechs—but if it comes down to it and we’re going to lose anyway, let’s lose the second way. Agreed?”

“We’re going to win,” Lorelei said in a hollow voice. Berit echoed the sentiment.

Jayne shrugged. “Fine, then. Let’s win.”

She jumped down through the blast hole into the blown bedchamber.

During the time Jayne had been outside, the ragged edges of the room’s air skin had knit together, joining just a few feet above the floor. With the seal complete, the flexible membrane had hardened into a smooth, curved surface. Jayne kept her feet when she landed on it, but she couldn’t stop herself from sliding until she fetched up against the exposed wall of ice.

It occurred to Jayne that not an hour before, she’d been sleeping in this room, in the cocoon of Carly’s warmth.

“No time for sightseeing,” Berit chided gently.

“Hush, child. Don’t annoy your elders.”

Jayne fired up her torch. Braced against the wall, she bent low and started cutting.

At the first touch of the flame, the air skin caved in, dropping away from the heat. Jayne bent lower and kept cutting, until slowly, slowly, the flame sliced the air skin open. The small space enclosed by the air skin had already started to re-pressurize, so for a second ice flakes geysered through the crack. Then, along the cut edges, the air skin softened, again becoming a flexible, rippling fabric as it strove to seal up the cut.

Jayne didn’t let that happen. She jammed her foot through the crack and kicked it wider. Lorelei jumped down to help, folding the air skin back while Jayne kept cutting, separating a large sheet of it and exposing again the remains of the room.

Berit stayed on the roof, watching the approaching mechs and counting down the time to their arrival. “You’ve got maybe twenty seconds. Okay, ten. That’s it! The first one just jumped to the roof.”

Jayne passed the torch to Lorelei. “Be ready to make the last cut, but only when I tell you, not before.”

It was too dark to see her face past the helmet, but she took the torch with steady hands.

With a corner of the membrane gripped in one mechanical hand, Jayne jumped back up through the blast hole. All five remaining mechs were already on the roof. Berit stood facing them, with the hole at her back.

The air skin writhed in Jayne’s grip, rolling up and down her arm. She hadn’t been afraid of the mechs before—not really, truly afraid. She’d known they were dangerous. After the first bang rod, she’d known her life and Berit’s and Lorelei’s could end as quickly as Carly’s had, but the mech assault had happened so fast she’d had no time to really be afraid . . . until now.

Of the five mechs, three held ten-foot-long steel rebars, while two used their dexterous double arms to hold torches and drills. Jayne had a nasty suspicion the drills weren’t meant for drilling.

“Look out!” she shouted, as a mech hurled its drill dead-on at Berit.

Berit dropped flat. The drill spun past her, disappearing into the dark as the mechs swarmed.

“Get up!” Jayne growled as the mechs came after Berit—a pack of mechanical zombies armed with sticks and stones and fire. “Berit, move.”

“Stop worrying about me and do your job!” Berit snapped, still lying face down.

“Fine, then!” Jayne tugged hard on the air skin. “Lorelei—cut it and jump!”

Berit waited another second, until the mechs were in rebar range, then she vaulted backward, landing on her feet. The startled mechs slowed. Berit turned and ran. The zombie mob took off after her, while Lorelei shouted, “Jumping!”

As Berit darted past the blast hole, Lorelei appeared at its mouth. She hauled herself out, clutching another corner of the air skin in one mechanical hand. They now had a sheet of it, cut free from the room. Severed from its power source, the skin had only seconds before it froze into a crystal coffin. Already Jayne felt it getting stiff in her hands. She got ready, knowing they’d have only one chance to make this work.

Alongside the blast hole there was only a narrow strip of intact roof. The mechs bunched together as they passed around it, just as Jayne had hoped.

“Stand firm,” she said. “I’m going . . . now!”

With the air skin gripped in both hands, she stepped away from the mechanical mob. Lorelei held the other end and the skin became a trembling gray curtain between them. Lorelei stood behind it, but Jayne kept in sight. The mechs saw her and pursued, sweeping past Lorelei. As soon as they’d gone by, Lorelei cut behind them, bending the air skin to form a U.

Now came the critical part. Could they close the circle? Jayne waited an extra second. Then she turned and darted back along the roof’s edge. The air skin billowed around the mechs as they turned to cut her off. And then she was past them. Lorelei was only a step away.

“Pull it tight!” Jayne warned.

An eight-foot rebar came spinning out of the mech mob. Jayne felt betrayed—she’d never taught them to throw a rebar! She ducked, but not fast enough. Steel slammed against her shoulder, knocking her down and sending her skidding across the ice—but she didn’t let go of the air skin. Her mechanical hands kept their grip, even as she plunged over the roof’s edge.

Jayne stirred, wondering how she’d come to be in the easy room. She was stretched out on a couch, a blanket pulled up to her chin. Berit sat in a cushy chair a few feet away, watching her with a critical expression. Jayne tried to speak, but she had to swallow a few times before she had enough moisture in her throat to ask, “What the hell is going on?”

Berit leaned back in her chair. Her eyes narrowed. “You fell off the roof. If you remember, that wasn’t in the plan.”

It all started coming back. “Where’s Lorelei?”

“I’m here, Jayne!” Her gentle voice came sailing out of HQ.

“As it turns out,” Berit went on, “falling off the roof probably saved us all. The air skin wasn’t going to pull tight enough around the mechs to confine them—not until you went over. Then Lorelei jumped after you and dragged the mechs down with her. By the time they knew what hit them, the air skin had crystallized around them and they couldn’t move. All but one. It got out, but I tackled it and shut it down.”

“And the rest?”

“We cut them out one at a time and turned them off. Then we reset them all to factory specs. Lorelei’s loading some basic construction directives into them now.”

“So we got lucky again?”

“We got lucky. The Red didn’t beat us this time. You did good, Jaynie. I’m proud of you. You didn’t harm even a single enemy.”

Jayne snorted. “Let’s both try to live a few years longer—and make up for it next time.”

© 2012 Linda Nagata.

Linda Nagata grew up in a rented beach house on the north shore of Oahu. She graduated from the University of Hawaii with a degree in zoology and worked for a time at Haleakala National Park on the island of Maui. She has been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven websites, and lately a publisher and book designer. She is the author of nine novels including The Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for best first novel, and the novella “Goddesses,” the first online publication to receive a Nebula award. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.

Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese
Nicola Griffith

I sat by the side of the road in the afternoon sun and watched the cranefly struggle. A breeze, hot and heavy as a tired dog’s breath, coated the web and fly with dust. I shaded my eyes and squinted down the road. Empty. As usual. It was almost two years since I’d seen anything but Jud’s truck on Peachtree.

Like last month, and the month before that, and the third day of every month since I’d been out here alone, I squashed the fear that maybe this time he wouldn’t come. But he always did come, rolling up in the cloud of dust he’d collected on the twenty mile drive from Atlanta.

I turned my attention back to the fly. It kept right on struggling. I wondered how it felt, fighting something that didn’t resist but just drained the life from it. It would take a long time to die. Like humankind.

The fly had stopped fighting by the time I heard Jud’s truck. I didn’t get up and brush myself off, he’d be few minutes yet; sound travels a long way when there’s nothing filling the air but bird song.

He had someone with him. I sighed. Usually, Jud would give me a ride back down to the apartment. Looked like I’d have to walk this time: The truck was only a two-seater. It pulled up and Jud and another man, about twenty-eight I’d guess, maybe a couple of years younger than me, swung open their doors.

“How are you, Molly?” He climbed down, economical as always with his movements.

“Same as usual, Jud. Glad to see you.” I nodded at the supplies and the huge gasoline drums in the back of the truck. “A day later and the generator would’ve been sucking air.”

He grinned. “You’re welcome.” His partner walked around the front of the truck. Jud gestured. “This is Henry.” Henry nodded. Like Jud, like me, he wore shorts, sneakers and t-shirt.

Jud didn’t say why Henry was along for the ride, but I could guess: a relapse could hit anybody, anytime, leave you too exhausted even to keep the gas pedal down. I hoped Henry was just Jud’s insurance, and not another piece in the chess game he and I played from time to time.

“Step up if you want a ride,” Jud said.

I looked questioningly at Henry.

“I can climb up into the back,” he said. I watched him haul himself over the tailgate and hunker down by a case of tuna. Showing off. He’d pay for the exertion later. I shrugged, his problem, and climbed up into the hot vinyl seat.

Jud handled the truck gently, turning into the apartment complex as carefully as though five hundred people still lived here. The engine noise startled the nuthatches nesting in the postal center into a flurry of feathers; they perched on the roof and watched us pull up ten yards in, at what had been the clubhouse. I remember when the brass Westwater Terraces sign had been shined up every week: only three years ago. Six months after I’d first moved in, people had begun to slow down and die off, and the management had added a few things, like the ramps and generator, to try and keep those who were left. It felt like a lifetime ago. I was the only one still here.

“Tiger lilies are looking good,” Jud said. They were, straggling big and busy and orange all around the clubhouse; a feast for birds and bees.

The gasoline drums were lashed down, to stop them moving around the flatbed during the drive to Duluth. Henry untied the first and trundled it forward on its casters until it rested by the tailgate.

Inside the clubhouse, the dark was hot and moist; a roach whirred when I uncoiled the hose. Back out in the sun I blew through it to clear any other insects, and spat into the dust. I put one end in the first drum.

I always hated the first suck but this time I was lucky and avoided a mouthful of gas. We didn’t speak while the drums drained. It was an unseasonable May: over ninety degrees and humid as hell. Just standing was tiring.

“I don’t mind walking the rest,” I said to Henry.

“No need.” He pulled himself back up into the flatbed. More slowly this time. I didn’t bother wasting my energy telling him not to use up his trying to impress a woman who was not in the least bit interested.

Jud started up the truck then let it coast the twenty yards down the slope to the apartment building I was using. When he cut the engine, we just sat there, listening to it tick, unwilling to step down and start the hauling around of cases that would leave us aching and tired for a week. Jud and I had worked out a routine long ago: I would go and get the trolley; he would unbolt the tailgate and slide out the ramp; he’d lift cases onto the trolley; I’d trundle them into the apartment. About halfway through we’d stop for iced tea, then swap chores and finish up.

This time, when I went to get the trolley, it was Henry who rattled the bolts on the tailgate and manhandled the ramp down from the flatbed in a squeal of metal. I did my third of the lifting and carrying, but it felt all wrong.

When we were done, and the cans of tuna and tomato and cat food, the sacks of flour and beans, the packets and cases and bottles and tins were all heaped in the middle of the living room floor and we’d bolted the tailgate back up, I invited them both into the cool apartment for iced tea. We sat. Henry wiped his face with a bandanna and sipped.

“That’s good on a dusty throat, Ms. O’Connell.”

“Molly.”

He nodded acknowledgement. I felt Jud watching, and waited for the inevitable. “Nice place you have here, Molly. Jud tells me you’ve stayed here on your own for almost three years.” It was closer to two since Helen died, but I let that pass. “You ever had any accidents?”

“One or two, nothing I couldn’t handle.”

“Bet they gave you a scare. Imagine if you broke your leg or something: no phone, nobody for twenty miles around to help. A person could die out here.” His tanned face looked earnest, concerned, and his eyes were very blue. I looked at Jud, who shrugged: He hadn’t put him up to this.

“I’m safe enough,” I said to Henry.

He caught my tone and didn’t say anything more right away. He looked around again, searching for a neutral subject, nodded at the computer. “You use that a lot?”

“Yes.”

Jud decided to take pity on him. “Molly’s writing a book. About how all this happened, and what we know about the disease so far.”

“Syndrome,” I corrected.

Jud’s mouth crooked in a half smile. “See how knowledgeable she is?” He drained his glass, hauled himself off the couch and refilled it in the kitchen. Henry and I did not speak until he got back to the couch.

In the past, Jud had tried everything: teasing me about being a misanthrope; trying to make me feel guilty about how the city had to waste valuable resources sending me supplies every month; raging at my selfishness. This time he just tilted his head to one side and looked sad.

“We need you, Molly.”

I said nothing. We’d been through this before: He thought I might be able to find a way to cure the syndrome; I told him I hadn’t much chance of succeeding where a decade of intense research had failed. I didn’t blame him for trying—I was probably one of the last immunologists alive—it’s just that I didn’t think I could do anything to help: I and the world’s best had already beaten our heads bloody against that particular brick wall and gotten nowhere. I’d done everything I could, and I’d had a very good reason to try to achieve the impossible.

I had tried everything I knew, followed every avenue of enquiry, run down every lead. Working with support and good health, with international cooperation and resources, I got nowhere: My promising leads led to nothing, my time ran out, and Helen died. What did they think I could achieve now, on my own?

They’d told me, once, that they would take me into Atlanta forcibly. I said: Fine, do that, see how far it gets you. Coercion might make me go through the motions, but that’s all. Good research demanded commitment. Stalemate. But the way they saw it, I was their only hope, and maybe I would change my mind.

“Why do you stay?” Henry said into the silence.

I shrugged. “I like it here.”

“No,” Jud said slowly, “you stay because you still like to pretend that the rest of the world is getting on fine, that if you don’t see that Atlanta is a ghost town you won’t have to believe it, believe any of this is real.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said lightly, “but I’m still not leaving.”

I stood, and went to rinse my glass. If the people of Atlanta wanted to bring me food and precious gasoline in an attempt to keep me alive until I changed my mind, I wasn’t going to feel guilty. I wasn’t going to change my mind either. Humanity might be dying, but I saw no reason why we should struggle, just for the sake of struggling, when it would do no good. I am not a cranefly.

I woke up briefly in the middle of the night to the soft sound of rain and eerie chorus of bullfrogs. Even after two years I still slept curled up on one side of the bed; I still woke expecting to see her silhouette.

My arms and hips ached. I ran a hot bath and soaked for a while, until I got too hot, then went back to bed where I lay on my back and did chi kung breathing. It helped. The song of bullfrogs steadied into a ratchety rhythm. I slept.

When I woke, the sky was still red in the east. The bedroom window no longer opened, so I padded stiffly through into the living room and slid open the door onto the deck. The air was cool enough for spring. I leaned on my elbows and looked out across the creek; the blind-eyed buildings on the other side of the gully were hidden by white swamp oaks that stretched their narrow trunks up into a sky the same powder blue as a bluebird’s wing. To the right, sun gleamed on the lake. Birds sang, too many to identify. A cardinal flashed through the trees.

My world. I didn’t want anything else. Jud was partially right: Why should I want to live in Atlanta among people as sick as myself, listen to them groan when they woke up in the morning with stiff knees and stomach cramps, watch them walk slowly, like geriatrics, when I had all this? The birds weren’t sick; the trees did not droop; every spring there were thousands of tadpoles in the pond. And none of them depended on me, none of them looked at me with hope in their eyes. Here, I was just me, just Molly, part of a world that offered no pain, no impossible challenge.

I went inside, but left the door open to the air and bird song. I moved jerkily, because my hips still hurt, and because I was angry with all those like Jud who wanted to fight and fight to their last breath. Humankind was dying. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out: If women had so little strength that they died not long after childbirth, then the population would inevitably dwindle. Only five or six generations before humanity reached vanishing point.

I wanted to enjoy what I could of it; I wanted to write this book so that those who were born, if they survived the guilt of their mothers’ death, would at least understand their doom. We might not understand the passing of the dinosaurs, but we should understand our own.

After breakfast I put on some Bach harpsichord music and sat down at the keyboard. I pulled up chapter three, full of grim statistics, and looked it over. Not today. I exited, called up Chapter One: How It All Began. I wrote about Helen.

We’d been living here at Westwater Terraces for two months. I remember the brutal heat of the August move. We swore that next time we had to carry desks and packing cases, we’d make sure it was in March, or October. Helen loved it here. I’d get home from the lab after a twenty minute drive and she’d bring me iced tea and tell me all about how the fish in the lake—she called it the pond, too small for a lake, she said—were growing, or about the turtle she saw on her lunchtime walk and the way a squirrel had filled its mouth with nuts, and she’d ease away all the heat and snarl of a hard day’s work and the Mad Max commute. The pond was her inspiration—all those wonderful studies of light and shadow that hang on people’s walls—her comfort when a show went badly or a gallery refused to exhibit. I rarely bothered to walk by the pond myself, content to see it through her eyes.

Then she won the competition, and we flew to Bali—for the green and the sealight, she said—on the proceeds. I was grateful for those precious weeks we had in Bali.

When we got home, she was tired. The tiredness got worse. Then she began to hurt, her arms, her knees, her elbows. We assumed it was some kind of flu, and I pampered her for a while. But instead of getting better, she got worse: headaches, nausea, rashes on her face and arms. Moving too fast made her lower body go numb. When I realized she hadn’t been around the pond for nine days, I knew she was very sick.

We went to the doctor who had diagnosed my gastro-enteritis last year. She suggested Helen had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. We did some reading. The diagnosis was a blow, and a relief. The Syndrome had many names—Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Chronic Epstein-Barr, Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome, Chronic Immune Dysfunction, Yuppie Flu—but no clear pattern, no cure. Doctors scratched their heads over it, but then said not to worry: It was self-limiting, and there had been no known deaths.

We saw four different doctors, who prescribed everything from amino-acid supplements to antibiotics to breathing and meditation. The uncertain leading the ignorant. Most agreed that she would be well again, somehow, in two or three years.

There were weeks when Helen could not get out of bed, or even feed herself. Then there were weeks when we argued, taking turns to alternately complain that she did too much, or not enough. In one three month period, we did not make love once. Then Helen found out about a support group, and for a while we felt positive, on top of things.

Then people with CFS began to die.

No one knew why. They just got worse over a period of weeks until they were too weak to breathe. Then others became infected with a variation of the syndrome: The course of the disease was identical, but the process accelerated. Death usually occurred a month or so after the first symptom.

Helen died here, the day the Canada geese came. She was lying on the couch, one hand in mine, the other curled loosely around Jessica, who was purring by her hip. It was Jessica who heard the geese first. She stopped purring and lifted her head, ears pricked. Then I heard them too, honking to each other like they owned the world. They arrowed past, necks straining, wings going like the northwind and white cheeks orangey yellow in the evening sun. Helen tried to sit up to look.

They circled the lake a couple of times before skimming in to land. Their wake was still slapping up against the bridge posts when Helen died. I sat there a long time, holding her hand, glad that she’d heard the geese.

They woke me at dawn the next day, honking and crying to each other through the trees on their way to wherever. I lay and listened to the silence they left behind, realized it would always be silent now: I would never hear Helen breathe beside me again. Jessica mewed and jumped up onto the bed; I stroked her, grateful for her mindless warmth and affection.

I came home tired from the funeral, with that bone-deep weariness that only comes from grief. Or so I thought. It took me almost a week to realize I was sick too.

The disease spread. No one knew the vector, because still no one was sure what the agent was: viral, bacterial, environmental, genetic? The spread was slow. There was plenty of time for planning by local and national bodies. It was around this time that we got the generator at the complex: The management were still thinking in terms of weathering the crisis, persuading occupants that it was safe for them to stay, that even if the city power failed, and the water systems, they’d be fine here.

There’s something about the human race: As it slowly died, those that were left became more needy of each other. It seemed that we all became a little kinder, too. Everyone pulled inward, to the big cities where there was food, and power, and sewage systems. I stayed where I was. I figured I’d die soon, anyway, and I had this irrational urge to get to know the pond.

So I stayed, but I didn’t die. And gradually it became clear that not everyone did. The latest count indicated that almost five percent of the world’s population has survived. The deaths have been slow and inevitable enough that those of us who are still here have been able to train ourselves to do whatever it takes to stay alive. It wasn’t so hard to keep things going: When the population is so small, it’s surprising how many occupations become redundant. Insurance clerks now work in the power stations; company executives check sewage lines; police officers drive threshing machines. No one works more than four hours a day; we don’t have the strength. None of us shows any signs of recovering. None but the most foolish still believe we will.

Westwater Terraces is built around a small lake and creek. Behind the water, to the west, are deciduous woods; other trees on the complex are a mix of conifers and hardwoods: white pine and oak, birch and yellow poplar. The apartment buildings are connected by gravel paths; three white-painted bridges span a rivulet, the creek, and the western end of the lake.

I stood on the bridge over the rivulet, the one Helen and I had always called the Billy Goats’ Gruff bridge, and called for Jessica. Weeds and sycamore saplings pushed through the gravel path to my left; a dead oak straddled the path further up. Strong sun made the cat food in the dish by my feet smell unpleasantly.

The paint on the bridge was peeling. While I waited, I picked at it and wondered idly why paint always weathered in a pattern resembling a cross-section of epithelial cells, and why the wood always turned silvery gray.

Today I missed Jessica fiercely, missed the warmth of her on my lap and her fur tickling my nose when I tried to read. I hadn’t seen her for over a week; sometimes the cat food I put out was eaten, sometimes it wasn’t. A warbler landed on the bridge and cocked its head, close enough for me to see the gleam of its bright eye and the fine wrinkles on the joints of its feet.

I waited longer than usual, but she didn’t come. I scrunched over the gravel feeling annoyed with myself for needing to hold another warm living creature.

Late morning was edging towards noon and the sun was hot on my shoulders. I was thirsty, too, but didn’t want to go back to the beige walls of my apartment just yet.

The lake used to have three fountains. One still works, which I regard as a minor miracle. A breeze pulled cool, moist air off the surface of the water and through my hair. A frog plopped out of sight, warned of my approach by the vibration of my footsteps. The ripple of its passing disturbed the duckweed and the water lilies. They were open to the light: white, pink, yellow. A bee hummed over the rich yellow anthers and I wondered if any ever got trapped when the lilies closed in the afternoon.

The bridge spanning the thinner, western end of the lake was roofed, a kind of watery gazebo reigned over by spiders. I crossed carefully, watchful of their webs. Helen used to call it running the gauntlet; some of the webs stretched five feet in diameter, and very few were empty.

For me, the bridge was a divide between two worlds. The lake lay on the left, the east, a wide open expanse reflecting the blue sky, rippling with fountain water, surrounded by white pine and yellow iris. The right, the western end, was the pond: green and secret, shrouded by frogbit and lily pads. Stickleback and carp hung in the shadow of cattails and reeds, finning cool water over their scales.

There are almost a dozen ducks here, mallards mostly. And their ducklings. Careful of webs, I leaned on the rail to watch. The one with the right wing sticking up at a painful angle was paddling slowly toward a weeping willow on the left bank. Two of her three ducklings hurried after her. I wondered where the other one was.

It was getting too hot to be out.

Walking around the other side of the lake to get back to the roadway was hard work. The ground sloped steeply and the heat was getting fierce. Storms brought heavy rains in the summer and they were gradually washing away the dirt path, making it unsafe in places. The lake was twenty-five, maybe thirty, feet below me now and to my left, partially screened by the trees and undergrowth on the sloping bank. I heard a peeping noise from the water, just behind a clump of arrowhead. Maybe it was the missing duckling. I stepped near to the edge to get a closer look.

I felt the bucket-size clump of dirt give and slide from under my left foot but my leg muscles, already tired from the heat and the climb, couldn’t adapt to the sudden shift. My body weight dropped to one side with nothing to hold it but bone and ligament. I felt the ligament tear and pop and bones grind together. Then I fell, rolling and sliding down the slope, pain like a hot rock in my stomach.

I crashed into the knobbed bark of an oak; it took the skin off my back and shoulder. I saw the mossy rock clearly just before I hit it.

I woke to heat thick enough to stand on. My mouth was very dry and my cheek hurt. My face was pressed against a tree root. I blinked and tried to sit up. The world swooped sickeningly. This time my face fell on grass. It felt better at first, not so hard.

I was hurt. Concussion at least. Something crawled down my cheek and into my ear. It took me a moment to realize it was a tear; it felt like someone else was crying, not me. I closed my eyes and began my testing with the left leg, moving it just an inch or so. More tears squeezed out from under my eyelids: The ankle and knee felt like they were being cut into with a rusty ripsaw. I moved my right leg. That was fine. My left arm seemed all in one piece, but moving the right hurt my ribs. I remembered hitting the tree. Probably just bruising.

I opened my eyes. The tree root my face had been resting on belonged to a smooth-barked birch. If I was sitting up I might be able to think.

I pulled my right leg under me and pulled myself forward with my left elbow. My moan startled a lizard sunning itself behind a leafy clump of purple loosestrife; its belly flashed blue as it skittered through the undergrowth and disappeared into a rotting tree stump. Sweat wormed over my scraped ribs, stinging. I dragged myself forward again.

I had to lift my head, bring my right elbow down to hip level and twist to roll over onto my back. The pain and the dizziness pulled thick, stringy nausea up over my skin. I thought I was going to pass out. After a moment, I sat up, shuffled back a couple of feet, and leaned against the tree.

The sun shone almost directly into my eyes. The floating sunlotus were open now, damselflies flashing metallic blues and greens against the rich yellow cups: must be about three o’clock in the afternoon. The air was still and quiet; the frogs silent and the birds sleepy. Fountain water pattered and splashed. I was very thirsty, and the air felt too hot and big in my lungs.

The slope stretched more than twenty feet upward to the path. I could do it if I moved in a zig-zag and used every tree for support, and if I started soon: I was dehydrated and every moment I spent out here in the sun made it worse. The water was about ten feet away, downslope, almost hidden by the tangle of ivy, undergrowth and dead wood.

I edged myself around the bole of the birch and shuffled backwards. The next closest tree was a white pine, about five feet away to the right. I had to stop four times before I got to within touching distance of the pine. I rested against its trunk, panting. The bark was rough and smelled of sun-warmed resin.

It was taking too long: At this rate, the sun would have leached away all my strength before I got even halfway up the slope. I had to risk moving faster. That meant standing up.

I wrapped my arms around the trunk and got myself onto my right knee. The soil was cool and damp on my bare skin. I hauled myself up. The ridged trunk glided in and out of focus.

The next tree was close, only two feet directly up-slope. Trying not to think how easy this would be if both legs worked, I took a deep breath and hopped.

The world came crashing down around my head.

I opened my eyes. The pool was slicked with sunset, hot and dark and mysterious. Whirligigs and waterboatmen dimpled the surface. My hand hung in the water. I pulled my face forward a few inches and lapped. Some went up my nose and dribbled down my chin, but enough went into my mouth to swallow a couple of times.

I drank again. It tasted odd, thin and green, but I could feel the good it was doing me. My cheeks felt hot and tight: sunburn. I dipped one side of my face in the water, then the other, then rested my forehead on my arm. Cicadas filled the evening with their chitinous song.

It looked like I’d been out four hours or more. No point beating myself over the head with my stupidity. The best thing I could do for myself right now was rest, wait for the cool of night, rehydrate. Then think.

Swallows dipped and skimmed over the center of the lake, drinking in flight, snipping up unwary insects with wing-flicking grace. A cotton mouse nosed her way out from under a pile of leaves and scampered from the shelter of a log to a tree root. She sat up and gnawed on a seed.

I tried not to think about the green peppers ripening on the slope behind my apartment, of the fish in the freezer and fruit in the refrigerator.

About two feet away, a big spider sat on a lily pad, perfectly still but for one of its back legs that hung in the water, twitching. I thought maybe the leg was trapped by something, some hidden weed, but the rhythm was too deliberate; the spider was using the surface of the water as a drum. A mosquito fish came to investigate. It was tiny, no longer than a fingernail. The spider shot out its front legs and hauled the fish onto the lily pad, into its mouth.

The sunset had turned to purple and I could see stars. Tonight I couldn’t recognize any of them; they looked cold and alien. It was cooling rapidly now, but I made no attempt to sit up.

My concussion and exhaustion had prompted a poor decision earlier: Heading upslope was not the only way. If I could see a route along the lake shore that was relatively clear of undergrowth, I could walk or crawl around it until I reached the eastern end where the bank was only four or five feet high. That route would also bring me closer to the roadway that led to the apartment.

I blinked. I’d been asleep: The moon was up. This time, I could dip my hand into the water and bring it to my mouth to drink. I felt less like a wounded animal, more like a thinking, reasoning human being.

All around the pond, bullfrogs were singing. The moon was bright enough to reflect the flutter of trapped wings four feet from where I lay: Perfectly still, a frog sat half hidden by cattails, a caddisfly in its mouth. The fly stopped struggling; they only lived a few hours anyway. Born without mouths, they reproduced then died. The frog’s eyes glittered cold in the moonlight, watching me. Bullfrogs lived fifteen years.

They sang louder, following each other’s lead, altering duration, pitch and rhythm until the water boomed and echoed with their song. Tree frogs buzzed in the higher registers. I felt surrounded and menaced by sound.

Leaves rustled; a shadow eased through the undergrowth behind me. I turned my head slowly, faced two green eyes like headlights. Jessica. A friendly face.

“Jess. Here baby.” She sniffed at my hip. I patted my chest, an invitation for her to snuggle. She froze. “Come on Jess. Come here baby.” She sniffed my hand, and purred. I laughed. “Yes, you wild thing. It’s me.” Your friend.

She licked my hand. I lifted it to stroke her. She hissed. “It’s me, Jess. Me.” She regarded me with cold emerald eyes; in the moonlight, her teeth looked like old ivory.

A small creature, maybe the cotton mouse, scuttled somewhere close to the water. Jessica crouched, bellied forward.

I remembered how she had looked as a seven-week old kitten, the way she had comforted me when Helen died.

Now I saw her as she had always been: a hunter, a wildcat who only licked my hand for the salt. I was not part of her world. I was not any part of anything’s world. What I saw when I looked into the eyes of a frog or a mouse was nothing: not fear, not affection, not even contempt.

But I stayed. For Helen. To be part of the world Helen had loved. But staying here did not make me part of Helen’s world: Helen was dead. Gone. She’d gone and left me with nothing. No one. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t want to be alone.

I beat on the dirt with my fist. Why had she died and left me alone? Why, Helen?

“Tell me why!”

My scream was raw, too hot, too human for this place. Tears rolled down my cheeks, big tears, big enough to reflect the world a new way. Helen was gone, and the geese were gone; I could stay here forever and she would never come back. I shouldn’t be here.

The realization made me feel remote, very calm.

I sat up, ignoring the pain. Getting my t-shirt off was difficult; stretching for the branch two feet away, even worse. The t-shirt was already ripped; it made it easier for me to tear it into strips. I had to try several times before I could tie secure knots around the makeshift splint. Whenever the pain got too much, I rested.

An owl hooted, hunting.

I levered myself up onto knee and elbows, left leg stuck out behind me, stiff in its splint. Pain was just pain.

I dragged myself forward through a monochrome world: water sleek and black; trumpet honeysuckle leached lithium gray; moonlight lying like pools of mercury on leaves the color of graphite. Nature, thinking there was no one there to observe, let slide the greens and purples, the honey yellows, and showed her other face: flat, indifferent, anonymous.

I imagined making my pain as impersonal as nature’s night face, putting it in a pouch at the small of my back, zipping the pouch shut. Out of sight, out of mind. Somewhere, I knew, there was a place where all the colors and scents of the day waited for morning, and then I would smell iris and pine resin, rich red dirt and green pond scum. And feel the hot orange jags of pain. In the morning.

Left elbow, right knee, right elbow, drag. I focused on the tree forty yards away on the eastern bank, the tree I would use to haul myself upright and up onto the road. Left elbow, right knee, right elbow, drag.

Behind me, I heard the squeak of a small animal. The cotton mouse. Left elbow, right knee, right elbow, drag. The night stretched on.

The tree bark was rough on hands and arms already red raw. No pain until morning. I pulled myself up the incline. The road felt marvelously smooth. I lay my cheek on the asphalt and breathed in the smell of dust and artificial things. Below, the pond glimmered, obsidian. The bullfrogs sang.

My ankle was not broken. I suspected that several ligaments were torn, in my ankle and knee, but distalgesics and support bandages kept me able to manage until, eight days later, I could get around using a heavy branch as a cane. It was hard to hold the cane: The bandages wrapped around my hands and forearms were thick and clumsy.

I limped out to the deck and lowered myself into the hammock: The sky was thick with churning clouds. Usually, I loved watching the sheer power of a storm, the way it could boom and slash and drive over a hot and parched world, cooling and soaking. This time it was different. This time, when the wind tore through the stand of swamp white oak, it seemed to me that it was killing things, flattening them, exposing them: turning the oak leaves silvery side up, ripping off branches, bending the trees almost to breaking point, pressing the grasses flat to the earth and snapping the heads off the marsh marigold. It was brutal.

I swung myself off the hammock. The show could go on without me. Inside, I made myself hot tea, put on Vivaldi—human music to drown the sound of the storm—and retired to the couch with a book, facing away from the glass doors. Let it do what it wanted. I refused to watch the rain swell the creek until it rose high enough to fill the burrows of voles and mice and drown their young.

My ankle and knee improved and I could walk slowly without the cane. I took the bandages off my arms. I did not go near the pond, and walked only on the black artificial surfaces of the road.

Tonight was soft and warm, there was a quarter moon. I walked over the Billy Goats’ Gruff bridge and listened to the frogs singing around the pond. I turned and walked up to the clubhouse. It took me a while to find the red switch handle. I threw it; the floodlight still worked.

I stood on the road overlooking the pond. Sodium light heaved greasily on the water next to the silver ripple of the moon. The water looked mysterious, unknowable, like an ancient harbor lit by naphtha flaming in a great bronze bowl.

I looked at it a long time. Helen was not here, she was in my heart. The pond belonged to the past.

I waited by the side of the road for Jud. There were more flowers, and it was just as hot and dusty, but this time there was no spider web, no cranefly. Just the birds singing, and me sitting on my suitcase. Three of Helen’s paintings, wrapped in our sheets, leaned against the gate.

Jud was on his own. He coasted the truck to a stop and climbed down. I stood. He saw the suitcase.

“This mean what I think it means?”

“Yes.”

And that’s all we said. He always did know when to speak and when to keep quiet. He helped me push the case and the paintings up into the back, in among all the cans and bottles and sacks I wouldn’t be needing.

“You want to drive?” he asked. I shook my head. We climbed up. I put the seatbelt on; my life had suddenly become more precious. Jud noticed, but said nothing. He made a U-turn and we set off back along the road to Atlanta.

I leaned my head against the window and watched the dog violets nodding at the side of the road. I had nearly died out here, believing struggling was for fools and craneflies. Perhaps those who struggled were fools, but they were fools with hope. They were human. Helen was dead. I was not. I was sick, yes, but I still had intelligence, direction, purpose. And time. Something craneflies did not have. If I personally could not finish the research I intended, then those who came after me would. I could teach them what I learned; they would build on it. If I struggled and failed, that was not the end. I am not a cranefly.

© 1991 by Nicola Griffith.

Originally published in Interzone.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Nicola Griffith: English novelist living in Seattle. Author of five novels (Ammonite, Slow River, The Blue Place, Stay, Always) and a multi-media memoir (And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life). Co-editor of the Bending the Landscape series of original queer F/SF/H stories. Essayist. Teacher. Blogger. Winner of the Nebula, Tiptree, World Fantasy, and six Lambda Literary Awards. (Also a BBC poetry prize, some Gaylactic Spectrum awards, the Premio Italia, and a few others.) Partner of writer Kelley Eskridge (and co-owner of Sterling Editing). Currently lost in the 7th century—working on a novel about Hild of Whitby. Emerges to drink just the right amount of beer and take enormous delight in everything.

The Cross-Time Accountants Fail To Kill Hitler Because Chuck Berry Does The Twist
C.C. Finlay

Mabel blurred through the Doorway and stumbled into a wall. She groped for a fingerhold, anything to prop herself up until the gut-twisting vertigo passed. Every time she experienced the blur it got a little worse. All that worse added up to worst because she had made hundreds of auditing trips to the past during her thirty-nine year career in cross-time accounting. One of the reasons her career in the CTA office would soon be over. Except that it was already over the second she made this unauthorized trip.

A hand touched her shoulder—she cursed and slapped it away. She needed to orient herself, make sure she had arrived at the right place at the right time. She pressed her forehead against the cool wall, trying squeeze the headache out. Noises throbbed in her head—the babble of voices, musicians sound-checking their equipment, a screech of feedback through a microphone—but she could pick out individual sounds now. That was good. When she opened her eyes it was like trying to see through a sheet of wax paper at shadows that slowly resolved into murky silhouettes. She braced herself for the final wave of nausea that always hit just as the metallic scent of scrubbed oxygen from her own time faded. Her stomach clenched as the odors slammed into her, a potpourri of sweet smoke and stale beer, honest sweat and cheap perfume.

She knew enough to keep the nausea manageable—she hadn’t eaten anything more solid than vitamin paste laced with anti-emetics since she got back from her last 20th-century audit.

The mix of odors—to be honest, the stench—made her smile.

Mabel knew this stench, this place, this time.

She was in the Daisy Theatre, Beale Street, Memphis, 1956. She was in the hall behind the stage that led past a restroom and payphone to the rear exit.

“Hey, girl, you all right?” asked a voice beside her. “You don’t look so good.”

Her mind raced. Maybe it was only a “bouncer.” During this time period they would have had someone watching the back door. It was probably the same guy who’d touched her shoulder a moment ago. “I’m fine,” she said. She staggered away from the wall to end the conversation.

He followed her, damn it. Her vision was clearing, enough to see that he was huge. Maybe twice her size. His job was to keep out—or bounce out—people who didn’t belong. She desperately wanted to belong.

“Just leave me alone,” she snapped. The adrenalin that shot through her system brought a fresh surge of nausea. Her training kicked in: If you step through a Doorway into a populated room or area, use local period slang to get your point across quickly while you acclimate and shake off the blur. She had practiced the most effective phrases so she could use them without thinking. “I need some space.”

“Do you want something to drink? Some water?”

“I want you to fuck off right now,” she said. She took a deep breath to calm herself and find her center of gravity. If language didn’t work, she had been trained to use other methods of extrication. Usually an aggressive posture was enough—which was good, because she didn’t think she could take this guy alone, not yet.

He laughed at her, and she tensed, but she realized there was no cruelty in it.

“Al’right, al’right.” He pointed to a stool by the back door, which was cracked open to let fresh air in—a notion that seemed as foreign and wonderful now as it did the first time Mabel witnessed something like that during an audit. “When you change your mind, you can find me over here,” he said.

“Al’right, al’right,” she said, trying to match his pronunciation and cadence. All the hours working with audio never fully prepared you for the period dialect. But she had a good ear and could adapt quickly—it was one of the things that had helped her excel at accounting. “Thanks.”

She leaned against the wall and took a deep breath.

Her ears popped from a sudden change in pressure as recycled air rushed into the hall. Someone had just opened a Doorway. They had found her somehow, despite the fact that she had covered her steps in the office, left dozens of clues to false destinations, and didn’t bring anything they could use to track her through time.

A hole in the world materialized, revealing a small sealed room filled with repurposed machines and piles of spare parts. A man stepped through and the hole blinked out of existence. She grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and threw him against the wall by the payphone because it was the only cover at hand. She glanced quickly to see if the bouncer had noticed them, but his attention was focused on something or someone in the alley.

“Aren’t you a little young to be hanging out in this blunt?” slurred a familiar voice with the same training she had: use local period slang to get your point across quickly.

“Joint,” she whispered furiously. “Joint, Harry, not blunt. And not that kind of joint. And not funny! How long has it been?”

She’d seen him only ten minutes ago in her personal temporal reference, but she wouldn’t have recognized him if she hadn’t heard his voice. His suit was too small and was covered with dust as if it had been pulled off a museum exhibit, which it probably had. He was over forty—you had to be before they would let you step through a Doorway—yet he appeared much younger than the last time she saw him, which meant that he’d stepped through a lot of Doorways between then and now. The sandy blond hair that made his pale skin even paler was new, as were the contacts that turned his eyes an icy blue. Only the confused, angry expression on his face was normal for him, and that had nothing to do with the blur.

“We need you, May,” he said. “Come back with me.”

One of his hands inched slowly toward his jacket pocket. Mabel grabbed his wrist, digging her thumb into a pressure point, and pinned his arm against the wall. With her other hand she twisted his collar tight enough to choke him and banged his head against the phone, which answered with a dull metal clang. “How long has it been?” she asked.

“About two and a half years,” he choked out.

She loosened her grip on his collar to let him catch a breath, then twisted it again. Ten minutes for her, two and a half years for them—so she had hidden her destination well. With such limited resources in her own time, she expected them to give up long before then. “Why? Why couldn’t you just let me go?”

“You don’t know how bad it’s gotten, May. Worldwide crop failures the past two years. Population is under a billion, and there are at least a million people dying every day. Plant and animal species are dying out even faster. It’s an extinction event, and the only creatures thriving are the cockroaches. Maybe they’ll evolve into intelligent life after we’re all dead.”

It felt like someone had pinched her heart. “That’s nothing new. Why do you think I left?”

“So you did it. You did go Button-down?”

The incredulity in his voice surprised her. Benjamin Button had been the CAO’s first auditor, the man who discovered that going into the past reversed the auditor’s age. Button finished up as a small boy obsessed with twentieth century writers. In the end he ran away in time to meet them. One writer—F. Scott Fitzgerald—even wrote down a garbled version of Button’s story. Going Button-down was selfish. It meant putting yourself before humanity. It was the worst thing a cross-time accountant could do. But it was something every auditor thought about in those dark hours of the soul. That’s why they banned you from taking any more trips when you reached a certain age or a certain number of trips. Mabel had timed it so that her age and trip limit would hit on the same day.

“What if I did go Button-down?” she asked. “I reach terminal age tomorrow. I only had one more Doorway to step through before I reached my limit. I’ve done everything I could—now it’s your turn or someone else’s.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Look at me—tight dress, lipstick, high heel shoes—these were damn hard to get. I’m not here on business!”

“You have to come back,” he said. “You’re the best expert we’ve ever had on the 20th century, at least since Button himself. We’ve pinpointed our last chance to change history in 1945, but Womack thinks we need you to make it work.”

Her emotions twisted in different directions. She had been arguing that the 20th century was the pivot ever since the CTA program changed from surreptitious resource extraction—thus “accounting”—to active historical intervention. The proximists had argued for altering events closest to their own century, to minimize the changes. Everyone was afraid of timeline multiplication—that they would save an alternate world but leave their own unmarked. She’d come to believe that timeline multiplication was inevitable, because nothing they altered seemed to work. And yet . . . the mid-20th century, that was the moment things changed for the worse.

At the very back of her consciousness, she’d been aware of voices at the club’s back door for several seconds, but now a shout and the brittle rattle of a bar stool hitting the floor caught her full attention. Her reaction came almost before recognition—she grabbed Harry and shoved him in the other direction, toward the club.

“Keep your head down—it’s hoods,” she said, trying to hold down the panic in her voice.

“It’s what?” Harry asked.

“Hoods,” as if it were self-explanatory. Which it would be if he had done good prep. She had intended to run with him for the front door, but she saw that another group with pillow-case masks and bedsheet robes emblazoned with swastika-eagles had also forced their way in. There was a crowd around them trying to get out, but the hoods were shooing them back inside.

She grabbed Harry by the hand and dragged him across the dance floor, toward a dark spot behind the steps at the edge of the stage. She glanced over her shoulder again. Hoods! There wasn’t any record of this in the histories, only the protests that took place tomorrow.

“Let’s go home,” Harry said, pulling the callback switch from his jacket pocket. She grabbed his hand to prevent him from using it.

“I’m not going back,” she said. The callback was poorly disguised as a disposable lighter—even though those wouldn’t be invented for decades yet. She hated the way some people in the office got sloppy with their history, as if everything within a hundred years happened at the same moment. “What’s the target?”

“Hitler.”

Of course, it would have to be Hitler. Her mind raced for a second. This was the summer of 1956, so Hitler was in Brazil. The winds off the Atlantic carried the radiation from Great Britain all the way to Germany at this time of year. Stalin, Mao, and Nixon were all easier targets, but Hitler made sense.

“Where and when is the Doorway?”

“The Führerbunker, end of April ’45. That’s why Womack wants you. The Doorway is narrow, less than an hour in a tight enclosed space. Nobody else is good enough to crack it open.”

“Don’t flatter me,” she said, even though she knew it was true. It was as tight a Doorway as the one here, which is why Harry had popped in a moment after her. They’d used her calculations. If they could do any better, they would have arrived a few minutes before her and caught her when she was still weak with the blur.

The Führerbunker in ’45?

The timing was right. Hitler had just married Eva Braun, so he was distracted. The Third Reich was at its lowest point. Vulnerable. The weak spot in the causality chain. But she didn’t see what they could do to reroute the river of time. “I don’t see any way to prevent Hitler’s last-minute alliance with the US against the Soviets. The chance to deplete the resources of two enemies at once was too tempting for the US to resist, and that drags the war on for another five years until Hitler uses nuclear weapons in Europe.”

The whack of a nightstick on a table interrupted them. “Where’s the band?” shouted one of the hoods.

“Don’t let us interrupt your jive,” another said, twisting the word to make it sound like an insult. “We’re all friendly here. Just making sure everything is peaceful.”

“The goddamn band better start playin’,” the first one shouted again.

Mabel tried to melt into the shadows. Their best option was to hide until the hoods went away. The hoods weren’t here for them. This was a random event.

“There’s one way to make it work,” Harry said, brushing some of the dust off his suit. “Suicide mission.”

“Suicide?”

“Yes. If my life—if our lives—can balance the spreadsheets even a little, and bring our world out of the red, it’s worth it. Come with me, Mabel. Werde mein Valkyrie.”

“Every day of our lives is a prolonged suicide,” she said, fighting to keep her voice down. “The air has too much carbon to breathe, the oceans have too little oxygen to support life, the food—when we can grow any—is too poisoned to eat. And your German pronunciation is terrible—the initial sound is ‘veh’ and you have to elide the words.”

“See, that’s why we need you.”

“I don’t want to die, Harry. I want to live.”

“So go ahead and live,” said a new voice.

“Mind your own—”

The words froze in her throat as she turned to look up at the man on the steps to the stage. It was him, the reason she had gone Button-down to this day, this place. He was tall and lean, with an Errol Flynn mustache, a shiny pompadour, and a guitar slung over his shoulder. But it was his hands that caught her eye—they were large, strong, and masculine. When she glanced up again she noticed him staring at her, up and down and up again, openly appraising her. Then he smiled and it made her knees feel weak.

It had to be the last lingering effects of the blur. She had long ago outgrown that kind of reaction to any man’s attention. “I’ve been a fan of yours my whole life,” she said, remembering, even as the words came out of her mouth, that he’d been only been performing for five or six years.

He laughed and his smile turned smug. “Uh huh. And how long would that be?”

“Tomorrow I turn sixty—” She caught herself. “Sixteen. Tomorrow, I turn sixteen.”

Another whack on a table made her jump. “Play some music,” the hoods shouted again.

The singer winked at her. “See, even these hillbillies make an excuse to come listen to me. That’s how good I am. So I guess the show’s gotta go on.” He paused at the top of the steps. “Hey, what’s your name?”

“Maybellene,” she said. “With two ells.”

“All right Maybellene with two ells. Maybe I’ll sing a song for your birthday. So you better stick around.”

As if I have a choice, one part of her thought. The hoods still blocked all the exits. The other part of her was thinking, Maybe he’ll sing a song for my birthday!

He swaggered across the stage to the microphone. Her heart pounded with anticipation and she wondered if this was how Benjamin Button felt when he met Fitzgerald.

“Who’s that?” Harry asked.

“Chuck Berry,” she said. “He should have been famous, should have been the king of American music. He mixed country and the blues, white music and black music, bringing together both traditions into one new sound, and created songs like nobody ever heard before or since. But this is his last show. The witnesses said it was his best show, as if he knew something was going to happen. Then tomorrow afternoon he’ll go to a protest in Tom Lee Park, which turns into a riot when the hoods show up. He gets kicked to death by a sneering cracker thug named Elvis Presley.”

“We have some unexpected guests in the audience tonight,” Berry said from the stage, and the crowd, already tense, fell silent. “I’m sure they’re here because they’re lovers of music, and so I’m going to start off with a song about a man who had a lot to do with music. A relished memory in my mind, he is, and a pretty good musician. So I hope he forgives us for using his name. Roll over, Beethoven.”

As soon as his fingers touched the guitar, Mabel had to fight the urge to dance. She saw others struggling the same way—the song had so much energy. Berry didn’t hold back. If anything, the presence of the hoods made him play even harder.

It had an effect, but maybe not the one he expected. The hoods started moving among the tables, tapping people on the shoulders and telling them to get out on the dance floor. People went, but they moved self-consciously, tightly constrained dancing, doing anything to avoid attracting negative attention. A few of the hoods pointed and laughed, mocking the way people moved. Mabel had a very bad feeling, like she was sitting on dynamite watching the fuse burn.

“Okay, you met him,” Harry said, taking hold of her arm. “Now it’s time to stop playing around and go home.”

“I’m not going,” she said. She tugged her arm once to free it, but Harry held on tight.

“I never thought you could be so selfish.”

“Selfish? Things are hard here, but the people have hope, they have joy. If I go home, I’ve got neither. I’d rather live one day here than die for ten more years at home.”

“Womack said you’d say that. I thought I knew you, swore to him I could persuade you. But he was right—you’re selfish. And that’s why I’m authorized to bring you back against your will.”

If he had just clamped the handcuffs on her wrist so she couldn’t escape him and then used the callback, they’d already be on their way home. But Harry wasn’t that clever. She grabbed one of his fingers, bending it back until it snapped. Harry’s eyes went wide with pain—he dropped the handcuffs and his knees buckled.

She used the moment to climb over the steps and make her way through the dance floor. All she had to do was stay away from Harry until she could find a place to hide or a way out. She meant what she’d said, even if she didn’t know it before she arrived—she would rather die here than live another day in her own time.

The song stopped and there was scattered applause, some perfunctory and some genuinely enthused. The crowd on the floor stopped moving. Mabel made sure she was surrounded by people when she stopped.

“I see a pretty little girl on the dance floor,” Berry said from up on the stage. “Her name is Maybellene, with two ells, and she’s got a birthday tomorrow. I want you all to help her celebrate tonight. Go on, make room.”

He pointed to her and everyone stepped back, leaving her in the center of the floor and the center of attention. She wanted to bolt, but if she bolted it would only draw more attention, so she smiled and acted shy and gave people a little wave. A few people wished her happy birthday. One woman complimented her on her dress.

“Let’s go, Maybellene,” Berry said, strumming out a riff on the guitar. “I want to see you twist.”

That made some people around her laugh and Mabel flush. Twist was slang for dancing and also slang for sex. Musicians in this time period often played word games with both meanings.

As the band started playing “Ida May,” another of her favorite songs, Harry’s good hand clamped on her arm like a shackle. Sweat poured off his forehead. “That’s enough. Let’s go.”

His other hand, the one with the broken forefinger, reached for the jacket pocket with the callback. She grabbed his wrist and they struggled, a strange dance for control as the music filled the hall.

“What’s going on here?”

They both froze. Hoods surrounded them in a circle.

Up on stage, the drummer missed a beat.

“You two a pair of mutes?” the hood said. The toes of shiny cop shoes peered out from under the hem of his robe, and the bulge on his hip appeared to be a holstered gun. He was tapping a nightstick in the palm of his hand. “Or do you want to explain what salt is doing in this here pepper shaker?”

Harry’s usual confused and angry expression summed up his understanding of the situation. Mabel pulled her arm free and tried to explain. “Oh, it’s noth—”

“I’m not talking to you,” the hood said. “At least not yet. I’m talking to him. White women aren’t good enough for you, you got to come down here and mix with coloreds? That girl there is dark as coal. Why do you want to plant your seed in that kind of dirt? You a traitor to your own race, son?”

Harry slipped his hand into his pocket. Mabel knew he was going for the callback, and she had no idea how she was going to explain his sudden disappearance to these men. She formulated a plan to fall down screaming about the devil—on one other audit that went bad, something similar had helped her get away.

But she didn’t get a chance to use it. The cop in the hood also saw Harry reach into his pocket. He swung the nightstick so hard that Mabel heard bones crack and the callback shatter. Harry screamed and collapsed on the floor. He yanked his hand out of his pocket as he fell and extended his fist toward Mabel. Blood ran between his fingers and down his arm.

A different hood stomped on Harry’s wrist, pinning it to the floor. “You want to drop that, mister?”

Harry squeezed his fist tighter. The hood ground boot into bones, until Harry gasped in pain. His fingers uncurled, spilling the shattered pieces of the callback on the floor. On stage, the last notes of music sputtered to a stop.

“Thank you, thank you very much,” the hood said. To the cop he added, “Looks like a toy, maybe bakelite, I don’t know. It’s not a knife, it’s not a gun.”

The cop crunched them under his heel and kicked them out of the way. Then he turned to Mabel. “You have some part in this, girl? You a whore or something?”

“No, sir.” She lowered her eyes and swallowed hard. She’d been on audits that had gone poorly before, but never this bad. She might get a chance to test her resolve to die here instead of going home.

“Maybe you sell drugs. Maybe you got marijuana on you. Some, what do you call it, reefer. You got reefer on you, girl?”

“No, sir.”

The cop nodded to the stomper, who came over to check her pockets, which were empty. So he unbuttoned her dress and slipped his hand inside the cups of her bra, just groping her, not even pretending to search. She tried to stand absolutely still, but he liked that and his breathing got heavy. When he lifted up the hem of her dress, she squeezed her legs together, but he forced his hands between them and up inside her panties. Bile rose in her throat and she trembled with a mixture of fear and outrage. It was worse because he didn’t have a face, because none of them had faces, only masks. She could feel him staring at her, wanting the attention of a reaction, so did everything she could to deny him even that.

“She’s got nothing to write home about,” the stomper said when he was done.

Cop nodded at her. “So now I’m asking you. What’s going on here?”

“I just came to listen to the music, sir,” Mabel said, though the sir felt like poison on her tongue. “That man, he just showed up here and started talking to me. I tried to walk away but he followed me and grabbed me.”

Those were all true statements, more or less. If the hoods had asked the bouncer at the back door anything, that ought to corroborate what he would’ve already said. More or less.

“What did he want with you?” the cop asked.

She thought hard and fast. Say too much it would make things worse, say too little and it would do the same. “He asked me to go away with him and I said no.”

Harry lifted his head to look at her, and stomper kicked him in the face. His head snapped back, cracking against the floor and his body went limp. Mabel realized she was shrieking and covered her mouth to choke off the sound. Poor Harry—he was unconscious if he was lucky, dead if he wasn’t.

In just a few seconds, the mood in the club changed from tense to explosive. The cop sensed it too. One hand slipped inside his robe and rested on his gun. With the other, he swung the nightstick in a slow arc at the crowd.

“Now listen up, you dumb niggers. Sometimes a fool gets it in his head to associate with folks he’s got no business associating with, and so he goes and talks to people who don’t want to be talked at, like this here fellow did with this here girl. So all of you better take care to stay with your own kind and we’ll stay with ours. You take care of your problems, we’ll take care of ours. Nobody wants mixing, right? Right.”

He gestured for the hoods to leave out the front. As soon as the hoods guarding the back door joined their friends, people ran to leave that direction. Mabel stayed rooted in place, fighting back tears, while two hoods dragged Harry away by his heels, bumping his head along the floor as they went.

Berry appeared beside her, rested a hand on her shoulder. She was aware of it, tensed when he touched her, but it was a reflex to what had just happened. She felt so numb she wouldn’t have known it was there if she hadn’t seen it.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

“You have any idea what that was all about?”

“No, no idea.”

He blew out a breath and said softly, “Oh, Maybellene, why can’t you be true?”

She didn’t reply. The pieces of the callback device lay scattered on the floor. Harry had wanted his life to mean something and instead he had wasted it coming back for her. Her choices opened up like a pair of Doorways. She could gather up the pieces, try to fix the device, go back to her own time, to a place she hated—a place that needed her. Or she could leave the callback on the floor, walk away, and enjoy whatever time she had here, in a place she wanted to be.

“I can tell you’re upset,” Berry said. He took his hand off her shoulder. “So you do what you think is best. But you’re welcome to come backstage and sit, have something to drink, calm yourself down. It’s up to you.”

He took a step away and Mabel spun around.

“I want—” she said, and hesitated.

“What do you want?”

“I want to live,” she said. And then a second later, she added, “I want to twist.”

He answered her with a suggestive grin that didn’t ignore the pain or the humiliation that either one of them knew, but a grin that promised life was worth living despite all the bad things that happened, all the cruelty and injustice visited by other people. It was a grin that made her knees feel weak all over again, and this time she knew it had nothing to do with the blur.

“Come on,” he said, holding out his hand. “Let’s get started.”

She glanced at the pieces of the callback one last time, then slid her fingers across his palm and took hold. It was her life, after all, and her choice wouldn’t make any difference to the future or the past, not now.

How could it?

© 2012 C. C. Finlay.

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.

Different Kinds of Darkness
David Langford

It was always dark outside the windows. Parents and teachers sometimes said vaguely that this was all because of Deep Green terrorists, but Jonathan thought there was more to the story. The other members of the Shudder Club agreed.

The dark beyond the window-glass at home, at school, and on the school bus was the second kind of darkness. You could often see a little bit in the first kind, the ordinary kind, and of course you could slice through it with a torch. The second sort of darkness was utter black, and not even the brightest electric torch showed a visible beam or lit anything up. Whenever Jonathan watched his friends walk out through the school door ahead of him, it was as though they stepped into a solid black wall. But when he followed them and felt blindly along the handrail to where the homeward bus would be waiting, there was nothing around him but empty air. Black air.

Sometimes you found these super-dark places indoors. Right now, Jonathan was edging his way down a black corridor, one of the school’s no-go areas. Officially, he was supposed to be outside, mucking around for a break period in the high-walled playground where (oddly enough) it wasn’t dark at all and you could see the sky overhead. Of course, outdoors was no place for the dread secret initiations of the Shudder Club.

Jonathan stepped out on the far side of the corridor’s inky-dark section, and quietly opened the door of the little storeroom they’d found two terms ago. Inside, the air was warm, dusty, and stale. A bare light-bulb hung from the ceiling. The others were already there, sitting on boxes of paper and stacks of battered textbooks.

“You’re late,” chorused Gary, Julie, and Khalid. The new candidate, Heather, just pushed back long blonde hair and smiled a slightly strained smile.

“Someone has to be last,” said Jonathan. The words had become part of the ritual, like a secret password that proved that the last one to arrive wasn’t an outsider or a spy. Of course they all knew each other, but imagine a spy who was a master of disguise . . .

Khalid solemnly held up an innocent-looking ring-binder. That was his privilege. The Club had been his idea, after he’d found the bogey picture that someone had left behind in the school photocopier. Maybe he’d read too many stories about ordeals and secret initiations. When you’d stumbled on such a splendid ordeal, you simply had to invent a secret society to use it.

“We are the Shudder Club,” Khalid intoned. “We are the ones who can take it. Twenty seconds.”

Jonathan’s eyebrows went up. Twenty seconds was serious. Gary, the fat boy of the gang, just nodded and concentrated on his watch. Khalid opened the binder and stared at the thing inside. “One . . . two . . . three . . .”

He almost made it. It was past the seventeen-second mark when Khalid’s hands started to twitch and shudder, and then his arms. He dropped the book, and Gary gave him a final count of eighteen. There was a pause while Khalid overcame the shakes and pulled himself together, and then they congratulated him on a new record.

Julie and Gary weren’t feeling so ambitious, and opted for ten-second ordeals. They both got through, though by the count of ten she was terribly white in the face and he was sweating great drops. So Jonathan felt he had to say ten as well.

“You sure, Jon?” said Gary. “Last time you were on eight. No need to push it today.”

Jonathan quoted the ritual words, “We are the ones who can take it,” and took the ring-binder from Gary. “Ten.”

In between times, you always forgot exactly what the bogey picture looked like. It always seemed new. It was an abstract black-and-white pattern, swirly and flickery like one of those old Op Art designs. The shape was almost pretty until the whole thing got into your head with a shock of connection like touching a high-voltage wire. It messed with your eyesight. It messed with your brain. Jonathan felt violent static behind his eyes . . . an electrical storm raging somewhere in there . . . instant fever singing through the blood . . . muscles locking and unlocking . . . and oh dear God, had Gary only counted four?

He held on somehow, forcing himself to keep still when every part of him wanted to twitch in different directions. The dazzle of the bogey picture was fading behind a new kind of darkness, a shadow inside his eyes, and he knew with dreadful certainty that he was going to faint or be sick or both. He gave in and shut his eyes just as, unbelievably and after what had seemed like years, the count reached ten.

Jonathan felt too limp and drained to pay much attention as Heather came close—but not close enough—to the five seconds you needed to be a full member of the Club. She blotted her eyes with a violently trembling hand. She was sure she’d make it next time. And then Khalid closed the meeting with the quotation he’d found somewhere: “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.”

School was a place where mostly they taught you stuff that had nothing to do with the real world. Jonathan secretly reckoned that quadratic equations just didn’t ever happen outside the classroom. So it came as a surprise to the Club when things started getting interesting in, of all places, a maths class.

Mr. Whitcutt was quite old, somewhere between grandfather and retirement age, and didn’t mind straying away from the official maths course once in a while. You had to lure him with the right kind of question. Little Harry Steen—the chess and wargames fanatic of the class, and under consideration for the Club—scored a brilliant success by asking about a news item he’d heard at home. It was something to do with “mathwar,” and terrorists using things called blits.

“I actually knew Vernon Berryman slightly,” said Mr. Whitcutt, which didn’t seem at all promising. But it got better. “He’s the B in blit, you know: B-L-I-T, the Berryman Logical Imaging Technique, as he called it. Very advanced mathematics. Over your heads, probably. Back in the first half of the twentieth century, two great mathematicians called Gödel and Turing proved theorems which . . . um. Well, one way of looking at it is that mathematics is booby-trapped. For any computer at all, there are certain problems that will crash it and stop it dead.”

Half the class nodded knowingly. Their home-made computer programs so often did exactly that.

“Berryman was another brilliant man, and an incredible idiot. Right at the end of the twentieth century, he said to himself, “What if there are problems that crash the human brain?” And he went out and found one, and came up with his wretched “imaging technique” that makes it a problem you can’t ignore. Just looking at a BLIT pattern, letting it in through your optic nerves, can stop your brain.” A click of old, knotty fingers. “Like that.”

Jonathan and the Club looked sidelong at each other. They knew something about staring at strange images. It was Harry, delighted to have stolen all this time from boring old trig., who stuck his hand up first. “Er, did this Berryman look at his own pattern, then?”

Mr. Whitcutt gave a gloomy nod. “The story is that he did. By accident, and it killed him stone dead. It’s ironic. For centuries, people had been writing ghost stories about things so awful that just looking at them makes you die of fright. And then a mathematician, working in the purest and most abstract of all the sciences, goes and brings the stories to life . . .”

He grumbled on about BLIT terrorists like the Deep Greens, who didn’t need guns and explosives—just a photocopier, or a stencil that let them spray deadly graffiti on walls. According to Whitcutt, TV broadcasts used to go out “live,” not taped, until the notorious activist Tee Zero broke into a BBC studio and showed the cameras a BLIT known as the Parrot. Millions had died. It wasn’t safe to look at anything these days.

Jonathan had to ask. “So the, um, the special kind of dark outdoors is to stop people seeing stuff like that?”

“Well . . . yes, in effect that’s quite right.” The old teacher rubbed his chin for a moment. “They brief you about all that when you’re a little older. It’s a bit of a complicated issue . . . Ah, another question?”

It was Khalid who had his hand up. With an elaborate lack of interest that struck Jonathan as desperately unconvincing, he said, “Are all these BLIT things, er, really dangerous, or are there ones that just jolt you a bit?”

Mr. Whitcutt looked at him hard for very nearly the length of a beginner’s ordeal. Then he turned to the whiteboard with its scrawled triangles. “Quite. As I was saying, the cosine of an angle is defined . . .”

The four members of the inner circle had drifted casually together in their special corner of the outdoor play area, by the dirty climbing frame that no one ever used. “So we’re terrorists,” said Julie cheerfully. “We should give ourselves up to the police.”

“No, our picture’s different,” Gary said. “It doesn’t kill people, it . . .”

A chorus of four voices: “. . . makes us stronger.”

Jonathan said, “What do Deep Greens terrorize about? I mean, what don’t they like?”

“I think it’s biochips,” Khalid said uncertainly. “Tiny computers for building into people’s heads. They say it’s unnatural, or something. There was a bit about it in one of those old issues of New Scientist in the lab.”

“Be good for exams,” Jonathan suggested. “But you can’t take calculators into the exam room. ‘Everyone with a biochip, please leave your head at the door.’”

They all laughed, but Jonathan felt a tiny shiver of uncertainty, as though he’d stepped on a stair that wasn’t there. “Biochip” sounded very like something he’d overheard in one of his parents’ rare shouting matches. And he was pretty sure he’d heard “unnatural” too. Please don’t let Mum and Dad be tangled up with terrorists, he thought suddenly. But it was too silly. They weren’t like that . . .

“There was something about control systems too,” said Khalid. “You wouldn’t want to be controlled, now.”

As usual, the chatter soon went off in a new direction, or rather an old one: the walls of type-two darkness that the school used to mark off-limits areas like the corridor leading to the old storeroom. The Club were curious about how it worked, and had done some experiments. Some of the things they knew about the dark and had written down were:

Khalid’s Visibility Theory, which had been proved by painful experiment. Dark zones were brilliant hiding places when it came to hiding from other kids, but teachers could spot you even through the blackness and tick you off something rotten for being where you shouldn’t be. Probably they had some kind of special detector, but no one had ever seen one.

Jonathan’s Bus Footnote to Khalid’s discovery was simply that the driver of the school bus certainly looked as if he was seeing something through the black windscreen. Of course (this was Gary’s idea) the bus might be computer-guided, with the steering wheel turning all by itself and the driver just pretending—but why should he bother?

Julie’s Mirror was the weirdest thing of all. Even Julie hadn’t believed it could work, but if you stood outside a type-two dark place and held a mirror just inside (so it looked as though your arm was cut off by the black wall), you could shine a torch at the place where you couldn’t see the mirror, and the beam would come bouncing back out of the blackness to make a bright spot on your clothes or the wall. As Jonathan pointed out, this was how you could have bright patches of sunlight on the floor of a classroom whose windows all looked out into protecting darkness. It was a kind of dark that light could travel through, but eyesight couldn’t. None of the Optics textbooks said a word about it.

By now, Harry had had his Club invitation and was counting the minutes to his first meeting on Thursday, two days away. Perhaps he would have some ideas for new experiments when he’d passed his ordeal and joined the Club. Harry was extra good at maths and physics.

“Which makes it sort of interesting,” Gary said. “If our picture works by maths like those BLIT things . . . will Harry be able to take it for longer because his brain’s built that way? Or will it be harder because it’s coming on his own wavelength? Sort of thing?”

The Shudder Club reckoned that, although of course you shouldn’t do experiments on people, this was a neat idea that you could argue either side of. And they did.

Thursday came, and after an eternity of history and double physics there was a free period that you were supposed to spend reading or in computer studies. Nobody knew it would be the Shudderers’ last initiation, although Julie—who read heaps of fantasy novels—insisted later that she’d felt all doom-laden and could sense a powerful reek of wrongness. Julie tended to say things like that.

The session in the musty storeroom began pretty well, with Khalid reaching his twenty seconds at last, Jonathan sailing beyond the count of ten which only a few weeks ago had felt like an impossible Everest, and (to carefully muted clapping) Heather finally becoming a full member of the Club. Then the trouble began, as Harry the first-timer adjusted his little round glasses, set his shoulders, opened the tatty ritual ring-binder, and went rigid. Not twitchy or shuddery, but stiff. He made horrible grunts and pig-squeals, and fell sideways. Blood trickled from his mouth.

“He’s bitten his tongue,” said Heather. “Oh lord, what’s first aid for biting your tongue?”

At this point the storeroom door opened and Mr. Whitcutt came in. He looked older and sadder. “I might have known it would be like this.” Suddenly he turned his eyes sideways and shaded them with one hand, as though blinded by strong light. “Cover it up. Shut your eyes, Patel, don’t look at it, and just cover that damned thing up.”

Khalid did as he was told. They helped Harry to his feet: He kept saying “Sorry, sorry,” in a thick voice, and dribbling like a vampire with awful table manners. The long march through the uncarpeted, echoey corridors to the school’s little sickroom, and then onward to the Principal’s office, seemed to go on for endless grim hours.

Ms. Fortmayne the Principal was an iron-grey woman who, according to school rumours, was kind to animals but could reduce any pupil to ashes with a few sharp sentences—a kind of human BLIT. She looked across her desk at the Shudder Club for one eternity of a moment, and said sharply: “Whose idea was it?”

Khalid slowly put up a brown hand, but no higher than his shoulder. Jonathan remembered the Three Musketeers’ motto, One for all and all for one, and said, “It was all of us really.” So Julie added, “That’s right.”

“I really don’t know,” said the Principal, tapping the closed ring-binder that lay in front of her. “The single most insidious weapon on Earth—the information-war equivalent of a neutron bomb—and you were playing with it. I don’t often say that words fail me . . .”

“Someone left it in the photocopier. Here. Downstairs,” Khalid pointed out.

“Yes. Mistakes do happen.” Her face softened a little. “And I’m getting carried away, because we do actually use that BLIT image as part of a little talk I have with older children when they’re about to leave school. They’re exposed to it for just two seconds, with proper medical supervision. Its nickname is the Trembler, and some countries use big posters of it for riot control—but not Britain or America, naturally. Of course you couldn’t have known that Harry Steen is a borderline epileptic or that the Trembler would give him a fit . . .”

“I should have guessed sooner,” said Mr. Whitcutt’s voice from behind the Club. “Young Patel blew the gaff by asking what was either a very intelligent question or a very incriminating one. But I’m an old fool who never got used to the idea of a school being a terrorist target.”

The Principal gave him a sharp look. Jonathan felt suddenly dizzy, with thoughts clicking through his head like one of those workings in algebra where everything goes just right and you can almost see the answer waiting in the white space at the bottom of the page. What don’t Deep Green terrorists like? Why are we a target?

Control systems. You wouldn’t want to be controlled.

He blurted: “Biochips. We’ve got biochip control systems. In our heads. All us kids. They make the darkness somehow. The special dark where grown-ups can still see.”

There was a moment’s frozen silence.

“Go to the top of the class,” murmured old Whitcutt.

The Principal sighed and seemed to sag in her chair a little. “There had to be a first time,” she said quietly. “This is what my little lecture to school-leavers is all about. How you’re specially privileged children, how you’ve been protected all your lives by biochips in your optic nerves that edit what you can see. So it always seems dark in the streets and outside the windows, wherever there might be a BLIT image waiting to kill you. But that kind of darkness isn’t real—except to you. Remember, your parents had a choice, and they agreed to this protection.”

Mine didn’t both agree, thought Jonathan, remembering an overheard quarrel.

“It’s not fair,” said Gary uncertainly. “It’s doing experiments on people.”

Khalid said, “And it’s not just protection. There are corridors here indoors that are blacked out, just to keep us out of places. To control us.”

Ms. Fortmayne chose not to hear them. Maybe she had a biochip of her own that stopped rebellious remarks from getting through. “When you leave school you are given full control over your biochips. You can choose whether to take risks . . . once you’re old enough.”

Jonathan could almost bet that all five Club members were thinking the same thing: What the hell, we took our risks with the Trembler and we got away with it.

Apparently they had indeed got away with it, since when the Principal said, “You can go now,” she’d still mentioned nothing about punishment. As slowly as they dared, the Club headed back to the classroom. Whenever they passed side-turnings, which were filled with solid darkness, Jonathan cringed to think that a chip behind his eyes was stealing the light and with different programming could make him blind to everything, everywhere.

The seriously nasty thing happened at going-home time, when the caretaker unlocked the school’s side door as usual while a crowd of pupils jostled behind him. Jonathan and the Club had pushed their way almost to the front of the mob. The heavy wooden door swung inward. As usual it opened on the second kind of darkness, but something bad from the dark came in with it, a large sheet of paper fixed with a drawing-pin to the door’s outer surface and hanging slightly askew. The caretaker glanced at it, and toppled like a man struck by lightning.

Jonathan didn’t stop to think. He shoved past some smaller kid and grabbed the paper, crumpling it up frantically. It was already too late. He’d seen the image there, completely unlike the Trembler yet very clearly from the same terrible family, a slanted dark shape like the profile of a perched bird, but with complications, twirly bits, patterns like fractals, and it hung there blazing in his mind’s eye and wouldn’t go away—

—something hard and horrible smashing like a runaway express into his brain—

—burning falling burning falling—

—BLIT.

After long and evil dreams of bird-shapes that stalked him in darkness, Jonathan found himself lying on a couch, no, a bed in the school sickroom. It was a surprise to be anywhere at all, after feeling his whole life crashing into that enormous full stop. He was still limp all over, too tired to do more than stare at the white ceiling.

Mr. Whitcutt’s face came slowly into his field of vision. “Hello? Hello? Anyone in there?” He sounded worried.

“Yes . . . I’m fine,” said Jonathan, not quite truthfully.

“Thank heaven for that. Nurse Baker was amazed you were alive. Alive and sane seemed like too much to hope for. Well, I’m here to warn you that you’re a hero. Plucky Boy Saves Fellow-Pupils. You’ll be surprised how quickly you can get sick of being called plucky.”

“What was it, on the door?”

“One of the very bad ones. Called the Parrot, for some reason. Poor old George the caretaker was dead before he hit the ground. The anti-terrorist squad that came to dispose of that BLIT paper couldn’t believe you’d survived. Neither could I.”

Jonathan smiled. “I’ve had practice.”

“Yes. It didn’t take that long to realize Lucy—that is, Ms. Fortmayne—failed to ask you young hooligans enough questions. So I had another word with your friend Khalid Patel. God in heaven, that boy can outstare the Trembler for twenty seconds! Adult crowds fall over in convulsions once they’ve properly, what d’you call it, registered the sight of the thing, let it lock in . . .”

“My record’s ten and a half. Nearly eleven really.”

The old man shook his head wonderingly. “I wish I could say I didn’t believe you. They’ll be re-assessing the whole biochip protection programme. No one ever thought of training young, flexible minds to resist BLIT attack by a sort of vaccination process. If they’d thought of it, they still wouldn’t have dared try it . . . Anyway, Lucy and I had a talk, and we have a little present for you. They can reprogram those biochips by radio link in no time at all, and so—”

He pointed. Jonathan made an effort and turned his head. Through the window, where he’d expected to see only artificial darkness, there was a complication of rosy light and glory that at first his eyes couldn’t take in. A little at a time, assembling itself like some kind of healing opposite to those deadly patterns, the abstract brilliance of heaven became a town roofscape glowing in a rose-red sunset. Even the chimney-pots and satellite dishes looked beautiful. He’d seen sunsets on video, of course, but it wasn’t the same, it was the aching difference between live flame and an electric fire’s dull glare: Like so much of the adult world, the TV screen lied by what it didn’t tell you.

“The other present is from your pals. They said they’re sorry there wasn’t time to get anything better.”

It was a small, somewhat bent bar of chocolate (Gary always had a few tucked away), with a card written in Julie’s careful left-sloping script and signed by all the Shudder Club. The inscription was, of course: That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.

© 2000 by David Langford.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

David Langford has published over thirty books, eighty short stories and several hundred magazine columns since his 1975 debut. His awards include the Skylark, European SF Award (shared with Peter Nicholls and Brian Stableford) and 28 Hugos—some for his SF newsletter Ansible, launched in 1979 and currently appearing monthly: see news.ansible.co.uk. Langford’s most popular novel is the nuclear farce The Leaky Establishment (1984), based on his years as a weapons physicist. His straight stories are collected as Different Kinds of Darkness (2004) and parodies/pastiches as He Do the Time Police in Different Voices (2003); his latest collection, of columns, essays, reviews, and a few short-shorts, is Starcombing (2009). His large Victorian house in Reading, England, contains numerous computers and far too many books. In recent years his life has been eaten by the online Encyclopedia of SF.

The Children of Hamelin
Dale Bailey

The swings hang perfectly still in the windless dawn. I come here most mornings to stand among the abandoned jungle gyms and sliding boards; sometimes the swings squeak, sometimes they are still, but either way the equation comes to loss. Either way I think of Sarah. Ellen stays behind, sleepless, wandering the empty house like a ghost, the T.V. in the family room spilling its perpetual stream of speculation into the silent air. But even now, three months later, the talking heads can’t say what happened. And though they say, those talking heads, that soon such places will ring once again with the cries of children—that already life kindles in the wombs of millions of mothers to be—I can find little comfort in this.

Once, in September, not a month after the catastrophe, I suggested to Ellen that we too could make a fresh start, that we were not yet too old, that there were other children to be born.

She slapped me, and I deserved it.

There is no replacing a child, she said, and she is right. If I could have found words to apologize, I would have, but apologies are meaningless in this empty world of ours. What have I suffered or inflicted that hundreds of millions of other parents around the globe do not suffer or inflict as well?

So it is the dawn for me, and the empty playground where I brought Sarah when she was a child, all those years ago. She was nearly grown when it happened—and though there was no neat threshold of division, I think of that sometimes, how close to grown she was, how close we were to keeping her forever. Another year, another month, perhaps a mere handful of days. There is no logic to the thing, no sense, no order that we can discern. Other girls her age are with us still. But that’s a selfish thought; to remind myself, I come here to the deserted elementary school where I once dropped her off at kindergarten, where I had admired her art taped to the wall outside her classroom, where I saw her graduate from sixth grade. An absurd idea, I had thought then, graduation from elementary school, and I attended the ceremony as I had attended so many of her activities—the soccer games and the dance recitals and the fifth-grade picnic—with a kind of grudging resentment: outwardly the good father, inwardly narcissistic and coldly isolate. Little did I know that it was the only graduation she would ever have. Or that I would someday be so utterly bereft.

Not alone, though.

We keep the company of millions, Ellen and I, and some days when I drift down to the playground under the lowering November sky, someone else is there: a woman wedged into one of the tiny swings, her face cupped in her palms, or a man standing in the mulch by the teeter-totter, staring into the middle distance. Today it is a woman: tall, her hair tied back beneath a scarf, her hands in the pockets of a blue woolen coat that has seen better days. She’s standing under the great elm that grows just inside one corner of the black iron fence. She glances at me as I push through the gate. I wander over to the benches that line the sidewalk, sweep one dry with the edge of my hand, and sit down.

Once, teachers would have taken their lunches here, eating their sandwiches and chatting while the children played on the swing sets, their skin dappled with coins of light. I lean my head back and close my eyes. The days are long, the nights restless. I am weary to the bone, and perhaps I doze—this is how I sleep now, in snatches—and then I feel her shadow fall across me.

I open my eyes.

She stands three or four feet away, lean and young—much younger than I am—but no longer youthful. Grief has stolen away whatever youth she might have once possessed. Her skin is waxy and lucid, as if lit from underneath. She has weather-gray eyes, thin lips set in an expression I cannot read. Beyond her, the playground stretches empty beneath the overcast; the swing set and jungle gym—the towering elm—stand black and depthless against the sky.

She sits down on the other end of the bench. She smoothes the coat across her thighs. Her breath is a ghostly plume in the still air.

“How old?” she says at last.

“Sixteen.”

“So close,” she says: my own thought echoed back to me.

Then we are silent for a time, it’s hard to be sure how long. A car hisses by in the street, a blur of red beyond the fleeting black columns of the fence. This is not conversation, but something more distant and impersonal: dots and dashes tapped out in bursts down transcontinental lines. Words punctuate the silence; they do not fill it.

“Six and nine,” she says, though I haven’t asked.

I ponder the arithmetic of despair. Is sixteen greater than or less than six and nine? One child versus two, exponents of how much pain? I steal a look at her, head bowed beneath her scarf. Jutting cheekbones, hawkish nose: She looks like she is starving, like some parasite is devouring her from the inside.

“Let’s walk,” she says.

“Why not?”

She leads me out of the playground, moving away along the sidewalk toward the center of town. Ours is no metropolis. I’m not sure of the population—thirty thousand, thirty-five? Large enough that most of the population has moved to the outskirts of the city, small enough that downtown has survived in a fashion: banks; a dollar theater; a couple of limping old furniture stores, mahogany tables and oaken vanities, powdered with dust. Streets of Edwardian houses—beautiful old mansions, most of them—radiate from this core. The ones to the west are still inhabited by genteel families who built high-end furniture factories here generations ago. Now the furniture factories are gone, replaced by call centers and server farms. To the east, the houses have been mutilated, chopped into sagging, poorly air-conditioned apartments.

She leads me east. Thin smears of sun now and then appear in the overcast, throwing watery shadows across the pavement. The air smells of bright, prickling cold. Around us the town stirs. Lights flick on in upstairs windows. Cars cough and exhale in the stillness. There is more traffic now, the faraway din of a siren. The elementary school falls behind us, my house still farther. I can picture Ellen there, pacing, always pacing.

“Where are you taking me?” I ask, just to hear the sound of my own voice.

The woman doesn’t respond.

I don’t press the issue. I feel a sort of kinship with her, the silence in which she endures her loss. Not all the bereft have responded in this way. Others fill the airwaves at night, voices lifted in lamentation or cries for justice, as if the universe is interested in justice, or has recourse to it. There has never been justice, I think now, imagining the legions of children lost to famine, to disease and war, over long centuries. It is the scale of the thing that is different—its clean efficiency across lines of class and race, across borders, across oceans—its concentration in time. A handful of fourteen-year-olds survived—no more than two or three thousand around the world—a scattering of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, most seventeen-year-olds. In three months, no one has come forward to report a missing eighteen-year-old. Missing, taken, disappeared. Choose your term. The reaping, some have called it; others, the rapture. Language cannot contain the scope of the bereavement.

The woman stops outside one of those peeling Edwardian houses that have been divided into apartments. A frost-heaved sidewalk leads up to a sagging front porch where a rusty swing hangs. A car passes, swirling up a platoon of leaves. The woman’s key rattles in the lock. Before I know it—before there is any moment of decision—I am inside a family room. Surgically shining surfaces gleam back at me. The piney aroma of furniture polish permeates the air. A spavined sofa and faded armchair sit at angles to an old-fashioned television, almost as deep as it is wide. In the ambient morning light that steals around the blinds, the woman leads me down a hallway into a kitchen. When she flips on the light, it snaps into relief, hyper-real: glistening countertops and white cabinets, a deal table with three wooden chairs against the windows. A cat clock hangs on one wall, rolling its eyes and switching its tail with each passing second. The deep hum of the refrigerator anchors and compounds the stillness.

I too am still, watching as she shucks her coat and scarf and drapes them over a chair. She loosens her hair. Then she busies herself about the kitchen, setting water to boil, pouring ground coffee into a French press. This room, like the family room, has been scrubbed clean of any evidence that a six- and nine-year-old once lived here. No youthful artifact remains—no toy soldier shoved halfway under the range, no plastic cell phone abandoned on the counter. After Sarah disappeared, Ellen made her room into an immaculate chapel, smoothing tight the counterpane and dusting the bureau daily; imperceptibly, over the last few months, our house has reorganized itself around this new center. Anywhere in the house, any time of day—in my basement workshop, in the bedroom where I lie sleepless at night—I feel it exert its pull upon me, inexorable as the gravity of a collapsed star. I stand in the doorway for fifteen minutes at a time, not sure how I came to be there, wishing that Ellen had left things as they were, the bedclothes twisted, the desk piled high with books and papers. Then I might sense some lingering hint of Sarah’s presence—the faint jasmine scent of her shampoo, the echo of her voice. In the pristine shrine I sense nothing at all.

The woman pushes a cup of black, aromatic coffee across the table to me. I clasp my hands around the cup, leaning into the rising steam, hungry for its warmth. Simple pleasures; the worst thing about them is that you still enjoy them. The body has its own logic, immune to the calculus of grief. We sit there, sipping coffee. I don’t know how long. I watch her steady herself half a dozen times, and seeing it, I know that this small home has its own true north, the axis upon which her heart’s compass turns. Morning deepens. Sourceless gray light illuminates the unkempt garden outside the window.

“Here,” she said. “It happened here.”

“What do you mean?”

She swallows, pushes her hair out of her face. She cradles her forehead. “They were eating breakfast,” she says. “In this kitchen. I stepped out of the room, that’s all—”

Here is another mystery, much speculated upon: No one witnessed it. No one saw it happen—not even in the daylit regions of the world. In that moment—for just that moment—parents stepped out of the room, they dropped their children’s hands, they didn’t glance in the rearview mirror. Teachers turned to their desks. Security cameras went black. One moment our children were here. The next moment they were gone.

“I could hear them,” she said. “They were fighting over the toy inside the cereal box. The way kids do, that constant back and forth, and I just needed a moment, you know, the way they drive you crazy sometimes, and you just need a moment of quiet? And the next moment I had all the quiet I could ever want.” She speaks in a dull monotone, empty of expression. “I knew something was wrong, because I couldn’t hear them anymore. They used to fight all the time. I heard their spoons clatter to the floor,” she says, and I imagine the moment, things falling all over the world, spoons and jewelry, pencils and eyeglasses, fillings. “When I rushed in—” she says, “I knew something was wrong, I was so scared—they were just . . . gone.”

She pauses, gives me a searching look.

Close up, her eyes are the color of rainwater.

“Do you think—” she says. “Do you think I could have caused it? Do you think I was a bad parent? I was sometimes. I know that. Do you think it was my fault?”

I laugh bitterly. “Not unless we’re all bad parents.”

“I think about them at night. I’m lying in bed and it’s so still. It used to be I could never get any sleep. Mommy, can I have some water? Mommy, Jeff kicked me. Mommy, I’m afraid. And I would just leave them sometimes, to fight it out for themselves. Or to cry it out. That’s what the parenting books tell you to do, to let them cry it out. But that’s what I think about: the nights they were afraid and I was too tired or too selfish to go to them.”

A thin rain starts to spit down. I listen to it tick against the window. Tracks of water branch down the glass.

“Do you think I was a bad parent?”

Ellen’s question. My question.

I don’t know. How can we ever know?

“Sounds to me like you were human,” I say.

Something a therapist had told me—before we realized therapy wouldn’t help. Nothing can help. Not even time. But it’s all I have to offer.

“I never had any way of looking at it from the outside,” she says.

“Their father?”

“Did a disappearing act of his own. Almost four years ago now.”

The refrigerator shuts off.

The woman pushes her coffee away. Her hands knot themselves upon the table.

“What happened?” she says. “Dear God, what happened?”

For that too there is no answer. Just the sound of the clock switching its tail, the rain at the window, the damp loam of the neglected garden. Just the world as it is, not as I would have it be. The old business of suffering, its human position. The universe getting down to work. I can imagine the kitchen that bright morning. The trapezoid of sunlight on the far wall, the aroma of coffee in the air, the sound of a radio playing in some back room. Shouts and laughter, the cereal box spewing flakes as they tug it back and forth. I see her looking at herself in the mirror, running a brush through her hair. Tilting her head to put in an earring. And then there’s a silence under the sound, a deeper silence, more profound. The radio plays over a sudden vacuum: the hum of the refrigerator, the ticking of the clock. The water splashing in the sink cannot disguise it.

She twists the faucet closed.

She lets the silence gather around her, afraid suddenly to move. The radio playing in the bedroom—the good-natured banter about the weather and the latest celebrity gossip, the endless commercials, the idiot unawareness that the world has abruptly changed forever—cannot disguise the deeper silence, sudden, featureless, and black, like an ebony slab. She can feel the thunder of blood at her temples, the pulse of her heart in her breast. She knows the way you know when the world has gone irretrievably wrong—the way I had sensed it as I made my way down the too-quiet hallway to wake Sarah, ever late, for school. Sarah, I remember saying, it’s time to wake up, honey, fearing even as I flipped on the light that I would see something terrible, and I did: covers twisted and empty, my daughter’s earrings nestled in a fold of her pillowcase.

Everything else is aftermath. The lies you tell yourself—

—she’s in the bathroom, she sneaked out with friends—

—the panicky minutes working your way through the contacts in her phone. Voicemail. Voicemail. Voicemail. And then the panicky call to the police, the phone lines jammed, and finally the television, carrying word of the horror unfolding in the familiar rooms of your own house, making it real and universal. I don’t have to imagine how she must have felt as she slipped through the bathroom door and padded down the hall to the kitchen, already the terror of what she would find bearing down upon her, then the horror of actually finding it. I don’t have to imagine what comes after. I know. I’m living it still.

“Sixteen,” she says.

“Sarah.”

“Sarah.”

We sit there for a long time. I think of Ellen, pausing to pour herself a cup of coffee and stare at the little television flickering on the counter. And then, the coffee forgotten, resuming her circuit of the rooms, until at last she finds her way back to the new center of our home, the center we had known was there all along without really knowing what it was, or where. Sarah’s room.

We have not slept in the same bed for two months. I drifted away to the guestroom for reasons I can neither articulate nor resist. At night, we lie sleepless, each alone in our private darkness.

I reach out and cover the woman’s hand upon the table.

She doesn’t pull away, and that’s enough for a while. It’s something anyway, something as we wait and long and hope, this little comfort we can offer one another. Some enigmas defy explanation. Sometimes you lose your children, that’s all. And so we wait as the morning brightens toward full day, our coffee growing cold between us; hand upon hand we wait in silence, hoping that somewhere, somehow, a doorway will open in a hill and our children will come home to us.

© 2012 Dale Bailey.

Dale Bailey lives in North Carolina with his family, and has published three novels, The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.). His short fiction, collected in The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories, has won the International Horror Guild Award and has been twice nominated for the Nebula Award.

A Hole to China
Catherynne M. Valente

I: An Exceptional Child

Tristram was certain she would never have made the attempt had she not heard that it was a thing other children often did. She did so want to be like other children—lolling about like great striped cats, batting at moths with oversized paws, snapping at dust-motes with wet pink jaws. If at times they held still long enough for a mockingbird to alight on their teeth, it was only to fool the poor thing into thinking that for a moment she was tolerated, endured by that tribe of violent, bloody beauties. Her mother had been like that, when she was her age. Her father had been, too—all the pictures of them when they were young seem to have far too much sunlight. And Tristram’s mother always looked at her as a tiger might very well if she found that she had birthed an antelope instead. Certainly the antelope is big and graceful and has very fine horns, but it is not quite what was desired, not quite. In order to escape that perplexed gaze, that constant worry: Where are your stripes? Where are your claws? Why do you not invite your friends over to the house? Why do you never go to school dances? Why do you not try out for the cross-country team? Where is your tail, your paws, your sharp teeth?

Tristram did like to watch the big cats of her school, to study them, log their behaviors in the basement library of her heart so that in the evenings when they had all gone, she could take out their manners and learn to imitate them. She was not very good at it yet, but she felt sure that given time she could manage a pantomime of sorts.

If a child carries a shovel, for example, adults will laugh among themselves and say that the little one is digging a hole to China. This is what exceptional children do. Children who are imaginative, charmingly illogical, magical in their thinking if somewhat less than gifted in their understanding of geology. Children who have blonde hair and play soccer, children who eat very little and read less. But they would not think this of her, as Tristram was not a dreamy girl, and had a general idea of the anatomy of the planet she stood on—mainly drawn from textbooks, which labeled each layer with garish primary colors. Blue for the crust, yellow for the mantle, red for the core. She liked the mantle best. Yellow was a friendly color, and besides, though she was surely not one of the exceptional children, she knew another meaning for the word “mantle,” and could not help thinking of the warm earth as a thing she could slowly unwind and drape over her pale shoulders like a coat of gold.

She was doubtful, of course, that she could dig a little highway, just for herself, all the way to China. But if such a thing could be done, she was utterly certain that the vital thing was beginning in the right place. You could not just leap onto the interstate wherever you liked—you needed an on-ramp. And there are only a finite number of on-ramps. Surely someone’s garden opened up into a land of jade and low fog, of red bowls filled with rice, of handwriting like stalks of grass and silent green places. It might be her garden, it might be her neighbor’s. It was all luck, really. Adults laughed because they knew how fantastically unlikely it was that they had purchased such valuable real estate without knowing it. There were signs, always signs, leading to an on-ramp, with arrows and such, but she could not be sure that the leaves in her garden said: This is the way, or if the bluebells marked an entrance, or if the raspberry brambles which looked so like calligraphy secreted away a path to the other side of the world. If she were like other children, Tristram reasoned, she would have at least tried by now.

And so, as if taking an exam that she could not hope to pass, Tristram took her father’s rusty shovel from the garage on a long, violet summer dusk. She went out into the weedy garden, overgrown because she was a lazy girl with no work ethic, and cleared a space under the wide, flat squash leaves which were so very like jade. She worked the blade into the loamy black soil, soft and moist like crumbled chocolate, and turned over a lump of dirt, and then another.

She discovered very quickly that this was tedious work, and only the most exceptional of children would continue past the first few shovelfuls. She wondered how far she would have to go before the mantle seeped up into the soles of her feet, wrapping her up in golden shoes and stockings—surely not very far. The crust was always so thin in her textbooks, hardly strong enough to bear all those people walking on it.

The stars were out by the time Tristram was waist-deep in her hole. They were small and high, like the tips of tiny pens ready to sign their names to the earth. The garden-dirt had become very wet and clayey, but she had not yet hit rock, and she took this as a good sign. The yellow squash roots were long past her, their thready fingers relinquishing their hold as if to say: We tried to hold you here. It is not our fault.

She was sweating into the mud; her shoulders throbbed. She had discovered so far: three antediluvian soda cans, six skeletons of mice or mice-like creatures, one enormous marrow bone buried by some long-dead spaniel, and too many earthworms to count. It did not occur to her that the children she wished to imitate made their assays in daylight, with others about to take shifts on the shovel, and never in secret, never with their parents sleeping in rooms far off, dreaming of lean wolves with second mortgages rolled up in their jaws. She only dug on, and on.

If you or I had asked her, Tristram would not have been able to say what she expected. To dig without resistance all the way through? To hit the wooden floor of the garden and pry up the boards? To dig until it was time for school and then give up, having done her duty by her study of normal children and made an honest attempt?

Instead, she found the eye.

It opened up an hour before dawn, when a bit of pale wind had begun to pick up and blow away the dark like leaves. She almost sliced it open with her shovel, but it blinked very quickly, with great alarm, and she saw it in time, just at the bottom of her hole: a large black eye, like a crow’s, round and rheumy.

Tristram dug carefully around it, first with the now-terribly dull shovel, and then with her fingers. She found no head to match it, but a wide steel shelf with a small hole cut in it for the eye to peek through. The eye rolled several times and strained to its left, and Tristram felt very badly for it: An exceptional child would certainly understand immediately what it meant. She scrabbled in the left-hand dirt, whispering apologies. The eye softened a bit, but kept straining, as if trying to see what she as up to.

Gently, Tristram cleared the soil, trying not to spray it into the unprotected eye. Finally, she found what it must have meant for her to find, and her throat went thick, her breath moth-quick. It could not be real, could not possibly be. To find a thing like this, a girl must have great faith already. Faith is rewarded. She could not even think of what the opposite of faith might be, but that was the thing she had, and that was not rewarded with such prizes as this.

It was a handle, ornate and iron, like a great spoon bent by grim hands. It was carved like a stalk of bamboo with silver peonies blossoming at its tip and its base. She closed both small hands around it and wrenched it open: a little door, not much more than a hatch, just the size, really, of a hole a girl of twelve might manage to dig. There was a staircase with a long banister, and a dark corridor, leading down and down and down. She took a deep breath and looked around her, sure the house was dark and innocent of what she had done to the garden.

Tristram stepped onto the staircase, and closed the door behind her.

The squash roots, being kind and considerate folk, gathered up the displaced soil and spread it beneath them, hiding the hatch once more and smoothing the garden like a bedsheet until no one might tell that it had ever been disturbed. The fat yellow squash themselves lurched onto the place where Tristram had gone, and fell asleep under the morning wind.

“Destination?”

Tristram blinked. The creature blinked back. The light beneath the steel door was fitful and golden, a few torches blazed lazily.

It sat on a high steel chair, not a throne, but a Chair, with long arms and a smooth back, framing the head of the seated soul. In this case, a woman in a white hood, remarkably white, with the head of an enormous crow. She rubbed at one of her eyes with a gargantuan hand, as big as the rest of her body, ponderous fingers as long as Tristram’s legs. She stretched her feathery eyelid up and down and worried her black beak against her shoulder.

“Destination?”

“Um . . . I think . . . China, I think.”

“It’s a bit of a traditional choice, don’t you think?”

“It’s just a figure of speech, you know . . .” Tristram shrugged lamely.

“And where did you think those came from? It’s very hard to push a figure of speech into the world, as hard as a child.”

Tristram tried to peer through the flickering shadows. “Are there very many children here?” If there were, she could not compete, she knew, and ought to go home, give them the chance to get where they were going.

The crow-woman cocked her head and leaned forward in her chair. “We have a quota. Five in a century. Any more and one begins to invite archaeologists. They’re like ants—once you’ve got one, you’ve got a colony. You will make two for this phase.”

Tristram looked down into the dark. It was hot down there; the breezes were warm and scented, like burning stone and honeysuckle. She heard voices and rushes of air, like listening to a subway station through a grating. The crow extended one of her mammoth hands and wrapped Tristram up in her fingers, gently, with great care.

“Don’t be afraid, little one,” she said, bringing her eye very close. “I am here to Watch the door—there are only a few doors, and it is very dangerous to have one so close to a garden, but what can one do? We did not predict the New World and all its squash, all its houses and children and buses and rosebushes. I am very good at Watching, and from my hole in the ceiling of the world I can see as much as any runner in the red streets of Ignis. If you pay the toll, you will be safe, and the Thoroughfare will keep you and bear wherever you wish, through plains of fur and high silver tundra. A road often-traveled is well-trained and dear, a sweet hound at your feet.”

Tristram shut her eyes. Her blood beat at her skin. An exceptional child would go—she would never hesitate. She would be brave, she would be resourceful. She would have read very many books to prepare her for this sort of thing. China, all the way to China, where everything would be made of jade, just everything, and there would be no terrible cats at all to smile and smile while they scraped her to the bone.

“What can I give you?” she whispered, her eyes still shut, dark hair plastered to her forehead. “I have nothing to pay your toll.”

The crow frowned. Tristram could feel the frown land on her face, the disapproval, the inevitable disappointment. It was not heavy, but it clung, like a shroud.

“I do not understand what children think these days. They expect everything for nothing. The business of psychopomps is exchange. Just because you are cherubic and wee does not mean you are exempt from economy. Not even an earring? Not even a purely symbolic penny?”

Tristram shook her head, her eyes full of tears. No work ethic at all, her father said. Why had she not brought her allowance? Crows like silver, she seemed to recall.

“If you have nothing, you must barter.” She set Tristram down on the smooth stair and reached into her robes with her dexterous beak—much more clever and quick than her hands. “Take this to my sister in Ignis and I shall call us fair.”

Into Tristram’s shovel-bloodied hands the crow placed a pair of huge emerald scissors. The blades were ornate and engraved with all the things a bird cares for: beetles and high trees, clouds and seeds, fallen fruit and eggs. The scant torchlight of the landing glittered on the handles. They were warm from the crow’s body.

“How do I get to Ignis?” Tristram marveled.

“All our roads lead there, sooner or later. Gravity, you know. You can no more miss it than fall out a window and fail to hit the ground.”

Tristram put the scissors through her belt and hefted her rusted shovel onto her shoulder. When I am through, she thought, I will have passed through so much fire, I will burn so brightly no tiger will be able to look at me without being blinded.

She turned and walked down the first stairs, winding around and around. The crow cawed softly behind her. Tristram counted thirty-six steps before the Thoroughfare opened beneath her—an endless crystalline road flowing on beneath a black sky which was the stony earth above, lit not by torches but by winding glass flowers that grew down from the lowest of all soils, straining like trumpets toward the road, glowing golden as if still molten and searing. They smelled sweet, like honeysuckle and green woodsmoke. Stumpish, deformed glass trees sprouted blue and black beyond the pearl guardrails.

And all along the Thoroughfare folk walked, pilgrims, brass lanterns raised against the dark, their faces turned towards the heart of the world, and on each of their shoulders was a mantle of gold.

II: The Ox of Sorrows

Before and behind, the line of brass lanterns extended. Tristram was caught up in the traffic, her feet hardly touching the glowering red road, swept along by a tide of bodies. She snatched breaths whenever the teeming folk swelled and her head crested theirs, only to be driven down again, surrounded by swinging arms and strange scents—women who smelled of nutmeg and cardamom, men who smelled of smoldering newspapers, glossy-coated dogs on their hind legs and horses in prim green vests and Windsor ties, smelling of expensive rose-leaf perfumes. She could hardly breathe for the press of them.

Tristram walked—everyone walked. Around her rose the rumble of a thousand languages at once. The curling glass flowers played a slow, quiet music, something like a department store radio, and something like a sitar of cedar, stuck in a minor key. She strained to hear it, and in her straining nearly collided with the creature before she saw it.

Standing far taller than it ought to have and refusing to move, so that the throng was forced to part around it, was a black peacock, its eyes red and hard, its tail aflame, dancing, scarlet and white.

“You are traveling far under the speed limit,” it chirruped airily, its tail flicking sparks at a passing monkey, whose shoes were rose-colored silk. The peacock was taller than Tristram, and its plumage seemed stony, sharp-edged, as though it was a statue of a bird.

“I’m going as fast as I can,” said Tristram demurely.

“That really isn’t much of an excuse. There are rules here. Good ones, that took a very long time to think up.”

By now, businessmen in sulfurous yellow suits were shoving angrily by the pair of them, banging Tristram unceremoniously with their suitcases and cursing in trilling tongues.

“Rule Number the FIRST,” announced the peacock, “Any journey on the Thoroughfare from origin point to destination may not last longer than three days without expressed written permission from the Transit Authority (who is a most disagreeable and sour-faced Boar). If you are found in the wild, four days out from anywhere, you will be furnished with rather rough transport to the Bath-House, where you will be fined and questioned most keenly by the Tusks of Transit.”

“Three days? But that will never be long enough!”

“I am still speaking. It is a very important rule, designed to reduce traffic. As you can see, it is highly effective.”

Tristram stared at the crush of creatures, a multitude of determined, rushing faces beyond her ability to count.

“Rule Number the SECOND. No weapons of any kind are allowable on the Thoroughfare, as this is a sacred road, a pilgrim’s road, and pilgrims really ought to be spiritually elevated beyond the need for stabbing, shooting, or lighting anyone on fire.” The peacock glanced meaningfully at the emerald scissors.

“Oh, no, they’re . . . they’re a gift.”

“Rule Number the THIRD. When greeting another pilgrim on the road, one must furnish—immediately if not sooner—a calling card, and a curtsey, if anatomy allows.”

The peacock extended its claw and placed a golden card into Tristram’s wondering hand. It read:

CHIAROSCURO

An Historienne

3 Rue Brûlé

Ignis

“Historienne? But I thought only boy-peacocks had tails.”

Chiaroscuro glared haughtily and drew herself up. “And I thought human girls wore dresses. Do you never prefer to wear men’s clothes, when they are prettier, and more suited, and more sensible?”

“I rarely wear them if they are on fire,” Tristram said, chagrined.

“Well, as to that, most things are on fire in Ignis. More or less on fire, I daresay. It is so very deep, there is little one can do to avoid combustion. It’s better to embrace it than constantly pour ice over one’s head in a futile effort to stay cool.”

“About . . . about the three days. I am bound for Ignis, but I fear that three days is not nearly enough time.”

“I should say not.”

“Is there another way? A train, or . . . or a cab?”

“A cab? To the center of the earth?”

Tristram blushed furiously. Chiaroscuro tossed her tail-feathers, sending a golden spray of sparks upward towards the earthen ceiling of the world. “It’s only that I have to take these scissors to the Watcher’s sister. I promised I would. It’s my toll, since I hadn’t any money.”

The black peacock’s avian face softened. “Oh, I’m sorry, child. What a very wicked bird she is. Unpleasant, if you ask me, and such a liar! The Watcher—if that’s what you like to call her—she knows her sister, who I suppose you could call the Watched, isn’t what you would call available.”

“Where do you mean? Where is she?”

“The Ox of Sorrows has her, and has for a century. He keeps her in his Manor, and croons to her five times a day, like prayer. He insists they are having tea, and are quite friendly, and the lady has so many fascinating things to say . . . but we all know that isn’t it. You don’t carry off a girl on your back to have tea. You don’t chain her to her chair if you mean to ask her if she prefers cream or lemon.

“Why does he keep her, then?”

“Well! To understand that I think you would need to know a great deal more about the history of Ignis than you do! But simply: he thinks she can tell him why he weeps, and stop up his tears. Of course she can’t, poor thing.”

“Why not?”

Chiaroscuro cocked her head to the side. “Do you know how the city of Ignis was founded? My monograph on the subject was very popular.” She did not wait politely for Tristram to take interest, but hurried on. Tristram felt very much as though she were in class, and resisted the urge to take notes. The peach-vendor smiled behind his hand. “There is a snake at the center of the earth. He is called the Contemplating Serpent. It is wound around the core, so tightly that no one may see what stuff the core might be made of. They keep each other warm, the snake and the core. But after a long while, the snake became hungry, and reached up to eat earth and drink magma, as snakes are inclined to do. The Contemplating Serpent took great bites out of the earth, which then had no lovely flowers hanging from it, and with each bite took whole towns full of folk and animals and haberdasheries and synagogues, and all of these went into the snake’s belly, what do you think of that?”

“It must have been a surprise for the haberdashers.”

“I should think so! Now, then, when a snake eats a large meal, it goes promptly to sleep—and this is a very great snake, who had a very great meal, and thus, went to sleep for a hundred-thousand years. And in his belly, the folk and animals and haberdasheries and synagogues grew extremely cross, and used hatmaking scissors and Torah-scrolls and pickaxes and kitchen spoons to break holes in the skin of the Contemplating Serpent, and climbed out onto his scales.” The peacock slurped the last of her peach-wine with noisy relish. “It seemed the natural thing to do to build a city there, the snake being so very large that there was plenty of room to walk about and buy hats and such. And that is why there is an Ignis, and Ignis is why there is a road, and the road is why you are here, and it all generally works together to create a very nice tableau.”

“But the Ox? And the Watcher’s sister?”

“Oh! Digression is the professorial disease! The Ox used his horns to scramble out of the snake’s belly—he was one of the first. And the Watched is, sadly, neither very old at all nor a historian, so she cannot help him, and so he will keep her on her red chair until the snake wakes up, because he is stubborn, and she is beautiful. Why do no villainous wretches kidnap professors of history when they are in need of arcane knowledge?”

“Then you know why he weeps?”

“No, but I know that he will never stop until he remembers where he came from, and he will never remember, for he is an Ox, and Oxen have their memories removed along with . . . the rest of them. It is a terrible procedure involving scimitars, I’m told.”

“I suppose it doesn’t matter. I swore I would, so even if she is in the care of a malicious ox, I must still give her the green shears. Perhaps you can give me his address?”

“It is much longer than three days. He does not live in the fashionable quarter.”

Tristram straightened her back beneath her battered shovel. She shrugged, in what she hoped was a nonchalant gesture.

“Oh, for pity’s sake, girl! I’ve been waiting for you to ask! How long will you make me wait? I can take you in two days, as the peacock, well, walks.”

“You mean . . . like, a cab? To the center of the earth?”

“Hush it.” She pushed the peach back towards the vintner with her sooty head and shook herself; a single golden, fiery feather drifted down, and the boy caught it with a deft—and heavily gloved—hand. Chiaroscuro aimed herself at the slowly descending road and clucked with impatience.

Tristram climbed onto the back of the peacock with some difficulty, peacocks not being traditional beasts of transit, and the fiery tail being unruly and liable to snap at her shoulders, as if tasting her. She clung to the beast, who strode like an ostrich. The underbelly of the earth was dark and hot and close, but in the dark and the close she smiled, and her smile was bright as a squash-blossom.

“Oh!” Tristram cried suddenly. “But I have already broken the third rule! I haven’t a calling card!”

“I rather think you have,” said the peacock, tossing her plumed head as she barreled through the crowd, tossing traveling salesmen over her muscled shoulders and snapping at the occasional onyx-wheeled rickshaw. “Check your pockets. You’ll find all sorts of things end up in your pockets when you’re hip-deep in a planet.”

Tristram held on with one hand, and with the other scraped in her pocket—and withdrew a small card, red, with black writing on it.

TRISTRAM

An Exceptional Child

III: Ignis

3 RUE BRÛLÉ

Un Salon de l’Histoire

Ignis was on fire.

Chiaroscuro skidded to a stop at a fetching garden apartment, its tall copper door prettily inscribed with a fanned peacock tail featuring eyes at the tip of every quill. Tristram could hardly see for the heat and the light. She clung to the bird’s neck, the emerald scissors blazingly hot against her back, her eyes squeezed shut. Bit by bit, she willed them to open.

It was a city of towers—cupolas, minarets, spires. Every building ended in fantastic whorls of architecture that reached like stalagmites, up and up—and disappeared into the stony earth that formed the ceiling of the world. And every brick glowed ruddy and gold, a banked blaze in the very stones that released itself across the ceiling in a blanket of fire that lit every alley. Firelight flickered over cobblestones, storefronts, door-plates. Everything was scarlet and orange and incredibly hot—sweat tricked down Tristram’s back. Her shoes were turning liquid on the glowing embers of the street—yet passersby ran and danced and walked wolfhounds naked, their bodies as red and gold as the city, barefoot and bare-breasted in the fiery avenues.

“How can they . . . ?”

“Best get inside before you burn, girl!” squawked the black peacock. “They were born here—their skin is like an iron snake’s. They feel nothing. You’ll soon feel like roasted chicken. Come in!”

Tristram slipped gratefully through the door and into blessed darkness and cool air. The Salon had dizzying ceilings, narrowing as they rose and the apartment became a tower. Chiaroscuro’s tail lit a small study, just exactly what you would expect a history professor’s study to look like: emerald green walls washed black by tail-light, overstuffed brown leather chairs, framed diplomas, a desk piled with papers. But the standing globe in the corner was turned inside out—the Thoroughfare gleamed golden across its surface, with a ruby Ignis sticking awkwardly out. On the inside of her globe, Tristram thought, must be the real world. Hoquiam. My mother.

The black peacock deftly flipped open a steamer trunk with her beak and drew out a pair of black opera gloves, shining black boots, a black head-scarf, and a filmy sort of black jumpsuit.

“Outsider gear.” she sniffed. “Soot-skin. Soot is a great fat salamander, just about the size of an elephant, who lives outside of town. He runs the junkyard—chews engines and spits out limousines, the old fool. He shuffles off his skin a few times a year for the sake of visitors.”

Tristram blushed. “I’ll look like a ninja . . . a sort of hooker-y ninja.”

“It breathes. Any more clothes and you’ll just sweat until you melt away. You can touch the fire with the gloves, and walk on the burning street with the boots. Say thank you, and quit griping.”

“Thank you.”

“Now,” clucked Chiaroscuro, “the next thing you’ll need is a Letter of Introduction. No one gets into the Ox’s estate without one.”

Tristram ran her hand along a yellow fern sprouting happily from a brass pot. The red light through the windows made everything eerie, shadowed. “Why are you helping me?” she said shyly.

The peacock cocked her head. “Because you were lost.” She went back to her linen paper, seizing a pen that dripped with red ink in her beak.

Tristram blinked in confusion. Chiaroscuro put her pen down.

“Historians,” she said airily, “are in the business of finding lost things, dusting them off, and bringing them to light. Battles, artistic movements, girls, it hardly matters. You are my business.”

The room was filled with the scratching of nib against paper, and Tristram sank into one of the big, shiny chairs. She began pulling on her new clothes. In her smallest of hearts, she imagined the cool mist on a Chinese river, the smell of bamboo, what the sky might look like, if there still was a sky.

“There!” crowed Chiaroscuro. She flourished the letter in her beak to dry it, and presented it proudly to Tristram.

To: My Winsome Friend, O.o.S.

From: Dr. Chiaroscuro Schist, Ph.D, J.D. and Winner of the Carbon Medal in Competitive Historical Arts.

Please find attached to this letter one (1) human female, approximately 13 years of age, mint condition.

In all her years, my dear Sir, she has never cried.

Yrs, etc.

“But that’s not true at all,” protested Tristram.

“Of course not. But it will fascinate him. To know a thing’s obsessions, be it man, nation, company or ox, is to own him utterly—that is the secret of the historian’s guild, and I give it to you—but if you babble, we shall punish you soundly.”

Chiaroscuro pecked her cheek—a quick, shy kiss.

A spot of blood welled up, and would not be wiped away.

Tristram walked down. It was the main direction in Ignis, as though all the land swirled around a great drain. Most of the folk were naked—naked men playing chess with fiery boards, naked grandmothers toting home their smoldering groceries, naked children hoisting blazing balloons into the dark air. One or two black-clad outsiders strolled along the streets, staring up in wonder. Tristram tried to look sophisticated, as though she didn’t care. But the spires shot golden sparks into the wind, and the cupolas were so red, so very red.

The Ox of Sorrows lived in a church, Chiaroscuro had said. The only dark cupolas in the city, since the beast has wept all over them and put them out.

She could see the space in the city that did not burn—it was enormous, a vast collection of needly towers and thick pillars. It seemed to swallow light. Tristram wound towards it, past flamewatch sellers swinging molten embers on long brass chains, bakeries offering charcoal loaves and cafés serving magma tea, hawkers of newspapers printed on ash-paper, and even a candymaker who extended one glowing ochre toffee to her—she could not help but take it. For later, she thought, and slid it into the lip of her boot. She would have to have something, something to say she was here, something she might say was hers of this place.

The boots held well, and Tristram felt neither the heat nor the shame of her strange costume. The emerald scissors hung lightly on a long black belt, slung over her shoulders like a huge knight’s sword. It was thus she appeared at the great black door of the Ox’s estate.

The bored-looking butler, a bear with fiery fur, glanced at her.

“He is not seeing visitors today,” he gruffed.

“I’m here to see her. The Watched.”

“She is not seeing visitors, either.”

Tristram produced her Letter of Introduction from beneath her scarf. The bear-butler glanced at it, holding it with two claws so as not to set it ablaze.

“Never? Not once? Your mother never scolded you or sent you to bed without dinner; you never stubbed your toe on a stair?”

Tristram took a deep breath. Lies require a lot of breath to propel them; the truth is light.

“I did those things, sir Bear, and so did my mother, but I never shed a tear.”

The bear moved aside, sweeping his arm grandly around her, his red, sparking pelt bristling through her black salamander skin. But once they were inside, the bear demurred and would not show her the way.

“If you are such a stranger to sorrow, you should be able to sniff him out. If you are not a little liar and a cheat. Follow the smell of alien things, and you’ll find him.”

The bear saluted her and fell onto all fours, trotting slowly from the great black hall. There was a long staircase and arching hallways—all the color of a mansion that burned long ago. The great ceiling was charcoal, the polished floor dark glass. The steps were cracked scorched wood. Tristram stood, invisible among the blackness, her scarf covering even her hair. Of course she was a liar, and could never find the Ox this way. But she sniffed all the same: a long, deep breath that pulled in the house, the scarlet street outside, even herself.

She could smell nothing—only burnt wood and sweat and a lingering trace of Bear.

Where, she thought, would I live if I were a great big cow who hated everything?

Her mind supplied the answer before she had finished the thought, leaping over itself to the conclusion.

The stable. I would live in the stable, for I would be sure I was nothing but a stupid beast who deserved to live in the straw.

And so she went, out the front door again and around the cathedral, following a rickety black palisade, until a gargantuan barn reared up before her, with wooden Xs on the doors and a strong, hayey scent flowing from its doors, terribly green among all the red fire and cinders.

“Ohhhh,” lowed the voice, deep and brown and earthy. “Ohhhh!”

Tristram peeked into the dark door. A mammoth ox lay on the fresh straw, his hooves spanning the floor, with scraggly hair that hung in his face and a great wet nose. His skin was dark and his flanks were muscled; his horns reached from one side of the barn to the other. He wept grand splashing tears onto the straw.

Beside him sat a woman in a long red cloak, with long pale hands and the head of a snowy owl. She stared at her hands; she made no sound. All around her were piled pamphlets and broadsheets, papers whirling around her in an angry wind. Within it, the owl-woman neither wept nor sighed.

“I have such a Woe,” the Ox wailed. “A Woe in my hoof! In my flank! In my rump! In my horns, oh, the Woe in my horns in keen!”

“Tell me, sir Ox,” Tristram tried to smile. “Tell me the Woe in your hoof.”

The Ox stirred, shook his ponderous head. “I don’t remember!” he bellowed. “But it pains me so!”

“Why have you got that woman all wrapped up in paper?”

“Because! Those are my Sorrows! I wrote them all down, oh, a million years ago. Or last week. So that I could forget them. But it was a very long and delicate process, and if you were to read them, you would never cease crying, even a stoneheart such as you! The recalcitrant slattern won’t read them, though. So I have punished her.”

Tristram frowned. “Her sister sent me here.”

“Her sister is a scavenger and a day laborer,” sniffed the Ox.

“Let her go,” Tristram’s voice was suddenly very small, and soft, heavy with pity.

“Not until she tells me my First Sorrow! She knows I know her mind. She has hidden it from me!”

“How can anyone know it but you, sir Ox?”

The Ox of Sorrows looked sideways at her. “Is it true you have never cried?”

Tristram chewed her lip. It was hot in the barn, and her hands itched in the long gloves. She could lie, she could keep lying, but very soon she felt the Ox would frighten her so much she might cry right there, and so it seemed little use.

“No, it’s not true. I cry all the time.”

The Ox snapped his head around and gnashed his teeth together; he came away with Tristram’s scarf in his jaws.

“What an awful child you are, and how wretched of Dr. Schist to believe in you.”

“I’m sorry. I had to see her.”

“Well, now you’ve seen her. And you must pay your admission price. Tell me your Sorrow. I will eat it up!”

Tristram didn’t have to think, not much. She tried to slow her heart and stepped forward, kneeling between the Ox’s front hooves.

“I had a party once, a birthday. And there were balloons and cake and streamers and music. My mother spent all day icing the cake. It was blue and white, with purple roses. And no one came. Not my uncles, not my grandparents. I hadn’t any friends from school, so it’s not really surprising that they didn’t come. Even my father forgot, and went into the office that day like it was any other day. My mother and I sat at the table, eating the cake, and she didn’t say anything at all, but when she looked at me it was like I wasn’t myself, just a big ugly ball of disappointment. We threw away half the cake and never talked about it. When my father came home, we pretended nothing had happened. It was just a day like any other day.”

“What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you have any friends?”

Tristram shrugged. “I’m small. I’m quiet. It’s easier for everyone to look through me, like a window.”

“No one can look through me,” snorted the Ox. “It’s better to be big.”

“Maybe.”

“I will save your Sorrow and eat it when I am alone. If you like, you can talk to her.”

Tristram crossed to the owl-woman and tried to put her hand through the papers; they slashed at her, slicing her glove to ribbons. The Watched shook her head sadly.

“Why does he think you know his Woe?” Tristram asked, holding her bleeding hand to her chest.

“Because I sit at the other end of the Thoroughfare, and between my sister and I, we see everything that passes, everything that was, everything to come. We came out of the Snake before him, you see. We are the beginning and the end of the earth. She sees what will be needed; I remember what was desired. Between the weight of us, we turn the world. Now that I am out of place, it turns more slowly, and there are strange stars, and grief, and an old age of the world tottering in senility.”

“Then tell him, and you can go!”

“Oh, child, I can never go. He keeps me because he loves me, and though that was not his First Sorrow, it is his longest.”

Tristram stared into the whirling sheets. She felt suddenly very clear and bright, as though she were made of glass, or of fire. She drew the emerald scissors from her back and slid them open. The Ox saw; he screamed, his flat teeth showing. Tristram cut—the scissors sliced through the papers, and they fell to the ground suddenly, a great heap of scribbled refuse. She extended her hand to the lady, who stepped gingerly out of her prison and pulled up her red cloak over her feathers.

“Thank you,” she breathed, tears welling in her avian eyes.

“This was my toll, on the Thoroughfare. Your sister made me bring these to you.”

“She knows what will be needed,” answered the Watched smoothly.

The owl-woman moved to leave. The Ox scrambled to go after her, but his horns stuck in the barn walls. He lowed pitifully.

“I love you,” he whispered. “Don’t leave me.”

“Tell him,” said Tristram. “Tell him why he started crying. Please.” She didn’t know why she cared, only that she did not want him to be alone, without even sadness to keep him company.

The owl-woman knelt as Tristram had done, before the Ox. She took his enormous face in her hands.

“When you were small, and walked and chewed upon the earth, you loved a fisherman’s daughter. You watched her every day, picking flowers, gutting salmon, milking. You laid your head on her lap. But her lands were razed and burned by soldiers, and in the fire her horse was shot. You came to her,” the owl-woman paused, her voice thick, “you came to her out of the flames, and you knelt beside her, until she understood that she was to climb upon your back, and you bore her into the battle, where she swung her father’s sword so many times her shoulders came loose and all the hair of her head burned up. She saw her father and her brothers and her mother dead; only her sister ran alongside, and pulled herself up onto your broad back. All seemed safe—you were fast, so fast, a good steed, and the three of you were coming to the end of their lands, where the fires were cold already. All of you took deep breaths; and in those breaths were swallowed by a great Snake’s mouth, and you plunged into darkness, all of you together.” Tears flowed down her face. “In the belly of the Snake all things mingled, and the sisters became owls and ravens, and you grew by eating the creatures of the belly, until you could chew your way out. But with her face so changed, you did not know the fisherman’s daughter, though she sat in your barn every day for a century. That is why you weep; it is an old hurt, and I bear it too.”

The Ox screamed again, and the owl-woman kissed his wet nose. She rose, took Tristram’s hand, and walked from him, never looking back, though he shrieked at her as though dying.

“Do you want to go home?” The Watched said as the pair walked along the Thoroughfare. It was quiet on this end, and though they had no peacock, they seemed to move quickly.

“I . . . I don’t think so. I dug this hole. I want to see where it comes out.”

The Watched climbed up a small rill, where sat a tall stone chair with depressions made for her small hands. She gestured up; there was a handle in the roof of the world.

“The Ox will come and take me again,” she sighed.

“I can stay,” said Tristram brightly. “I can protect you. I have the scissors.”

“No. He will forget again, and I will be cruel again, and refuse to tell him. That is the way of courtship.” She smiled slyly. “But it is good to be free, if only for a little while. To walk on the body of my old friend the Snake again, and touch his scales. The world will turn quickly again, and the sun will come out. He will come back, but it will be a long time, and I will wait once more until someone cuts me loose. It is the way of things.”

“How often does this happen?”

“About every twenty-six thousand years. I think you call it the procession of the equinoxes. We do process. Now there will be new stars, new light, and fast winds. For awhile.” The Watched gripped Tristram’s face tightly, and her voice was like a struck bell: “I see you, Tristram of Hoquiam. You are not a window. You are an axle, and you have moved the world. You are an exceptional child.”

Tristram brushed away tears. She reached up and pulled the handle; the stone fell away. Dirt slid into her face, and roots, and mushrooms, and grasses. She gripped the lip of the hole and pulled herself up into green air, and mist, and the scent of bamboo. Below her, the earth closed itself up, a seamless expanse of reeds. Tristram looked into thick jungled mountains and a slow sliver of rising moon. A farmer looked up from his field and cried: Ni hao!

She pulled the toffee from her boot and placed it on her tongue. It tasted like blue icing and purple roses.

Tristram adjusted the scissors on her back and started walking. Her smile glowed in the moonlight.

© 2010 by Catherynne M. Valente.

Originally published as part of the Omikuji Project,

and later published in book form in This is My Letter to the World.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and an enormous cat.

The Ruby Incomparable
Kage Baker

The girl surprised everyone.

To begin with, no one in the world below had thought her parents would have more children. Her parents’ marriage had created quite a scandal, a profound clash of philosophical extremes; for her father was the Master of the Mountain, a brigand and sorcerer, who had carried the Saint of the World off to his high fortress. It’s bad enough when a living goddess, who can heal the sick and raise the dead, takes up with a professional dark lord (black armor, monstrous armies and all). But when they settle down together with every intention of raising a family, what are respectable people to think?

The Yendri in their forest villages groaned when they learned of the first boy. Even in his cradle, his fiendish tendencies were evident. He was beautiful as a little angel except in his screaming tempers, when he would morph himself into giant larvae, wolf cubs, or pools of bubbling slime.

The Yendri in their villages and the Children of the Sun in their stone cities all rejoiced when they heard of the second boy. He too was beautiful, but calm and clearly good. A star was seen to shine from his brow on occasion. He was reported to have cured a nurse’s toothache with a mere touch, and he never so much as cried while teething.

And the shamans of the Yendri, and the priests in the temples of the Children of the Sun, all nodded their heads and said: “Well, at least we have balance now. The two boys will obviously grow up, oppose each other and fight to the death, because that’s what generally happens.”

Having decided all this, and settled down confidently to wait, imagine how shocked they were to hear that the Saint of the World had borne a third child! And a girl, at that. It threw all their calculations off and annoyed them a great deal.

The Master and his Lady were surprised, too, because their baby daughter popped into the world homely as a little potato, by contrast with the elfin beauty of her brothers. They did agree that she had lovely eyes, at least, dark as her father’s, and she seemed to be sweet-tempered. They named her Svnae.

So the Master of the Mountain swaddled her in purple silk, and took her out on a high balcony and held her up before his assembled troops, who roared, grunted and howled their polite approval. And that night in the barracks and servants’ hall, around the barrels of black wine that had been served out in celebration, the minions of the proud father agreed amongst themselves that the little maid might not turn out so ugly as all that, if the rest of her face grew to fit that nose and she didn’t stay quite so bald.

And they at least were proved correct, for within a year Svnae had become a lovely child.

On the morning of her fifth birthday, the Master went to the nursery and fetched his little daughter. He took her out with him on his tour of the battlements, where all the world stretched away below. The guards, tusked and fanged, great and horrible in their armor, stood to attention and saluted him. Solemnly he pulled a great red rose from thin air and presented it to Svnae.

“Today,” he said, “my Dark-Eyed is five years old. What do you want most in all the world, daughter?”

Svnae looked up at him with her shining eyes. Very clearly she said:

“Power.”

He looked down at her, astounded; but she stood there looking patiently back at him, clutching her red rose. He knelt beside her. “Do you know what Power is?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Power is when you stand up here and make all the clouds come to you across the sky, and shoot lightning and make thunder crash. That’s what I want.”

“I can make magic for you,” he said, and with a wave of his gauntleted hand produced three tiny fire elementals dressed in scarlet, blue and yellow, who danced enchantingly for Svnae before vanishing in a puff of smoke.

“Thank you, Daddy,” she said, “but no. I want me to be able to do it.”

Slowly he nodded his head. “Power you were born with; you’re my child. But you must learn to use it, and that doesn’t come easily, or quickly. Are you sure this is what you really want?”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation.

“Not eldritch toys to play with? Not beautiful clothes? Not sweets?”

“If I learn Power, I can have all those things anyway,” Svnae observed.

The Master was pleased with her answer. “Then you will learn to use your Power,” he said. “What would you like to do first?”

“I want to learn to fly,” she said. “Not like my brother Eyrdway. He just turns into birds. I want to stay me and fly.”

“Watch my hands,” her father said. In his right hand he held out a stone; in his left, a paper dart. He put them both over the parapet and let go. The stone dropped; the paper dart drifted lazily down.

“Now, tell me,” he said. “Why did the stone drop and the paper fly?”

“Because the stone is heavy and the paper isn’t,” she said.

“Nearly so; and not so. Look.” And he pulled from the air an egg. He held it out in his palm, and the egg cracked. A tiny thing crawled from it, and lay shivering there a moment; white down covered it like dandelion fluff, and it drew itself upright and shook tiny stubby wings. The down transformed to shining feathers, and the young bird beat its wide wings and flew off rejoicing.

“Now, tell me,” said the Master, “Was that magic?”

“No,” said Svnae. “That’s just what happens with birds.”

“Nearly so; and not so. Look.” And he took out another stone. He held it up and uttered a Word of Power; the stone sprouted bright wings, and improbably flew away into the morning.

“How did you make it do that?” Svnae cried. Her father smiled at her.

“With Power; but Power is not enough. I was able to transform the stone because I understand that the bird and the stone, and even the paper dart, are all the same thing.”

“But they’re not,” said Svnae.

“Aren’t they?” said her father. “When you understand that the stone and the bird are one, the next step is convincing the stone that the bird and the stone are one. And then the stone can fly.”

Svnae bit her lip. “This is hard, isn’t it?” she said.

“Very,” said the Master of the Mountain. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a doll instead?”

“Yes,” said Svnae stubbornly. “I will understand.”

“Then I’ll give you books to study,” he promised. He picked her up and folded her close, in his dark cloak. He carried her to the bower of her lady mother, the Saint of the World.

Now when the Lady had agreed to marry her dread Lord, she had won from him the concession of making a garden on his black basalt mountaintop, high and secret in the sunlit air. Ten years into their marriage her orchards were a mass of white blossom, and her white-robed disciples tended green beds of herbs there. They bowed gracefully as Svnae ran to her mother, who embraced her child and gave her a white rose. And Svnae said proudly:

“I’m going to learn Power, Mama!”

The Lady looked questions at her Lord.

“It’s what she wants,” he said, no less proudly. “And if she has the talent, why shouldn’t she learn?”

“But Power is not an end in itself, my child,” the Lady said to her daughter. “To what purpose will you use it? Will you help others?”

“Ye-es,” said Svnae, looking down at her feet. “But I have to learn first.”

“Wouldn’t you like to be a healer, like me?”

“I can heal people when I have Power,” said Svnae confidently. Her mother looked a little sadly into her dark eyes, but saw no shadow there. So she blessed her daughter, and sent her off to play.

The Master of the Mountain kept his promise and gave his daughter books to study, to help her decipher the Three Riddles of Flight. She had to learn to read first; with fiery determination she hurled herself on her letters and mastered them, and charged into the first of the Arcane texts.

So well she studied that by her sixth birthday she had solved all three riddles, and was able at will to sprout little butterfly wings from her shoulders, wings as red as a rose. She couldn’t fly much with them, only fluttering a few inches above the ground like a baby bird; but she was only six. One day she would soar.

Then it was the Speech of Animals she wanted to learn. Then it was how to move objects without touching them. Then she desired to know the names of all the stars in the sky: not only what men call them, but what they call themselves. And one interest led to another, as endlessly she found new things by which to be intrigued, new arts and sciences she wanted to learn. She spent whole days together in her father’s library, and carried books back to her room, and sat up reading far into the night.

In this manner she learned to fly up to the clouds with her rose-red wings, there to ask an eagle what it had for breakfast, or gather pearls with her own hands from the bottom of the sea.

And so the years flowed by, as the Master throve on his mountain, and the Saint of the World brought more children into it to confound the expectations of priests and philosophers, who debated endlessly the question of whether these children were Good or Evil.

The Saint held privately that all her children were, at heart, Good. The Master of the Mountain held that the priests and philosophers were all a bunch of idiots.

Svnae grew tall, with proud dark good looks she had from her father. But there were no black lightnings in her eyes, as there were in his. Neither were her eyes crystal and serene, like her mother’s, but all afire with interest, eager to see how everything worked.

And then she grew taller still, until she overtopped her mother; and still taller than that, until she overtopped her brother Eyrdway. He was rather peevish about it and took to calling her The Giantess, until she punched him hard enough to knock out one of his teeth. He merely morphed into a version of himself without the missing tooth, but he stopped teasing her after that.

Now you might suppose that many a young guard might begin pining for Svnae, and saluting smartly as she passed by, and mourning under her window at night. You would be right. But she never noticed; she was too engrossed in her studies to hear serenades sung under her window. Still, they did not go to waste; her younger sisters could hear them perfectly well, and they noticed things like snappy salutes.

This was not to say that Svnae did not glory in being a woman. As soon as she was old enough, she chose her own garments and jewelry. Her mother presented her with gauzes delicate as cobweb, in exquisite shades of lavender, sea mist and bird-egg-blue; fine-worked silver ornaments as well, set with white diamonds that glinted like starlight.

Alas, Svnae’s tastes ran to crimson and purple, bluegreen and cloth of gold, even though the Saint of the World explained how well white set off her dusk skin. And though she thanked her mother for the fragile silver bangles, and dutifully wore them at family parties, she cherished massy gold set with emeralds and rubies. The more finery the better, in fact, though her mother gently indicated that perhaps it wasn’t quite in the best of taste to wear the serpent bracelets with eyes of topaz and the peacock necklace of turquoise, jade, and lapis lazuli.

And though Svnae read voraciously and mastered the arts of Transmutation of Metals, Divination by Bones, and Summoning Rivers by their Secret Names, she did not learn to weave nor to sew; nor did she learn the healing properties of herbs. Her mother waited patiently for Svnae to become interested in these things, but somehow the flashing beam of her eye never turned to them.

One afternoon, the Master of the Mountain looked up from the great black desk whereat he worked, hearing the guards announce the approach of his eldest daughter. A moment later she strode into his presence, resplendent in robes of scarlet and peacock blue, and slippers of vermilion with especially pointy toes that curled up at the ends.

“Daughter,” he said, rising to his feet.

“Daddy,” she replied, “I’ve just been reading in the Seventh Pomegranate Scroll about a distillation of violets that can be employed to lure dragons. Can you show me how to make it?”

“I’ve never done much distillation, my child,” said the Master of the Mountain. “That’s more in your mother’s line of work. I’m certain she’d be delighted to teach you. Why don’t you ask her?”

“Oh,” said Svnae, and flushed, and bit her lip, and stared at the floor. “I think she’s busy with some seminar with her disciples. Meditation Techniques or something.”

And though the Master of the Mountain had never had any use for his lady wife’s disciples, he spoke sternly. “Child, you know your mother has never ignored her own children for her followers.”

“It’s not that,” said Svnae a little sullenly, twisting a lock of her raven hair. “Not at all. It’s just that—well—we’re bound to have an argument about it. She’ll want to know what I want it for, for one thing, and she won’t approve of my catching dragons, and she’ll let me know it even if she doesn’t say a word, she’ll just look at me—”

“I know,” said her dread father.

“As though it was a frivolous waste of time, when what I really ought to be doing is learning all her cures for fevers, which is all very well but I have other things I want to be learning first, and in any case I’m not Mother, I’m my own person, and she has to understand that!”

“I’m certain she does, my child.”

“Yes.” Svnae tossed her head back. “So. Well. This brings up something else I’d wanted to ask you. I think I ought to go down into the world to study.”

“But—” said the Master of the Mountain.

“I’ve always wanted to, and it turns out there’s a sort of secret school in a place called Konen Feyy-in-the-Trees, where anybody can go to learn distillations. I need to learn more!”

“Mm. But—” said the Master of the Mountain.

She got her way. Not with temper, tears, or foot-stamping, but she got her way. No more than a week later, she took a bag, and her bow and quiver, and climbing up on the parapet, she summoned her rose-red wings, that now swept from a yard above her dark head to her ankles. Spreading them on the wind, she soared aloft. Away she went like a queen of the air, to explore the world.

Her father and mother watched her go.

“Do you think she’ll be safe?” said the Saint of the World.

“She’d better be,” said the Master of the Mountain, looking over the edge and far down his mountain at the pair of ogre bodyguards who coursed like armored greyhounds, crashing through the trees, following desperately their young mistress while doing their best not to draw attention to themselves.

Svnae sailed off on the wind and discovered that, though her extraordinary heritage had given her many gifts, a sense of direction was not one of them. She cast about a long while, looking for any place that might be a city in the trees; at last she spotted a temple in a wooded valley, far below.

On landing, she discovered that the temple was deserted long since, and a great gray monster guarded it. She slew the creature with her arrows, and went in to see what it might have been guarding. On the altar was a golden box that shone with protective spells. But she had the magic to unlock those spells, and found within a great book that seemed to be a history of the lost race whose temple this was. She carried it outside and spent the next few hours seated on a block of stone in the ruins, intent with her chin on her fist, reading.

Within the book, she read of a certain crystal ring, the possession of which would enable the wearer to understand the Speech of Water. The book directed her to a certain fountain an hour’s flight south of the temple, and fortunately the temple had a compass rose mosaic set in the floor; so she flew south at once, just as her bodyguards came panting up to the temple at last, and they watched her go with language that was dreadful even for ogres.

Exactly an hour’s flight south, Svnae spotted the fountain, rising from a ruined courtyard of checkered tile. Here she landed, and approached the fountain with caution; for there lurked within its bowl a scaled serpent of remarkable beauty and deadliest venom. She considered the jeweled serpent, undulating round and round within the bowl in a lazy sort of way. She considered the ring, a circle of clear crystal, hard to spot as it bobbed at the top of the fountain’s jet, well beyond her reach even were she to risk the serpent. Backing away several paces, she drew an arrow and took aim. Clink!

Her arrow shuddered in the trunk of an oak thirty paces distant, with the ring still spinning on its shaft. Speedily she claimed it and put it on, and straightway she could understand the Speech of Water.

Whereupon the fountain told her of a matter so interesting that she had to learn more about it. Details, however, were only to be had from a little blue man who lived in dubious hills far to the west. So away she flew, to find him . . .

She had several other adventures and it was only by chance that, soaring one morning above the world, deep in conversation with a sea-eagle, she spotted what was clearly a city down below amongst great trees. To her inquiry, the sea-eagle replied that the city was Konen Feyy. She thanked it and descended through the bright morning, to a secluded grove where she could cast a glamour on herself and approach without attracting undue notice. Following unseen a league distant, her wheezing bodyguards threw themselves down and gave thanks to anyone who might be listening.

The Children of the Sun dwelt generally in cities all of stone, where scarcely a blade of grass grew nor even so much as a potted geranium, preferring instead rock gardens with obelisks and statuary. But in all races there are those who defy the norm, and so it was in Konen Feyy. Here a colony of artists and craftsmen had founded a city in the green wilderness, without even building a comfortingly high wall around themselves. Accordingly, a lot of them had died from poisoned arrows and animal attacks in the early years, but this only seemed to make them more determined to stay there.

They painted the local landscapes, they made pots of the local clay, and wove textiles from the local plant fibers; and they even figured out that if they cut down the forest trees to make charmingly rustic wooden furniture, sooner or later there wouldn’t be any trees. For the Children of the Sun, who were ordinarily remarkably dense about ecological matters, this was a real breakthrough.

And so the other peoples of the world ventured up to Konen Feyy. The forest-dwelling Yendri, the Saint’s own people, opened little shops where were sold herbs, or freshwater pearls, or willow baskets, or fresh produce. Other folk came, too: solitary survivors of lesser-known races, obscure revenants, searching for a quiet place to set up shop. This was how the Night School came to exist.

Svnae, wandering down Konen Feyy’s high street and staring around her, found the place at once. Though it looked like an ordinary perfumer’s shop, there were certain signs on the wall above the door, visible only to those who were familiar with the arcane sciences. An extravagant green cursive explained the School’s hours, where and how she might enroll, and where to find appropriate lodgings with other students.

In this last she was lucky, for it happened that there were three other daughters of magi who’d taken a place above a dollmaker’s shop, and hadn’t quite enough money between them to make the monthly rent, so they were looking for a fourth roommate, someone to be Earth to their Air, Fire and Water. They were all of them pleasant girls, though Svnae was somewhat taken aback to discover that she towered over them, and somewhat irritated to discover that they all held her mother in reverent awe.

“You’re the daughter of the Saint of the World?” exclaimed Seela, whose father was Principal Thaumaturge for Mount Flame City. “What are you doing here, then? She’s totally the best at distillations and essences. Everyone knows that! I’d give anything to learn from her.”

Svnae was to hear this statement repeated, with only slight variations, over the next four years of her higher education. She learned not to mind, however; for her studies occupied half her attention, and the other half was all spent on discovering the strange new world in which she lived, where there were no bodyguards (of which she was aware, anyway) and only her height distinguished her from all the other young ladies she met.

It was tremendous fun. She chipped in money with her roommates to buy a couch for their sitting room, and the four of them pushed it up the steep flight of stairs with giggles and screams, though Svnae could have tucked it under one arm and carried it up herself with no effort. She dined with her roommates at the little fried-fish shop on the corner, where they had their particular booth in which they always sat, though Svnae found it rather cramped.

She listened sympathetically as first one and then another of her roommates fell in love with various handsome young seers and sorcerers, and she swept up after a number of riotous parties, and on one occasion broke a vase over the head of a young shapeshifter who, while nice enough when sober, turned into something fairly unpleasant when he became unwisely intoxicated. She had to throw him over her shoulder and pitch him down the stairs, and her roommates wept their thanks and all agreed they didn’t know what they’d do without her.

But somehow Svnae never fell in love.

It wasn’t because she had no suitors for her hand. There were several young gallants at the Night School, glittering with jewelry and strange habits, who sought to romance Svnae. One was an elemental fire-lord with burning hair; one was a lord of air with vast violet wings. One was a mer-lord, who had servants following him around with perfumed misting bottles to keep his skin from drying out.

But all of them made it pretty clear they desired to marry Svnae in order to forge dynastic unions with Master of the Mountain. And Svnae had long since decided that love, real love, was the only reason for getting involved in all the mess and distraction of romance. So she declined, gracefully, and the young lords sulked and found other wealthy girls to entreat.

Her course of study ended. The roommates all bid one another fond farewells and went their separate ways. Svnae returned home with a train of attendant spirits carrying presents for all her little nieces and nephews. But she did not stay long, for she had heard of a distant island where was written, in immense letters on cliffs of silver, the formula for reversing Time in small and manageable fields, and she desired to learn it . . .

“Svnae’s turned out rather well,” said the Master of the Mountain, as he retired one night. “I could wish she spent a little more time at home, all the same. I’d have thought she’d have married and settled down by now, like the boys.”

“She’s restless,” said the Saint of the World, as she combed out her hair.

“Well, why should she be? A first-rate sorceress with a double degree? The Ruby Incomparable, they call her. What more does she want?”

“She doesn’t know, yet,” said the Saint of the World, and blew out the light. “But she’ll know when she finds it.”

And Svnae had many adventures.

But one day, following up an obscure reference in an ancient grimoire, it chanced that she desired to watch a storm in its rage over the wide ocean, and listen to the wrath of all the waters. Out she flew upon a black night in the late year, when small craft huddled at their moorings, and found what she sought.

There had never in all the world been such a storm. The white foam was beaten into air, the white air was charged with water, the shrieking white gulls wheeled and screamed across the black sky, and the waves were as valleys and mountains.

Svnae floated in a bubble of her own devising, protected, watching it all with interest. Suddenly, far below in a trough of water, she saw a tiny figure clinging to a scrap of wood. The trough became a wall of water that rose up, towering high, until into her very eyes stared the drowning man. In his astonishment he let go of the shattered mast that supported him, and sank out of sight like a stone.

She cried out and dove from her bubble into the encroaching wave. Down she went, through water like dark glass, and caught him by the hand; up she went, towing him with her, and got him into the air and wrapped her strong arms about him. She could not fly, not with wet wings in the storm, but she summoned sea-beasts to bear them to the nearest land.

This was merely an empty rock, white cliffs thrusting from the sea. By magic she raised a palace from the stones to shelter them, and she brought the man within. Here there was a roaring fire; here there was hot food and wine. She put him to rest all unconscious in a deep bed, and tended him with her own hands.

Days she watched and cared for him, until he was well enough to speak to her. By that time, he had her heart.

Now, he was not as handsome as a mage-lord, nor learned in any magic, nor born of ancient blood: he was only a toymaker from the cities of the Children of the Sun, named Kendach. But so long and anxiously had she watched his sleeping face that she saw it when she closed her eyes.

And of course when Kendach opened his, the first thing he saw was her face: and after that, it was love. How could it be otherwise?

They nested together, utterly content, until it occurred to them that their families might wonder where they were. So she took him home to meet her parents (“A toymaker?” hooted her brothers) and he took her home to meet his (“Very nice girl. A little tall, but nice,” said his unsuspecting father. They chose not to enlighten him as to their in-laws).

They were married in a modest ceremony in Konen Feyy.

“I hope he’s not going to have trouble with her brothers,” fretted Kendach’s father, that night in the innroom. “Did you see the way they glared? Particularly that good-looking one. It quite froze my blood.”

“It’s clear she gets her height from her father,” said Kendach’s mother, pouring tea for him. “Very distinguished businessman, as I understand it. Runs some kind of insurance firm. I do wonder why her mother wears that veil, though, don’t you?”

Kendach opened a toyshop in Konen Feyy, where he made kites in the forms of insects, warships, and meteors. Svnae raised a modest palace among the trees, and they lived there in wedded bliss. And life was full for Svnae, with nothing else to be asked for.

And then . . .

One day she awoke and there was a grey stain on the face of the sun. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. It did not go away. It came and sat on top of her morning tea. It blotted the pages of the books she tried to read, and it lay like grime on her lover’s face. She couldn’t get rid of it, and she did not know from whence it had come.

Svnae took steps to find out. She went to a cabinet and got down a great black globe of crystal, that shone and swam with deep fires. She went to a quiet place and stroked the globe until it glowed with electric crackling fires. At last these words floated up out of the depths:

YOUR MOTHER DOES NOT UNDERSTAND YOU

They rippled on the surface of the globe, pulsing softly. She stared at them and they did not change.

So she pulled on her cloak that was made of peacock feathers, and yoked up a team of griffins to a sky chariot (useful when your lover has no wings, and flies only kites) and flew off to visit her mother.

The Saint of the World sat alone in her garden, by a quiet pool of reflecting water. She wore a plain white robe. White lilies glowed with light on the surface of the water; distantly a bird sang. She meditated, her crystal eyes serene.

There was a flash of color on the water. She looked up to see her eldest daughter charging across the sky. The griffin-chariot thundered to a landing nearby and Svnae dismounted, pulling her vivid cloak about her. She went straight to her mother and knelt.

“Mother, I need to talk to you,” she said. “Is it true that you don’t understand me?”

The Saint of the World thought it over.

“Yes, it’s true,” she said at last. “I don’t understand you. I’m sorry, dearest. Does it make a difference?”

“Have I disappointed you, Mother?” asked Svnae in distress.

The Lady thought very carefully about that one.

“No,” she said finally. “I would have liked a daughter to be interested in the healing arts. It just seems like the sort of thing a mother ought to pass on to her daughter. But your brother Demaledon has been all I could have asked for in a pupil, and there are all my disciples. And why should your life be a reprise of mine?”

“None of the other girls became healers,” said Svnae, just a little petulantly.

“Quite true. They’ve followed their own paths: lovers and husbands and babies, gardens and dances.”

“I have a husband too, you know,” said Svnae.

“My child, my Dark-Eyed, I rejoice in your happiness. Isn’t that enough?”

“But I want you to understand it,” cried Svnae.

“Do you understand mine?” asked the Saint of the World.

“Your life? Of course I do!”

Her mother looked at her, wryly amused.

“I have borne your father fourteen children. I have watched him march away to do terrible things, and I have bound up his wounds when he returned from doing them. I have managed the affairs of a household with over a thousand servants, most of them ogres. I have also kept up correspondence with my poor disciples, who are trying to carry on my work in my absence. What would you know of these things?”

Svnae was silent at that.

“You have always hunted for treasures, my dearest, and thrown open every door you saw, to know what lay beyond it,” said the Saint of the World gently. “But there are still doors you have not opened. We can love each other, you and I, but how can we understand each other?”

“There must be a way,” said Svnae.

“Now you look so much like your father you make me laugh and cry at once. Don’t let it trouble you, my Dark-Eyed; you are strong and happy and good, and I rejoice.”

But Svnae went home that night to the room where Kendach sat, painting bright and intricate birds on kites. She took a chair opposite and stared at him.

“I want to have a child,” she said.

He looked up, blinking in surprise. As her words sank in on him, he smiled and held out his arms to her.

And did she have a child? How else, when she had accomplished everything else she wanted to do?

A little girl came into the world. She was strong and healthy. She looked like her father, she looked like her mother; but mostly she looked like herself, and she surprised everyone.

Her father had been one of many children, so there were fewer surprises for him. He knew how to bathe a baby, and could wrestle small squirming arms into sleeves like an expert.

Svnae, who had grown up in a nursery staffed by a dozen servants, proved to be rather inept at these things. She was shaken by her helplessness, and shaken by the helpless love she felt. Prior to this time she had found infants rather uninteresting, little blobs in swaddling to be briefly inspected and presented with silver cups that had their names and a good-fortune spell engraved on them.

But her infant—! She could lie for hours watching her child do no more than sleep, marveling at the tiny toothless yawn, the slow close of a little hand.

When the baby was old enough to travel, they wrapped her in a robe trimmed with pearls and took her to visit her grandparents, laden with the usual gifts. Her lover went off to demonstrate the workings of his marvelous kites to her nieces and nephews. And Svnae bore her daughter to the Saint of the World in triumph.

“Now I’ve done something you understand,” she said. The Saint of the World took up her little granddaughter and kissed her between the eyes.

“I hope that wasn’t the only reason you bore her,” she said.

“Well—no, of course not,” Svnae protested, blushing. “I wanted to find out what motherhood was like.”

“And what do you think it is like, my child?”

“It’s awesome. It’s holy. My entire life has been redefined by her existence,” said Svnae fervently.

“Ah, yes,” said the Saint of the World.

“I mean, this is creation at its roots. This is Power! I have brought an entirely new being into the world. A little mind that thinks! I can’t wait to see what she thinks about, how she feels about things, what she’ll say and do. What’s ordinary magic to this?”

The baby began to fuss and the Lady rose to walk with her through the garden. Svnae followed close, groping for words.

“There’s so much I can teach her, so much I can give her, so much I can share with her. Her first simple spells. Her first flight. Her first transformation. I’ll teach her everything I know. We’ve got that house in Konen Feyy and it’ll be so convenient for Night School! She won’t even have to find room and board. She can use all my old textbooks . . .”

But the baby kept crying, stretching out her little hands.

“Something she wants already,” said the Lady. She picked a white flower and offered it to the child; but no, the little girl pointed beyond it. Svnae held out a crystal pendant, glittering with power, throwing dancing lights; but the baby cried and reached upward. They looked up to see one of her father’s kites, dancing merry and foolish on the wind.

The two women stood staring at it. They looked at the little girl. They looked at each other.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t enroll her in Night School just yet,” said the Saint of the World.

© 2007 by Kage Baker.

Originally published in Wizards: Magical Tales From the Masters of Modern Fantasy edited by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Kage Baker (1952-2010) was the Nebula and Hugo Award-nominated and Locus Award-winning author of the Company series. In addition to the nine Company novels and dozens of Company short stories, her fiction includes novels, novellas, and short stories that span science fiction and fantasy. Her 2003 novel The Anvil of the World was a Mythopoeic Award finalist, and her 2004 short story collection, Mother Aegypt and Other Stories, was a Locus Award nominee. The House of the Stag earned her a second Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Winner in 2008 and a World Fantasy Award nomination. Her full bibliography can be found at KageBaker.com.

Mother of All Russiya
Melanie Rawn

Kyiv, 946

She paced the stones, her feet separated from the chill by sable-lined slippers. She was cold despite them, cold from her toes to her crown. Perhaps it was the vengeance of the fire, that she had not joined her husband in its embrace. Long ago, he had decided that he wished to be immolated in the manner of their ancestors. The Christ-folk had gawked and fled, horrified by what they saw as desecration to the body, but when Yvor’s corpse was at last returned to her by the treacherous vassals who had killed him, she had done as he had asked. Better, yes, to send a soul instantly unto the gods, rather than bury the flesh in the ground for the worms to feed upon.

She could think of many Drevlianian souls she would see denied the flames and devoured by worms. They were the souls of murderers who had taken a father from his son, a prince from his people.

A husband from his wife . . . no, for that she cared not at all.

As she passed through the stone corridors, she was vaguely aware of the slaves and warriors and druzhina, her personal attendants, all bowing to her, their Grand Princess. So empty, the obeisances; meant for the woman others had made of her. Daughter of one Grand Prince, wife—widow now—of another, mother of yet a third. A boy of five, she thought, her frozen fingers twisting around each other as she walked unseeingly through her dead husband’s stronghold on her way to she knew not where.

A boy of five. She had been twice his age when her father died and Yvor took dead Helgi’s golden earring and golden daughter for his own. They had the jewels now, her husband’s killers: two huge white lumps of pearl and a clot of blood-crimson ruby, the earring handed down since her people had come from the Dane-land to rule over the fractious Rus. The pearls: Tears of Freya. The ruby: a drop of Woden’s Blood. These sanctified the Grand Princes of Kyiv. The Drevlianians had sent back Yvor’s body but kept his symbol of power. Soon they would have more than the symbol. Those who had killed her husband would choose who would next wear the Tears and the Blood. It would not be her son.

Or perhaps it would be a son of her body—though certainly not the little boy now playing safely in his chamber. She was no longer young, but she was not yet too old for bearing. And suddenly through the frozen numbness of her fear there came fire’s heat. She would sink her father’s dagger into her own heart before any of the assassins took her to his bed to seed her body with a Grand Prince of Kyiv. Her son, her Sviatoslav, was the Grand Prince.

But they had the jewels. They would soon have her. Unless—

Grand Princess Olga swore loudly and violently, in words that would have made her father roar with laughter.

“Ah, I perceive you have awakened,” murmured a soft, oddly-cadenced voice.

Awakened, most certainly; she looked around and found she was in her own chambers, with no idea how she had arrived there. A fire blazed in the hearth, thick carpets softened her steps on the stone floor, and patterned woolen weavings flung bright colors across the walls. She strode to the bed and flung her sable cloak upon it, casting a sideways glance at the strange little man who had spoken from the shadows.

After all these years she was still unused to the angle of his eyes and the odd duskiness of his skin. In his youth, in his homeland, had this wizened creature been deemed handsome? Perhaps. She had no way of knowing if all the peoples of Serica looked like Master Cheng. She only felt his strangeness, down to her blood and bones. He was the only man allowed solitary speech with her—but only because he was not wholly a man.

“What do you recommend?” she asked bitterly. “They intend that before the summer I shall be either dead or wedded and bedded.”

“This is undoubtedly in their minds, Most Gracious One.” He preened himself like a tidy little bird, smoothing the heavily embroidered silk of his sleeves. His only concession to the climate was the sable lining of his boots.

“And?” she asked impatiently. She hated him when he breathed his cleverness at her.

“They will come. You know they will come. And you must be ready for them. May this unworthy one suggest . . . ?”

She swore again in her own language, then returned to the Greek that was the only tongue she and the sage shared. “Tell me!”

“They deserve to die for what they have done. They know it. They will expect you to—”

“—to huddle in my bed, weeping and wailing, frightened and helpless—” She began to pace again, knowing how close she had come to doing exactly those things. Forever. “So I must do as they will not expect, Cheng. That is what you mean, yes? They will come as conquerors, and as men guilty of murder, to claim their prize—me.” She choked to say the words, but knew they must be said. “And I am compelled to welcome them as honored and honorable guests.”

“Excellent.” Thin lips stretched in a smile. “A large feast is poor nourishment for suspicion.”

She paused in her restless stalking about the carpeted room. Cold again; she felt so cold. Feasting put her in mind of—“Poison?” she enquired sharply. “So that they all die at the same time, and only they die? Or do you suggest I sacrifice a few spare members of my druzhina to make it all look reasonable? As if such a thing could look reasonable! I am not a fool, Cheng.”

“No, Most High,” he agreed. “Poison is a woman’s weapon, in any case.” A musing smile crossed his face. “Have I ever shared with you the tale of Livia, Empress of Rome, who—”

She interrupted impatiently. “Another time. But if in your learnings of history there is example for me to follow, tell me at once.”

“Your situation is not unique—though you yourself are most certainly so. As I say, poison is a woman’s weapon. Something they will expect. They will have guards, so the weapon cannot be a man’s weapon of blade or cudgel, either. And all must die at the same time, in such a fashion as—”

“—as to encourage belief that it was an accident. Yes, I see. But how?”

He said nothing. He merely watched her, waiting for her to be clever.

“The weapon of neither woman nor man,” she said slowly, “but of one who is neither.”

Master Cheng bowed low. “Your husband, may your gods grant him glory, forbade my magic.”

“Perhaps if he hadn’t, he might have lived longer,” she snapped. “But Yvor had greater faith in his own strength.” Yvor, of course, had been a fool. She shrugged. “I will have you use your magic, then. By the snake that killed my father, I swear—” And she broke off, only to repeat more softly, “Snake.” Memory took her back to that horrible day of her childhood, when her nurse had told her that her father was dead. Tall, golden, magnificent Grand Prince Helgi, who had hung his shield on the gates of mighty Mikligardur, who was clever and invincible, had been bitten by a deadly snake.

A soothsayer had told Helgi many years earlier that a certain horse would be the cause of his death. He had known instantly which horse the man had in mind. The stallion was a noble animal, fine in form and regal in manner, and Helgi loved him—so much that he could not order him killed. Instead, he commanded that the horse be properly fed and looked after, but never led into his presence. Occasionally, though, he would be out walking, or riding another horse, and glimpse the stallion at a distance, and after a few moments’ sorrowful gazing would turn and move swiftly away. But eventually, after living many years and siring many foals almost—but not quite—as splendid as he, the horse died. Upon Helgi’s return from another victory in battle, he went to the place where the skull and bare bones lay. He walked about in great distress, regretting the magnificent stallion, and by accident his boot crunched the whitened skull. It so happened that the skull lay atop the entrance to a snake’s lair. The snake crawled forth from underground and sank its fangs into his flesh. And Helgi died.

Olga remembered imagining the snake in its lair deep in the earth, slithering out to strike down a noble prince. She had for years afterward dreamed of snakes, and been unable to enter the homes of any of her people: the wood dwellings were built above pits twice a man’s height, and she was sure snakes waited there to kill her. Gradually she had conquered her dread of visiting her people’s houses, but she had never overcome her terror of snakes.

Yet as she thought of the dreams, and of the houses, all at once she smiled. “Make me a magic, Master Cheng of Serica, as lethal and as cunning as a snake,” she murmured almost sweetly. “The Drevlianians will come here, and die.”

He looked puzzled—him, the great sage from the silk-lands where all other countries were sneered at and all other peoples were considered savages. She laughed softly, pleased that she had finally managed to out-think him.

“The history of the land that has become our land,” said her father, “begins with three brothers and a sister.”

“What was her name?” she asked. “Was it Olga, like me?”

“No, but that’s no reason not to listen.” He softened the reproof with a smile. He always did; he was always gentle with her, this fierce and fearsome warrior. She was ferociously proud of him, and of herself for being the only one who ever saw that particular smile.

“The first brother’s name was Kyi, the second was Shchek, and the third was Khoriv.” Her father paused, arching one heavy blond brow. She knew from his look that he was expecting, not another interruption, but instead some sign that she recognized the names. She did not. She hated it when she disappointed him. “And their sister, who was very beautiful—as all sisters in such tales must be—was named Lybyd. Their parents and all their folk had been killed by invaders from the East, and they were seeking a new place to live, safe from war.”

Olga could not help but frown. Lybyd’s desire to escape, she could understand; it was not a woman’s business to make war. But war was the thing that all men who were true men lived for, the only way a man became rich and great and powerful. Her father was a perfect example. Yet here he was, telling her a story about three brothers who did not want to go to war—not even for vengeance against those who had murdered their parents and kindred.

“They came upon a beautiful river, and on its western banks saw seven green hills, lush with kashtan trees and carpeted with flowers. Kyi, Shchek, and Khoriv made for themselves a boat to cross the great river. Lybyd waited on the eastern shore, anxious for her brothers’ safety. And what do you think happened? I’ll tell you what happened. The boat—for it was not a mighty longship like ours, but a boat smaller than a lodya—it was caught in dangerous rapids. The three brothers fought bravely against the currents as water foamed all around them. What they did not know was that within the river lived spirits who enjoyed more than anything else playing with whatever boat might dare to cross. And because the local people knew of them, and avoided the river, they had not had anything to play with in a long, long time. These spirits were called Vesuppi, who warns the traveler ‘do not sleep,’ and Gjallandi, who warns by loudly ringing, and Eiforr ever-fierce, and Hlaejandi who is always laughing—or maybe that spirit’s name was Leandi who is always seething—”

“I think there must have been two of them—one laughing while the other seethed. Just like when Heirleif sees Ylwa talking to another man, and she giggles when he looks all daggery at her!”

“Entirely possible. And I am glad to know that even at your little age you can recognize a look that flashes daggers.” Her father nodded his approval, and she glowed from the inside out. She could feel it, warmer than sables, brighter than summer sunlight. It was a vast thing, to have this man’s praise.

“Where was I? Ah, yes. The three brothers in their little boat were tossed from one to the other like the toys the spirits considered them to be. Lybyd, back on shore, loudly wailed, sure that her brothers would be lost to her forever. But Kyi and Shchek and Khoriv fought back, for to them their lives were not toys to be played with by river spirits. Shchek and Khoriv wielded their oars as weapons, and though they were brave and strong, after a time they began to tire. Kyi struggled with the tiller, steering as best he could while his brothers battled the river spirits. He knew that if he let go, the little boat would veer even more madly and they would certainly all be killed. Finally, seeing that his brothers were exhausted, Kyi summoned the last of his strength and was able to swerve the boat away from the river spirits. It fetched up onto shore, and the three brothers dragged themselves out and onto dry land—soaked to the skin, tired unto death, but alive.”

She waited, knowing there must be more, but at length could contain herself no longer. “What about Lybyd?”

“They called to her from the western bank of the river, and she left off her fear and weeping and called back joyously.”

“But—how did she get across?”

“Because the three brothers had fought so long and valiantly, the river spirits were tired and so the waters were quiet. They went back across, picked up Lybyd, and soon all were safe on the western shore.”

“But didn’t she do anything? She only wept and waited for them to come back, and didn’t do anything?”

“What was there to be done?”

Olga twisted her mouth to one side so her front teeth could chew on the inside of her cheek. It was a deplorable habit, according to her nurse, but it helped her to think. Once or twice she had gnawed hard enough to taste blood. “I don’t know—she could have made another boat, couldn’t she? If the river spirits were tired, then she could have gone across on her own.”

“So it’s your belief that there is always something to be done?” her father asked, grinning widely. “I believe the same! I have yet to encounter circumstances where there was absolutely nothing to be done. And I hope I never do!” He laughed his sharp, loud laugh and swung her up off his knees, holding her high in the air with his big hands strong and gentle around her shoulder bones. Olga giggled, and grabbed at the ends of her long golden braids to tickle her father’s cheeks and nose. It was an old game with them, going back to her earliest memories, before her mother had died. He shook his head and twitched his face around in terrible contortions, which only made her laugh harder.

At length, exhausted with laughing, she settled back into his lap and asked, “What happened to the brothers—and their sister who didn’t do anything?”

Another burst of laughter told her she had chosen exactly the right thing to say. “You don’t approve of Lybyd, do you? I think that you would not weep and wail on the riverbank. As for Lybyd, she and Kyi and Shchek and Khoriv made a great city on the banks of the river. A smaller river that ran through the city was named for her. Each of the brothers chose a hill to live on, and so named them Shchekovitza, Khorivitza, and—ah, I see you have guessed!”

“The whole city was named for Kyi! Are you going there? Are you going to Kyiv? Will you take me with you?”

“One day. One day. For now, you must stay here at home in Novgorod, attend to your lessons, and be very good, for there is a place waiting for you in Kyiv, and to take it with honor you must become accomplished and wise.” He kissed her forehead in blessing, and set her onto her feet. “And I do not think you will cower on the shore and wait to be rescued, the way Lybyd did.”

Five years later, she took the place her father had promised.

She made the long journey from Novgorod to Kyiv in winter—for to travel at any other time was to risk becoming hopelessly mired in mud on roads that barely existed; the ice and snow stayed solid beneath the hooves of the horses and the runners of the sleighs. She went to Kyiv and married Yvor, grandson of the great Rurik, and if it had been many, many years before she gave Yvor a son, it was the fault of Yvor and no one else. Had he spent more time in Kyiv instead of progressing through the tributary lands; had he stayed to rule instead of venturing out to battle the Pechenegs, the Khazars, the Greeks, the Drevlianians . . .

And, of course, if he had not beaten her bloody many, many times for being the daughter of a greater warrior than he, perhaps she would have borne more sons.

There was only the one little boy. Five years old. And the Drevlianians would kill him.

They came to Kyiv, the triumphant Drevlianians, but only twenty of them. She hid her furious disappointment and received them in the great hall. They were uneasy with the stone all around them—they who lived within wood and wattle, with packed dirt for flooring. Yet they understood the wealth that all this stone implied.

With great ceremony, they gave her the Tears and the Blood. She was surprised by this, and allowed it to show. She had expected one of them to be wearing the earring. Yet it seemed they had something else in mind.

“The Grand Prince Yvor,” one of them said, their warchief, his darkness suiting the rain-clogged day as her own golden fairness did not, “while a great man in some ways, was unwise. This year he came as he always came each year to our city of Iskorosten. We presented him with our tribute. He demanded double. We spoke among ourselves, and decided thus: If a wolf comes among the sheep, he will take away the whole flock one by one, unless he be killed.”

He paused, as if waiting for her to say something. To acknowledge his tribe’s cumulative wisdom in murdering their Grand Prince, perhaps? She clamped her jaws shut over exclamations of outrage as he reviewed the events that had brought them all here. One did not shout at someone who merely told the truth, insulting as that truth might be. She kept her gaze on the sprays of flowers thickly embroidered on her silk-covered sleeve, and resisted the impulse to chew at her cheek.

“Now you are a woman without a husband, and a woman alone cannot rule. As Yvor, grandson of Rurik, married you and became Grand Prince in your father’s stead, so now a Drevlianian will become your husband, and Grand Prince, and rule long and wisely, and provide sons for the future glory and wealth of Russiya.”

Stiff and formal in her crimson silk robes and heavy crown and looped necklaces of gold and amber, she said nothing.

“We invite you to choose among us,” their warchief continued with an oily smile. “I have brought with me twelve fine, strong, proud young warriors. The best our land can offer.” The promised twelve came forward; she did not even glance at them. “Only consider, good Lady, that with a Drevlianian as your husband, and a Drevlianian as your son, this land will be ruled by those who have belonged here since time began.”

She stayed silent, not trusting herself to speak, for what she was thinking would have ruined all. Those who “belong” here—by which you mean those descended of the three brothers who ran away from taking vengeance for their people’s destruction! And let us not forget the sister who cringed and shivered on the riverbank! It is no wonderment to me that you pleaded with great Rurik to rule over you and give you laws and safety from your enemies, for you are all cowards and fools.

It was her late husband’s warchief, Sveneld, who spoke, taking one long stride from near the silk-draped chair that was her throne. “Dare you forget,” Sveneld rumbled from deep within a chest the size of a wine cask, “that it was you who asked of us a prince to rule over you? We Varangians wanted only a secure route to Mikligardur, to the Silk Road of Serica, to the trading of sables. Prince Rurik you invited—begged!—to become your leader and your salvation from invaders. Prince Helgi made you great, proclaimed Kyiv the Mother of All Russiya—”

“Enough,” Olga said softly. All eyes, wide with shock, were upon her. She would apologize to Sveneld later—and thank him for saying what she must not. Rising from her chair, she smoothed her robes and looked down on the Drevlianian warchief. “You must understand the disquiet of my spirit since—since—” She stopped and stared down at her hands again, as if unable to go on. Spies had reported to them, she was certain, about her pacing and her sleeplessness and her cold turmoil. She could not present them with a woman completely in control of herself and her emotions. If they thought her grief-stricken and terrified, so much the better. “You have given me a difficult choice, for all the young men you propose are worthy, I am sure, of the Tears and the Blood.” Her fingers clenched around the earring in her palm. “Please, forgive me if I am unable to choose at this exact moment—”

“We never intended you to, gentle Lady,” soothed the Drevlianian. “You may take as long as you like. We will wait.”

Later, to Master Cheng, she gave voice to her fury. “Yes, wait! And while they do so they will devour my food, drown themselves in my drink, despoil my maids—”

“Peace, Most Gracious,” the old man murmured. “Did we not hope for exactly this? They are here, and think you unbalanced by sorrow for the past and fear of the future. While they believe you to be wringing your hands in private over this choice, they will not think to see what is truly there to be seen.”

Calming herself with an effort, she began removing the heavy amber jewelry from her neck. The crown she had taken off upon entering her rooms; it had given her a headache with the weight of its gold.

“All is prepared?” she asked.

“Of course.”

A chain snagged on silken embroidery. She yanked at it, abruptly furious again. “Why did Yvor do it? Why did he demand double the tribute? Did he think himself so powerful that none would dare refuse? How rich did these Drevlianians appear, that Yvor demanded double?”

“Who can say what was in his mind?” Master Cheng folded his hands inside his sleeves. “Traveling to each vassal, collecting tribute, being feasted and entertained for a month or more—he considered the expense to them sufficient to deplete their resources, so that no armies might be raised against him. And indeed, you will note that a mere twenty men and their servitors have come to you. They are not the ones with an army. You are.”

Finally freed of the offending necklace, she threw it onto the carpets. It was the hour when she went to see her son, and did not wish to frighten him by appearing in all her glittering golden finery. “An army,” she observed, “is a man’s weapon, Master Cheng.”

“Of a certainty. And there are no men here.” He smiled.

Only a mother, and one who could never be a father. It hovered on her lips to ask why he had lingered in Kyiv these many years; surely after experiencing the marvels of stately Athens and proud Rome and mighty Mikligardur in his travels with the silk trade, her city was pitiful in contrast. Those places blazed brighter than the sun; Kyiv was nothing more than a hearthfire by comparison—a fire likely to sputter and die if she did not guard it against the Drevlianians.

Yvor had asked Cheng once if he did not desire to go home to Serica. The old man shrugged, smiled, and replied that he feared he was too decrepit to survive the journey, and even if he did reach the Silk Lands, he had been hopelessly corrupted by his years in the vulgar West. Besides, he added with a twinkle in his tilting black eyes, he enjoyed looking at golden-haired women far too much never to look at one again.

“Tribute and armies,” Cheng sighed, startling her from her thoughts. “An inconvenient and wasteful method of governing, if I may say so, Most Gracious. Building a nation from twigs and twine, when stone is required.”

She shrugged. “It was always done that way. Is there a better?”

He only looked at her, amusement dancing in his black eyes. He had taken to watching her this way in the weeks since Yvor had been killed: watching her, waiting for her to be clever.

She thought of her first effort at such cleverness, and how he had actually laughed with glee and approval of her plan, and all at once tribute and armies and wood and stone came together and made elegant sense.

“From now on, keep them here,” she heard herself say. “Let them go back to their own lands rarely, so they cannot make mischief. Root in them the desire to live as a prince does: in a house of stone, in a city encircled by stone, not cramped in a village of wood. They will build a city of stone for me, Cheng. They will spend their substance on that, and on pretty things to put inside their new houses, not on armies.”

“The Most Gracious One is wise.” He bowed to her, and once more she marveled at the satisfaction it gave her to earn his admiration. It was, she thought suddenly, even better than her father’s smile.

She finished twisting her thick fair braids atop her head and secured them with a dragon-headed pin that had belonged to her husband’s kinswoman, the Queen of Denmark. She composed her face into lines that spoke of happiness and humor, not anger and anxiety. “Come,” she said to Master Cheng, “we’ll go upset the nurses by keeping Sviatoslav awake late into the night. And you shall show him another magic.” The prospect cheered her, and she wagged a finger playfully at the old man. “But not the one with the pigeons again!”

“They’d just fed,” he protested, eyes dancing, “or they would not have messed the carpets.”

“Your own master should have taught you how to make manure vanish,” she teased. Then, grimly: “It would have been useful right now.”

The fourth evening of the Drevlianians’ stay, a feast was given. She had ordered constructed a large wooden hall, caparisoned in bright bolts of silk and warmed by iron braziers, and so thickly strewn with carpets that the floor of pine planks was completely covered. Sumptuous food was served by the prettiest of her pretty blonde slaves. Strong liquor flowed like spring snowmelt into immense silver-mounted drinking horns, and down the throats of her guests.

She had inspected the hall that morning. For so hasty a project, it was all quite beautifully built and decorated. She said this, exchanging glances with Master Cheng, and smiled.

As the guests feasted, she stayed upstairs watching her son wear himself out shrieking with delight as Master Cheng wielded magics complex enough to entertain a shrewd, clever child. At length the old man excused himself, much to the boy’s dismay. She sat up late with Sviatoslav, soothing him to sleep in her lap, listening to the crackle of the hearthfire. There was a peace about it, despite the dread hovering nearby, for in these hours she was nothing grander or more elaborate than the mother of a beloved son. Other mothers sat near other fires tonight, rocking children to sleep throughout great Kyiv. And it seemed to her that she had been correct in her imaginings, and that the city was a hearthfire in itself, warmly glowing, as welcoming as a mother’s gentle arms.

Mother Of All Russiya.

Gazing into the flames that defended her from cold and darkness, she turned her mind to the new wooden hall beyond her windows, and heard the music change from the old heroic ballads that always accompanied feasting to tunes suitable for dancing. The slaves would now be departing one by one, until only Drevlianians remained. They roared out drinking songs, fists pounding on tables, making plates and bowls skitter. Boots stomped on the pine planks beneath those tables and in the cleared spaces where agile young men danced off the excess energy of plenteous horns of wine. In her mind she saw it all. Saw, as well, just outside the wooden hall, an old man with strangely tilting black eyes making a gesture, and muttering a few words, and reaching most delicately with magic always young.

From her son’s rooms she heard the screams begin. She heard the crack and splinter of a million flimsy kindling twigs beneath heavy boots as the flooring beneath the carpets lost its bewitchment and became what it truly was. She heard the crash of bodies and tables and benches and iron braziers as they all fell into a pit twice as tall as a man. She heard the hissing of ripped silks, the cracking of white skulls, and the final great sound like thunder as the walls woven of switches as slender as snakes collapsed atop the pit, smothering all within, burying them alive.

She smiled then, and nodded, and stared into the hearthfire, rocking her son in her arms.

But that night she dreamed of snakes.

“They are not all dead,” she told Master Cheng the next day. “Some of those who killed my husband yet live.”

He took some moments to respond to her words. “Short of attacking Iskorosten—”

“If I must.” She paced, fingers fidgeting with the ends of her long golden braids. She did not feel clever. She could not command her brain to brilliance. She only knew that she could not use a man’s weapons; she was no warleader to general an army. They would expect her to use a woman’s weapon, and she was no Empress of Rome to wield poison. Magic stood before her in the shape of an old man—but she must be clever, and tell him how it ought to be done.

She stood before the hearthfire and stared into it, seeking among the identities others had provided her: daughter, wife, mother, Grand Princess. And she found her answers in all of them. In the fire.

There was only one way to be sure that a snake was dead.

Some weeks later, her envoy stood among the shocked and grieving Drevlianians and told them: “The Grand Princess is afraid, my lords. This horrible tragedy, this terrifying accident that took so many strong, proud lives—she is only a woman, my lords. Pity her in her solitude! Her father of glorious name is dead, her brave husband also, and her son is a child of but five summers. Therefore she begs that you send to her all your wisest men, the best men who govern Drevliania, for she is in dire need of your learned counsel.”

They came. They actually came. She watched and hid her delight as they marched grimly into the stone-walled courtyard, fully a hundred of them, all in armor and all warriors. They were dark and stocky and full-bearded, and each possessed an axe, a sword, and a knife that never left him, not even when he slept. And they were angry. Gods, so angry.

Their new warchief, son of the old, stalked up to her on the steps of her residence where she stood ready to receive them. “We will stay here,” he told her without preamble, “within stone walls. Your hall is large enough to house us. There will be no more accidents. We will stay here.”

The clamor of their armor and weapons as they milled around her hall throbbed daily, nightly, in her brain. And in her dreams, while she slept and was vulnerable, their axes and swords and knives became yet more snakes, with iron fangs that sank into her son’s small body.

“Highness,” said Sveneld on the fifth afternoon, just before another session of “counsel” with her guests, “it has not escaped my notice that these assassins yet live.”

She rounded on him furiously, ready to tear out his eyes with her fingernails. Nearby, Master Cheng folded his hands meekly within his sleeves and bent his head. She knew he was hiding a smile.

When she spoke, her voice emerged gentle as swansdown. “They will not be living much longer. They will pay tribute, Sveneld, believe me—and after this, the days of tribute are over.” This one last tribute that would rid her of snakes.

For she had discovered a new weapon—not a man’s or a woman’s or a magician’s, but the weapon of a mother. Master Cheng had done more than smile when she had told him of her plan. He had done something he had never done before, not even in her husband’s honor: he went down on his knees, arms in their green silk sleeves spread wide as wings, and touched his forehead to the cold stone floor.

The great lodya in which her father had sailed to Mikligardur was brought by her command from its place of honor by the river. Made from the hollowed-out trunk of a single mighty oak, the lodya’s planking was as fresh as the day Grand Prince Helgi had stood among its oarsmen on his triumphant return home. The lodya had seemed huge to her when she was a little girl; she realized as she watched it being dragged carefully into the stone courtyard that it would of course appear smaller to her now, for she was a woman grown, with a whole country to worry over.

The mast was raised, the square sail unfurled. As the men worked, they sang the song of Grand Prince Helgi’s great victory over proud Mikligardur, and how he had forced Emperors to pay for the food and shelter of every merchant of Russiya who came to the city thereafter. She waited, smiling, for her favorite part: The Emperors also had to provide as many baths as the Rus wished. It was always the hardest part to sing, for no one could keep from laughing: the lyric described hundreds of Greeks sweating and cursing as they hauled and heated water day and night for the gleefully fastidious Rus.

That night she stood on the steps of her home, arrayed in her finest silken robes and every jewel she owned, watching the commotion in the courtyard as all was readied for a celebration. Forty years it had been since Grand Prince Helgi’s triumph over proud Mikligardur, and she intended to commemorate the occasion most impressively. These Drevlianians would be reminded that it had been a Varangian who had won such a great victory. They would remember why they had begged a Varangian to come and rule over them.

They were encouraged to climb onto the lodya, every one of them, and the pretty blonde slaves made sure each had a brimming horn of liquor. Sveneld had not been happy about allowing them access to the ship, but she merely shook her head and told him to have patience. He was especially disturbed that she gave orders for all the Kyivan soldiers to leave their weapons in their barracks. Again she was adamant. She was the Grand Princess, and it was her people’s duty to obey.

She stood on the highest step, watching the Drevlianians drink and laugh. Master Cheng glided silently to her side. She glanced at him, and he smiled at her, and made a subtle gesture with his long, thin fingers.

Below them, every one of a hundred torches ranged about the courtyard sprang to fiery life.

And everyone in the courtyard gasped like a child taking its first breath.

She had seen Cheng do this before, but never on such a scale as this. The courtyard blazed bright as noonday. The Drevlianians’ hands went to their sword hilts. She eyed Master Cheng sidelong. He gave her an innocent smile.

As she had planned, with the darkening of the sky and the lighting of the torches, a powerful male voice began to chant. On the gray stone walls of the courtyard, shadows began to flicker. They might have been cast by the torches. The dancers filed in and the warriors calmed down, leaning on the ship’s railing to enjoy the show.

Prince Helgi, mighty in name, eternal in glory, forty springs are gone,

Yet we remember, will always remember, the splendor of your triumph.

It was difficult to watch Master Cheng at the same time she watched the courtyard. She felt rather than really saw his fingers twitch periodically, sensed rather than truly heard his voice whisper strange words.

Two thousand lodya he sailed, only to find the harbor of Mikligardur

Blocked by vast chains; the cunning Greeks thought victory theirs.

Yet Grand Prince Helgi was of a cunning even greater than the Greeks’.

The fire-lit dancers swarmed about the courtyard. The shadows on the walls outlined brick towers bristling with warriors. No one believed the shadows torch-flung now. Fear rippled through the arrogant Drevlianians who had murdered a Grand Prince. But the fascination of it held all who watched in silent thrall.

The warriors leaped from their lodya like wolves leap from their lairs,

Within sight of proud Mikligardur, beneath its very walls.

The Greeks came forth, soft sheep in their thousands,

To be slaughtered, devoured, only white bones left on the shore.

Suddenly a deafening roar went up from her own people, a bellow of proud victory as Grand Prince Helgi’s army destroyed the shadows of the Greek host. At her side, Cheng trembled and whispered.

The warriors of Russiya knew not defeat, nor weariness, nor pain.

Prince Helgi hung his mighty shield on the gates of vanquished Mikligardur,

Then sailed him home with golden treasure and silver plunder

And gems enough to make a mountain; see them now,

Gracing his daughter’s sweet white throat, her slender supple arms.

The shadows vanished, and all the torches save one were extinguished—and that one lit only her as she stood on the steps, alone now. From her neck and wrists and ears and fingers and body shimmered jewels of a hundred different colors, set in gold or silver or stitched into her robes. She stood unmoving, unsmiling. Nearby, out of the bright torchlight, Master Cheng was breathing heavily with effort.

All glory to Grand Prince Helgi, he of the cunning and courage and might,

His word-fame will live forever among the hearthfires of Kyiv, Mother of All Russiya!

Helgi’s ship flared to light, spitting fire. Sparks caught and clung to Drevlianian clothing. Thick dark hair burned. The wooden handles of axes ignited; leather sword-sheaths blazed; embroidered sashes that held long knives turned to searing belts of flame. All the fire in the world devoured the screaming men in the lodya. The stench of charring flesh was horrible. Olga watched, thinking that in their agony the men were very like snakes—writhing, wicked snakes, burning alive. It was the only way to make sure they were really dead. Soon all that was left of Drevlianian strength and pride was the scorched metal of their axes, swords, and knives. Men’s weapons, useless against the power of her fire. Great Mother Kyiv’s warm hearth had become an inferno.

Master Cheng sank to the stones at her side. She knelt, taking his frail shoulders in her hands, and whispered his name. He smiled slightly, fingers daring to touch her hair.

“Living gold,” he murmured.

And all at once she knew why the old man had lingered in Kyiv all these years. She knew, and suddenly his strange, wizened face with its tilting black eyes was beautiful.

By dawn the ship and the men trapped on it were ashes, and Master Cheng was dead.

For him, she used her army to destroy the Drevlianian city of Iskorosten. Her little son Sviatoslav accompanied her, guarded closely by the warchief Sveneld and the steward Asmund, who loved the boy dearly and together made a wiser and better father than Yvor could have been. Sviatoslav was allowed to cast the first spear against the enemy. The weapon of a man, wielded by a valiant little boy, put such fierce heart into the warriors that they forgot that it was a woman who had ordered them into battle.

Iskorosten was taken. Most of its citizens were killed, and the rest were handed over to Olga’s druzhina as slaves. On the day Iskorosten fell, Olga put upon her ear the Tears and the Blood, and relinquished the jewels only when her son came of age. Sviatoslav then set out on his own wars of conquest, while his mother continued to rule. She was a wise and clever Grand Princess who reorganized the state and abolished the annual tribute. To Kyiv came the highest nobles of all the tribes, and until they built their own stone dwellings they slept in wooden houses—and flinched violently at sudden flames, at cracking twigs. She laughed to herself each time she heard of this, but she made sure that Kyiv became a city made more of stone than of wood: Mother of All Russiya, her hearthfire warm and welcoming.

Olga died in July of the year 969, having been twelve years baptized into the Christian faith—which, for her motherly care of her country and her guidance of her people to the Church, made of her the beloved Saint Olga of Kiev.

She never dreamed of snakes again.

Author’s Note

Although Olga’s methods are of my invention, she really did avenge her husband and protect her son by having the Drevlianian emissaries buried alive and burned alive. The detail of the trench beneath the houses is accurate, as is the description of the boat and the conquest of “Mikligardur”—Constantinople—by Olga’s father. He died after stepping on a poisonous snake. The tale of the founding of Kyiv is one of the oldest historical legends of Russia. It probably stems from the mingling of three settlements, for which there is much archaeological evidence, that existed within the present-day city. At Iskorosten, Sviatoslav did throw the first spear. A contemporary account by an Arab chronicler made note of the earring he wore as an adult: pearls and a ruby. His son became the most celebrated of the Grand Princes of Kyiv: Saint Vladimir the Great. Through him, Olga was the ancestor of the kings of Poland, Hungary, France, Spain, and England.

© 2012 Melanie Rawn.

Melanie Rawn received a B.A. in history from Scripps College and worked as a teacher and editor before becoming a full-time writer. Her latest novel, Touchstone, is the first in a new fantasy series. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Author Spotlight: Jeffrey Ford
Gina Guadagnino

The Cosmology of the Wider World is set in an alternate world, parallel to our own, in which animals take on humanoid traits, communicate with one another, and exist in relative peace and harmony. It reminded me of the dawn of Narnia—what was your inspiration for the Wider World?

When I was younger and less wise, I thought that talking animal stories were the height of corniness in fantasy fiction. And so I set myself a challenge to try to see if I could write one that I, myself, could stand. The Cosmology was my attempt. It was directly inspired by a painting of a Minotaur leaning on the edge of a tower, staring out to sea. The picture is by the 19th century British artist, George Frederic Watts. The whole story grew out of my finding that image one afternoon in a book. The form the story takes is The Beast Epic, which has a long tradition in literature—a kind of fabulation. I’ve long since learned my lesson and come to the conclusion, from reading works like Kipling’s The Jungle Books and Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, that talking animal stories are some of the best stories ever written.

Belius the Minotaur is a refugee from the “lesser world” whose Cosmology seeks to chronicle the history of his adopted home. Eventually, the very act of writing a work with which he is dissatisfied seems to sicken him in a very real and visceral way. As a writer yourself, do you ever experience a sense of frustration with your own work?

I’d rather not go on about it, but yes that does happen. The life reflects the work and the work reflects the life. I’ve been a morose, lowing Minotaur from time to time, although I usually can break out of it by writing through it. That sense of melancholy that Belius feels is where some of the best ideas for fiction and some of the greatest frustrations in writing come from. Like Belius, I’ve always had a sense that there is the real world (the lesser world) and the world of the imagination (the wider world), and I too feel like a halfling trapped between them. The story has a lot to do with writing fiction—more than I ever realized when writing it.

Belius’ friends, who live in a world where the written word is not particularly valued, don’t ever consider that the Cosmology might be the cause of Belius’ distress. Instead, they focus on creating him a mate. Can you discuss your philosophy on the tension between artistic creation and romantic pursuits?

I don’t really have a philosophy on that, but I think in this instance it’s like when your friends and family say to each other he or she just needs to find the right person in order to be happy. I hear that all the time about people when in reality they need to come to a place wherein they are right with themselves before they can meet anyone and begin a relationship or create anything. Someone else can’t fulfill that for them. As Emerson said, “My giant goes with me where ever I go.” This is one of the ideas that plays out through the book—and actually manifests as a character, but I’ll say no more. Read on!

Part One ends with several unresolved mysteries; what is the true cause of Belius’ illness? What became of the smoke created by the burnt Cosmology? Will the creation of Soffea cure the Minotaur? What will happen to Thip as he continues to consume the Minotaur’s blood? Without spoilers, what can readers anticipate in the conclusion of this novella?

There will definitely be resolutions to all of these issues. And I’m glad that these specific points were the ones you are wondering about. They are some of the very things that drew me on into the fiction when I was originally composing it.

Editor’s Note: We’ll be publishing our second spotlight on Jeffrey Ford next month with Part Two of The Cosmology of the Wider World.

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: Linda Nagata
Erin Stocks

In your story “Nightside on Callisto,” four female soldiers face an unexpected conflict. Why did you choose the Jupiter system to set this particular story in?

The moons of Jupiter were on my mind because I’d just finished reading Piers Anthony’s Bio of a Space Tyrant, Volume 1, Refugee. I knew I wanted to tackle a story that was hard SF, and set off Earth, so why not on one of Jupiter’s moons? I have a bad habit of starting story development with setting instead of plot, and that’s what happened here. So I just kept throwing ideas at the page until I had enough to create a story for my chosen setting.

There’s an interesting focus on the age of Jayne and the other women of her team in the story. How do you think the many years they’d lived (and what they’d seen) contributed to their reactions under pressure?

In this story, the premise is that health care is at the point where most of the debilities of old age, both physical and intellectual, have been greatly reduced. Setting war and accident aside, people can expect to live in fair health, and to participate in and actively contribute to their society—up until the moment some part of their physiology suffers catastrophic breakdown. So once we’ve eliminated the health factors that tend to isolate older people, what we have left are elderly like those in the story: people who have been through a lot, and have had time to reflect on why they’re here and what they want to leave behind. If they were the sort to panic when things went wrong, that would be well known by the time they neared the century mark, and they wouldn’t have been selected for the mission. These are can-do survivors.

Much of your science fiction output touches on nanotechnology. Is that what makes up the pressure suits and air skins sealing in the igloo? Will you tell us a little about your fascination with this kind of tech?

I see the pressure suits and air skins as a kind of biotechnology that adapts and extends the tricks of living organisms. I find nanotechnology fascinating from the bio perspective, in that we—all living things—are built up from tiny components. I was a biology major in college, and took the usual classes covering physiology, cell structure, evolution, ecology, and it was fascinating stuff. Then in my last semester I took a lecture class on biochemistry and that was revelatory, because it pulled together everything that had gone before, providing a mechanism for the macro-scale effects. When nanotechnology became the buzzword, I looked at it mostly as a means toward designed life.

I found it fascinating that the Red posed such a serious threat, although we never see it directly, only its influence, in a less-is-more kind of way. What gave you the idea of an enemy like that? Do you use the Red in any of your other stories or books (or plan to)?

The Red was born in the writing of this story. It’s an “if this goes on” extension of some current trends. As soon as I started conceptualizing it, I began to think that maybe this was the seed for my next hard SF novel, which was an exciting moment. I’ve started a file on the idea, but at this point I’ve got several other projects to finish off before I can think about starting something new. The minimalism was a personal triumph—I’m a novelist after all, and we like to explain stuff—but I thought the suggested background was all I needed to make this story work.

You have a background in web programming. How has that influenced your writing?

I don’t think it has, at least not in any direct way that I’m aware of. But the more time I spent at programming, the more I started to see the parallels with writing novels. Both are intricate creative endeavors where you have to look at causes, consequences, and goals, all the while asking yourself not just “What happens next?” but also, “What can go wrong?” And both are concerned with how efficiently the story/program moves on to the next chapter/step. But in programming, it’s much more likely that you’ll know if and when you’ve got it right, because the program produces a specific, desired result. In novel writing, you might think you’ve got it right, but who really knows? The result is nebulous and entirely dependent on the perspective of the reader.

You’re also an advocate for self-publishing, and your fantasy novel The Dread Hammer, recently released, is published by your own Mythic Island Press LLC. Can you tell us a little bit about the decision to self-publish?

My traditional publishing career was an emotional roller coaster, shooting regularly between triumph and disaster. It encompassed six novels, ten pieces of short fiction, and two awards, but except for some foreign translations, it ended in 2003 with the publication of Memory by Tor Books. I thought this was possibly the best of my books, but it went nowhere, and there was no interest in a sequel. To say I was discouraged is an understatement. At the same time, I was working full time while dealing with teenage children and elderly parents. I did eventually produce a fantasy novel, but this failed to sell. Fast-forward to late 2010 and the ebook revolution. I was in the process of republishing my backlist when it became painfully obvious that I needed to get something new out into the world as quickly as possible—and I was still burned out on the traditional way of doing things. So I wrote a book, intending from the beginning to publish it myself. This was The Dread Hammer (Stories of the Puzzle Lands—Book 1), a short, quirky, darkly humorous fantasy novel entirely unlike anything I’d written before. I started it in late December and published it in late April, 2011—a four month turn-around, which still amazes me. If I’d tried to market it traditionally, it probably still wouldn’t be published. I love self-publishing because of the control it gives me over my work. I own the mistakes, but I’m also in a position to fix them, which is a huge plus. But I haven’t written off traditional publishing either, and if I come up with the right book, I’ll take it to market.

What’s coming up next for you?

Well, just out is the next Puzzle Lands book, Hepen the Watcher. I really like this series, and I hope to start laying out a third book before the year is over. In the meantime, I’ve got three novels in various stages of existence. Hopefully one of those will be done by the time this interview is published. Contemplated projects include more short fiction, the novel dealing with the Red, an occasional flirtation with a fifth Nanotech Succession book, and trying my hand at an entirely new genre. The great advantage of not having a contract is I get to do exactly what I want.

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: Nicola Griffith
Robyn Lupo

Can you tell us about how your story, “Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese,” came about for you?

In spring 1989, in England, after a bout of flu, I didn’t recover my strength. I went from being the kind of person who goes running in the morning, teaches self-defense in the afternoon, and studies karate at night to a wraith who had lost twenty pounds, didn’t have the strength to sit up straight, and couldn’t walk half a block. I was diagnosed with post-viral syndrome, and then myalgic encephalomyelitis. (And then Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome; I didn’t get a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis until 1993.) Six months later, in December, I moved from England, to Duluth, Georgia, to live with my partner, Kelley.

We lived in an apartment complex called Northwoods Lake Court. In December it was a place of greys and browns, bare tree trunks and gravel. It had a lake, with a fountain, that I assumed was artificial and ornamental and empty of life. It mirrored how I felt.

On good days I would wrap up in hat and scarf and gloves and walk as far as I could around the lake: there were benches every fifteen yards, so if that was as far as I could go, it didn’t matter; I could sit and watch the play of rain on water, or sunshine, or the movement of clouds.

Winter turned to spring, and Northwoods Lake greened, delicately at first. I saw the beginnings of cattails and, one day, a fish. After that, new discoveries came almost daily: frogs, a snapping turtle, mosquito fish, damsel flies and dragon flies, lilies and duckweed. I began to feel better . . .

What really grabbed me was the slowness of the illness’s spread; I think this is the first story I’ve read where humanity’s extinction event moved slow enough for people to see it, to prepare. What prompted this choice, and do you think it would be better to know, like the characters in your story did, or worse?

I really wanted to write about this world I’d discovered, its rich, slow secrecy—its winter melancholy that turned gradually, then all at once, into an astoundingly fecund summer. To do that, I needed a plausible way for Molly to stay behind, to live reasonably well in an otherwise-abandoned version of the place. I hit upon a creeping apocalypse.

As for what’s best—well, if you look at history, this is the way civilization often falls: not with a bang, but a long, slow sigh on the way to becoming something else.

Two worlds seem to be a reoccurring motif in “Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese”; the bridge, Atlanta versus Helen and Molly’s home, Jessica’s domesticity and her wildness. Could you tell us about the significance of these opposing worlds?

The thing that struck me most forcibly about Northwoods Lake Court was how few residents were aware of the rich life around them. They saw the lake the way I had first seen it: artificial and sterile. They used the tennis courts and the pool, but they ignored this luscious, teeming world right outside their back window. That stance seemed like a metaphor for the way too many exist: wrapped up in their own affairs, unaware of how they fit in a wider world.

What’s next for you?

I’ve just finished a novel, Hild, set in seventh-century Britain. It’s about a girl who grows up to become the woman known as Hild of Whitby. In a time when might equals right, she is born as the second daughter of a widow in exile, and ends up being a woman to whom kings bend the knee.

It’s a huge book, in every sense of the word, a thousand manuscript pages of life, death, politics, sex, violence, grief, joy. Imagine Kristin Lavransdatter meets Wolf Hall or Game of Thrones (only without the dragons). It’s epic in every way—except for actually being an epic in the accepted literary sense. It isn’t from multiple viewpoints; Hild is in every scene. So it’s an intimate novel of character painted on an epic canvas. With warlords, priests, and kings. And anxious reeves, stressed-out seers, and beleaguered queens. Plus some slaves and farmwives and scops. And more trees than you can shake a stick at. And rivers and oceans and rills and burns and becks, and seals and cows and crows and otters and herons, and death and destruction and famine and plague. And song and heroism, and gold and plotting . . .

These Anglo-Saxons lived without safety nets. Writing this novel felt the same: death or glory. I’m grinning as I type this, remembering the rush.

If you want to know more about Hild, I’ve been keeping a blog about the research and writing process, Gemæcce (gemaecca.blogspot.com).

Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.

Author Spotlight: C.C. Finlay
Robyn Lupo

“The Cross-Time Accountants Fail to Kill Hitler Because Chuck Berry Does the Twist” has it all: action, time travel, love, and rock ‘n roll. How did it come together for you? Also, your title is both a hook and quite specific—where did that come from?

I can’t always remember the exact genesis of a story, but this one is easier than most. A couple years ago when I was actively blogging, some editorial minion had complained about their slushpile being full of stories with titles that spoiled the ending mixed with time-travel stories about people trying to kill Hitler. I commented that maybe it wasn’t a good time to submit my story titled “The Cross-Time Accountants Fail to Kill Hitler Because Chuck Berry Does the Twist.” I meant it as a joke, but it was a joke wrapped around a good idea. I was in the middle of writing a novel on deadline so I dashed out a short sketch of the story, just a few hundred words. Mabel was there, and Chuck Berry, and Memphis. Anyway the idea nagged at me for years until I finally fleshed it out. That happens with a lot of stories. New story ideas come to me all the time, far more than I can write. The ones that keep rising in my thoughts again and again over the years are the ones that get written.

What made you come up with the terms “accountant” and “auditor” for the time travellers?

It’s part of the backstory. I’d been thinking for a long time about a resource-depleted future where time travelers stole things from the past. Like if monks in the dark ages could have gone back to take technology and knowledge directly from Rome. It’s a variation on the idea in John Varley’s Millenium, if you know that novel.

Originally they were obsessed, like eco-tourists, leaving no sign of their visit: These were the “accountants,” making sure the spreadsheets balanced, nothing from the future left in the past, nothing from the past (besides information) brought to the future. But as their own present grew shittier and more desperate, they started to send out time auditors—experts in search of errors they could “correct.”

There’s a wonderful treatment of fandom in this story; Mabel’s initial meeting with Chuck Berry is truly moving. Where does this come from in terms of your own life?

I can think of so many examples. I’m a fan of Howard Waldrop’s short stories, and at one of the first Worldcons I attended, when I had only published one or two things myself, I ended up in an elevator with Howard and, I think, Eileen Gunn, who were deep in conversation about something. I don’t remember what. I just stood in the corner, thinking “OMG, OMG, that’s HOWARD WALDROP.” And then there was the time in college when I had just discovered dance. I went to see the ballet and loved one of the dancer’s performances, so I sent her some flowers along with my compliments and phone number. I don’t know why I was surprised when she called me, but she did and I was. I ended up so tongue-tied I’m sure I sounded like a dork or a creep. Most awkward phone call ever. So I drew on all those things.

Why did you choose Elvis as the murderer of Chuck Berry?

Elvis is iconic, and he and Chuck Berry make for such a rich compare-and-contrast discussion. Elvis was accused of stealing black music, and was often described by whites in racist terms, and Chuck Berry was accused of stealing white music, and often described as “that black hillbilly.” Together they show the power of the cross-cultural influences and their music was a harbinger of the integration that was coming in the ’50s and ’60s. I’m also fascinated by the psychological studies of Elvis, including the effect of his twin brother’s death and Elvis’s life as a “walking zombie” who could only feel alive through music. So when I imagined a world where their kind of mutual musical appropriation wasn’t possible, it seemed like we would end up with a very different Elvis, one whose unconscious obsession with death would manifest in a different way. There would also be very different options for Chuck Berry.

Instead of Elvis and Chuck Berry thriving musically, both creative paths would end up annihilated. And once I had decided to write a time-travel alternate world story that touched on race in America, I knew that I had to make a nod toward the influence that Jack Womack’s chilling Dryco novels had on me, particularly Elvissey. Womack is the master.

What’s next for you in terms of writing?

I’ve got half a dozen new stories drafted and two new novels well underway. What’s next is finishing some of them to send out into the world in search of readers.

Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.

Author Spotlight: David Langford
Andrew Liptak

Hello, David, and thanks for taking the time to speak with us. What can you tell me about the origins of your story, “Different Kinds of Darkness”?

The notion of basilisk images was something I’d had in mind ever since reading Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. Hofstadter’s favourite analogy for the impact of Gödel’s Theorem on mathematics is a music recording that can’t be played because its resonances destroy the playing mechanism. That set me wondering about images that the human optical software can’t process, leading to a 1988 Interzone story called "BLIT": (infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm).

Other writers seemed to like the idea—that first story has been referenced in fiction by Greg Egan, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, and others.

This story sees a very different type of terrorism: one that strikes by a mere glance (it actually reminds me much of a Monty Python sketch about a deadly joke), rather than explosive vests or car bombs.

The Monty Python link occurred to me later, and I slipped this into the follow-up piece "comp.basilisk FAQ" written for the short-short SF spot in Nature (ansible.co.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html).

This also references fictional research leading to the first basilisk image, but that’s another story (called "What Happened at Cambridge IV" and reprinted in my collection Different Kinds of Darkness). The “World’s Funniest Joke” sketch was in fact anticipated in an 1830 poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and of course the Ghastly Thing Too Dreadful To Gaze Upon is an old horror trope with deep roots in mythology. There used to be a handy Wikipedia article on this general theme, called “Motif of harmful sensation.” This was deleted for the dire crime of “original research” but can still be found online.

Meanwhile, John Clute urged me to write an equivalent SF Encyclopedia entry, titled “Basilisks” (sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/basilisks).

Which, as the little girl in James Thurber’s anecdote didn’t quite say, will probably tell you more about SF basilisks than you wished to know.

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as io9, Tor.com, SF Signal, Blastr, Kirkus and Armchair General, and he can be found over at andrewliptak.wordpress.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.

Author Spotlight: Dale Bailey
Andrew Liptak

Hi Dale, thanks for sitting down and taking the time to speak with us about “The Children of Hamelin”! First off, can you tell us a little about the genesis of this story?

This is always the most difficult question to answer. Stories tend to come to me as titles. From there, it’s a matter of excavating the narrative that goes with the title. I’ve had the title “The Children of Hamelin” rattling around inside my head for years, but it took me a long time to figure out the story that went with it.

How do you think society would recover from such a trauma? Would we survive?

Sure, I think we’d survive, though we’d be irrevocably changed. The story doesn’t take up this question, in part because it begins in the immediate aftermath of the trauma and in part because I wanted to focus on the micro-level. I think many SF stories would take the macro approach: How did the disappearance happen? Who or what is responsible, and why? But in this case, as is often the case with my fiction, I was interested in how the loss would affect people emotionally, how it would change the individual.

If you’re looking at society at large, I think there would be a lot of civil unrest inspired by the destruction of our society’s existing certainties about the way the world works. I imagine millennial cults would develop and that traditional religious belief would see a sharp rise. Secular and scientific voices would likely be drowned out. It would take a novel to develop it properly.

I’m reminded a bit of a recent television show, Awake, which deals with some similar themes: the loss of a loved one and what people do to cope and move on. Why do you think this theme is covered in our stories as often as it seems to be?

I haven’t seen the show, but the fear of personal loss is a primal one. We all fear losing our loved ones, and we all have to grapple with it in some way. I believe that fiction allows us to rehearse and exorcise those fears—catharsis, I suppose.

What advice can you give an aspiring short-story writer?

Read a lot and write a lot. Read everything, fiction in all genres and all kinds of non-fiction. Be a sponge. Listen to the voices in your head.

I also think workshops can be helpful for some people. They’ve certainly helped me at various points in my writing life.

What do you have coming up that we should keep an eye out for?

Stories in Asimov’s, F&SF, and a Datlow/Windling anthology called Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells. A piece in a forthcoming anthology called Zombies vs. Robots: Diplomacy, which was a pulpy lark to write. And, inevitably, a novel in process, but there’s still a long way to go on that one . . .

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as io9, Tor.com, SF Signal, Blastr, Kirkus and Armchair General and he can be found over at andrewliptak.wordpress.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.

Author Spotlight: Catherynne M. Valente
Erin Stocks

Tristram’s preconceived notions about herself are heartbreaking. Can you tell us a little about how you came up with her character and the journey she goes on in your story “A Hole To China”?

It’s funny looking back on this story, which was probably my first real attempt at a children’s portal fantasy. I can see that a lot of Fairyland’s tone was in infant form in this piece. Tristram is very much me as a child—she even lives in the part of the country where I grew up. Childhood was a sad and difficult place for me, one in which I was always trying to come up with explanations of the world without asking grown ups questions which might lead to me being rejected in some fashion. I was quite neurotic, really. All of that goes into Tristram.

I loved the eclectic characters she meets: the crow-woman and her sister, the peacock historian, and the Ox of Sorrows and his penchant for woe. What kind of effect do you think Tristam’s encounters had on her by the end of the story?

I think she’s seen something of another world, things more spectacular and beautiful than she suspected, and that she feels at least a little special, for having gotten to glimpse them. She has a secret to keep, and that makes her feel powerful. I think she will have that to hold beside her troubles when she finds her way back home.

Your love for and history with folklore and fairy tales is apparent in much of your writing, and this story is no exception. Do you plan on working myth and magic into a story ahead of time, or does it find its way in on its own?

I can’t help it, folklore always wins out. It’s how my mind works, finding connections between myth and reality, between myth and myth, between fairy tales and real children. My original folklore lies alongside the aspects from real human mythologies, mirroring it and commenting on it. It is what draws me to fantasy as a genre, the ability to take apart folklore and put it back together again. That’s no different when writing for younger readers—in fact, it’s more intense, because you’re working at that primal fairy tale level, close to the bone, and a lot of times you’re bringing a kid certain aspects of folklore for the first time, coloring their future interactions with it.

This story was originally published in a crowdfunding experiment called the Omikuji Project, and then in the collection This is My Letter to the World. Will you tell us a little about that, and your activity with crowdfunding in general? How has it affected your writing and output?

I started the Omikuji Project in 2008 and it’s been a wonderful experience. I write a short story that is not published elsewhere without the permission of the community, (and thank you to them for allowing Lightspeed to reprint “A Hole to China”!) and we print it on archival paper, seal it with a wax seal, and send the stories to subscribers all over the world. We have members on every continent but Africa and Antarctica, and in 2010 I collected the first two years of stories into a collection. There have been member meetups all over the country and it’s been amazing to see the attachments formed both to the stories and between members.

It’s affected my writing in that I’m very good at the 2000 word story length now! And it’s certainly tough sometimes to produce a new short story every month in addition to all the other short fiction I do. But it’s been so rewarding. It’s worth the occasional brain-pain.

What are you working on right now?

I’ve just finished the sequel to Fairyland and am working on the third book, as well as a western novella and two new adult books, which I can’t announce just yet!

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: Kage Baker
Jennifer Konieczny

“The girl surprised everyone.”

This, the opening line of Kage Baker’s short story “The Ruby Incomparable,” describes Svnae, the magically-gifted protagonist who seeks power through knowledge. But it just as easily could describe Baker herself.

In March 1997, at the age of forty-four, Baker surprised the science fiction community with the publication in Asimov’s of her debut novelette “Noble Mold.” She followed it, in the October/November issue of Asimov’s, with her second novelette, “Facts Relating to the Arrest of Dr. Kalugin,” and then in December with the U.K. release of her debut novel, In the Garden of Iden (published in the U.S. in February 1998).

These stories introduced science fiction fans to Baker’s Company universe, in which a twenty-fourth century Company trains cyborgs to time travel in order to preserve historic artifacts. When asked by Nick Gevers in a 2002 interview (www.sfsite.com/08b/kb134.htm) why her SF series focused so much on the past, she explained, “I find the pageant of history more interesting than rocket ships blasting off to other planets. And, at the end of the day, people are more entertaining than technology.” Her fascination with history had been long-standing, leading her to a career at the Living History Centre and, like Svnae’s wanderings, away from the path her mother had envisioned for her.

Baker confessed to Gevers, “I obediently spent my childhood writing little stories, until I reached that age when you dig in your heels and tell your parents you hate them and you’ll never, ever be what they want you to be. And I more or less ran away with the circus for the next twenty years.” Her writing was the better for it. After years of writing, directing, and teaching the Living History Centre’s performances, Baker explained her idea for the Company series to her mother by acting it out. She captured the voices and mindsets of the cyborgs Mendoza and Joseph in her performance, and the story she told became the basis of “Noble Mold.” She continued to bring Mendoza, Joseph, and her other characters to life throughout the nine Company novels and dozens of Company short stories.

Although the Company universe saw her nominated for two Hugos and a Nebula, and earned her the title of Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Winner in 2005, her writing extended far beyond them. In 2003, Tor published her novel, The Anvil of the World, which was a Mythopoeic Award finalist. The following year her collection, Mother Aegypt and Other Stories, was published and nominated for a Locus Award. Her 2008 novel, The House of the Stag, was another Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Winner and a World Fantasy Award nominee.

Baker was prolific. She was award-winning. And much like Svnae, who declared, “There’s so much I can teach her, so much I can give her, so much I can share with her,” Baker enjoyed sharing her knowledge with others. Before she lost her battle to cancer on January 31, 2010, she entrusted her sister Kathleen with a message for her readers. “I want you to tell all these people that I wanted more time to spend with them. Tell them I meant to, tell them I wanted to hear what they said and tell them what was on my mind.” Although time ran out, through Baker’s writings, we can still know and be surprised by her.

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: Melanie Rawn
Theodore Quester

Your story, “Mother of all Russiya,” features a strong historical element, and a great sense of place. Did this require a lot of research? Did you travel to the region at all? Is this something that comes before or after the story idea?

“Travel to the region”—don’t I wish!

There is a tremendous amount of world-building here—do you make use of it in other stories?

Whereas the research was for this story specifically, one can’t help but collect things for other projects along the way. I’m sure bits of it will show up in future novels.

What drew you to this subject?

A few years ago, I was looking up some other things about that period in Russia and happened upon a brief biography of Olga. She lived an amazing life. In the one portion of it told in “Mother of All Russiya,” there’s treachery, murder, intrigue, rebellious vassals, a nation in the making, and a smart and ruthless woman who will do anything to protect her son—what’s not to love about a story like that?

Was this a difficult story to write?

The difficulty was in trying to make the time and place more real—all this happened more than a thousand years ago, and in a part of the world that we don’t usually learn much about. Set a story in Ancient Rome or 12th Century England, and the reader will most likely have a mental file of background information; medieval Kiev is pretty much a mystery. So I got to put my history B.A. from Scripps College to good use (not the Scripps in La Jolla, the one in Claremont; we don’t do fish!).

What else do you have coming down the pipeline?

Right now I’m working on the third book of the “Glass Thorns” series. In March, I did a West Coast book tour for the first volume, Touchstone, and had a terrific time. Writing these books is huge fun; the characters are unlike anybody I’ve ever done before.

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.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in June, in Lightspeed . . .

We’ll have original fantasy by debut writer Kelsey Ann Barrett (“My Teacher, My Enemy”) and award-winning author John Langan (“Renfrew’s Course”), with fantasy reprints by best-selling author Seanan McGuire (“Lost”) and Hugo-winner Tim Pratt (“Cup and Table”).

We’ll also have original science fiction by Maggie Clark (“A Plague of Zhe”) and Simon McCaffery (“The Cristóbal Effect”), along with SF reprints by Eileen Gunn (“Contact”) and bestselling author George R. R. Martin (“The Way of Cross and Dragon”).

For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive is again not a novella, but the second part of the two-part serial novel: The Cosmology of the Wider World, by Jeffrey Ford. (Look for the first part in this 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!