Editorial, June 2012
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue twenty-five of Lightspeed—our second anniversary issue!

It’s hard to believe it’s been two whole years already, isn’t it? But it’s true: We launched Lightspeed in June 2010, so this issue marks the start of our third year of publication. We’ve had a great run so far, including a slew of best-of-the-year reprints and award nominations—including two Hugo Award nominations for Lightspeed itself. Thanks to all of our wonderful writers and our ever-vigilant and hardworking staff. And, of course, thanks too to all of you readers who have supported us since our inception; we’re glad to see you sticking with us, and to see your ranks growing by leaps and bounds.

Speaking of Lightspeed’s launch, we’re actually in the process now of launching a new magazine—Nightmare, which, as you can probably guess from the title, will be devoted to horror. The publishing model will be very familiar to those of you who regularly read Lightspeed: Nightmare will publish four stories a month, two originals and two reprints, along with assorted author spotlights and nonfiction. The first issue will contain all-new, original stories by Laird Barron, Sarah Langan, Jonathan Maberry, and Genevieve Valentine.

We’re currently running a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to launch Nightmare. We’re attempting to raise $7500 to fund the first issue and cover other launching costs. Hopefully by the time you read this, we’ll have already met our goal. But if we haven’t—or even if we have!—I hope you’ll consider supporting the magazine. We’ve got it setup so that the donor rewards are akin to pre-ordering: For $3 you’ll get an ebook edition of issue #1; for $25 you’ll get a one-year ebook subscription, and so on. The Kickstarter ends on June 7, 2012, so if you want to participate, don’t delay! To learn more about Nightmare, or to donate, visit our Kickstarter page: http://kck.st/JPr0uu.

So that’s all very exciting, isn’t it? But I know you’re ready to hear about this month’s issue, so without further adieu . . .

This month, we 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 bestselling author Seanan McGuire (“Lost”) and Hugo-winner Tim Pratt (“Cup and Table”).

We 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 and final part of the two-part serial novel: The Cosmology of the Wider World, by Jeffrey Ford. We also have excerpts from two new novels: David Brin’s Existence and N. K. Jemisin’s The Killing Moon.

All that plus our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, and feature interviews with bestselling author Anne Rice and documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock (director of Comic-Con, Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope).

Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for Blackout, the concluding volume of Mira Grant’s Hugo Award-nominated Newsflesh trilogy. You can find more from Orbit—including digital short fiction and monthly ebook deals—at www.orbitbooks.net.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And remember, there are several ways you can sign up to be notified of new Lightspeed content:

Newsletter: lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS feed: lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Twitter: @lightspeedmag

Facebook: facebook.com/lightspeedmagazine

Google+: plus.google.com/100415462108153087624

Subscribe: lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

And one last bit of news . . . or, really, an apology: We messed up! The May ebook edition of Lightspeed, which contains Catherynne M. Valente’s story “A Hole to China,” was somehow finalized with a substantial amount of text missing from the end of Cat’s story’s second section (“The Ox of Sorrows”). We discovered the error and fixed the web edition before it was published, but our ebook editions had already been sent out into the world. We did fix the ebook edition and upload new versions to all of our vendors, but a number of readers certainly had already downloaded their ebooks, so those folks will have received the version that contained the Valente story with the missing text. You can, of course, read the entire story on our website right now, but since those of you who purchase our ebook editions pay for the convenience of having your stories in ebook format, we wanted to make the full version of Cat’s story available in ePub and Mobi format, so that you can enjoy it as Crom intended. If you’d like to grab the full version of Cat’s story, please go to lightspeedmagazine.com/valente-ebook and download your preferred ebook edition and enjoy. Again, we’re very sorry about the mixup, and we will endeavor to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again!

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, 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 four-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 (November, Tachyon), and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor). He 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

[NOTE: This is the conclusion of a two-part serial; the first part appeared in our May 2012 issue. —ed.]

On this particular morning near the end of the winter season, Belius finally traveled the ninth and last horrendous circle of Hell, making his way up and then down the hairy length of Satan to emerge beneath the stars. With the last word read, he gave a great sigh and closed the book as not to further torment the already pitiful souls trapped between its covers.

He stood up and stretched his arms. Through the parlor window, he could see that a light snow was falling. Moving over to that window, he stood and stared blankly for a time, considering how much he had learned in so few months. In the beginning it seemed that he would never even memorize the alphabet, but his mother’s patience and encouragement gave him the confidence to conquer his initial fear. On the day that he read and understood his first paragraph by himself, he knew that there was nothing to stop him from completing the Inferno by winter’s end.

The dictionary that had been his Bible for those cold weeks now lay on the table next to the leather bound epic, its pages hoof worn, torn and scribbled and separated from the binding. Instead of being stymied by each new word he had never before known existed, he would take it as a challenge and dive headlong into that kingdom of words. Every meaning, like a compound of matter, he found to be made up of smaller atoms of meaning that each in their turn had to be looked up. He adopted his mother’s patience and laboriously searched out the smaller definitions and then gathered them together in his mind to create the conglomerate that was the word he had originally sought. In a notebook with the design of a black swan stitched into the cover, he would copy down all of his discoveries.

From the very start, Belius was enchanted by the story that Dante told. Although he was most interested in following the action of the tale, merely trying to see it in his mind’s eye and recreate the various torments of Hell as best he could, he knew, through an anxiety located between his heart and his head, that the poor lost poet had much in common with himself. It was as if he were reading about his own future, or more his present situation, but seen by a Belius that stood somewhere outside the Belius that was himself.

He read on with intense concentration, struggling to catch up with the words that slowed as he gained, but which refused to relinquish the lead. The exotic Italian place names and surnames that had not been translated were like ruts that twisted the ankle of his concentration and tore him from the dream that their more familiar, domestic counterparts had created.

“I think you would do better to go on by yourself now,” his mother had told him after they finished wading through the first few cantos. “I don’t think I have ever heard of or seen someone learn to read quite as fast as you have. There’s a special gift in that big head of yours.”

Her praise elated him, and for a few days he did not read a word, but took walks through the snowy woods, convincing himself that he was a “genius”—a word he had discovered in the Dictionary not but four days earlier. Plension and Austina happened to overhear him mumbling to himself about his brilliance one evening while he was puttering around the barn, and it was their combined hooting and ridicule that brought him back to his senses.

When he returned to the poem later that week, he saw that the next chapter contained a description of the mindless minotaur of rage that guards the river of boiling blood, and he understood then why his mother, who was in the habit of reading on ahead, had sent him off on his own.

The snow began to fall harder now, sticking to the ground and leaving a thin layer of white on the roof of the barn. The sky was a uniform gray, except for one small spot of brighter dimness behind which the sun was hiding. He turned away from the window and went in search of his mother to give her the news that he had finished. As he left the parlor, he knew instantly by the deep brown smell of coffee that she was in the kitchen preparing breakfast.

“Guess what?” he asked as he stepped into the kitchen.

She turned around from the stove where she was frying eggs. Taking one look at what someone unused to her son might take to be a grimace, she smiled and said, “You’ve finished.”

He nodded and a none-too-human grunt came from low in his throat.

“And how was it?” she asked.

“Both beautiful and horrible,” he answered with a laugh. By the way she instantly looked back to the eggs on the stove, he knew she was thinking about the scene with the minotaur.

“You’ve done very well, Belius,” was all she said as she set their plates down.

When his mother would look down at her plate, Belius would look up, studying her face. She was old now. He imagined how her looks must have changed drastically when he was born to her. It was a certainty that when his father died, her posture changed as if overnight; the weight of her loss drawing her toward the ground. All of her tears had left erosion lines of wrinkles behind when they had dried, and her eyes, themselves, had sunk back into her head, closer to the memories of her husband. The minotaur wondered, in between glances, if his mother, having passed the greater part of her years, considered her life to have been a happy one.

Belius shook his head to rid himself of this knot of thoughts and rose from his seat to get another cup of coffee. As he passed by his mother, he touched her on the shoulder. She looked up to him and smiled, placing her hand for a brief second on his hoof. He stood at the counter pouring his second cup and shuddered. When he’d touched her, it was as if she were made from paper. When her hand covered his hoof, it was as light as a page from the book. He took a sip from his cup to steady himself, but the Inferno flared up in his mind and the hot coffee burned his tongue.

Before he put on his coat and boot and went out to fetch hay for the cows, he knew that he would have to stop in the parlor where his mother sat sewing and break the silence that had been served with breakfast. As he moved down the hallway, though, he heard a knock at the front door. “Diversion,” he thought. He stopped where he was and waited for his mother to answer the door. The door opened and then he heard talking. When the door closed and the talking continued, he knew they must have a visitor. Very quietly, shuffling his foot along the wooden floor and tapping lightly with his hoof, he snuck down the hall and peeked around the corner into the living room. There was Doctor Grey, looking yet more wizened than on their last meeting at his father’s funeral. The old man had his hat in one hand and with the other he brushed snow from the shoulders and sides of an overcoat that was three sizes too large.

Belius burst into the room but stopped short when he saw that his sudden appearance made the doctor back up a step.

“I finished the book today,” he said.

“Well, Belius,” the doctor said and moved forward to shake his left hoof. “So you’ve read the entire thing. Quite an accomplishment for such a short time. I knew you could do it.”

“Did you come for it?” Belius asked. “I can tell you what I think of it.”

“I’d like that, son, but not today. I’m here on another matter.”

“What is it?” Belius’ mother asked, seeming to sense some trouble in the way the doctor played with his hat, twirling it by the brim.

“I need your son’s help, ma’am,” he said.

“For what?” she asked.

“There’s been a pack of wild dogs ranging through the valley, killing livestock. I intend to help track them down and shoot them.”

“I’m sorry, doctor,” she said. “Belius won’t be going. Besides, he can’t use a gun, he hasn’t any fingers.”

“I see,” he said and put on his hat. “Let me put it this way, I’d go by myself, but I’m too old to go alone. It’s too dangerous. I need someone like Belius, who’s young and strong, to help.”

“Let the other farmers take care of it,” she said curtly.

“I’d very much like to do that, but last night I sat at the bedside of a young girl who was attacked. They ripped her throat almost right off of her neck. She died this morning. This is everybody’s problem now. It’s your son’s duty to help. We’re the only two available to cover this area. The boy should go.”

“And what do these other people care for my boy?” she asked.

“Makes no difference,” he said.

“I’m going,” Belius said. He left the room to put on his boot and get his coat.

His mother ran behind him. “You’re not going, Belius. I won’t have it.”

In his bedroom he slipped his human foot into the boot without laces and took his coat from the closet. When he turned to make his way back to the living room, he saw his mother standing with her arms out, blocking the doorway. “I won’t have you killed by animals like your father,” she screamed. He walked up to her and leaned over so that his head was level with hers. Looking into the depths of her sunken eyes, he made a tremendous mooing noise that rattled every pane of glass in the house. “We’re all animals,” he said.

They went by foot over the snow-covered fields toward the woods. The doctor had given Belius a large sack to carry.

“What’s in it?” the minotaur asked.

“Bait for our friends,” the doctor answered.

“What kind of bait?”

“Just some meat,” said the doctor and then took a flask from his back pocket and drank so the conversation could not continue.

The wind blew miserably and the storm came harder. The woods were wrapped in a white silence. Occasionally there was the sound of a branch cracking with the cold and the doctor would reach down and rest his hand on the pistol that sat in a holster slung around his waist. Belius saw how the old man grew more fatigued and winded with every hundred yards they traveled, so he didn’t bother to ask any questions. He was pleased just to be there, walking beside Grey, who seemed determined and unafraid.

“If I could only live my life like that,” Belius thought to himself. “There’d be no swerving onto lost paths.”

Then he realized that he was out on the hunt in his father’s stead, and it came to him that he must act as a man would and not a child. The novelty of the adventure gave way to a sense of business and he began peering through the stands of trees in hopes he might catch sight of one of the killers. He decided he would not talk unless spoken to. Never before had he felt so completely human.

When they’d walked for a solid two hours into a part of the woods that Belius had never visited before, the doctor held up his hand and said, “That’s far enough for me. If we keep going, we’ll be in the next county.”

A few yards off to their left they found a clearing. Grey instructed Belius to open the bag he had been carrying over his shoulder and empty its contents on the ground. When the drawstring at the top of the bag had been loosened, a powerful smell wafted up. The minotaur’s head jerked back as if the old physician had passed a vial of smelling salts under his snout. Belius turned the bag over and a mass of bloody meat spilled onto the snow, dyeing it a deep red. A cloud of steam swirled into the air. He gagged, turning away from the bait. When he looked back, he saw Grey calmly drinking from the flask and studying his reaction.

“No offense, Belius,” he said, nodding toward the mound of carnage. “It’s what they go for.”

Belius shook his head to let the old man know he understood.

“I couldn’t very well have cut up a human now could I?” said the doctor with a crooked smile.

The minotaur mustered a nervous laugh.

They left the clearing and took up a position in a natural blind of saplings and bushes not far off. Belius found a dead log and dragged it behind the cover for them to sit on while they waited. The doctor flipped the bottom of his huge coat over the log and sat down. The minotaur did the same with his tail and also sat.

“I heard you went to town a few months back,” Grey said, staring straight ahead into the clearing at the pile of raw meat.

“I did,” said Belius.

“How’d it go?”

“Not so good.”

“So I heard,” said the doctor with a laugh. “Give ‘em time. They’ll learn.”

“I didn’t mind the children so much, following me and mooing,” said Belius. “It was the older people. I tried to introduce myself to them, get into a conversation, but they either ran away or taunted me. The staring eyes were the worst of it.”

“Why?”

“I think it’s that there are people out there hating you that you don’t even know exist. Not even people, just eyes without faces.”

“Did you get what you went for?” asked the doctor, turning to look at him.

“The man at the grocery was too frightened not to fill my order. After what happened on the street, I figured if I was going to get what my mother had sent me for, I’d have to be sterner. I didn’t try to talk about the weather with him, I just gave him the list, told him to gather the items on it, and then I paid him and left. If he only knew I was as frightened as he was. At least I saw how my strangeness could work for me.”

“Did you have to knock that boy over in the street before you left?” Grey asked.

“I suppose I didn’t. But a bunch of them were all around me and somebody threw a rock that hit me on the side of the head. I figured that if my being mean had worked with the grocer, it might be my only chance to gain respect. He was the closest one. He yelled something about my mother and I couldn’t help it. I clipped him on the shoulder. It wasn’t much of a swing. When he fell over, the others backed up and I walked to my wagon. I wanted to run, but I walked slowly.”

“It may not have seemed like much of a swing to somebody your size, Belius,” said Grey, “but I had to treat that boy for a dislocated shoulder that afternoon. His father was all for getting a posse together and hunting you down. Of course, I dissuaded them, but it won’t take as much next time to get them thoroughly riled.”

“Thanks,” Belius said. The word came as cold as the day.

“I understand your frustration. You’ll learn as well as they will,” he said and reached up and gave Belius’ closest horn a tug. “Next time you have to go to town, I’ll go with you.”

The afternoon wore on without incident or further conversation. Belius was sorely tempted to discuss the Inferno with the doctor, but he knew it wasn’t the time or place for it. For the most part they just sat and stared at the mound of beef in the clearing. Every now and then the doctor would take a swig from his seemingly bottomless flask. They took turns getting up and going for short walks to keep the cold out of their bones. As the sun began to set, the snow let up and the wind died down, no longer whistling as it cut through the trees. During their vigil some squirrels had come to inspect the bait, tasted it, and went away uninterested. A deer had passed through the clearing, stopped in the middle, and, getting a whiff of the slaughter, took off as if the lifeless mess was a hungry wolf. There was no sign of the dogs, though; not even the distant sound of barking. Belius tried to picture the pack. He wondered what it was that had made them mad.

After the old man had returned from his tenth trip behind a leafless oak to urinate, he said, “We’ll give it one more hour. After that it will be too dark for us to do any good. I don’t fancy getting lost in the dark.”

“Where do you think the dogs are?” Belius asked.

“What they usually do is stick to the woods by day, hunting for wild animals, but in the evening, as it starts to get dark, they go down to the farms and look for livestock; calves or young goats that can’t protect themselves.”

“And the girl that was killed?”

“She was just a young thing. Probably thought they were somebody’s pets and went up to them. When you get that many of them together, though, and they’re crazy with their freedom and hungry as winter itself, they’ll attack just about anything.”

“How many?” Belius asked.

“Well, Phil Miller, who owns a farm a few miles from here, shot one of them. He said there were about twenty or so. And the woman whose daughter was killed said there must have been thirty. So, knowing how people like to exaggerate about things that scare them, I’d say there are probably no more than ten.”

They waited out the final hour, but nothing came for the meat. By the time they decided to head back for the house, both Belius and the doctor were shivering. The sun was now only a few minutes over the horizon and still covered by clouds so that night would come quicker than usual. In the gathering darkness the woods took on an eerie aspect with all the bare branches, now black for lack of light, jutting up and out at all angles. A snow owl hooted somewhere over their heads. The surrounding scene reminded Belius of the time he had lain out in the fields all night. Without thinking, he raised his snout toward the tree tops and a mournful lowing sound crept out of his throat. He stopped walking and just stood and listened as if for an answer. An odd tingling sensation traveled slowly up from the tip of his tail to the back of his neck, raising hairs to attention as it went. The doctor had also stopped walking when Belius moaned.

“What is it?” Grey whispered. He reached quickly for his flask and took a drink. “Belius, are you all right?”

Belius meant to answer in words, “There’s something nearby,” but his response came in a series of grunts and squeals.

The doctor threw the flask on the ground and drew his gun. He turned quickly to look behind himself, the hem of his long coat spinning with the sudden movement. As Belius watched the bottom of the coat, rippling like wind through a field of wheat, an explosion of red went off in his mind. Without thinking, he turned just in time, lowering his head to impale the leaping dog on his right horn. With a wild jerk of his neck, he threw the whimpering creature to the ground and caught it in the throat with the hoof at the end of his leg. There were three gun shots then and the yelp of another dog.

From behind the trees, Belius heard them saying, “Leave the man, he has a gun. Bring down the bull.” The message was passed around among the pack. “Bring down the bull.” The voices were low and rough. The only thought that traveled the human corridors of Belius’ mind was the doctor’s previous words, “Hungry as winter itself.” He heard another leap and turned back around again to break the ribs of a huge shepherd that had been aiming for his jugular. It fell clear of him but didn’t give up. It struck out again as soon as it hit the ground, clamping its teeth around his human leg. With another blow to the skull, blood seeped from behind the dog’s eyes and it let go with a gurgling cough.

Belius sensed he was out of danger for the moment and looked up to locate the doctor. Darkness surrounded him now as if night had pounced out of the sky. The doctor was nowhere near and all that could be heard was the vicious growling of the pack.

He stood his ground, knowing there was no sense in running. His ears were erect and listening. He waited for the next leap, the next lunging set of jaws and sharp teeth. From somewhere, not too far off, there came the sound of three more gunshots, followed by a scream.

“Doctor,” he yelled into the night, but, again, his language became the language of animals. He was breathing heavily, and his heart pounded with the force of a mallet. Cautiously, he began moving in the direction of the scream. After he had covered no more than five yards, the night materialized two mongrels that charged at him simultaneously through a whirl of snow. As he crouched to meet their attack with his horns, a searing pain shot up through his body from behind. There was a crunching sound, like a tree being cracked in half by a great wind, and then the tearing of flesh. Agony ripped through his entire body. He bellowed with such force that the charging dogs were knocked off their feet. The blood poured out from the stump that was left of his tail, and the smell of it sent the pack into a frenzy. All sensation left him and he dropped to his knees.

Four of them circled around him now, waiting for him to fall. Their eyes were bright yellow in the night. Their mouths were wide open, displaying froth and fangs. He knew they were taunting him, but he could no longer hear them. They went around and around his slumping form, and on every third orbit one would jump in and bite him on the arm or the leg. He tried to raise his hooves for protection, but they were heavy as stone.

The dogs whirled faster and faster around him, and his mind adopted their motion until they became a blur. His fear of death was a twister that sucked consciousness into its funnel. Before long he was in the center of the cyclone and it was still and blue. His father handed him the knot. Without thinking, he took one of the loops of the tangled cord and pulled on it. It came apart as if by its own volition, and he fell forward into the snow.

Belius woke with his snout buried in two inches of snow and found a fiery pain waiting for him on this side of consciousness. He lifted his head to take a deep breath of the cold night air. The freshness of it stung his snout, and, when he exhaled, the steam came forth mixed with a moan. He rolled over on his left side. Finding that his arms once again worked, but like rusty machines, he lifted the back of one to his eyes and wiped the frost and melted snow from them.

Listening intently over the action of the wind, he heard no growling but instead a wild flapping noise and wondered if it was the owl he had seen earlier in the tree tops. In the time he had been unconscious, the clouds had cleared. Above the swaying branches that clacked together in the wind, the stars and moon shone with frigid clarity. He knew he must get up and try to get away, but there was a ringing in his ears and a weariness in his legs that increased the power of gravity. The ragged stump of tail that was left to him pulsed exquisite pain throughout his spine and flanks as the numerous bites on his arms and legs began to make themselves known, each in turn, blossoming into a new chord of suffering.

“I’m going to die out here,” he thought. The realization made him wild, and fighting his heaviness, he pushed himself up onto his knees. With his arms out in front of him, he managed to crawl a few feet. Every other second, the blackness that he knew he would not awaken from a second time flitted through his head.

He had dragged himself no more than twenty feet, stopping five times in the process, when he again heard the flapping noise. It seemed to be drawing close to him. He lifted his head and squinted to try to see what it was. In the new moonlight, he could make out a shadow rushing toward him. It seemed to have wings at its sides, and it flew just above the ground. In an instant, it was upon him. Though his mind was completely blank, in his heart he thought, “This is death.” He meant his final statement to the world to be a roar, but his bodily weakness diminished the sound to a squeal more fit for a pig.

The doctor took the opportunity of the minotaur’s open mouth to pour the remaining whiskey from his flask into it. The liquor brought summer to Belius’ insides. The ringing in his ears was drowned out by near instant inebriation. The pain wilted in the heat, and the blackness that had flitted through his mind lay down and slept.

“You’ve got to get up, Belius,” the doctor said.

“The dogs,” Belius whispered harshly.

“I think I got the last of them. I’m out of bullets, though. We’ve got to get going now.”

“Give me a second, just a second.”

“No time,” said the doctor, slipping his spindled arms beneath the minotaur’s. With a strength that could only have come from somewhere outside his thin frame, Grey hoisted Belius to a standing position.

“I’m going to let go of you for just a second. I’ve got to get my coat around you.”

“Keep your coat, you’ll freeze,” Belius said without conviction.

The doctor let go of him and the minotaur’s huge body swayed in standing circles like a top running down. The coat was quickly sloughed and draped over the wide shoulders that were big enough to actually fill it out. Belius draped one arm around the old man’s shoulders, their height difference making Grey’s thin body appear a crooked crutch. The two started inching their way back to the farm.

The walk seemed to Belius to take years and years. Grey never stopped talking the whole trip, explaining how he had to run for cover and reload after his first volley. He had made it back to Belius just in time, as the pack was getting ready to move in for the kill. He hit all six of his shots, one right after the other and in the process killed two more of them. The other two took off through the woods, seeing the damage the doctor’s gun could do. This was the only information that Belius could cull from the incessant monologue. The rest was just a string of words that at times sounded as if the old man were praying or practicing an incantation.

The doctor let go of Belius and moved toward the kitchen door, calling to the old woman to come help with her son. A strong wind came and toppled the minotaur. Then his eyes no longer worked, and he suddenly realized that he had forgotten to remember.

With a scream, he awoke and found himself in a strange bedroom. The windows had been shattered. Knick-knacks lay broken on the floor. A rocking chair was twisted into a knot. There was a large fissure in the plaster of one wall. Wherever he was, he knew he’d been snoring.

The bed he was in was big enough to accommodate his full size, unlike the one at home where his foot and hoof stuck out over the end almost touching the floor. Blankets and comforters were piled five thick on top of him to keep him from freezing in the cold air that blew freely in through the broken windows. The pillows beneath his head had been tattered by his horns.

He peered out over the edge of the impressive mattress at the decimation his snoring had caused and felt like a castaway adrift on a sea of fragments. Through the broken windows, bright morning light poured in and glimmered against pieces of ceramic and glass. With great difficulty caused by the stiffness of his limbs and the pains that tattooed his whole being, he made it to the edge of the bed, threw back the layers of blankets, and sat up. This simple action caused his head to swim, and from somewhere just in front of him, he hallucinated a mad dog, jumping for his throat. He threw his hooves up to protect his face from the attack. With the movement of his arms, the illusion dissipated into nothing.

“I’ve returned from the dead,” he said to himself, and laughed softly so as not to jar any of his wounds. This joy filled him and in it he found the energy to lift himself to a standing position. Slowly, he hobbled to the door of the room, trampling even more fully those objects he had sonically destroyed in his sleep. He opened the door and walked out into a long, wide hallway, the new warmth of which made him feel as if he were home in the parlor of his mother’s house.

As he wandered through the halls, passing rooms and alcoves, taking a flight of stairs down to another hall, he had every intention of finding Doctor Grey, whose place he surmised he was in. His condition was jittery though, and, when he passed a room, the door of which was opened slightly, and saw a big red leather chair, he decided to enter and sit down for a rest before continuing. When he opened the door to enter, the pain seemed to flee his body.

“My god,” he said under his breath, “a library.” And then in a voice that was much surer, “Yes, of course I know how to read.” He was dizzy with the prospect of such a gold mine of ideas and images, remembering the magical effects of just the one book he had read. He ran his hooves along the spines of the leather bindings. Twice, he went around the entire room, tottering and leaning against the shelves as he made his way. His eyes passed over so many wonderful titles that they seemed to make a story in and of themselves. Finally, he came to his senses and chose one volume, reaching with his arm extended to the very top shelf to bring it down. He nudged it out of its place with his hoof and then let it fall the rest of the way into his arms. It was a thick book of more than eight hundred pages entitled The Collected Writings of Scarfinati. He didn’t bother to sit down in the chair that had at first attracted him, but stood where he was, swaying unsteadily like a buoy in rough water. He opened the book and began reading the first page. Most of what he read made no sense to him, but he continued, lost in a daze that had everything to do with dreaming.

Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth page of the essay, “Evidence of the Almighty’s Schizophrenia in the Natural Existence of Living Organisms,” he was drawn back from the attraction of the printed words by a noise behind him. He spun around ungracefully, slamming the book closed in case the doctor did not want him hoofing through an expensive volume. Instead of meeting the glance of the old physician, he encountered a young woman. He was as startled as she. Meaning to say something polite as a greeting, his words turned on him and he remained silent. She moved her glance down his figure to stop at a point below his waist. Then putting her hand softly to her cheek, she turned her head away and ran from the room.

“Wait,” Belius called. It was not until he had set the book down on the chair and passed out of the door into the hallway that he realized he was naked.

Back in the room he had awoken in, Belius discovered the camel’s hair overcoat the doctor had sacrificed to him the night in the woods. He slipped it on and buttoned it up the front. Prepared now against any further meetings, he earnestly went in search of the old man. This time, he again passed the library with the red leather chair, but did not enter. Instead, he simply stuck his snout in for a second and took a whiff of the aging paper and leather bindings the way a child might linger in the doorway of a bakery. The only way he could describe the aroma he took deep into his lungs was rich.

He resumed his journey, and in the course of it discovered the enormity of Grey’s house. He knew that perhaps it seemed bigger than it actually was because he had backtracked and gotten lost a few times, but, from his most rational summation, he could say for certain that it had two upper floors and a main floor. The upper floors were defined each by four hallways that formed a square around some central courtyard. These upper passages were lined by rooms as in a hotel. The only difference, though, was that these rooms were not designed for economy, but for spacious living. A quick look in each of them showed that they were for the most part empty and unused. Every fourth or fifth one would have its walls lined with bookshelves and contain a library as impressive as the first that Belius had discovered.

On the second floor of the house, Belius was rounding one of the four corners of the network of halls, moving quietly like a ghost without a reason to go haunting, when he heard up ahead a female voice singing. Immediately, he knew from the slight rasp of the voice that it must be the young woman who had seen him naked earlier. To save himself embarrassment, he quickly turned and headed in the opposite direction. Considering his bulk and the clumsiness his wounds imposed on him, he had to move slowly in order not to make a sound. So when he heard the voice approaching from behind him, he ducked into what he thought to be one of the empty rooms and found instead a staircase. With great haste, he hobbled down the steps and out through another door at the bottom of them. This entrance led directly into the kitchen on the first floor.

Sitting at the kitchen table, drinking from a coffee cup and reading the newspaper, was the doctor. Slung around his neck was a stethoscope. Across the front of his partially unbuttoned white shirt was a splotch of dried blood. By the way he lifted the cup with trembling hands and the way he placed it down with placid grace after a long gulp, Belius knew it wasn’t filled with coffee.

The old man looked up and saw the minotaur standing in the doorway to his right. His eyes widened with delight. “I’m glad you’re finally up and about. Another night of your infernal snoring, and I think the rafters would have splintered,” he said. With his foot, he pushed one of the chairs out from its place under the table and nodded, inviting Belius to sit down.

“You’ve been out for a few days, boy. Lost a lot of blood. How do you feel?”

“Very weak,” said Belius, easing himself into the chair and leaning his elbows on the table, “but, if I remember everything that happened, also lucky to be alive.”

“Those dogs did you pretty good. I hate to admit to this, but, for a second time since delivering you, I thought for sure you were going to die. My biggest fear was rabies, but fortunately you escaped that horror.”

“What am I doing here, doctor?”

“I had to bring you here where I could keep a constant eye on you. Your mother and I actually lifted you into the back of my wagon that night.”

“How is my mother?”

“She’s angry with me and worried about you. I’ve been sending somebody by to check on her every day to see if she needs anything. When I told the people in the town what happened, how you risked your life for them, I had more volunteers to help out than was needed. You can go back home in three days, but not before. I want to make sure you don’t get an infection in one of those bites and that your tail is beginning to heal.”

“My tail?” asked Belius. He reached behind him under the coat and groped around with his hoof. A look of fear came over his face. “My tail!” he cried and stood up.

“I had to remove what was left of it. They chewed it almost completely through,” said the doctor in a voice that was meant to calm the minotaur.

“But, but . . .” Belius threw the coat off and tried to look over his shoulder behind him, but he couldn’t. For the first time, he noticed that the usual tug of its weight at the end of his spinal column was missing. Now he felt the loss of its constant gyration and swish. He concentrated and made believe there was a fly on his left shoulder blade. Tensing the muscles that had always turned the tail into a whip, he didn’t feel the bushy end of it brush the spot.

“No tail,” he said and his eyes glazed over. The sudden realization of its loss threw his body off balance, and he fell forward to the floor as if now there was no longer enough of him behind to balance things out.

“Nonsense,” said Grey, who got out of his seat and came over to help Belius off the floor. “You don’t need a tail to stand up. You’re overreacting. It’s a vestigial appendage, a useless throwback.”

Belius was so upset that he took to moving his arms at his sides in a swimming motion. Instead of interfering, Grey just stood back and watched the minotaur traverse the channel of his loss. After doing three laps around the kitchen floor, he finally came to his senses. He quietly stood up, walked over and picked up the overcoat and put it on. After the two were again seated at the kitchen table, a conversation ensued.

Grey told Belius that the enormous house they now sat in was given to him by the town as a lure to bring a physician to the area since the community was growing so fast, and, what with the nature of the local work, all its hazards of spooked plough horses and errant machinery. Grey had been born in the country and done his apprenticeship with a country doctor. Although he had attended medical school in a big city, he never cottoned to the frantic pace of urban life. He missed getting to know his patients and having long conversations that didn’t necessarily have to go anywhere or be concerned with business or the pursuit of status. To him, his practice in the city had been just a long string of complaints with no personalities behind them.

The boarding house had once been owned by an old man of great learning, who would take in people and use the money he gained to buy books. Evidently, at one time, this previous owner had been a scientist in a country across the ocean. Many strange stories were told about him. He didn’t set up the boarding house until he was well into his nineties. Still, he supposedly had great vitality for one so ancient. He didn’t die, but one day just disappeared, leaving behind all of the books he had collected in the seven years he had lived there. His name was Scarfinati and the libraries upstairs held more than twenty-five works that he had personally authored.

When Grey began discussing the libraries in relation to the previous owner of the house, Belius moved the conversation around to asking Grey if he would mind him looking through the books in the next few days.

“By all means. Someone may as well use them. I find little interest anymore in books. I used to go through them avidly, but not so now,” he said shaking his head.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I was in one of them today,” said Belius.

The doctor waved his hand as if brushing away the thought. “Even when you’re well again, I want you to come any time and take what you want. There’s just about everything up there. There are ten libraries in all, spaced out in different rooms of the house. If you’ll notice, each room contains works on a different subject. By the way, did you happen to see the one with the mummy in it?”

Belius shook his head. He had not seen the mummy, but he had seen the girl and wanted to ask the doctor who she was. He held his questioning, though, knowing that if he mentioned her, he would also have to mention that he had been wandering the hallways naked and was seen by her in that condition. So he let the conversation move on, and they filled each other in on what they had done that winter between the time of Belius’ father’s death and when Grey had come to call.

When Grey had drained his third coffee cup of whiskey and they had thoroughly discussed everything from the Inferno to the weather, the old man rose from his chair and announced that he was going upstairs to lie down until dinner. “Feel free to roam around, Belius,” he said with slurred speech. “I’ll see you at seven for dinner right here. By then my niece will be back from town with some clothes for you. You scared the daylights out of her today, walking around the place. She can’t quite make out what the hell you are. She didn’t mind taking care of you while you were out cold, but, now that you’re up and about, I think she thinks you’re the devil come to call.” Grey laughed as he teetered toward the door through which Belius had entered. There came the sound of him stumbling up the stairs and then perfect country quiet.

Belius remained at the kitchen table. He closed his eyes and rested his head down on the blue and white checkered cloth. The annoyance of his wounds came back to him all at once like a shift of workers returning to their jobs. Mixed in with the ache was a wisp of sleep that grew desperately fast into a thick cloud bank that blotted out even the moaning of his phantom tail. Later that evening, after finishing a dinner of broccoli and potatoes, the minotaur excused himself from the table and asked the doctor if it would be all right to go up to the libraries to read.

“Certainly,” said Grey. “Nona will make up another room for you since your snoring has devastated the one you were in.”

“No need,” said Belius, waving his hooves to dispel the thought. “I like it very cool when I sleep. Tomorrow I’ll repair the windows and clean up the room. I’m afraid, though, that some of the knick-knacks are beyond repair.”

“They were junk,” said the doctor, leaning back in his chair. “Isn’t that right, Nona?”

“Junk,” she said softly, the first word she’d spoken in Belius’ presence. She smiled at the minotaur, but it was a weak smile that seemed more a plea for him not to devour her.

“Before I go to sleep tonight, I’ll step outside and pick up a rock. When I have something hard and sharp in the collar of my nightshirt, I don’t sleep on my back. I don’t snore then. It was my mother’s invention.”

“I bought some clothes for you today. There’s a pair of pajamas with them. I’ll bring them to you after I clean up down here,” said the girl.

“Thanks,” said Belius and bowed toward her. Seeing his horns come down level with her head made her push back her chair a few inches.

Up in the library that held the red leather chair, Belius found a book by Scarfinati, the previous owner of the house. It was entitled Cosmology, and was thicker than the unabridged dictionary that sat next to it on the shelf. Instead of taking to the chair to read, he remained in a standing position since the nub of his tail had been agitated by all his hours of sitting.

The house was as calm and quiet as he often imagined the bottom of the pond to be when the thick ice of mid-winter covered it. He paused before opening the book, knowing that once he entered through its black leather door, the voice of the author would begin speaking to him behind his eyes. He concentrated for a moment on Nona. Although the girl had said but few words to him and it was obvious that she was frightened by his strangeness, he knew that his interest in her was something more than plain curiosity. She had not yet given him a genuine smile, but he could tell that if she were to, it would be extraordinary. Nona’s eyes were a light hazel and looked as if they might be luminescent in the night. Beyond her initial distrust for him, he thought he saw a personality whose first inclination would be a move toward friendship. As he sat next to her at dinner her closeness had inspired a sense of calm, and once, as she passed him the salt, the edge of his hoof had lightly grazed her thumb.

For the next two hours, Belius knew nothing but what the words on the page in front of him commanded. The introduction to the massive book was over three hundred pages, and, of this, he only finished a little over a third before the weight of ideas and that of the tome made him slam it shut and place it back on the shelf. All of the ideas he had gathered from his reading began to run through his being like a powerful drug. He was not used to such a great dose of concentration all at once, and the effects of it made him stumble to the red leather chair and sit down. There he sat for yet another hour in a stupor, his big head lying to the side, propped on the tips of one hoof, as he let the wise old man’s theories percolate behind his eyes.

If the minotaur was correct in his reading, he garnered a few basic ideas from the book. The first was that Cosmology was the study of man’s perceptions of the creation, perpetuation, and destruction of all that lay outside himself. From here, Scarfinati had gone on to explain that each different epoch in the intellectual history of the human race had its own peculiar view of how the universe operated, and that each of these different views was a reflection of that stage of civilization’s perceptions of itself. For instance, during the height of an age where mechanical science is in its greatest stages of discovery and development, the world and surrounding heavens are seen to operate like a mechanism.

None of these epochal Cosmologies, he stated, is any more “correct” than the next. Each is merely a reflection of the face of culture, and each, in its turn, fully captures culture’s imagination like Narcissus hypnotized by his own reflection. All of the implications and outcomes of that ancient myth adhere to each given group of people who stare into the pool of creation. In other words, each civilization’s Cosmology is an intense love affair with itself that nurtures it and allows it to grow, but, in the end, is its undoing.

These thoughts spun about like planets thrown from their orbits. The one central idea, though, that shone more brightly than a sun was Scarfinati’s conviction that Cosmology was of the utmost importance in the formation of civilizations. “It gives to men and women a basic something in common, an illusion of certainty in which they can assuage the fear caused by the fact that they are utterly alone unto themselves.”

“Beyond the needs of civilization,” Scarfinati wrote, “each individual must have his or her own Cosmology, a personal set of myths by which to live. For to live only in the greater Cosmology of the civilization, is truly to be a ghost that sees everywhere action and creation, but can participate in neither.”

It was at this point that Belius stopped reading and closed the book. In his excitement, he believed that what he had read was everything, although some thousand or more pages were still left to read. He didn’t even skip to the last page and read Scarfinati’s final paragraph. A vague, shimmering reflection of himself was beginning to form before his eyes as he sat in the chair. Now he believed it was entirely up to him to sharpen the focus of this image; to write a Cosmology for himself and also for the civilization of minotaurs he dreamed he would father.

At the end of his hour of meditation, he rose and stretched. Although the fire of the new ideas was still with him, he was physically exhausted. As he came back to his waking self, he had a distinct urge to gore something; to smash his horns into a tree or the side of a barn. He thought then about the old door his father had propped against the willow for him and what had happened the day on which he rammed it into oblivion. Shaking his head, he tried to disrupt the “unnatural” desire. What he needed at the moment, he knew, was to talk to the doctor. There were a thousand questions to ask about Cosmology.

He left the library and made his way quietly down to the lower level of the spacious house. He came first to the kitchen but did not find Grey there. Instead, he found three cold potatoes, left over from dinner, in the refrigerator. He swallowed them like pills.

From there, he wandered out into the corridors that were different from upstairs in that they opened into large rooms and were not lined with doors. These rooms were mostly unlit, and from the light of the hallway he could make out the ghostly figures of furniture draped in bed sheets. Occasionally, he would come across one that appeared to have been in use, but it was easy to see by the layer of dust on the mantles and chandeliers that the doctor rarely, if ever, did any entertaining.

For the entire day he’d worn the old overcoat, buttoned to the neck and strapped tightly at the waist in case of any meetings with Nona. He was finally becoming used to the feel of its unsettling lamb’s wool lining. He made his way quietly along, sneaking like a burglar from place to place, sweating beneath the weight of the wrap.

Passing three corridors of these larger rooms, Belius entered a fourth that had but one door in the middle of it on the left hand side. A dim light seeped out from around the slightly opened door. The hall was darkened and seemed a place he should not go, but, from within the one concealed room, he heard muffled sounds that escaped with the weak light. He crept up to the door and took a position outside of it. Turning his head so that he could spy through the crack with one eye, he held his breath as to make the least amount of noise and squinted to see into the murky room.

Although lit only by a single fluttering gas lamp, he immediately could tell from the sight of instruments and an examination table that it must be the doctor’s office. Below the lamp was a big oak desk, highly polished, behind which was a wall of what he assumed to be medical texts. Grey sat at the desk, slumped forward, his arms laying flat out in front of him on the smooth surface. In the strange light he looked, with his thousand wrinkles, as if he were made from beaten leather. His body shook in intermittent spasms, and, after each of these, he made a choking noise as if he were trying to swallow something made of metal. At first Belius thought he was dying, but then he saw the bottle of whiskey at his elbow and the glass tumbler an inch from his hand, and he realized the physician was simply crying.

Sitting also on the desk top was a huge glass jar. The light from the lamp made the almost clear liquid inside the jar glow like a frosted window catching the sunset. Floating inside was a tiny human form. Its arms were out at its sides and its legs were bent slightly at the knees. The head was thrown back as if in the act of screaming. It did not float near the top or bottom but was suspended directly in the middle.

Back at his room, Belius surprised Nona in the act of laying out the new clothes on his bed. He was still very upset with what he had seen in the doctor’s office, and the effects of it cancelled out all of the decorum he had adopted when in her presence. Before she could flee through the open door, he put his hoof out and touched her shoulder.

“Why does your uncle sit in his office and drink and cry?” he asked her.

“He’s a man of great feeling,” she said.

Belius nodded, hoping she would continue.

A few more moments passed, and then she looked into his eyes. “He sees all of the suffering around him in the world. He tells me that life is only suffering. He has great pity for others. All the time, he seems to be laughing when he is with people, but when he is alone he lets his true feelings out. He doesn’t want to let on to them what he knows about the hardships they’ll face. He told me once that he wished he could cure everyone’s pain, but that he knows the only cure is death. He drinks to forget his feelings.”

“Can’t he just accept things the way other people do?”

“I suppose not, after having seen so many people suffer in his life. I remember, from when I was very young, my mother telling my father that his wife had died. It was when he lived in the city. He had tried very hard to cure her, but in the end there was nothing he could do. Perhaps that was where his sorrow began.”

“Do you believe these things he told you?” Belius asked.

“What’s to believe?” she asked and reached into the pocket of her dress. “Will this do?” She pulled out her hand and in it was a rock she could just about get her fingers around. She handed it to him and left the room. He knew, from the way she had spoken, that she no longer had any fear of him.

As he lay in the dark, shivering and blowing silver clouds of steam, listening to the sound of the wind slipping through the shattered windows, he thought about the word “pity.” He recognized it as being that enemy of his which had caused his parents to lie to him in his childhood. He saw that it was simply a ghost of a feeling that, if left to grow unchecked, would finally give birth to depression and deceit. In a moment, he was sleeping.

He dreamed he was outside in the cold, standing in a pasture covered with deep snow. In the moonlight, he was able to discern, at the opposite end of the wide field, a barren tree that was so tall that its branches went up into the night to a point he could not see. The trunk of it was thicker than a house and much of the bark had fallen off. He began running toward it with his head bent for impact. The further he ran, the colder the night became. He continued on though, hugging himself with his arms and trying to bury his snout down into the front of the overcoat. He ran toward it for an hour, and during that time the cold had snuck into his body and formed a thin layer of ice on his face and horns and even on the camel’s hair of the coat. His joints began to seize and, as he drew close to his target, he moved increasingly slowly. Just as his horns made contact with the smooth white wood, he froze solid. Ice covered him. He tried to yell out for help, but his voice was frozen too. In the depths of the shell of ice, after struggling for a long time to make a sound, he found another dream that carried him away in its current.

Three days later, Belius left the doctor’s house. He was wearing one of the new outfits he had just gotten—a white shirt, black pants and a coat with a red and black plaid design. Both he and Grey were sitting in the doctor’s wagon, ready to pull out onto the road. Just as the doctor was lifting the whip to spur the horse into action, the front door of the boarding house opened and Nona came running out to them. In her arms, she carried the overcoat. When she reached the side of the wagon, she called up, “You almost forgot this.” Belius reached down and took it from her. He smiled and, to his surprise, Nona returned the true smile he had been looking for. The doctor laughed, but Belius noticed that the old man’s mirth was louder and lasted longer than ever before.

A week passed and, whereas Pezimote still had not come to call, Thip came every day like clockwork. With each feeding he grew bigger until now he stood a full three inches off the table. The wound on Belius’ arm was a festering sore. When the flea dipped into it, his enormous head was capable of draining a quarter of a pint of blood. The lurid transfusions were having a marked effect on both donor and recipient. Though Thip was fat and sluggish, his new height and girth could not be equaled by his dot of a brain which remained its original size.

He ranted and raved in spontaneous verse, the topic of which was always his conquest of the Wider World. He told Belius how his beautiful castle had become too small for him, how he had accidentally killed his devoted wife by trying to have sex with her, how he had eaten his pet tapeworms and been fired by Shebeb. His daughters had fled from the castle and refused to see him. Although he lamented the destruction of his previous life, he could not keep himself from Belius’ arm. It had become the reason for his waking in the morning.

The minotaur, on the other hand, grew weak and giddy from the loss of blood. The lack of oxygen to his system was starving his reason. He laughed at everything and couldn’t concentrate. All day, he would rush from one task to the next, accomplishing nothing. One minute he would be out in the garden, and, the next, he would be at his telescope, looking through the wrong end into the cracked mirror of his study. Whatever he did he found hilarious, but when the fits of fatigue would seize him and make him sit still, he would realize he was dying and that he was alone. Not one of his friends had come to him for days. It was at these times that he wished he hadn’t burned The Cosmology. “At least it would be something to hold,” he would say to himself before passing out.

The work on Soffea had gone exceptionally well. Her nearly-completed form lay next to the riverbank waiting for the life force that would be supplied by a mosquito and a handful of bees. The golden condor had brought the human foot with toe nails painted as had been promised. The teak wood hooves had been secured in place, the open mouth shone with the iridescent splendor of pearls, and the leaf tongue from the blabbering trees was already at work mumbling and jumbling almost words. Even that part of Siftus that always sought after perfection was satisfied with the results of his own labor.

The one thing that troubled the mole was the fact that to this point nothing had been found to fill the empty eye sockets. Many of the creatures had brought reasonable facsimiles for his approval—pairs of small round jelly-fish, bird eggs with pupils painted on, and, probably the worst of all, two circular globs of amber with trilobites trapped in them. Upon sniffing these offerings for “rightness,” the mole could tell immediately that they wouldn’t convey emotion or take in and hold another’s glance. Vashti was getting fed up with his insistence that nothing would do. He knew in a way that she was right in thinking that something had to be settled on before Belius fell deeper into depression, but he also knew she didn’t look on the creation in the same way he did. To her it was a means to an end. To him it was an end in itself. “I don’t even care if she’s blind,” he told the owl, “as long as the eyes are everything that eyes should be.”

“Let’s just settle on one of the suggestions that’s been made. What about the globs of amber? You must admit they have a disarming quality, a certain charm about their strange color.”

“You mean disarming in the sense of losing an arm?” he asked.

“You’re impossible. Either come up with an alternative, or we’re going to have to use what we have. Soffea will walk tomorrow. You have till then, otherwise, her eyes will be amber.”

“All right, all right,” he said and stormed away along the riverbank, swinging his cane at low hanging branches. He had not slept in days so it was a great effort for him to try to organize his thoughts. “Eyes,” he said to himself, but his mind kept returning to an image of his stone bed. He cursed and quibbled with himself for a half mile before, in his near-blindness, he walked into the trunk of a tree and fell onto his back. The snout-first collision jarred everything in his head, allowing an obvious solution to his dilemma to rise to the fore. “That’s it,” he said and drew the new idea from his mind into his mouth where it was mixed with a wad of spittle. He shot this morsel onto the ground and put his still aching snout to it. The second he smelled its makeup, he knew it was the only answer. He clawed the air once in victory and then, losing no time, set off for Shebeb’s cave.

It was a rare few minutes in Shebeb’s life when he had no patients to administer to. When Siftus came upon him, he was in the grove of blabbering trees, collecting the long stringy moss from their branches. The trees were high-strung that day, and their usual palaver sounded more like a song of whippoorwills than speech.

“Shebeb,” said the mole, “how are you?”

The ape nodded and continued his gathering.

“The female minotaur is almost ready to walk,” said Siftus.

“Almost,” said Shebeb with a grunt.

“I could tell from your speech the other night that you don’t believe it will even be able to twitch an ear.”

“That pile of mud will not move of its own volition for a million years. Of that, I’m positive.”

“You’re wrong,” said the mole, taking out a cigarette. He propped his cane against the tree and lit up.

The ape shook his head and then covered his mouth for just a moment with the palm of his hand.

“Would you care to bet?”

“I don’t bet,” said Shebeb, “there’s nothing I want to win.”

“There’s got to be something,” said Siftus.

“Nothing,” said the ape.

“Let’s say we have a bet and I lose, I will donate my body to you after I’m dead. What about that? Wouldn’t you like to get your hairy fingers on a mole corpse?”

“It would be helpful in my studies,” said the ape.

He stopped gathering moss now and looked down as if to size up Siftus’ carcass.

The mole blew a cloud of smoke upward to obscure the look on Shebeb’s face. “Let’s make a bet then. You have sole possession of my body, after I’m dead, of course, if Soffea doesn’t walk by herself.”

Shebeb scratched thoughtfully at his backside for a moment and then agreed to the deal with one quick nod.

“Don’t you want to know what I want if I win?” asked Siftus.

“No.”

“You’re that sure of yourself?”

“I think that what you want to do, help Belius, is a good thing, but the way you’re going about it is all wrong. You’re deluding yourself and, in the process, leading everyone to a grave disappointment. Life can’t be created by slapping together whatever is at hand. You’ll see tomorrow when your statue lays there, a mound of wet clay with things stuck to it.”

“All I hope,” said the mole, “is that you’ll honor your word when the time comes.”

Shebeb turned away and headed for his cave.

Taking a long drag of his cigarette, Siftus considered the possibility that he might have been all wrong. If he was, it meant that when he died his body would not be buried deep in the beautiful, loving earth, but, instead, would be scattered about the ape’s cave and slowly, over a period of years, picked away to nothing by sharp instruments. He shuddered at the thought of his poor snout forever forced to smell the wicked odors of Shebeb’s elixirs. His doubt lasted only a few seconds. Right where he’d stood conversing with the physician, he bent over and quickly dug his way below the surface of the earth. In the past few days he’d spent too much time in the open air, beneath the oppressive yellow sky. Halfway back to his burrow, he stopped to rest and just breathe in the smells of the underground. “Ah, dirt!” he said aloud, frightening an earthworm. He went no further for the time being but closed his eyes and slept.

While Siftus lay asleep underground, the raccoon brothers, although hoping for the best for Belius’ sake, offered odds of acorns and measures of honey, ten to one, that the contrived form would remain on the ground until the rains finally washed it away. They found many a willing bettor, especially among those creatures who had forsaken snatches of fur from their own hides in order that the female minotaur might have a luxuriant mane.

The ants of the tower did not take bets, but, being the communal group that they were, initiated a joint meditation of all their brethren, melding together their combined psychic powers in the attempt to produce a modest spark of good faith. A feather fell from Vashti’s left wing and floated down from where she perched on a tree near the riverbank, overlooking the unknowing form. It twirled in the air and finally came to rest on the sculpted navel of Soffea. As she watched it land, covering the bodily center of the being yet to be, she saw instantly that if everything worked out and she were to introduce the creation to Belius the next day, it had better have some clothes. She was thankful that she now had a project with which to take up the dreadful time of waiting. She left the believers to the non-believers and went in search of Bonita to see what the cat could come up with by way of material in the storage room of Belius’ tower.

Nothing of importance, be it on land or sea, ever escaped the notice of Nosthemus. In one small closet of the vast mansion that was his brain he registered the suspense that had been generated by the possible birth of Soffea and saw it as a prime opportunity to make a prophecy. He swam out from the bay of the coral reef into deep water. Two miles off shore, he sucked in enough oxygen for a bull elephant to breathe recklessly for a lifetime and dove down and down beyond where the sunlight shone, beyond the realm of eatable fish, into the shivering darkness at the bottom of the Wider World. As he thrust himself toward his destination with powerful strokes of his tail, he anticipated the impact a correct prophecy of such importance would have on the creatures of the surface. For one, he knew it would add to his own grand status as the baffling mystic. He would have only five minutes to expend on questioning the giant worm that lived in the light and heat of the molten fissure. It was from this ancient first-of-creatures that he got all his prophecies, though no living thing for miles above was aware of it.

The fiery gorge that was like the sun to Floridusk ran for miles across the basin of the ocean: a canyon river that meandered among the enormous mountain range that lay three hundred fathoms down and was like a gaping crack in the skull of the Wider World. The molten lava that bubbled up from the very center of things contained the essence of the planet’s dreams and thoughts. It was from the light thrown off by this liquid blaze that Floridusk assumed the knowledge of what was to happen. The giant worm was a creature, but, in its creation, was blessed with the property of photosynthesis. Its special chlorophyll produced oxygen for it to breathe in its cells the way a plant on the surface would. It drew nutrients from the rich volcanic muck it wallowed in. Once, the worm had told Nosthemus that it believed it had been born from a nightmare the Wider World had once dreamt.

After an hour of swimming through pitch dark, Nosthemus could barely make out a thin line of orange unraveling below him. The closer he drew to it, the more the molten light illuminated the barren landscape. Finally, exhausted, the whale could clearly see the peaks of the undersea mountains looming in the distance. Flying in amongst these crags, he continued to descend. The freezing cold diminished, and the heavy water pressing against his slippery skin began to glow with warmth. He spotted the huge round head of Floridusk and swam up close to announce himself.

“Worm!” he shouted at the full moon of a face that could have incorporated within its circumference a hundred of him.

The pale body of the behemoth quit its digestive undulation and rumbling. Thick, mile long lips parted to show teeth and give the effect of a condescending sneer. Floridusk opened one lid to reveal a jelly eye with lavender cornea and iris the color of old snow. The other eye remained closed. This ancient of the depths had the ability to be both asleep and awake at the same time. Earlier that week the sunken corpse of a great white shark had gotten tangled in the sparse hairs of the worm’s beard. To scratch the itch that the decaying flotsam caused, he pivoted his head to rub his chin against the bottom of the ocean. This movement created a strong current, making it difficult for Nosthemus to remain in the same spot. “Be still, parasite,” Floridusk bellowed in a great release of bubbles, “it’s difficult enough to focus on you when you aren’t squirming around.”

“My apologies,” said Nosthemus.

“What is it this time?”

“Just one thing. Will she be born tomorrow?” The whale did not have to elaborate, knowing that Floridusk must already know why he was there.

“Tell me one thing, my swimming insignificance, do you think it really matters whether she walks or talks or cures your friend? Do you think that if this were to happen, you would not still die and float down here to the bottom and rot and turn to muck and be assimilated by me? Do you think the Wider World would shed a tear for such a niggling tragedy or lose a moment of night?”

Nosthemus was used to being belittled by the worm. He had quickly learned to simply go along with the pomposity, groveling as much as possible without whining. “No,” he answered, “I suppose it wouldn’t matter one way or the other in the larger scheme of things.”

“Not matter? Well, you’re wrong. Everything matters to this celestial head. I have taken in the light of this matter from the molten glow. I know what will happen. The dream of it bubbled up from the gorge years and years past.”

“And what was the outcome? What did the Wider World dream about this?” Nosthemus grew anxious, feeling the tightening up of his innards that always came as his oxygen was running low.

“I’m afraid the dream was explicit in that I was not to tell you when you came to ask. This is a gift for you and your friends from the planet. The thought is that the suspense of having to wait will make all of your lives more rewarding.”

The whale knew there was no sense in arguing. “Thank you for recognizing me, worm. I will return.”

“That’s a prophecy you can take heed of,” said Floridusk.

Mustering all his strength, Nosthemus whipped his tail and sent himself shooting up through the incredible pressure of the depths. He hurried, knowing he had stayed down too long. The journey to the surface would take hours. The fiery river receded below him and with it the light. He shot past the tallest peak of the mountain range and entered the zone of complete black. It was in this most lonely part of the return trip that Nosthemus felt himself being chased upward by a giant presence. He swam as hard as he could, but it was inevitable that whatever it was would overtake him.

“What unknown monster of the lightless realm can this be?” he thought as he pushed himself along, using up vital oxygen in his haste. Fear overwhelmed him just as his pursuer did, and he screamed, releasing all his air in a cascade of bubbles. The thing enveloped him, and he thought, at first, that he was being swallowed whole. Then, to his surprise, he found that he could breathe. He took in a great supply of oxygen. As the precious gas eased the incredible aching of his lungs, he heard the earthquake voice of Floridusk echo in his mind. “I knew you wouldn’t make it to the surface if I didn’t help you with this bubble. I let it frighten you for your charade as a soothsayer in the upper regions. But I admire your foolishness. For this, I will tell you something that will come as prescient news to your friends. The autumn wind will blow tonight and shake the blossoms from the trees.”

The newborn night was still as a cliff face, and, because the blue sun was only minutes below the horizon, a rich lime shadow submerged the forest. Belius wanted to be quiet, but the laughter forced its way in fitful bursts up from his throat and out his nostrils. “What’s so funny?” he asked himself and then spun around quickly as if expecting an answer from someone behind him. There was nothing there. The oak trees stood tall and quiet, supporting the sky. Grass, and dead leaves, chips of fallen bark and deep deposits of brittle pine needles gave off their scents. A lone cricket pulsed out a code that when deciphered told the story of a certain star it had witnessed the extinction of one night in its youth. Belius stopped his sneaking about and listened to the message. Although he was not quick enough to translate the song word for word, its overall effect gave him the mood and as easily as the snorts of laughter came, so did his tears. Slowly, he picked up the rhythm and began to dance in small circles, his arms raised in the air. He sang along and wept. Eventually the cricket became annoyed with what it took to be a mockery of its story and hopped away. The silence returned and with it the minotaur’s purpose. He had come down from the tower to hunt the invisible creature that had stolen his overcoat.

So little red blood now ran through Belius’ mind and body that his synapses had no energy with which to fire and all his thoughts were a result of the fermentation of his brain. The digitalis he had smoked before leaving his study gave a veneer of assurance to his dementia. He stumbled gracefully amongst the trees with a liquid certainty that his mission was of the utmost importance. “I’ll have my coat,” he cursed in a rough whisper to a tree stump he momentarily mistook for Shebeb.

A week earlier, when he had first seen the overcoat slipping through darkness of its own accord, he was terrified of it, but, as Thip sucked away at his reason and will, to have the coat again on his back became everything he had ever wanted to accomplish in his life. As his senses dwindled, his courage had grown. He swam through the green twilight practicing a left jab as occasional sparks of colored light exploded in his field of vision. Then a cold wind was all around him, blowing down from the north with a force that shook the limbs of the trees the way a child shakes the dead to wake them. White, pink, yellow blossoms tasted ice in the sudden gale and, fearing they had miscalculated the onset of autumn, let go their hold on summer.

Belius turned the collar of his shirt up against the weather as if it were the collar of his old overcoat. Protecting his eyes with a forearm raised to his brow, he peered through the blizzard of airborne petals and dandelion skeletons and moved into the storm. He no longer laughed or mumbled because the shock of the frigid air stole his wind. All around him, he heard the voices of the dog pack that had attacked him in his youth. He forged forward, deeper into the forest, toward the river.

After the minotaur had forgotten why he was trudging through the forest, and when the flight of blossoms was at its heaviest, he saw something move a few yards in front of him. The camel hair color of it caught what little moonlight slipped through the storm of petals and told him immediately what it was. A trace of the lamb’s wool lining flew directly up his nostrils. He lowered his horns and snorted. As weak as he was, his muscled arms pumped up and down to the beat of his lunacy. His leg hoof dug into the ground. His human foot took the first step and then he was charging. “I wanted to see the light,” the coat seemed to scream as he chased it through the storm, over fallen tree trunks, through webs of vine and sticker shoots, beneath low branches that required him to bend down to the height of four feet. The hunt traced a serpentine path through the trees, doubling back, overlapping previously trampled ground. Never once did Belius lift his head or slow his pace. His target was the wide piece of material between the shoulders at the back of the coat. His horns somehow directed his pursuit.

The smoke-being reached the river bank only seconds ahead of the charging minotaur. With incredible speed, it worked its arms out of the overcoat. The coat fell into the slowly moving waters and was carried away as the spirit of The Cosmology leaped into the air in a high arc, flipped over on its back during the descent, and floated down to mix its atoms with what it took to be the oddly shaped trunk of a fallen tree somehow made of clay. As Belius charged into the clearing by the riverbank, the manifestation of his book closed its eyes within the darkness of its hiding place and passed out.

After spotting the overcoat on the surface of the water, Belius lost all his rage. He walked along the bank, following its progress as it moved toward the mouth of the river. His wild chase had diminished the hallucinatory hold of the digitalis, and a few drops of blood made their way to his brain. A great fatigue came over him, and, for the first time in days, he could think clearly. His first healthy thoughts were of Pezimote, Vashti, and Siftus. The realization of his loneliness made him sober for his walk to the sea. He considered wading out into the waters to retrieve his prize, but the autumn wind made the air too cold. The old swatch of camel’s hair no longer mattered to him. Before long, he reached the mouth of the river. He watched as the coat met its first wave and sank beneath the foam.

Belius opened the front door of the tower and ascended the winding stairway. He didn’t stop at the landing that held his bedroom but continued to the turret. There, he moved across the cobblestones to take up a position leaning against the facade. He stared out to sea, watching as the last few flying blossoms lost the wind and fell. Out past the coral reef, there was an eruption of water. Nosthemus broke the surface gaping for air. The giant whale, who now, by the light of the moon, looked so distant and puny to Belius, released a spout of water from his blow hole. With this spray came a psychic message, a prophecy to all the creatures of the Wider World. The minotaur heard it in his head as clearly as he heard the tortured rhythm of his own heart, “The autumn wind will blow tonight and the blossoms will fly.” From out of the forest came a chorus of laughter, and then the creatures resumed sleeping or hunting. Belius shook his head as he slipped down to lie on the floor of the roof of his tower. He sank into sleep as his overcoat sank down past the regions of moonlight and eatable fish.

As the blue sun showed itself in the west, both day and night creatures gathered at the riverbank. Obadai and Mez were the first to arrive, hoping they could still take a few more bets before the event got underway. The crowd grew thick and Vashti, who was perched in the branch of a tree situated directly over Soffea, had to keep shouting for the throng not to press in too close on the object of their wonder. The ants from the tower gathered around their hero, Duc-Sin, who held back the brain’s intended consciousness with a looped and knotted stem from a honeysuckle bush. The mosquito was five times the size of the fierce warrior.

Siftus winced as he tapped the two globs of amber into his sculpture’s eye sockets. When he was finished, he looked over his shoulder up to Vashti and shook his head. He could not actually see her, but it gave him some solace when he sniffed a whiff of agreement from her about the inadequacy of the orbs. Shebeb stood on the fringes of the crowd, arms folded, patiently awaiting failure. He had already assured himself that he would take no pleasure in the embarrassment of the mole and owl, and had even secretly vowed to let Siftus back out of their deal of the day before.

Vashti flew down from her perch, and, as she lighted upon the stomach of Soffea, those petals that had covered the body and fallen around it were blown to a distance by the action of her wings. The pieces of blossom flew up in the faces of the crowd and everyone took a step backward. Only Siftus remained standing next to her. He leaned over and whispered to the owl, “The eyes are terrible, aren’t they?”

“It’s time for her to walk,” was all Vashti could think to answer. Then she motioned with her wing, and two woodpeckers hopped out from the circle of creatures. One took up a position on the brow of Soffea, between her horns, and the other mounted the chest above where the cavity of the heart had been sunk into clay. With a nod from the owl, the two red-headed birds went to work with their beaks and in no time had drilled the holes through which “life” would enter the form.

Duc-Sin strode forth and climbed up onto the brow of the sleeping mud form. He began reeling in the incredible mosquito he’d caught in the mango grove. When there was no more stem left, he grabbed the buzzing insect by the throat and, in one swift action, thrust it down into the dark vault that was Soffea’s skull. Siftus was right there to smooth the clay before the mosquito could find its way out. With a smooth flip of his paw, he covered over the hole that had been drilled as if it had never existed. The ant contingent applauded their hero, and the other creatures joined in. Siftus then moved down to the chest of his creation and waited for the bees to do their last barrel roll and enter one by one to become the energy of heart and soul. He gave a word of thanks to them before again smoothing over the clay.

Just as the owl and mole stepped back to join the circle, the blue sun peered over the rim of the forest. Its light engaged the leaf-tongue from the blabbering tree and Soffea began to mumble. Siftus initiated the chant, “Rise, rise,” and the crowd picked up his rhythm and joined in. The noise of the creatures awakened the sleeping spirit of The Cosmology, which had been hiding, inside the form of Soffea since Belius had chased it through the night.

The clay legs twitched. The chest heaved. The eyelids blinked. The whole sculpture went through a series of convulsions that seemed to emanate from within as if life were percolating and trying to sort itself out. Shebeb unthinkingly pushed aside smaller creatures in order to get closer to the scene. “Impossible,” he shouted.

“Possible,” Siftus countered and stepped forth to take the fair minotaur’s hoof and help her to her feet. She rose off the ground in slow stages, each bit of progress applauded by the crowd. All the time, the tongue blathered on and on as if picking up in the middle of a conversation interrupted from a previous life. As Soffea reached her feet, Vashti flew into the air, screeching and hooting.

The minotaur wobbled on her legs, the disparate parts of her anatomy jostling but staying fairly intact. Her left horn did fall off onto the ground, but it didn’t seem to cause her any distress. Her head continued to jerk around, her arms to swing slightly with the cadence of her innocuous monologue. She discovered how to smile and practiced it a few times, baring her pearl teeth in an unknowing show of good will. With a halting syncopation, she took her first steps. The crowd made way for her, and she tottered head on into a tree, bounced off it, turned and stood still as if waiting for something to do.

Vashti called Bonita from the crowd. The cat came forth with a balled up piece of blue material that had once served as a table cloth in the tower’s kitchen. During the night, she and Vashti had fashioned the cloth into a crude toga. The owl took the simple dress and flew into the air with it, letting it unfurl to its full length as she ascended. Then flying over Soffea, she aimed with her beacon eyes and let the thing fall. It slipped neatly over the minotaur’s figure, filling out at the chest and laying neatly down two good inches above the knees.

The owl resumed her perch upon the branch. “Silence,” she shouted. The crowd looked up to her and quieted down, all except Soffea. “Look what we’ve accomplished,” she said. “Everyone here has added to the creation of this beautiful creature. Those who didn’t have the skill to work on the form or have something to give gave their faith. I’m certain that today when we present Belius with his bride, he’ll break out of the cocoon of his depression and also be born anew. Now it’s time Siftus and I took her to the tower.”

The mole, who had climbed up the tree next to the minotaur in order to replace her errant horn, cried out, “No, it’s not quite time. She’s lovely, I admit, but . . . her eyes . . .” He backed down the tree trunk and waddled through the crowd to where Shebeb was standing, his long hairless fingers covering his mouth. “Ape,” said the mole, “go to your cave and bring back your instruments; the ones that cut. It is time for me to collect.” At the utterance of the word “collect,” Obadai and Mez slipped away from the crowd.

“Rise, rise, rise . . .” This chant reached Belius where he lay on the cobblestones at the top of the tower. The suggestion passed in through the openings of his ears and snout and presented itself to his sleeping consciousness. He took the advice and pulled himself up to his full height before completely awakening. Once his head was clear of the shadow cast by the facade, the sun hit his eyes and forced them to open. As his vision cleared, the world built itself around him. The green feather of nausea blew through his intestines as if, during the night, he had polished off a keg of dandelion wine. His whole body shook violently with fatigue, making his bones crack and his muscles stretch almost to ripping. “Shit,” he said, took a step and fell down. As he dragged himself again to his hoof and foot, he wondered how late it was in the day, how long it would be before Thip was back to exact payment. He knew there would not be many days left before he died from lack of blood. “Better off dead,” he thought as he moved toward the trapdoor that led to the spiral staircase. He took each step with great caution, inching his way down past the bedroom landing, past the laboratory and bathroom to his study. It was all he could do to make it to his chair and fall into it. The only thing on his mind was, of course, the digitalis, but before he leaned over the little table to his left to prepare the pipe, he needed to rest for a few moments.

Staring into the cracked mirror across the room, the minotaur could not make out any detail but could see from the shattered reflection that his color had lost almost every trace of blue. His hide had paled to the color of the moon on winter nights and his flesh to the sickening shade of a toad’s belly. Turning his gaze from the mirror, he looked down to the hooves at the ends of his arms. Each was webbed with networks of cracks and fissures. They would have bled had there been any blood that close to the surface. He feared now, when not under the influence of the digitalis, that if he were even just to tap his horns against something they would break off from his head without so much as a “crack.”

He knew that he should have been horrified by the condition of his health, but he felt no emotion. There were no tears, nor was there crazy laughter hiding just the other side of his larynx. There was nothing. He leaned over and, with shaking hoof, tried to fill the bowl of the pipe. The precious leaves of the dried foxglove scattered on table and floor. After three tries the bowl of the pipe was stuffed. He lifted it to his lips and drew on the stem. Five minutes later he realized he had not lit the petals. More fumbling and finally flame. The smoke began to rise. He sucked it in as deeply as his weakened condition would allow, hoping that its high would make him care again, make him think of some way to save himself. When the bowl was spent, the minotaur leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The smoke showed him no colors behind his eyelids this time. All was as black as that chamber of his heart Thip had explored. He snorted and moaned, trying to work up a memory. Even a bad memory, the most horrible one, would do for him now but nothing came. Because of the physical exertion, he had to finally give up. He opened his eyes to look at the objects in his study, feeling them more friendly than the “nothing” that was inside him. Across the coffee table from him, sitting on the divan was Pezimote.

“The door was open downstairs,” said the tortoise.

Excitement flared up inside Belius, but he couldn’t jump out of his seat as he wanted to. “My friend,” he said, the words spoken in a weak drawl. “I went everyday to the sea to look for you. Why haven’t you come?”

“I’ve been busy ruining my life.”

“Chelonia?” Belius asked, somehow guessing the problem from the look in his friend’s eyes.

The tortoise nodded. “She’s left me. Gone off into the ocean somewhere far away. I don’t know where.”

“Why?”

“A young female tortoise. I rode the waves on her back and Chelonia saw it in my eyes.”

“Couldn’t you have made amends?” asked Belius, filling a pipe for his companion.

“I didn’t try. I told her to go. I told her she was tiresome . . . but now I miss her terribly. I’ve never felt such pain in all my long years. I suppose I’ve never felt anything before. The young tortoise, she’s a fool. She talks more foolishness than Shebeb. She’s always talking. After Chelonia had gone, it was only a day before I began to weary of the nubile’s physical charms.”

“Speak of fools,” said Belius, handing Pezimote the pipe and his homemade lighter.

“Yes, yes, yes,” said the tortoise and leaned over to take the implements. He lit the bowl and drew deeply on the stem. With the release of the blue smoke, he coughed and said, “The things we do to make ourselves seem great.”

“She’ll come back to you,” said Belius.

“No,” the tortoise replied and shook his head. “I’m going to find her. I may be gone for a very long time, that’s why I stopped to see you.”

“See me now old friend, because I will most likely not be alive when you return.”

“And what is with you; you look older than I feel.”

Belius sat forward in his chair, hesitated for a moment by closing his eyes, and, deciding nothing mattered, told Pezimote the events of the past few weeks. He spoke of Thip’s blackmail and the incident from his past that had brought him down. The tortoise sat on the divan as still as the yellow day outside the window. He listened carefully to the tale, as a vision of the total immensity of the oceans of the Wider World filled his head. When Belius was through and silence had swept down between the friends, Pezimote stretched his scrawny neck as far out of his shell as possible and screeched like a magpie. The minotaur knew that the pitiful cry was all that his friend could now offer him. He let it enter his head and, once there, kept it alive, bouncing off the boundary between his horns, echoing through the pitch.

“Good-bye, Belius,” said Pezimote and leaned over to set the pipe and lighter on the coffee table. Once these things were set down, he reached even further and stumped his friend on the knee as he had done so many times in the past. Then he rose and walked toward the door. Before leaving, he turned and asked Belius, “And exactly what time is it now?”

The minotaur looked over at the water clock in the corner of the study. “A little before noon,” he said and immediately put his hoof to the festering wound at the crook of his opposite arm. Tears came to his eyes. He wiped them away as he listened to Pezimote descend the spiral staircase.

With a great effort he hoisted himself out of the chair and went to the study window. It was a perfect day with no hint that the first wind of autumn had blown only the night before. He looked down from the tower and saw Pezimote standing by the front door. The tortoise stood there for five minutes, and Belius hoped that he was changing his mind. He was about to call out to his friend to come back when he saw Thip strolling down the center path of the garden, now a half a foot in height, dressed in his too small top hat and cape. The flea was drooling and reciting and every few steps would lose control of himself, spin around in a complete circle and then continue toward the tower. As the flea neared the tower door, he took off his hat and bowed to Pezimote. “Good day, Mr. Tortoise,” he said.

Pezimote eyed the oversized insect up and down and then spat on the ground to his side. “Good day, Mr. Flea,” said the tortoise, and, with one fluid motion, punctuated at its completion by a snap of the beak, he swallowed Thip whole.

Belius lost his breath and leaned over on the window sill. “Pezimote!” he cried in admonishment.

The tortoise looked over his shoulder. “Not quite a man o’ war pie,” he called to the minotaur and then resumed the unaffected stance of all fours.

Belius watched as his friend moved slowly down the path to the beach. As the waters of the ocean lapped over Pezimote’s shell, a shrill squeal rose up from the forest. The mole’s horrific cry jarred something in Belius’ diminishing brain, and the memory of his last days in the lesser world swept across his darkened mind. Although he had just related the story to Pezimote, the impetus for the telling came only from his tongue. Now, each detail returned to him with frozen clarity.

When Austina caught a whiff of the perfume that Belius had dowsed himself with, she farted to try to clear the air. She called out from her stall in the barn, “Halfling, what’s that rancid aroma?”

Belius tried to ignore her as he coaxed the plough horse out into the center aisle.

“Who died?” asked Plension, taking in the minotaur’s dress: a black, double breasted suit, forest green shirt, maroon ascot. He wore a shiny black wingtip shoe on his human foot and had colored with black polish the cuticle of his hoof to match the shoe.

“No one died,” Belius muttered, knowing better than to try to explain his new clothes to them.

“I think he’s in love,” said Austina to her sister over the wooden boundary separating them.

“Is it the human we saw him with in the field last week?” asked Plension.

Austina mooed.

“I’m just going visiting,” Belius said to them.

“To the doctor’s again,” the old plough horse said to the cows.

“That’s right. He has a very fine library in his house, and he lets me borrow his books. I have to go there. He’s helping me study.”

“We totally understand,” said Austina. “It’s important that you make these concessions in your dress and aroma for the old man.”

“It’s civilized,” said Belius, “to dress properly.”

“We just thought you were out to impress the female,” said Plension. “See how ignorant we creatures can be?”

The horse and the cows laughed and Belius grabbed the horse’s bridle, giving it a rough tug. He led the old plough puller toward the door of the barn, wishing he’d laughed along with them from the beginning.

“How is she on all fours?” Austina mooed after him as he stepped out into the light of the winter day.

He slammed the barn door. The horse was no longer laughing, but Belius could see from the glint in the animal’s eye that he was working hard not to.

“You know, I don’t have to give you any carrots on this trip,” Belius said to him sharply. Then in the same instant he drew a carrot from his pocket. As the horse munched the treat, Belius rigged him to the wagon.

He climbed into the seat of the wagon and took up the reins. “Okay,” he said to the horse. The old animal gave three lethargic pulls against the weight of the wagon and finally got it rolling.

The afternoon was clear and cold, but off in the west dark clouds were gathering. The clean, sharp scent of snow was so prevalent in the air that it even drilled through the lavender-fruit smell of Belius’ cologne. He had not worn the overcoat, the suit jacket being enough for him as long as the sun shone. He wanted anyone who passed him on the road to note how well dressed he was. The camel hair wrap was rolled up and stored in the back of the wagon with the books he was returning to the doctor.

As the wagon moved slowly along the road, passing barren fields dotted with patches of unmelted snow from the last winter storm, Belius tried to think of the concepts he intended to discuss with Grey. He’d been making notes for a Cosmology, reading the great philosophers and scientists and poets, trying to boil down the workings of the universe so they might be presented in the form of metaphor—a scientific/philosophic/epic that would encompass all thought and emotion, that when read would center the spirit of Belius in the souls and minds of his readers. Even while he worked on the farm, planets and stars, great black distances peopled with characters called Gravity and Entropy filled his head. His musings excited him and filled him with the joy of discovery. Youth blanked out any idea of failure, and, as much knowledge as he gained, he was still able to stay ignorant enough to think that he was capable of his task. The only other thoughts that he gave any time to at all dealt with Nona.

Through a slow process that began on his first stay at the doctor’s house the previous winter, he had been able to prove to her that he was not the beast he appeared. At first, his only intention was to be friends with her. The sense of calm she inspired in him was like a drug that he knew he must have in increasing doses. On his early visits to Grey, in the weeks following his recovery, he would always make a point of chatting with her about incidentals, making sure not to push her into any weighty conversation that assumed any kind of bond between them. He found it difficult sometimes to know she was right there in the same house with him while he spent the entire day in the doctor’s library.

Then one day, late in the afternoon, he was sitting in the red leather chair of the first library he had entered on his original visit, reading an interesting little monograph by Scarfinati dealing with the mathematical concept of the golden section. He was lost to the ideas of the book, having settled down after a few hours of nothing but staring at the crowded shelves and daydreaming conversations with Nona. The huge house was silent, which sunk him even deeper into the morass of print. The doctor was out on a house call, delivering Phil and Terri Miller’s new child. It was a blustery spring day, and a light rain splashed softly against the outside of the one stained glass window that interrupted the walls of books. For no reason, he broke off his reading in the middle of an engaging concept and looked up to see her standing in front of him with a tray holding two tea cups and a kettle.

“Am I bothering you?” she asked quietly.

He straightened up in the big chair and uncrossed his legs. At first he was dumb with surprise, but he soon regained his composure and was able to say, “Not at all. I was just going to take a break.”

She stood there staring at him. Then he realized that there was no other seat in the library and jumped to his feet. What he had not realized was that his human leg had fallen asleep while he was reading. As he motioned for her to sit down and said, “Please,” his unconscious leg buckled beneath him and he lunged forward. She made a graceful movement to the side as if the tray were a red cape and she a matador, turning to foil a charge. “Leg asleep,” he yelled to let her know he was up to nothing untoward as he stumbled forward and fell, his horns goring, respectively, the bindings of Aristotle’s Poetics and The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. The weight of his embarrassment prevented him from standing, so after he had disengaged himself from the classics, he merely crawled closer to the chair and took up a sitting position. His own stupidity had so dumbfounded him, he just stared at her, hoping she would not run away.

“Are you all right?” she asked as she leaned over and set the tray on the floor between them.

He meant to say yes, but instead he gave a short moo before his words could form.

Her eyes widened at his animal indiscretion, but, all the same, she sat down in the red leather chair and smoothed out the front of her skirt. As she leaned down to pour him a cup of tea, the top of her blouse opened and he couldn’t help seeing her breasts. In moving to give him a spoonful of sugar and some cream, the view increased. He quickly turned his head to stare at the stained glass. “Rain,” he said quickly, uncertain as to whether she had caught him peeking. “Yes,” she said and handed him the cup and saucer.

For the following hour, the conversation came in fits and starts, well padded with many layers of thick silence. They spoke in simple sentences about the weather, Belius’ farm, the doctor’s most recent cases, how to prepare turnips and a few other things equally as interesting. For Belius, though, her descriptions of how to pare a turnip seemed to carry the same philosophical import and excitement as the closing chapter of Scarfinati’s autobiography. Only once did the conversation take a crucial turn. Belius happened to mention how helpful the doctor had been to him by letting him use the libraries.

“He likes it when you’re here,” Nona said. “He finds you very interesting. We both do. Perhaps in different ways.”

Belius took a sip of tea, trying to think of a way to ask her to explain without seeming to make too much of her statement. Luckily it wasn’t necessary for him to be shrewd. After a slight pause she continued.

“I’m amazed at how much time you can spend reading. You must have a marvelous mind, full of all kinds of wonderful ideas.”

He snorted, the sound a little too close to the barnyard, he thought, and waved his hoof in the air as if to thank her. “Everyone has the same amount of ideas,” he tried to explain. “It’s just that they’re different. One set of ideas is no better or worse than the other . . . as long as they are good ideas, of course. I mean as long as they are ideas about things that are good and are not too evil or uncaring or . . .” He could see in her eyes that he wasn’t making much sense, so to cover his foolishness he laughed. “There’s a few empty ideas for you.”

She smiled but didn’t laugh, and it was evident to him for the first time that, given her personality, it would not be right if she had. In that moment, it came to him that she was so very different from him. Life itself seemed to be enough for her, she didn’t need a Cosmology or the thoughts of long dead thinkers creeping through her brain or to know the why of everything. When she looked at a tea cup, the picture was not distorted by the concepts of physics or the fact that the matter that formed it might have originated millennia past in the white hot turmoil of an exploding star. She was willing to drift without a center and accept the uncertainty without fear. As she gathered the cups and saucers onto the tray and stood up to leave, he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

After that spring day in the library their friendship escalated through different stages, bringing them closer. Near the end of summer, she was making trips to see him during the day. At first it was under the pretense of bringing him some books that the doctor thought he might find interesting. She would stand out in the field with him as he worked, and they would talk. His mother was beside herself whenever Nona would stop in for lunch. The old woman never dreamed that anything even close to romance would ever be part of her son’s life. What Belius’ mother saw so clearly, Doctor Grey either ignored or was totally unaware of. When he talked to the minotaur, he never spoke of his niece. She was never invited by him to join in their conversations. Belius didn’t insist on it, feeling in some ways relieved that the old man took no notice. In the presence of Grey, he sometimes felt guilty about his growing love.

Belius was shivering so hard by the time the old plough horse brought the wagon to a stop in the yard of the doctor’s mansion that the hoof at the end of his beastly leg was doing an involuntary tap dance against the foot board. He had not passed one person on the road and was feeling somewhat disappointed, the long ride having taken some of the newness out of his suit. The pants were wrinkled and the left lapel of the jacket had been kept standing so long in the same position by the wind that it now refused to lie down as it was supposed to. As he unhitched the horse and put him in the barn, he tried unsuccessfully to keep one hoof over the lapel. Finally, he gave up on it.

He stood on the porch of the old boarding house, and the wind whipped by with a noise that sounded too much like the bickering of Austina and Plension. Grey answered the door after the second knock and ushered the minotaur in with a handshake and a pat on the back. The old man seemed in fine spirits, and it was obvious that he hadn’t yet begun to drink for that day. Belius was pleased with this, not that it ever really bothered him if the doctor was a little under. Sometimes the alcohol would make the old man lose his train of thought right in the middle of a complicated conversation and send him off on an incomprehensible monologue. Being the dutiful student that Belius was, he could never interrupt. He would simply sit there for the duration of the dementia and nod as if he understood everything that was being said.

“What is that smell?” asked the doctor as he led Belius down the hallway to his office.

“Cologne,” said Belius.

The old man turned around and reached up to tug on the minotaur’s right horn. As Grey entered his office, Belius paused for a second and looked down the hallway over his shoulder to see if he could catch a glimpse of the physician’s niece. She was nowhere to be seen. His spirits sank a little when he thought that he might come and go that day without her ever getting a look at him in his new clothes.

In the office, the doctor took a seat behind his desk and Belius pulled up a seat facing him. Whenever they had their discussions in the office, Belius could see that the doctor, when sitting in that chair, couldn’t help but treat him somewhat like a patient. Belius would describe what it was he was presently reading and Grey would ask questions as if he were trying to diagnose some malady.

Always present at these discussions, like a third party who had as yet never had anything to add was the homunculus in the huge glass jar at the corner of the desk. Only when the doctor fell into one of his alcoholic rants did Belius actually recognize how strange an ornament it was. Sometimes the minotaur would just happen to glance at it, and he could swear that he saw it move one of its delicate little fingers or blink an eyelid. Occasionally, when waking in the morning, he would have a vague sense that he had dreamed about the tiny being, but it was as if the dream was always too upsetting for his mind to allow him to take it with him into the waking day.

The topic of conversation that afternoon was an idea that Belius had dreamed up concerning the natural force of gravity. He was trying to establish some relationship between the attraction of objects in the solar system and the attraction of love between people. Grey admitted he couldn’t quite see the analogy. Belius tried to be more specific. The doctor stepped up his side of the argument and, in no time, they were off, soaring into the stratosphere of half-baked ideas. As they sat in the office, lost to the perturbations of a metaphorical cosmos, the blue sky outside the house turned dark with clouds and snow swept down across the valley.

Hours later, there was a knock at the door and Nona’s voice called out, “Uncle, it’s a blizzard outside.” Only now did they hear the wind moaning and the patter of snow against the side of the house.

“Oh, my,” said Grey, getting up and moving to the window. “There must be a few feet already.”

Belius’ mind was on other things than the weather. He straightened up in his chair and pressed down his errant lapel, hoping that Nona would come through the door. She didn’t enter, though, and eventually he heard her footsteps moving away down the hall.

“You’d better stay the night, Belius,” said the doctor. “I’ll have Nona make up a room for you.”

“Is it that bad?” asked the minotaur.

“If you go out in this, we won’t find you till the spring thaw,” said Grey. “Relax, stay the night and leave first thing in the morning when it’s over.” He moved back to his desk and took a seat. Bending down, he heaved a great sigh and reached into a bottom draw of the desk for his bottle and glass. As he set them up on the desk, he said, “That’s enough talk for today. I’m afraid I’m talked out. Why don’t you go and have something to eat and then go upstairs and read.”

Belius watched as the doctor poured a whiskey and took his first sip. The leathery skin of his cheeks puckered and his eyes shut tight. The gulp of liquor moved down the old man’s scrawny throat as if it were a hard boiled egg. Then, with an audible smacking of the lips, his face unclenched. When the lids of the eyes lifted, Belius could immediately discern the sadness in them. Grey shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.

“Goodnight,” Belius said. “I’ll see you in the morning before I leave.”

The doctor nodded his head and poured another. “Don’t forget to put that rock in your collar tonight. We don’t want to wake up with the snow in our faces tomorrow morning,” he said as if at the end of a consultation he were prescribing treatment. “The physical attraction of heavenly bodies seen as love,” he said as Belius moved toward the door. “You’re a hopeless Romantic.” He gave a curt laugh and then turned his attention to the glass of amber.

While munching on a celery stalk in the kitchen, the minotaur mulled over the doctor’s diagnosis of his aesthetic. In the light of his conviction toward what he was trying to accomplish with his Cosmology, he could not see the epitaph as anything other than a compliment. He continued eating, putting down cold ears of corn left over from some previous dinner, apples, and a half a loaf of bread, and decided that he would not worry about Nona that night, seeing as she had not gone out of her way to talk with him. He made plans to find some immense epic poem full of heroes and battles and settle down in the red leather chair to read until his eyes played their usual trick of fatigue—a column of smoke rising out of the yet unturned pages of his book.

Hours died and were carted away into the past while Belius followed the shipmates of the Argo on their search for the Golden Fleece. Wrapped in the solitude of this distant dream, he only thought of her once. As Jason wrestled with the soldiers sprung from dragon’s teeth, the minotaur changed his position in the chair and looked up, wishing that he would see Nona there. She wasn’t, and he focused for a second on the two books he had gored on that spring day when she had brought him tea. Another fifty pages later, he closed the book and left the study.

What it was that had awakened him, he had no idea, but suddenly he found himself wide awake. The room was cold and the snow could still be heard blowing against the window. He sat up in the bed and listened. There was the occasional groaning of old timbers and the pop of floorboards realigning themselves. The wind complained outside and some small creature scampered across the roof. All of these noises instantly became components of a great silence when he heard the tread of footsteps in the hallway. They came stealthily, stopping every now and then. They drew nearer and nearer to his room and then, just outside the door, halted. He listened more intently and could barely discern the sound of breathing. Minutes passed and, when he could no longer stand the tension his muscles were suffering from his rigid expectation, he whispered, “Hello?”

As soon as the word was out of his mouth, the door opened, someone entered and then it was shut quickly; the only sound, the clicking of the latch.

“Doctor?” he whispered.

“Shhhhh,” came the reply, and he knew immediately that it was Nona. A surge of warmth emanated from his solar plexus and moved out in all directions through his body. A slight buzzing filled his head, and, for the first time since waking, he wondered if he were not really still asleep. It was only when he felt the weight of her body press down on the mattress next to him and smelled the tell-tale hint of lemon from her hair that he was certain it was not a phantom.

His mouth was dry but he finally managed to swallow. “Nona?”

“Shhhh,” she cautioned and at the same time placed her open palm flat against his chest. His heart slammed as if trying to break through the skin and fill her grasp. With a gentle nudge she pushed him down onto his back. She stood up and pulled back the covers and climbed into the bed. Her body shivered next to his and he knew without touching her that she wore nothing. He enveloped her in his huge arms. As they lay silent and still his warmth was transferred to her, and he adopted the rhythm of her breathing. After some time, she turned to face him and kissed him just below his left eye. Because of the awkward nature of his snout, he couldn’t return the kiss, so instead he stuck out his tongue and licked her shoulder. He ran his hoof across her breasts as she scratched the hide of his beastly leg.

When she mounted him, she quietly gasped. He lowed, but with his mouth shut so the sound stayed within his chest. She began to move and then reached up and grabbed his horns for leverage. The bed creaked and the headboard lightly tapped the wall behind it. As their combined motion became more violent, Belius’ mouth would slip open and release a particle of his imprisoned voice. “Shhh,” she said, and then sounded off louder than he had. In the middle of their lovemaking, she stopped suddenly.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I thought I heard footsteps,” she whispered.

They lay locked together, frozen, listening until neither of them could stand it and they had to continue.

After they had finished, and Nona again lay at his side, Belius didn’t know what to say, so he said, “Thank you.”

“I love you, Belius,” she whispered into his pointed ear.

“How can you?” he asked.

“At first, you frightened me, but I’ve come to see how gentle you really are.”

“Is my being gentle enough for you to love me?”

“Yes.”

“I’m so ugly, though,” he said.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve thought of ugliness as a matter of looks. I’ve known real ugliness in my life, and many times it’s come from the people with the smoothest faces and most beautiful eyes.”

There was silence for a time. They both listened to the storm outside. It was Belius who finally interrupted the quiet. “Can I ask you something?” he said.

“You want to know why I live with my uncle?”

“Yes,” he murmured. “I want to know everything.”

“Well, I know quite a lot about you from talking to your mother, so I suppose it’s only fair. When I tell you, though, you’ve got to promise me one thing.”

“Anything.”

“You have to promise that you won’t feel badly for me.”

“I hate pity,” said Belius.

“I know,” she said. A few moments passed and then she began, her words coming with the same complacency with which she did everything but make love. “When I was younger, I lived with my parents. My mother is the doctor’s sister. Like you, I had keen interests in many things. Life was very powerful. A few weeks after my sixteenth birthday, while my mother was away visiting friends, my father forced himself on me. I had no warning. I was frightened and confused, but when I tried to get away from him, he slapped my face with the back of his hand and I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was lying on the floor, my dress torn, my blood all over me. He was standing over me, tightening his belt. He warned me, ‘If you say anything to your mother, I’ll kill you both.’

“I never said a word, but a few months later it became obvious that I was pregnant. I tried to hide it as long as I could, but my mother finally noticed. She was hysterical. She asked me who had done it. My father was right there, shaking his head as if he was completely disappointed in me. My mother wanted to throw me out of the house, but my father told her, ‘We all make mistakes, dear. Maybe we can send her to your brother for a cure.’ She agreed and I came to stay with the doctor.

“On the second day I was here, he performed the operation. He gave me a shot and made me breathe gas to knock me out. I really had no idea what was happening. When I realized what the operation meant, I was furious at first, but he had always been so kind to me that, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t hate him for it. It was almost an act of love. The thing I truly despise him for, though, is having kept my child in that jar on the desk in his office. When he drinks too much, he stares at it and uses it to focus all of his sadness on and it makes it easy for him to cry. He wants the world to be perfect. He doesn’t want anyone to suffer except himself. It’s hard to imagine such selfishness.”

Belius wanted to say something to her, but his animal nature told him to be quiet. He concentrated on trying not to cry and was almost successful, but for two large tears that formed, one in each eye. If he moved his arm to brush them away, she would surely know that he was crying. She lay perfectly still as if exhausted from the telling of her tale. Just as he was about to apologize for having broken his promise, he realized that she had fallen asleep.

As she slept next to him, he remained awake, thinking about the story she had told him. Now that he knew her, he felt as if he also knew himself for the first time. He was no longer half man and half bull, he was a minotaur—a separate entity unto himself. These thoughts circled like a whirlpool in his head until their dizzying action, along with the warmth of Nona’s body and the hushed violence of the storm, made him tired. He began to doze off to sleep, his head nodding down beneath the weight of his horns. Just before passing into the realm of dreams, where his father was waiting with the knot, he thought he heard footsteps moving down the hall away from his door.

The next morning, at the kitchen table, Belius searched the old man’s face for signs that he might actually have been outside the room during the night. The doctor gave no indication, but was full of jokes and word games and closets full of laughter. It was a beautiful day out; the warm sun already at work on the snow. Belius decided to leave the wagon, doubting it could make it back through the high drifts. He promised to return for the horse and rig in a few days.

After they had all finished eating, the doctor got up to adjourn to his office where soon his patients would be showing up. He wished Belius a safe trip home and promised to look after the plough horse for the next few days. Nona walked the minotaur to the front door. When they were certain that Grey was nowhere nearby, they put their arms around each other. She kissed him on the throat and then pushed him toward the door. He stepped out into the beautiful day, shading his eyes against the reflection of the sun off the snow. As he made his way down the road, his wingtip offering little protection against the icy slush, wearing nothing over his shoulders save the double breasted suit jacket, he was warm inside. For the entire journey, he threw himself into the task of learning how to whistle.

It was during the first of the spring thaw that Nona came to his farm with the news. In their meetings between their night together and now, they had slowly been working up the courage to announce that they would marry. They had decided to wait until the first day of spring. The message that Nona brought with her this day, though, immediately displaced the importance of their decision.

She told Belius, in breathless bursts, that the doctor had said he was long aware of their love for each other and that, when he first discovered it, he had written to a famous medical specialist across the ocean, whom, he had read, was doing some marvelous experiments with anomalies of birth. This famous doctor had created a chemical mixture that, when taken only once, would react upon the physical makeup of the patient, causing the distorted body to achieve the human look it might have had had nothing gone wrong while the fetus was forming. For a nominal fee, the specialist had sent Grey a bottle of the potion. It sat in the cabinet of his office, back at the enormous house, awaiting Belius’ decision.

Upon his hearing the news, the pitchfork that Belius was holding slipped out of his hooves and fell to the ground. He cocked his head to the side and stared into Nona’s eyes to search for a hint that she might be playing some odd joke on him. She knew what he was about and adamantly shook her head to show that she was in earnest.

“I can hardly believe it,” said Belius, forcing a laugh.

“Neither can I,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm.

“Is it guaranteed to work?” he asked.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“This is impossible,” he finally said and turned his back on her to stare out into the fields.

“What is it, Belius? I thought you’d be happy.”

He didn’t answer for quite a while but lifted his right hoof up and ran it along the horn on that side of his head. Finally, he asked, “Are you sure this was your uncle’s message?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“I would have hands,” he murmured.

“I could kiss your mouth,” she said.

He turned around to face her. “Do you think I would be . . . handsome?”

“Belius, I don’t care. I’m willing to marry you as you are. I just thought it would be something for you. It’s your decision. It might make your life easier, but then you might change in some ways. I don’t know.”

“It sounds like a fairy tale,” he said. “I can’t help it, it sounds too easy.”

“Well, my uncle said that this specialist is world renowned and that he has helped thousands of people to be . . .”

“To be what?”

“I suppose I was going to say ‘normal.’”

“I need time to think,” he said.

“I know you do.”

“Tomorrow, I’ll come to your house. I’ll make a decision tonight. I know I should be ecstatic, but I’m scared.”

She moved toward him to put her arms around his wide chest, but he warded her off with his hooves. “Please,” he said, “please go. I’m thinking already. I promise I’ll come tomorrow.” Then he turned his back on her again. He could hear her moving toward the barn where her carriage and horse stood waiting.

Some yards away, she stopped and called back, “Remember, think of yourself.”

That afternoon, he did a week’s worth of work around the farm. He fixed things that he had already decided to throw out, and, once they were fixed, threw them on the junk heap anyway. He ploughed a good portion of a field that was still too frozen to plough and only stopped because the horse finally reprimanded him for his stupidity. He kept himself desperately busy until the sun went down, the whole time making only one minor decision, and that to not mention the doctor’s message to his mother, whom he knew might go crazy at the very thought of the possibility.

He ate little and spoke less at dinner. His mother inquired if he was sick. “No,” he told her, “I’m thinking.”

“I saw Nona here today. Did you have a quarrel?”

“No.”

“Well, don’t worry too much about it. Just drive out there tomorrow and see her. It’ll all be fine,” said the old woman as she piled more potatoes on his plate.

After moving the potatoes around with his fork for a few minutes, he excused himself and went to his room. A book on Norse mythology lay open on his desk. He sat down and tried to read from it. The words refused to register. For two hours, he sat scanning the lines, saying each phrase quietly to himself, but, when the book was finished, he could remember nothing. “Think of yourself,” he repeated as he sat there, his huge head supported by his hooves. It came to him that he had done nothing else for his entire life. Only in the past few months had he grown to like the idea of being a minotaur. It had been such hard work getting to that point, and now, with the doctor’s offer, all of his struggle was made insignificant.

He left his desk and went to the mirror that hung on the wall near his bed. Looking at it, he tried to imagine his snout disintegrating into a human mouth. “Where will all of it go?” he wondered. Then his pointed ears shrank to two pink half-circles. His eyes lost their roundness and moved closer to each other in the middle of a face that was forming a chin and cheeks of flesh. The bushy crop of fur between his horns stretched into a slick wave of long stranded hair, and, as an afterthought, he dreamed a mustache and sideburns. The only feature of his anatomy that he could not bring the illusion of change to was his horns. They remained two curved and pointed bones, jutting out from just beside the temples.

“No horns,” he thought. The pleasant sensation of goring a tree would be gone forever. Plension and Austina would speak to him and he wouldn’t understand. The crops and garden vegetables would no longer tell him what they needed. He’d lose half his enormous strength and probably be a foot shorter. There would be no need for the Cosmology. There would be no race of minotaurs. He pulled himself away from the mirror.

It was well past midnight. Belius stood still as a tree stump in the stand of pines out past the corn field and pasture. It was still cool, so he wore the overcoat, but the fresh, green smell of spring was on the breeze. He stared up past the points of the trees, into the night sky. The moon was a sharp crescent and the stars were brilliant. When he breathed out, steam would obscure his view of the heavens. He had been there for an hour, watching the same small patch of sky. Each dot of white fire had burned its image into his memory. There were as many stars as there were reasons for him not to take the doctor’s potion. Then, while he was staring, one of the dots of light in the cluster he had been watching suddenly went out. There was no fiery explosion, not even so much as a hushed pop, no tremor in the earth. It was there and then it wasn’t. He cleared his eyes, only to find that what he thought he had seen had really happened. For the first time that day, he stopped thinking of himself and thought, instead, of Nona. He thought of the future—of marriage and children. He thought of the sacrifice his family would have to make for him.

His decision was finalized before he reached the sleeping cornfield. Before going in to bed, though, he stopped at the barn, thinking the cows might still be awake. He hoped they would ridicule him in their usual way, and he promised himself that if they did, he would laugh along with them and scratch them behind the ears.

A little after noon, Belius’ wagon pulled up in the yard outside the doctor’s house. He unhitched the plough horse and decided to let him roam around the property instead of putting him in the barn. “Don’t eat anything you shouldn’t,” Belius warned the horse with a few low grunts. “Same to you,” said the horse. Belius had told him and the cows everything during the night. Plension and Austina advised him to make the change. They told him it was the only “human” thing to do. He said good-bye to them and thanked them, promising always to be kind to them in the future, when he could no longer understand what they were saying. The horse was in total disagreement, saying he had never heard of anything so unnatural in his life. He had been overruled, though, and finally gave in and wished the minotaur a happy, hornless life.

Before he could even knock, Nona was pulling back the door at the front of the old house. “Belius,” she said, full of excitement. This time, he let her put her arms around him and he returned the hug. When they separated, she asked, “What have you decided?”

Belius looked past her to where he saw the shadowy figure of Grey, standing just out of the light let in through the open door. The girl didn’t know her uncle was there, but when the minotaur spoke, he knew he was answering both of them. “I’ve decided to try it,” he said.

“Are you sure?” she asked, as if she had truly believed the answer would be different.

He nodded and, as she hugged him again, he saw Grey also nodding. He rested his snout on the top of her head for a moment. When he looked up, the doctor was gone. Nona moved away and closed the door.

“I have to tell you, Belius, I spent all night thinking about this. I was almost hoping that your answer would be different,” she said.

“I didn’t sleep much, myself,” he said. “But I thought about us, not just me, and that finally made me decide.”

“You’re positive?” she asked.

“Don’t ask again,” he said, forcing a laugh.

The three of them sat around the kitchen table, staring at the brown, cork-stoppered bottle that rested exactly in the middle of the triangle they formed. The doctor wore his stethoscope and his black bag was nearby at his feet in case of, as he said, “Any emergencies.”

“What do you mean, emergencies?” asked Nona. “Isn’t this safe?”

“It’s as safe as any operation or treatment,” said the doctor. “Belius,” he said, turning to face the minotaur, “you know that nothing is totally foolproof when dealing with the reaction of a living organism to exotic chemicals. You do understand this, don’t you?”

“It’s too late for me to worry,” said Belius. “I’ve made my decision.”

“Well, what could happen?” asked Nona.

“An allergic reaction . . . too great an excitement of the heart . . . a few things. But the chances are slim. I’m not trying to scare you, son,” the doctor said and patted Belius on the arm.

Belius shook his head. “Let’s get on with it,” he said.

“In a moment,” said the doctor, who got up and moved over to the counter where his bottle of whiskey and a glass stood waiting. He poured himself a drink. As he brought the glass to his lips, Belius noticed the old man’s hand shaking.

“Are you nervous?” Belius asked.

“No, no, just excited for the two of you.” He dashed off the drink and poured another.

“What’s this made of?” asked Nona.

“Please, my dear,” Grey croaked in between gulps, “I’m nothing but a country doctor. I can’t know everything. This cure was prepared by a man so much my superior in intelligence, I couldn’t begin to guess. It was made to deal specifically with Belius’ problem.”

“Bring me a glass, doctor,” Belius pleaded, “I don’t think I can drink too well from this bottle.”

“What would happen if someone else were to drink it?” asked Nona. “Would they die?”

“No, I’ve already told you it’s safe,” said the doctor, reaching for a glass in the cabinet. “The eminent specialist . . . Doctor Rodondo, theorizes that a healthy person would take on the characteristics of whatever unfortunate the elixir was intended for.”

Grey set the glass for Belius down next to his own and poured himself one more drink. It wasn’t so much what he said, but more Grey’s faltering voice and trembling hands that told the minotaur, in the animal regions of his being, that the old man was lying. At just this time, he happened to look down at the floor and saw, peeking out of the doctor’s opened black bag, the handle of the revolver that had killed so many dogs two winters past.

Belius pushed back his seat and stood up. “What’s in the bottle, Doctor Grey?” he asked. The old man’s eyes widened and his drink fell from his hand. “No!” he cried and lunged forward. Belius caught him with one arm and threw him back against the counter. It was only after this that Belius realized the old man’s cry was not as a result of his being found out. The minotaur turned quickly to see Nona finishing the last of the dark liquid. Before she could even set the bottle on the table, a vicious tremor shot through her body. As the bottle dropped from her grasp and rolled along the table, her eyes turned upward, showing white. She coughed as though she were drowning and blood came from her mouth. The bottle tipped off the table and smashed into a hundred brown shards on the floor. Belius shook off his horror and made it to her side as she was clutching with her hands at the lace collar of her dress. He caught her as she slumped toward the floor. Her body erupted in a fit of spasms that lasted but a minute and then passed.

“She’s dead,” he screamed in a voice somewhere between creature and human. “Nona, Nona,” he yelled and shook her. “She’s dead.” He let her body slip gently to the floor. When he turned to face Grey, the old man had the revolver in his hand.

“Poison,” the doctor said as he backed up against the wall. His voice was distant and his gaze clouded. “I did it for both of you. It could never have worked between you. It was an atrocity. It would only have been suffering for you both. You were never meant to live. Nona would have borne your horrid children. I should never have let you live. It pained me to think that I made you live in this world where you would never belong. I take it back now, Belius. I take back your suffering.” His hand wobbled as he pointed the gun at the minotaur’s heart.

“You fool,” Belius bellowed. Then his words turned into a raspy squeal and Grey couldn’t understand that the sounds were telling him to shoot. “Shoot me. Kill me,” Belius roared and pounded the flesh of his chest with both hooves. The old man closed his eyes and began to cry. Upon seeing this, an explosion of red filled Belius’ mind, blanking out both feeling and vision. He charged and his horns broke through the bone of Grey’s chest and out his back to bury themselves in the plaster of the wall behind him. The crockery on the shelves above them crashed down on the old man’s head, pushing him further onto the points until his belly was pressed against Belius’ snout. Grey’s screams seemed to Belius to be coming from somewhere in one of the libraries upstairs. He didn’t feel the old man’s hands pushing against the base of his horns. He reared back, lifting the frail body off its feet and then pounded into the wall again.

He cleaned the blood from his eyes with the hem of Nona’s dress. Working methodically, he loaded into the wagon everything he thought might be of use to him in his refuge. As soon as he had sloughed the weight of the doctor’s body and let it hit the floor, he quit his snorting and cursing and realized that he would have to run. “I’ll be blamed for both of these deaths,” he told himself aloud, standing amidst the bodies, broken glass and china that littered the kitchen floor. In this instant, he desperately wished that he was capable of using the gun. He left it, though, and looted only armloads of books from the libraries upstairs, a telescope, a phonograph, some records and a few loaves of bread from the pantry. There was no time to bury Nona. The first patient that came by to see the doctor would discover the bodies and, after seeing the two gaping holes in his chest, know exactly who the assailant had been. He shook and cried uncontrollably as he went about his work.

As he hitched the plough horse to the wagon, he said to him, “I know you aren’t used to running. I’ve never asked you to in the past, but now, to save my life, you’ve got to.” The horse saw the blood and the wild look in Belius’ eyes. He asked no questions, but, once the bit was in his mouth, took the weight of the loaded wagon to his shoulders and pulled with everything he had. Just when it looked as if he were not capable of anything more than a stroll, he somehow overcame the tug of gravity and they were flying down the road at a reckless pace. Froth flew from the horse’s mouth, clouds of dust were born from his hooves. They took one bend on two wheels and a pile of books, all about the classification of dinosaurs, spilled onto the road.

Whereas Belius had seen no one the day he wore his new set of clothes, this day the careening wagon passed three other rigs, all going in the opposite direction so that their drivers got a good look at the grim figure of the bloody minotaur. Each of the drivers yelled out for Belius to stop, thinking, at first, that he might be hurt. As he passed each of them, he lowed in such a mournful way and with such force that the animals that drew their masters home from market stopped dead in their tracks.

By the time the wagon rolled into the barnyard of his farm, there was no question in his mind that someone was just then turning over the doctor’s body and sticking their fingers into the two neat holes. He leaped off of the wagon seat and went directly to the barn, hoping his mother hadn’t seen him from the kitchen window. In five minutes he had apprised the two cows of the entire situation. They stamped in their stalls as they listened.

When he finished with the horror that he, himself, had a hard time comprehending, he had only one question. “How do I get to the Wider World?”

There was silence for a moment.

“Tell him, Austina,” Plension lowed. “They’ll surely kill him if you don’t.”

“Let me think for a second, damn it. I have to remember myself.”

“You said that it was all around,” Belius prompted.

“Yes, yes,” said the cow. “All right, yes, I remember. You can take the path that leads through the woods out beyond the pastures. As soon as it is dusk, take to that path and start running. You’ve got to forget about being part human and run only as an animal would. Don’t stop. If you stop, you’ll never make it. You must start at sundown and run all night, run until you fall asleep running. That’s the key, to keep running even when you’ve fallen asleep. If you can do this and then begin to dream while you are moving, you will make it to the Wider World. It’s extremely difficult, but I believe you can do it. Now go, it’s only a short time before the sun disappears.”

He didn’t thank them or say good-bye. As he left the barn, he took with him the wheelbarrow. Once outside, he noticed that the sun had fallen below the level of the treetops. He moved over to the wagon, to which the horse was still hitched, snorting and rasping from his recent effort, and took all of his plunder and put it into the wheelbarrow. After finishing with this he was out of breath but didn’t stop to rest. He walked toward the house, bracing himself for his mother’s hysterical inquisition.

She wasn’t in the kitchen, watching him as he had assumed. He moved quietly down the hallway to his bedroom. In one giant armful, he gathered all of his clothes and those books most important to the completion of his Cosmology. He took his father’s pipe, which he had kept in the top drawer of his writing desk, and the three boxes of embossed paper that Nona had given him as a present at the start of winter.

Unable to see where he was going, he stumbled down the hallway, back toward the kitchen. He knew his mother must be napping in the parlor as she was sometimes wont to do before dinner time. There was no way that he could fully explain to her what had happened in the short time before the sun set. He thought about writing her a note, but he didn’t feel capable just then of lifting a pen and thinking hard enough to make everything come out clearly. He told himself that she would be better off knowing nothing when they came to look for him.

As he left the house, his arms were so full he couldn’t keep the kitchen door from banging shut. He ran to where the wheelbarrow was sitting and dumped his belongings into it. The pile of books and clothes jutted up out of the carrier, looking as if someone were trying to relocate a small mountain. From inside the house, he heard his mother call his name three times. He lifted the handles of the wheelbarrow, the fulcrum effect lightening the load considerably, and started off across the field. The plough horse whinnied a message after him. “Think nothing, Belius. Let your legs be brilliant.” The minotaur ran with all his strength toward the forest beyond the pasture and the path that struck a bull’s-eye in the face of the setting sun.

When Belius awakened from the daze of his reminiscence, he found himself slightly crouched, his horns deeply imbedded in the coral wall of his study, the screams of Doctor Grey disappearing into the haze that remained from the last bowl he’d smoked. Sweat glistened from every pore of his flesh and hide, carrying with it, as it ran in rivulets down his body, the aroma of the four bottles of dandelion wine he’d quickly consumed after Pezimote’s farewell. Satisfied that he was no longer in the past, he pulled back and, creating a sound of swords being drawn slowly across a whetstone, disengaged his horns.

Although his blood count had had a short time to recoup its recent drastic losses, he was still as giddy as a bee on a blue gardenia. Mingling with this hysteria were the effects of the wine and smoke, all of it combining to send him over the brink into insanity. He pirouetted through the study with a drunken grace that prevented him from knocking anything over and finally landed him in his chair.

“Nicely done,” he whispered to himself, and, when he realized that there was no one in the room, he repeated the compliment, this time shouting it. “Lovely day, Belius,” he said, at a more normal decibel. “A perfect day for a swim to the barrier reef, or a stroll through the mango grove, or to invent something . . . Yes, yes, I’ll invent something, something that it is beyond my power to invent. What will it be? What . . . ?” He sat thinking for a second and that was all it took for him to lose track of the idea that had set him thinking.

He stood up and walked in circles around the chair a few times, each circuit containing at least one mishap, during which he would have to contort his body to keep from falling. “The Wider World has increased its rotational speed while I was dozing,” he said with a smile to the bust of himself which Siftus had chiseled. He broke the stumbling cycle to walk over and pat the statuette on the head between the horns. Then he lifted the thing very carefully from its place atop the bookshelf, walked over to the window and pitched it out. Upon hearing it shatter against the cobblestone walk below, he heaved a sigh and giggled. “A damn shame! No doubt . . .” he mumbled and then turned back to the room to size up the globe and see if it would also fit through the opening. As his hooves clasped the Wider World at its tropical poles, he heard a familiar voice behind him.

“Belius, what are you doing?” Vashti inquired as she came to perch on the window sill.

The minotaur spun around from his task. “Vashti,” he said, matter-of-factly, “glad you could stop in. I’m just tidying up a bit. I’ve been out of sorts for some time, and, now that I’m better, I thought I’d catch up on some housekeeping.”

“It’ll have to wait,” said the owl. “You’ve got to go and change your clothes, I’m bringing a very special guest to meet you in a few minutes.”

“Who?”

“A very charming female of your species.”

“A woman?” he asked, sticking out his tongue to its full length.

“Don’t be a fool. I’m speaking about a minotaur.”

“A minotaur,” he yelled. “. . .Very well.”

“Go and get changed and set up a table and two chairs on the turret. Bring up some wine—and make it something other than dandelion. I think this will be a special occasion, if you know what I mean.”

“What do you mean?” asked Belius, just then becoming entranced by the tips of his hooves.

“Never mind. I’ll meet you on the tower, with your guest, in a few minutes.”

“Vashti, wait,” Belius cried before the owl could take off.

“Yes?”

“Pezimote is gone. I think he’s gone forever.”

“He’ll be back to see you soon,” she said.

“Very good,” he said and dashed out of the study and up the spiral stairs to his bedroom.

Soffea only fell twice on her climb to the turret of the tower. The first time was as a result of her clumsiness with the newly acquired condition called “life.” The second was because Obadai and Mez, who were supposed to be helping her as a payment to everyone whose debt they were in from betting against her birth, were so tickled by the first fall that they tripped her up. Each time, she got to her hoof and human foot, head bobbing from side to side, eyes wild but no more so than usual, her tongue blah-blahing like a runaway stone rolling down a mountain. After the raccoon brothers had the last of their fun with her, carving their initials with their claws in the soft clay of her backside, they let her toga fall into place and led her the rest of the way to the turret. It was the plan that they should not be seen, so as soon as she stepped out into the daylight, they scampered back down the spiral stairs.

Vashti was waiting on the turret with Belius, who was now pacing nervously, dressed in a candy striped blazer, flannel shirt and boxer shorts. His mind still wobbled with the spin of a broken gyroscope: crazy thoughts being born and then leaping out his ears to vanish in the breeze. When Soffea stepped into view, though, he stopped his pacing and stood as if in awe. To Vashti, who perched near him on the facade, he whispered, “She’s more lovely than you described.”

He didn’t wait for the owl to introduce him, but rushed over to the clay ingénue and took her hoof in his. “I’m Belius,” he said. “And you must be Soffea. That’s a lovely name. It reminds me of incense and soft water.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Soffea said in greeting.

Because of the state Belius was in, the fact that she spoke no actual words didn’t register with him. She moved her mouth and tongue and sound came out and these sounds were transformed in his feverish brain into phrases that he wished, from the instant he had laid eyes upon her, she would say.

“Nonsense,” he told her, “Belius is not near as special a name as yours. You really need not flatter me, seeing that we’re both minotaurs. We’re already fast friends. Don’t you agree?”

“Blah.”

“Very good then. Won’t you come over and have a seat and join me in a glass of wine?” He led her by the hoof to a chair and held the back for her as she missed the mark and sprawled on the cobblestones. Vashti cringed at the sight of the accident, but, when Belius had lifted his date into the chair and taken his own seat, she knew there was no more she could do. Without bidding the couple good-bye, she spread her wings and flew off toward the forest.

“Will you have some wine, Soffea?” Belius asked, already in the act of pouring her a glass. He looked up to see if there was any protest, and, when there was no reply, he interpreted the constant bobbing of her head to be an answer in the affirmative. “This is my best wine, I brew it from corn that I grow in my garden. It fizzes like the yellow sky.” He handed her the glass. She took it, miraculously without spilling a drop, and blathered her thanks to him.

“Drink up. A toast to the Wider World . . . no, better yet, a toast to your eyes, which are each a planet of lovely . . . er . . . uh . . . yes.” He tossed back the entire glass he had poured himself with enough gusto to crack a diamond.

Soffea watched her host and then attempted the same feat, but since her aim was not what his was, even in his multiple intoxications, she only managed to drench her face with it.

“You’re quite the little pagan, aren’t you?” he asked with a laugh, while pouring himself another glass and using it to follow her lead. Now that they were both drenched, he filled their glasses and then settled back in his seat, crossing his legs, to begin what he had decided would be a conversation with a philosophical bent. It was his plan to see if her mind was as promising as her figure. “And what do you think of Cosmology?” he asked.

She didn’t answer directly, but had noticed him crossing his legs and was trying to mimic the act. In her attempts, which were never to be successful, she managed only to hook her human foot under the table between them and send it over on its side. “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” she expounded.

“Quite right, why should we have physical barriers separating us while we communicate,” he said, delighted.

She gave him another mouthful.

“And do you think that an exploding star is actually hotter than an active volcano, or do you believe, as I do, that the light of stars is a cool brightness?”

She agreed with him and then went even further to draw an analogy between the light of stars and the smell of a dog’s breath.

“Very perceptive,” he admitted when she was done.

The afternoon on the turret went well. Conversation flourished and good will abounded between male and female. Belius drank the better portion of the bottle of wine, and Soffea, who was more demure, tippled daintily at her glass, dribbling most of it down the front of her blue toga. As the evening came on, the wine she had spilled had soaked the old table cloth she wore to the point where Belius could discern the outline of her sculpted breasts. This, along with the overall beauty he had perceived in her and her keen wit and intelligence, made his member stir and grow to where it was barely hidden by the hem of the right leg of his boxer shorts.

When his passion had reached a critical level, he manipulated the conversation around to the point where he could suggest a tour of the inside of the tower. The last stop, if everything went as he planned, would be the bedroom. She hesitated at the suggestion but then coyly accepted.

In the study, he showed her his maps and books and she was so taken in by the obvious extent of his knowledge that she lost her balance and fell into a bookcase, bringing the whole set of shelves and all their contents to the floor with her. In the kitchen, she managed to stab herself in the thigh with a paring knife, which gave Belius the opportunity to lick the wound. When she thanked him profusely with a torrent of burbling, he knew his scheme of sex had a chance. In the wine cellar, while Bonita watched from a dark corner, Belius explained the process of making wine from dandelions as he gently rubbed her back.

The tour through the confines of the tower brought the couple into close contact time and again, firing Belius’ eloquence in a direct ratio to the increase of his desire. It also, because of the warmer climate of the indoors, began to dry the clay that held Soffea together. The first thing to fall off of her was the horn that Siftus had had to refit that afternoon. When it dropped off, Belius was aghast, but, when he saw that she took no notice of it and that it didn’t seem to give her any pain, he laughed it off by saying, “Why have two horns when one will do as well?” A little later, though, when her hair began to float away from her mane and she spat out a few teeth, he decided that he must get her to the bedroom before she fell apart completely.

“The master bedroom,” Belius said as he swept open the door. She hobbled inside, her wooden hoof beginning to come loose. When she turned her back on him to look around, he slyly closed the door and reached over to lower the flame of the gas lamp that burned brightly on the wall. With the light gone, the leaf from the blabbering tree that was her tongue finally went silent. She turned to face him. They stared into each other’s eyes. Her constant motion became subdued and the new calmness was erotic to him.

“You’re beautiful, Soffea.”

She remained silent, staring.

“Your eyes make me think that I have always known you. As a matter of fact . . .” He craned his neck toward her and peered through the soft shadow. A vague sense of recognition rolled through his skittering mind. “ . . . Have I ever met your eyes before? I mean, haven’t we met before?” The shock of the familiarity of her eyes disintegrated as his attention was drawn back to her breasts and legs and hips.

“What I’ve been trying to say, is that I love you.”

As the words left his mouth, his passion reached a crescendo and the heat emanating from his body wafted over her, drying her already cracking clay even more. The loose hoof gave way and she stumbled backward, landing on the bed with her legs spread wide in the air and her toga thrown back. He needed no verbal invitation. In seconds he had shed his jacket and shirt and shorts. His member pulsed. He lowered his head and charged, giving a great squeal as he leaped into the air. With an aim that could not be blurred by intoxicants or lack of blood, he came down on her with his full weight. She exploded beneath him, body parts flying out the window and rolling under the bed. The dry clay disintegrated into dust and released her life—the smoke-cloud spirit of The Cosmology of the Wider World. As the stream of fluid that carried in it the potential heirs of the race of minotaurs left his body, its sudden absence created a great vacuum inside of him. He gasped with the power of an enormous whirlpool sucking down oceans. With this intake of air, the cloud that had once been his book reentered him, filling his heart and his head with peace.

Instantly, he fell into a deep sleep that assured him in every cell of his body that he would once again write and that his garden would flourish and that his friends would join him in his study at night, as they always had, to smoke a bowl of the digitalis and speak of things they knew and things they didn’t. In this sleep, he had a strange dream of a giant worm, lying miles long near a burning crater beneath the sea, chewing and chewing his overcoat as if it were a cud of grass.

© 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.

The Shelter of Tradition
David Brin

(An excerpt from his forthcoming novel Existence, to be published by Tor Books, June 2012.)

Sensing Destiny’s Call

The marchers were protesting something. That much Mei Ling could tell, even without virring. But what were they complaining about? Which issue—from a worldwide collection of grievances more numerous than stars—concerned them?

Carrying no placards or signs, and dressed in a wild brew of styles, the mostly-youthful throng milled forward, in the general direction of the Shanghai Universe of Disney and the Monkey King. Each individual pretended to be minding his or her own business, chattering with companions, window shopping, or just wandering amid a seemingly random throng of visitor-tourists. Cameras were all over the place of course, atop every lamppost and street sign or pixel-painted onto every window-rim. Yet nothing was going on that should attract undue attention from monitors of state security, or the local proctors of decent order.

But there were coincidences too frequent to dismiss. For example, they all wore pixelated clothing that glittered and throbbed with ever-changing patterns. One girl had her tunic set to radiate a motif of waving pine trees. A boy’s abstract design featured undulating ocean waves. Only when, as Mei Ling watched, the two bumped briefly against each other did the two image-displays seem to merge and combine across their backs, lining up to convey what her eye—but possibly no AI—briefly recognized as a trio of symbols.

Seek Urban Serenity.

The youths parted again, erasing that momentary coalescence of forest and sea. Perhaps the two of them had never met before that terse, choreographed rendezvous. They might not ever meet again. But soon, amid the throng, another seemingly chance encounter created a different, fleeting massage that caught Mei Ling’s built-in, organic pattern recognition system, still more subtle than anything cybernetic, inherited from when her distant ancestors roamed the African tall grass, sifting for signs of prey. Or danger.

Responsible Leadership is Appreciated.

No doubt about it. That’s what the shimmer of fleeting characters said.

Passersby and shoppers were turning to notice, nudging their neighbors and waggling their hands to toss virt-alerts down the street. Crowds of onlookers formed in time to catch the next flicker-pronouncement, as a fat man sidled next to a broad-shouldered woman with orange-striped hair. Their combined pixel-garments proclaimed—

The Tang Emperors Encouraged Creativity.

Watching from a niche between a hair salon and a stall offering pungent chicktish meat, Mei Ling reflexively rocked the baby in his sling-carrier while wondering. Why did these young people go to such lengths to stay disconnected from their messages, preserving their ability to deny responsibility, when the meanings seemed so innocent? So harmless?

Oh, she realized, the real essence must lie elsewhere. In vir-space.

Mei Ling pulled out the set of cheap Augmented Reality Spectacles that she had purchased from a vendor, just a little while ago. It seemed a reasonable use of cash, in an era when so much of the world lay beyond sight of normal eyes. Especially with Bin gone on his strange adventure beyond the sea. So long as he had a job, she had a little money trickling into a mystery card in her pocket. Enough to pay off some repairs to their salvaged shorestead home and even take little Xie Xie on an early morning shopping expedition into the bustling city, where giant arcology pyramids loomed upward to block half the sky, proclaiming the greatness of the world’s new superpower.

Mei Ling had chosen this time because such a large portion of the planet’s population was watching proceedings at the Artifact Conference in America—entranced by the possible stone-from-space—that she figured the streets would be largely empty. But it turned out that the event was in recess for several hours, which meant people poured outdoors, to do important shopping or business, or just to get a little air. It made the boulevards especially crowded—and ideal for this kind of youth demonstration.

Slipping on the wraparound goggles, Mei Ling felt acutely aware of how long it had been since she and Bin moved out to the tidal flats and ruined shoreline of the Huangpo Estuary, where the world had only one “layer”—gritty-hardscrabble reality. That made her several tech-generations out of date. The ailectronics salesman had been helpful, patient . . . and a little too flirtatious . . . while tuning the unit to her rusty GIBAAR skills. It was difficult to rediscover the knack, even with his help. Like remembering how to walk after too long a convalescence in bed.

Gaze. Interest. Blink. Allocate Attention. Repeat.

The most basic way to vir, if you don’t have any of the other tools.

She had no fingernail tappers. No clickers and scrollers, planted in the teeth. No subvocal pickups, to read the half-spoken words shaped by throat and mouth. Not even an old-fashioned hand-keyboard or twiddler. And certainly none of the fancy-scary new cephalo sensors that would take commands straight off the brain. Without any of that, she had to make do. Choosing from a range of menus and command icons that the spectacles created across the inner surface of both lenses, seeming to float in front of the real-life street scene.

By turning her gaze to look right at a search icon . . . and by actually being interested (which affected the dilation of her pupils and blood flow in the retina) . . . she caused that symbol to light up. There followed a well timed, one-two blink of the left eye then right . . .

On her third try, a new window-menu blossomed, allowing her to allocate her attention . . . to pick from a range of sub-options. And she chose one called Overlayers.

Immediately, the specs laid faint lines across the real world, bordering the pavement and curb, the fringe of each building and vendor stall—anything real that might become a dangerous obstacle or tripping hazard to a person walking about. Also outlined—the people and vehicles moving around her. Each now carried a slim aura. Especially those heading in her direction, which throbbed a little in the shade collision-warning yellow.

These edge lines—clearly-demarcated rims and boundaries of the real world—were inviolate. They weren’t supposed to change, no matter what level of virspace you chose—it took a real hacker to mess with them.

As for the rest of visual reality, the textures, colors and backgrounds? Well, there were a million ways to play with those, from covering all the building walls with jungle vines, to filling the world with imaginary water, like sunken Atlantis, to giving every passerby the skin tones of lizard-people from Mars. You name it, and some teenager or bored office worker or semi-autonomous cre-AI-tivity drone must have already fashioned an overlay to bring that fantasy cosmos into being.

Mei Ling wasn’t trying for any of those realms—she didn’t know the addresses, for one thing, and had no interest in searching out ways to become immersed in someone else’s favorite mirage. Instead, she tried simply stepping up through the most basic levels, one at a time—first passing through the Public Safety layers, where children or the handicapped could view the world conveniently captioned in simple terms, with friendly risk-avoidance alerts and helpful hands, pointing toward the nearest sources of realtime help.

Then came useful tiers, where all the buildings and storefronts were marked with essential information about location, products and accountability codes. Or you could zoom-magnify anything that caught your interest. On Strata Twelve through Sixteen, everyone in sight wore basic nametags, or ID badges identifying their professions. Otherwise, reality was left quite bare.

Up at Stratum Thirty, it suddenly became hard to see, as the air filled with yellow and pink and green notecards—postits—that floated around every shop and streetcorner, conveying anything from meet-me memos to traffic curses to caustic commentaries on a restaurant’s cuisine. And prayers.

Mei Ling experimented by raising her hand and drawing in the air with a finger. As the specs followed her movements and responded, a brand new postit appeared, bearing the name of her husband. Peng Xiang Bin. She then added characters that constituted an incantation for luck. When Mei Ling brought her hand down, the tiny virt fluttered away and seemed to fade into the maelstrom. This was what made Stratum Thirty almost useless for anything but prayer. Or curses. All visitors could see everything that was ever left there . . . which meant no one could see anything at all.

Do people really live like this all the time? Wading through the world, immersed in pretend things? She could see how this kind of tool would be useful on occasion. But she could take off the specs at any moment. What about those who got fitted with contaict lenses, or even the new eyeball implants? The very thought made her shudder.

At level Forty, a lot of walls disappeared. Most of the buildings seemed to go transparent, or at least to depict animated floorplans concocted from public records. These ranged from detailed inner views—of a nearby department store—with every department and manequin appearing eager to perform, all the way to many floors and offices that were blocked by barriers, in many shades of gray, some of them with glowing locks. You could look inside—if you had some kind of key.

Strata 50 through 100 were for advertising, and at one point Mei Ling quailed back, as all the normal dampers vanished. Messages and come-ons seemed to roar at her from every shop front and store-awning. Blasts of sound rocked the spec-rims till they almost flew off her ears, and she had to concentrate hard just to blink her way out of there! Fortunately, most advir-levels were selective, even polite. Stratum ninety, for example, offered her discreet, personalized discounts on baby formula and inexpensive shoes, plus a special on a massage/makeover in that shop over there, at a price that seemed so reasonable, she could nearly afford it! The proprietor would even fetch a nanny-grandma in five minutes to watch the baby.

But no. Not with the sudden comfort of Bin’s paycheck so new and unaccustomed. Maybe another time.

Anyway, Mei Ling realized that she had been idly following the gaggle of youthful demonstrators, awkwardly picking her way across each avenue, while making sure that Xie Xie’s bottle didn’t fall to the filthy sidewalk. A pedicab driver shouted and Mei Ling jumped back, heart pounding, especially on realizing—she had lost track of where she was, in an unfamiliar part of town.

It is not possible to get lost wearing specs, she reminded herself. Level Ten would always provide a handy guide arrow, aiming you down the quickest path to anywhere in the world you wanted to go.

That is, if I knew where he was right now.

If he weren’t swallowed up by the secret intrigues of powerful men.

Continuing to scroll upward through slices of the world, she saw the level counter skip whole swathes of virspaces where she wasn’t allowed. You had to be a member of some affinity group to see those overlays.

I recall that Stratum Two Hundred and Fifty was for street gossip.

Only instead, S-250 populated the boulevard with cartoon figures—colorful, high contrast versions of people walking by, with speech balloons floating above many of their heads. Some balloons were filled with written words. Others—nothing but gray static. Oh, yes. This layer is for eavesdropping, if people don’t care enough to set up a privacy block. The gossip level must have been S-350.

Mei Ling found she enjoyed this chance to recover her old knack of blink-navigation, even though the baby was starting to get crabby, and her shoulder bag full of purchases was heavy, and really, maybe it was time to set off for home.

At least she no longer had to ratchet through the layers linearly, one at a time, like a complete neo. A simple preference choice now let her view the virld as a three dimensional spiderweb of jump choices, stretching in all directions. It took just a look, a squint and wink to hop to the level she wanted, where—

—postits of another kind flurried about. Voice, text and vid twips kept zooming in, attaching themselves to the youthful demonstrators, sent by anonymous bystanders, or even people who were viewing the event from thousands of kilometers away.

smart aleck kids, one note commented. as if their generation knows a thing about struggle and revolution

Another groused. back in 2025 I was in the New Red Guards we really knew how to light up a street ruckus! wore masks that screwed facial recog cams . . .

Yep. Street gossip. Finally, Mei Ling found something related to her interest—a simple query-note.

WHAT are they demonstrating about?

Which had an even simpler comment-addendum attached to it, anonymously recommending a clickover to:

0847lals0xldo098-899as0004-hahd-dorad087

She blinked her way to that address . . . and found the street scene transformed once again.

The young people now wore costumes in seventeenth century Shun Dynasty style, like followers of the great rebel leader Li Zicheng. Mei Ling recognized the Peoples’ Militia fashion from a historical romance she had watched. Because he sought to free the masses from feudal oppression, Li Zicheng was officially proclaimed a “hero of the Chinese masses” by Chairman Mao himself, a century ago. Still, I’m surprised that today’s rich and powerful lords of the Beneficent Patriarchy approve of people invoking his memory, she thought.

Up and down the street onlookers and pedestrians were also transformed, mostly by replacing their 21st Century streetwear with shabby peasant clothing from the 1600s. Not exactly flattering, but she got the implied message. We’re all clueless plebians. Thanks a lot.

She was tempted to try accessing a nearby cam-view, and look down upon herself transformed, but decided—it really wasn’t worth the effort. Anyway, she could finally see the answer to her question. Over the demonstrators’ heads, there now floated huge banners that matched their gaily-colored costumes.

That Which Is Not Specifically Forbidden*

is Automatically Allowed!

* (for just cause, by a sovereign and rightful legislature)

Mei Ling had heard that phrase before. She strained to remember—and that effort apparently triggered a search response from the mesh-spectacles. She winced as a disembodied voice started lecturing.

“Eighteen years ago, human rights groups demanded that this principle be enshrined in the famous International Big Deal, firmly and finally rejecting the opposite tradition long-held by a majority of human societies, that anything not specifically allowed must be assumed to be forbidden.

“Activists called this change in tenets even more important and fundamental than freedom of speech. some social psychologists have since deemed the reform futile, since it concerns a deepseated cultural assumption, rather than a point of law.

“In return for granting this principle, the world’s professional guilds and aristocratic powers were able to win formal acceptance of the estates . . .”

Mei Ling finally succeeded in cutting off the pedantic lecture, which wasn’t much help anyway. The same problem held for another pair of student virbanners, waving in an ersatz wind—

All human beings—even leaders—

are Inherently Delusional

and

Criticism is the Only Known

Antidote to Error

Of course, there were ways to follow up. An infinite sea of definitions, explanations, and commentaries, even suitable for a poorly educated woman. So, was the demonstration meant to lure onlookers into study? Or might all this vagueness be the real point of the youths’ demonstration? Messing with peoples’ heads, aggravating their elders with the ever-elusive obscurity of their protest?

Whatever the answer—Mei Ling had lost patience.

Chinese people used to be forthright, known for saying what we mean and meaning what we say. Only now that we are the world’s greatest power, are we slipping into more classic Asian ways? Masking our motives and goals behind layers of tiresome symbolism?

Anyway, she thought with some satisfaction, people will forget about these kids just as soon as the Artifact Conference resumes.

Moving against the nearest building wall, she concentrated on blink-navigating away from this weird vir level, aiming for the blessed simplicity of Stratum Ten, where a friendly yellow arrow might start guiding her back to the sea wall separating these rich Shanghai citizens from the dark, threatening tides. And from there to the water taxi dock, where she might hitch a ride—

Abruptly, something popped into her foreground. A beckon-symbol, informing her that a live-message was coming in. It flashed with urgency . . . and the striped colors that denoted official authority.

With sinking realization, she thought—it is the Police. Or much worse.

Under Heaven’s Gaze

A bit nervously, Mei Ling looked toward the pulsating icon, and winked to accept the phone call. What then ballooned, just above the surrounding traffic and pedestrians, was a face and upper torso—stern-looking and male—wearing a uniform.

“Piao Mei Ling, I am Jin Pu Wang of state security. I had to exert some time and effort to locate you.”

It came across as a rebuke.

“Fortunately, I was able to lay a sift-mesh that found your iris pattern once you began using this pair of Overlay Spectacles. It is important that we meet right away, to discuss your husband.”

Mei Ling felt her throat catch and she stumbled. Little Xie Xie, who had drifted off to sleep, grunted in his sling carrier and clenched his little fists.

“What . . . what has happened?”

She had to utter the words loudly, in order to be certain the specs would hear. A couple of passersby glanced at her in surprise, clearly miffed that anyone would be so rude. Holding a phone conversation loud enough to bother others in a public place? Outrageous!

Lacking even a throat microphone, however, Mei Ling had little choice.

“What news do you have of him?”

“No news,” the official answered. “I want to discuss with you ways to rescue him from the bad company he has fallen into. How to return him to the embrace of his beloved nation.”

Mei Ling felt a wave of relief, having feared they had bad tidings. Moving to face the nearest wall of grimy bricks, she answered in a lower tone of voice.

“I . . . already told your other officers everything I know. They verified my truthfulness with machines and drugs. I don’t see what I could possibly add.”

Mei Ling said it with no sense of regret or betrayal. Bin had said that it would be best to cooperate fully, if authorities came asking questions. Nothing she knew should enable them to find him, after all. Anyway, at the moment of his departure with the penguin-robot there had been no reason to believe that he was doing anything against the law.

“Yes, well . . .” the man looked briefly to one side, nodded, and looked back toward Mei Ling. Making her wonder what viewpoint he was using to see her. Though his image appeared on the inner surface of the specs, he was probably using a pennycam on that lamppost over there.

“We would like to speak to you again,” he explained. “It should only take a few minutes to clear up one or two discrepancies. After that is done, we will provide you with a ride to your home, courtesy of the state.”

Well. That actually made the prospect rather tempting, instead of trudging across East Pudong District carrying both her purchases and an infant who seemed to grow heavier with each passing moment.

“I have the contact code for Inspector Wu, who interviewed me last time. Shall I call her to arrange an appointment?”

Jin Pu Wang shook his head. “No. My department cannot spare the time to go through local officials. These questions are relatively minor, but they must be clarified at once, on orders from the capital.”

Mei Ling swallowed hard.

“Where do you want me to go?”

“Let me give you the coordinates of a nearby police station. The officers will put you in a comfortable meeting room with refreshments. I will send my holvatar to meet you. Then a car will take you home.”

Her specs immediately reset to Stratum Fifteen. Some code numbers quickly scrolled by and a virtual arrow materialized in front of Mei Ling, indicating that she should proceed to the end of this block and then turn left.

“I hope that Inspector Wu was not unhappy with my level of cooperation,” she said, while starting to walk in that direction.

“Do not worry about that,” the policeman reassured her. “I will see you soon.” His face vanished from her view.

For some distance Mei Ling followed the guide arrow automatically, steeped in lonely gloom. It was not a good thing to draw attention from the mighty authorities—even though Inspector Wu and her technicians had been polite and unthreatening during the questioning session, with their big, shiny hovercraft bobbing next to the little shorestead she had built with Xiang Bin.

Of course, they wanted to know all about the glowing stone. The one so similar to the emissary artifact in Washington. When asked why her husband’s discovery wasn’t reported to the government, Mei Ling explained with complete honesty they feared what happened to the crystal’s earlier owner.

“Lee Fang Lu fell victim to the paranoia and corruption of that time,” Inspector Wu had conceded. “But those who executed him later suffered the same fate during the reforms that followed the Zheng He disaster and the Big Deal. It’s too bad your husband did not take that into account and bring his find to us, and benefit the nation.”

When Mei Ling protested that she and Xiang Bin had nothing but love and reverence for the great homeland, Inspector Wu seemed mollified. “It’s all right. We’ll find him, I’m sure. He will have ample opportunities to demonstrate his loyalty.”

With that reassurance the police investigators departed, leaving Mei Ling woozy from drugs and neural probing. They even let her keep the penguin-robot’s stipend, the modest comfort and freedom from want that Bin’s absence had earned.

Might other officials, even higher, feel differently? Mei Ling felt her nerves fray as she drew near the assigned coordinates. But what choice did she have, other than to do as authorities asked? They knew where she lived. They could cancel the shorestead contract, costing the small family everything.

The guide arrow indicated another turn—to the right, this time—through a little retail alley. Responding to her skeptical squint, the spectacles presented a map overlay showing it to be a shortcut to the Boulevard of Vivacious Children’s Mythology, famous for its robotic sculptures of characters from Journey to the West, to Snow White, to Fengshen Bang.

Perhaps I will get to glimpse Pipi Lu or Lu Xixi or Shrek, along the way, Mei Ling hoped. But first, to get there . . .

She peered down the dim passage where old fashioned, open-faced shops seemed to drop back in time, to an era when this sort of street could be found in every village and town. Especially before the Revolution, when four generations of a family would toil alongside each other, sharing cramped quarters over their store, while scrimping for one of the sons to get ahead. A traditional eagerness for advancement that she once heard cynically satirized in an ancient proverb.

First generation — coolie; save money, buy land

Second generation — landlords

Third generation — mortgages the land

Fourth generation — cooley

Weren’t those nasty cycles supposed to be over by now? Finished certainly by the Revolution’s centennial year? Mei Ling coughed into her fist, knowing one thing for certain. Her son would be smart, educated, and she would teach him to be wise! If we can get past trying times . . .

She started forward into the narrow street—when a voice interrupted.

“Honored mother, you should not go there.”

Mei Ling stopped, glanced to both sides, and realized that she was the only clearcut mother in sight. Peering toward where the words had come from, she found a figure sitting deep within a shadowed doorway. Her cheap specs tried to do image enhancement—though not very well—revealing a child perhaps twelve years old, wearing a faded green parka and some glasses that had been repaired with wire and generous windings of tape.

“Were you talking to me?”

Something about the youngster was odd. He rocked back and forth slightly and, while staring toward Mei Ling, his gaze slipped past hers, as if his eyes kept focusing on some far horizon.

“Mothers are the source of all problems and all answers.”

Spoken in flat tones, it sounded like some kind of aphorism or saying. She now saw that he had bad teeth, a serious underbite, plus a rash along one side of his neck that looked ongoing. Clearly something was wrong with the boy.

“Um . . . pardon me?”

He stood and shuffled closer, still not looking directly at her face.

“Jia-Jupeng, your mother wants you to come home to eat.”

Now that expression she had heard before. Something her parents’ generation used to say to one another, to get a laugh, though Mei Ling never understood what was funny about it. Suddenly, she realized—this child must be a product of the autism plague. In other words, a modern parent’s nightmare. Reflexively she turned a hip, moving her body to protect little Xie Xie, even though the defect wasn’t contagious.

Maybe not the disease. But luck can be.

She swallowed. “Why did you say that I shouldn’t go down the alley?”

The boy reached toward her with both hands. For a second Mei Ling thought that he wanted to be picked up. Then she realized—he wants my spectacles.

Mei Ling felt one part of her try to pull away. After all, the policeman was someone she did not want to make impatient. Yet something about the boy’s calm, insistent half-smile made her instead bend over, letting him take the cheap device off her head. The smile broadened and his eyes met hers for less than a second—apparently as much human contact as he could stand at a time.

“The men,” he said, “aren’t here to buy soy sauce.”

“Men?” She straightened, glancing around. “What men?”

Appearing to ignore the question, he turned the specs around, examining them, taking evident care not to let the scanners look closely at his own face. Then, with a laugh, he tossed them into a nearby garbage bin.

“Hey! I paid good—”

Mei Ling stopped. The boy was offering his own pair of glasses, with stems repaired by wire and tape.

“See them.”

She blinked. This was crazy.

“See who?”

“Men. Waiting for a mother.”

Without specs, he seemed to have a pronounced squint. The voice barely rose or fell in tone. “Let them wait. Mother won’t come. Not today.”

She didn’t want to reach for the glasses. She didn’t want to take them, or to turn them around, or to slip the stems over her ears. Especially Mei Ling did not want to find out who or what the child meant by “the men.”

But she put them on and saw.

Now the alley was illuminated, down a tunnel that seemed to penetrate through the sunless gloom, pushing by several shops where tinkerers reforged metal jewelry, or made garments out of real (if illicit) leather, or where one family bred superscorpions for both battle and the table. The glasses had looked simpler and more primitive than hers. They weren’t. She could make out the texture of the jujube fruits that a baker was slicing for a pie, and somehow their smell as well.

Symbols swirled around the tunnel’s rim—many of them Chinese, but not all. They arrayed themselves not in neat rows or columns, but spirals and surging ripples. She tried to look at them. But this view was not hers to control.

Perspective suddenly jumped, flicking to some pennycam that was stuck to a wall halfway down the alley, just above a little, three-wheeled tuktuk delivery van. The camera zoomed past the truck, whose motor was running, into a small shop where Mei Ling saw an elderly woman hand-painting designs on half finished cloissone pottery. The artist seemed nervous, trembling and biting her tongue as she bent over her work. Dipping her brush into a pot of red, it came out shaking. Droplets fell as the brush approached a fluted carafe she was working on.

Now the cam-view shifted again. Mei Ling suddenly found herself looking through the very specs that the old woman wore, seeing what she saw.

At first, that was only the tip of the paintbrush, filling in the tail of a cartoon lobster—the ancient Disney character who was a favorite companion of the Little Mermaid. Though confined by cloissone copper wire, the red paint spread a bit too far, unevenly. Mei Ling heard a muttered curse as the artist dabbed at the spillover . . . and glanced jerkily upward for just a moment.

Toward the small van, parked just outside with its smoky exhaust pipe—the driver was sitting idle with the door open, smoking a cigarette. A bundle of twine on his lap.

A jittery glance again at the paintbrush, as it dipped into the red again. Then, the camera view jerk-shifted to the left, only briefly, but long enough for Mei Ling to glimpse a second man, burly and muscular, standing well back in the shadows, shifting his weight impatiently.

Without her bidding them to, the child’s specs froze that image, amplified and expanded it, showing what the big fellow held in his hands. One clutched a bundle of black fabric. The other, a hypo-sprayer. Mei Ling recognized it from the crime-dramas she often watched. They were used by cops to subdue violent criminals. And also . . . by kidnappers.

The view then returned to that seen by the elderly pot-painter. The old lady was looking at the carafe again. Only now her brush tip was defacing the gay, underwater scene with a single character in blood red. Mei Ling gasped when she read it.

Run

Mei Ling tore off the specs, suddenly sweating, her heart beating in terror, certain beyond any doubt that this trap had been lain for her. But why? She was cooperating. Coming in of her own free will!

The answer struck home as obvious. There was no appointment at the nearest police station. That had been a ruse, with one aim—getting her to go down this alley.

Her mind whirled. What to do? Where to go? Maybe, if she went the other direction . . . kept to busy streets . . . tried phoning Inspector Wu.

“Mother comes this way,” said the boy. He took her hand, tugging. “Cobblies are all over the place and bad men too. In thirty-eight seconds they will know and give chase from all sides. But we know how to take care of mothers.”

She stared at him, resisting. But the child smiled again, making another flicker-brief eye-contact. “Come,” he insisted.

“Time to run.”

Then the moment of decision was in her past. They hurried together, away from that alley of danger, along a street that only a short time ago had seemed full of fantasies. Only now—she knew—it also contained dangerous eyes.

The Ten Million-Eye Gaze

Of course they should be able to track her every movement. The men who were pursuing Mei Ling obviously knew their way around the mesh. It would take little effort or expense to assign software agents—pattern sifters and face-recognizers—to go hopping among the countless mini-lenses stuck on every doorpost, lintel, and street sign, searching for a poorly-dressed young woman with a baby, dragged through prosperous Pudong by a strange little boy.

From the start, she expected them to catch up at any moment.

Only . . . what will they do if they corner us on a busy street? Grab me in front of hundreds of witnesses? Perhaps that is why I’ve been free to run for a while. They are only awaiting the right moment.

At first, while fleeing, she kept turning her head and darting her eyes, scanning for pursuers or suspicious-looking men . . . till the child told her to stop in his oddly flat and rhythmic voice. Instead, he recommended looking in shop windows in order to keep her face averted from the street full of AIs. Sensible—but she knew that wouldn’t help for long.

Vidramas were always portraying manic chase scenes through urban avenues. Sometimes the poor fugitive would be chased by tiny robots, flitting from wall to wall like insects. Or else by real insects, programmed to home in on a certain person’s smell. Spy satellites and strato-zeps were called upon using telescopic cams to zoom in from high above, while sewer-otters spied from below, scrambling along the storm drains to stick out their twitching muzzles, reporting on the hapless runaway.

That ottodog, over there, routinely sniffing for illicit drugs . . . might he turn suddenly and nip at your ankle, injecting it with anesthetic from a pointy, hollow tooth? She had seen that happen in a recent holo-ainime. There were no limits to the schemes concocted by fantasists—millions of them—equipped with 3-D rendering tools, free time, and lots of paranoia. Anyway, technologies kept changing so fast that Mei Ling had no idea where the borderline was between realistic tools and science fiction.

While the child seemed confident, pulling her along through back alleys, she still couldn’t help glancing left and right, scanning reflections in shop windows, looking for bugs, wary of all the eyes that she could spot . . . and those she couldn’t.

Early in the chase, she thought about simply calling for help. That nice Inspector Wu had been both sympathetic and professional when the police came to interview Mei Ling at the little shorestead, asking about Xiang Bin and his mysterious, glowing stone. The same stone that these other men probably wanted as well.

Making that call seemed a good idea . . . only then Mei Ling realized she had no easy means to do so! The child had thrown away her new pair of overlay spectacles—they were identified and trackable, after all—just before tugging her on this zigzag chase through the back streets, ducking under one store-awning after another. But weren’t there other ways to phone the authorities? Couldn’t she just stop any passerby, and ask that person to do it for her?

Or . . . she realized later, when it was too late . . . shouldn’t it be possible to just stand in front of any city traffic light or utility pole and say “I have a matter of state security to report?”

But no. Mei Ling didn’t want to come between powerful groups. What if this was all a fight between two factions of the government or aristocracy? Such things happened all the time, and when dragons battle each other, peasants are better off ducking out of the way.

Anyway, that was exactly what the child with the shifting eyes seemed to know how to do.

First, he led her to the back door of a tourist restaurant and through the steamy, aromatic kitchen. Most of the cooks ignored them, though one shouted a question as they darted through a pantry that led to a store-room that led past a bustling loading dock to a set of stairs that continued to a makeshift bridge over an alley into the next block where they then scurried through a fab-factory that was churning out Grow-Your-Own-Goofy kits for sale at the nearby theme park.

One vast loft filled with busy people confused Mei Ling—all the workers were plugged into action suits, moving and pantomiming some kind of activity that was mirrored on nearby holoscreens. From their actions—reaching out, grabbing at mid-air and clutching non-objects, or nobjects—these were workers were clearly building something. Only at the last moment, as she followed her guide out the other end, did she realize, they are constructing molecules! Atom by atom.

Mei Ling had heard of this. Somewhere, perhaps in the glass towers across town, or else on a rich Brazilian kid’s bedroom, or at an African university, some new kind of material or device was being computer-designed, to be fabricated by a desktop prototyping machine—translating imagination into something entirely new. Only there were certain problems that the AI couldn’t handle as well—or cheaply—as a room full of poor piece-working human beings with good stereo vision and shape-sensing instincts that went back a million years.

Another rickety bridge and another fab-shop—this one making pixelated hats that flared with rocket ship images, superimposed upon Chinese flags—allowed them to emerge into a third floor hallway lined with offices—a lawyer, a dental implaint specialist, a biosculpt surgeon . . .

He’s evading all the cameras on the street, she realized. Though of course there were cams indoors, as well. They were just harder for outsiders to access via the mesh. According to the tenets of the Big Deal, even the state had to ask permission to access them—or get a court order. That could take several minutes.

Down another rickety set of stairs they ran, through a curtained niche near the back of a second hand clothing shop that catered to low-level union workers. Moving quickly along the shelves, her young guide soon pulled down a bundle and showed it to Mei Ling. She recognized the garb of a licensed nanny—a member of the Child-Care Guild.

A good choice, she thought. Nobody will think twice about my carrying little Xie Xie.

But if I pay for them, even with cash, the purchase register will post my face on the mesh, and all that dodging about will be for nothing.

An answer to that was forthcoming. While she crouched in a corner, giving her baby a suckle, the boy busied himself with a small device, scanning all over the two-piece uniform before deftly plucking out a few hidden specks—the product ID chips.

“Anybody can find them,” he said, performing some kind of incantation made up of whispers and blurry fingertips, then putting the nearly invisible specks back where they came from. “But it’s another thing to time ‘em. Rhyme ‘em. Redefine ‘em.”

Mei Ling wasn’t sure she understood, but he did make shoplifting—supposedly impossible—look easy.

The boy offered another brief moment of eye contact, accompanied by a fleeting smile that seemed labored, painful, though friendly nonetheless, as if the mere act of connecting with her took heroic concentration.

“Mother ought to trust Ma Yi-Ming.”

The name could be interpreted to mean “horse one utter . . .” where “ma” or horse was traditionally symbolic of great power. Shanghainese, especially, liked names that were brash, assertive, the bearer of which might turn out confident and accomplished. Someone who stands out from the crowd, heroic despite handicaps. It struck Mei Ling as ironic.

“All right . . . Yi-Ming,” she answered. At least that part of the name stood for the people. Another irony?

“I do trust you,” she added, realizing, as she said it, that it was true.

Little Xie Xie grumbled over being denied the nipple, wanting to keep sucking after Mei Ling judged him to be fed. Still, the infant was well-taught and made no fuss while she changed him.

Then Mei Ling ducked into the nearby alcove to change into the new garments. Meanwhile Yi-Ming busied himself with her shabby old clothing. But why? Surely they would be abandoned.

Certain that something would go wrong during all of this, Mei Ling peered over the curtain nervously as she fumbled with the clasps. Sure enough, as she stepped out wearing the stiffly starched uniform, one of the store clerks glanced over and started toward them. “Here now, I didn’t see you—”

At that moment, while Mei Ling’s heart pounded, there came a crash from the other side of the store. A large, hunch-shouldered man—clearly the janitor—was backing away from a shop mannequin, moaning and using his mop to defend himself as the clothes-modeling puppet sputtered and squealed, waving animated plastic arms, tossing sweaters, acti-pants and e-sensitized tunics at him. Every member of the sales staff hurried in that direction . . . and the little autistic boy murmured.

“Mother has changed clothes. Now face.”

He pulled Mei Ling to the back door, in the blind spot between store and alley, and motioned for her to bend over. Drawing out a pen of some kind, he used his left hand to grip the back of her neck, holding her head still with uncanny strength as he drew across her cheeks and forehead with rapid strokes. When he let go, Mei Ling sagged back with a sigh that was equal parts anger and wounded pride.

“How dare you—” she began. Then she stopped, upon glimpsing herself in the changing area mirror. He had drawn just a dozen or so lines. Their effect was bizarre and clownish—when looked at straight on. But who viewed other people that way, out on the street? When Mei Ling diverted her gaze, even slightly, the effect was astounding. She saw a woman at least twenty years older, with gaunt cheeks and a much lower brow . . . a pronounced chin, a snub nose and eyes closer together.

“Facial recog won’t recog.” The boy nodded approvingly and held out his hand for her to take. “Next stop now . . . a safe place for mothers.”

A Smiling Face

After another hour spent dodging in and out of buildings, across upper story bridges, through warehouses and workshops and university classrooms, they found themselves standing in front of a place that Mei Ling had always dreamed of visiting someday with her own eyes.

“It . . . it is wonderful,” she sighed, shifting Xie Xie’s sling so that he could see. The baby stopped his fussing, joining her in staring at the marvelous portal to another world whose only boundary was that of imagination.

The Shanghai Universe of Disney and the Monkey King loomed straight ahead across a broad plaza, its artificial mountain lined with cave-rides and fabulous fortresses, with fabled beasts and impossible forests that were always shrouded in glorious, perfumed mists. Here one might find the sort of fantastic things that you only saw on wild layers of virspace, only made palpable and solid! A mix of imagination and solidity that could only have been brought into being by wondrous blendings of art, science, engineering, and astronomical amounts of cash.

In the foreground, just ahead, loomed those famous, wide-welcoming gates of shimmering Viridium that were topped by giant, holomechanical characters who preened and posed with theatrical exaggeration. She recognized Snow White and Pocahontas and beautiful Princess Chang’e. There was wise old Guanyin, accompanied on his epic westward journey by the mischievous Zhu Bajie and his brothers, the Three Little Pigs. A flying elephant with flapping ears flew joyous circles in an overhead dance with the wondrous dragon-horse. And everyone’s favorite, Sun Wukong, the Monkey himself, capered up and down a tower decked with pennants that seemed as colorful as they were impossibly long, playing catch-me-if-you-can with lumbering King Kong.

All of those familiar figures lined the storied battlements. The central figure, topping the gate itself, was a friendly-faced icon with immense black ears and a winning smile-of-confident-destiny, flanked on either side by active sculptures of the two real-life visionaries who imagined so much wonder and gave such dreams to the world: Uncle Walt and Scholar Wu. That pair—one of them dressed in an old-fashioned western suit and the other in the Ming dynasty robes of a Confucian teacher—seemed to look right at Mei Ling, beckoning her personally, with grins and open arms.

Xie Xie cooed with delight and Mei Ling felt herself drawn . . . except that the vast plaza of concrete and iridescent tile seemed so dauntingly open and exposed. No place on Earth was under scrutiny by more cameras than this.

Surely they are watching this place.

But there was another tug on her hand.

Yi-Ming did not bother to speak, this time. His urgent meaning was clear. If they were going to cross, it had to be quickly. Now.

Mei Ling’s sense of danger mounted as they headed straight for the portal. Suddenly her new clothes and AI-fooling makeup seemed wholly inadequate, especially since there were so few people around!

“Where is everybody?” she wondered, aloud, mostly to hear someone speak words. “I know it is a weekday. But there should be more tourists, children, visitors . . .”

Indeed, only a few hundred people seemed to be crossing the barren plaza, coming to or from the underground train station and parking garage. The sparseness seemed eerie, since it was still early in the afternoon. Though it feels like days since I last slept in our little shorestead. To be honest, she missed the solitude. The constant lapping of the Huangpo tides against her home’s rotting timbers.

“All indoors,” Yi-Ming explained. “Almost two-thirds of all the normalpeople. Twelve billion, three hundred and forty two million eyes, feeding impressions to twelve billion, three hundred and forty two million cerebral hemispheres, locked inside half that many skulls—,” he ran out of breath and had to inhale. “All watching space rocks that rock space. All curious about living forever. Even cobblies want to know.”

Mei Ling only grasped part of it, but the explanation sufficed. The whole world—or nearly—had gone into immersion-mode, watching entranced whatever was going on in America. The interview with the Artifact Aliens. An event meriting worldwide greedy interest was happening—perhaps even something wonderful. Yet Mei Ling wished it had never been found and that Peng Xiang Bin had left his own discovery in the bottom of the muddy estuary.

“So many spacey stones from stoned space,” the boy intoned. He always seemed to be experimenting with possible rhymes or songs. It must be one of those unbearably strong compulsions that drove so many young people with the Disorder. Only now he also sounded sorrowful, empathizing with lost mineral messengers, perhaps more than he would with flesh and blood.

“Those buried at sea can’t see! Thousands, trapped underground, try to make a sound! Many more in space can barely make a trace. Others, locked in vaults and graves, hoping to be saved—so sad. So bored! They chose their fate, now it’s too late.”

He seemed genuinely moved by the tragedy of it all.

“Wait a minute!” She halted, abruptly. “Let me get this straight. You mean there are many of the shining, speaking stones?”Her heart whirled with hope. If it were true, then perhaps no one would be desperate, any longer, to seek her husband.

“Yes Many—numerous, multitudinous . . . Shining—luminous numinous . . . Stones—crystalline serpentine olivine . . .” he tugged at her and skipped along gaily. “But only a rare-pair Speak!”

Hurrying to keep up, Mei Ling wondered. Only two speak? The one in Washington . . . and Bin’s? Then powerful people will still hunt for him. Or use me to help find him.

But . . . how would the child know?

A backward glance confirmed her worst fears. Several black vans had just pulled up onto the plaza, as close to the pedestrian barriers as they dared, and men piled out. One of them pointed and they started straight toward her at a rapid clip.

No sense in pretending, anymore, to be strolling along—a nanny escorting two children to the park. Now Mei Ling and Yi-Ming ran! Though she wondered, what will we do when we get there?

Despite there being so few visitors, the line at the ticket window was way too long. Even if she could afford the steep entrance fees, those men would arrive long before she could pay and then reach the gate. That assumed the Disney guards would not simply stop her when the pursuers shouted. After all, they had to be from some state agency. How else could they be acting like this in broad daylight? In China?

Yi-Ming cleared part of Mei Ling’s perplexity by steering her past the ticket booth and straight toward the broad, Viridium portal, right under the shadow of scholar Wu Cheng’en. who wrote the great national classic adventure tale Journey to the West. Though five centuries had passed, it was still easily a match, in culture and excitement, for more recent stories about talking ducks and dogs and mice.

Stopping abruptly, the boy turned and dashed over to a well-dressed couple who were just leaving the park with a little girl who wore a cute, if retro, silken costume copied from the classic Sailor Moon. Her mouth was stained from sucking at the neck of a candy victim from the featured ride Vampires of the Adnauseam. Evidently both tired and spoiled in an era that much favored girls over boys, she gaped suspiciously with sugary “blood” oozing down her jaw as Yi-Ming planted himself in front of the family, chattering in a friendly manner.

None of his words made sense, at least not to Mei Ling or to the parents. But for a moment their surprise was such that they allowed him to take their hands and pat them while continuing to babble away. The girl recovered first, swiftly snarling at him with red-stained teeth.

What’s he doing? Mei Ling wondered. Does he suddenly find the situation hopeless? Is he abandoning me here and picking someone else to guide around town?

The pursuers had made it halfway across the square. Mei Ling started eyeing alternative escape paths. None of which looked at all likely while schlepping a baby. Perhaps down the escalator to the train station . . .

The tourist couple had finally had enough. They yanked their hands away and, egged on by the girl’s screech, the father pushed at Yi-Ming—who simply laughed, spun about three times, and then hurried over to Mei Ling.

“Mother. Hand.”

As the rich family hurried off, she felt him take her wrist—and suddenly the boy was scribbling on the back of her left hand with the same pen that he had used upon her face an hour or so ago. There was no apparent pattern at first, just a rapid series of dots that pricked and hurt a little, even on her calloused skin. The specks were all constrained within a square area, perhaps three centimeters on a side.

Oh, she thought, could it be? Can a mere person do this?

The men were closer now. Yi-Ming let go of her hand and started doing the same thing to the back of his own. The right hand, making Mei Ling realize that he was a lefty. Somewhere she recalled reading that it was a trait that showed up more often among autistics. The same could be said of the boy’s misaligned teeth, his poor skin and strange gait. Though she found none of those as disconcerting as she originally did.

I saw worse among the drooling oldtimers at the hospice.

“We had better—” she urged, doubting this would work.

“Yes, mother, now.”

They turned together, walking as quickly but nonchalantly as they could, while still seeming like a nanny escorting a child and a baby toward the portico where arrivals were automatically checked for tickets. Tickets in the form of temporary, coded tattoos.

Mei Ling made sure that her left hand was open to view, though she never saw the beam that scanned it. To her great surprise, no Disney guards or robots pounced on them. Instead, a voice crooned downward, as if from Heaven.

“Welcome back, Mrs. Chu and darling little Lui. My, it did not take you long to change your clothes and return from your hotel.

“Of course, your VIP pass is still valid. A robo-carriage awaits you, down the Avenue of Pandas, on your left.

“If Mr. Chu comes later, we’ll bring him to you with courteous haste.”

Hurrying onward, she and Yi-Ming crossed over the boundary, demarked by a line of tiles that gleamed Imperial Yellow, well before their pursuers reached the security cordon. There, the large men fumed and stomped, knowing how futile it would be to try entering without a pass—let alone armed. It might, in all likelihood, bring down upon them, from nearby hidden places, more swift force than they could possibly deal with. At least not without a fistful of lawful writs, signed by several courts and by many powerful men. Nor even then.

Mei Ling drew a rush of luscious satisfaction, glancing over her shoulder at their frustration, before turning all of her attention the other way, toward a cascade of wonders. Ahead of them lay a boulevard of shops and rides, buildings that seemed to be alive, and playful robotic characters who bowed or danced with pleasure when you looked their way. Little Xie Xie was charmed instantly, and so was she. Though Yi-Ming kept shaking his head, murmuring something about cobblies . . . cobblies everywhere.

Well, anyway. This certainly beat wearing puny vir-spectacles that merely painted fantasy overlays upon a mundane city street. Nor could any full-immersion game match it. For, in this enchanted place, where every flower looked ten times its normal size and even the Shanghai smog vanished under aromatic mists, all the disadvantages of real life seemed to be gone, even down to pebbles one might trip upon—and yet, the richness of reality lay all around her. It was nothing less than the world re-made!

With a VIP pass as well? Mei Ling wondered what that meant. Feeling a growl in her stomach, having missed lunch while fleeing across half of East Pudong, she hoped it would turn out to be something good, as she carried her baby and followed her strange young guide under the beaming, beneficent smile of Mickey Mao.

[End Excerpt]

From the book Existence by David Brin. Copyright © 2012 by David Brin.

Reprinted by permission of Tor Books, New York, NY. All rights reserved.

David Brin is a scientist, technology speaker, and author. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare, and the world wide web. A 1998 movie, directed by Kevin Costner, was based on The Postman. His novels—including New York Times Bestsellers and winners of the Hugo and Nebula awards—have been translated into more than twenty languages. David appears frequently on History Channel shows such as The ARCHITECHS, The Universe and, most recently, Life After People. His doctoral research predicted today’s view of comets as iceballs covered by insulating dust layers, and he has published extensively on the Search for Extraterrestrial life. Brin’s non-fiction book—The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Freedom and Privacy?—won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.

From The Killing Moon
N. K. Jemisin

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

N. K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was one of the most acclaimed debuts of recent years. Now Jemisin returns with The Killing Moon, an unforgettable tale of empire, war, and religion. The Killing Moon and its sequel, The Shadowed Sun, will be published in consecutive months in May and June 2012 from Orbit. Read on below for the first chapter.

Chapter 1

In the dark of dreams, a soul can die. The fears we confront in shadows are as reflections in glass. It is natural to strike a reflection that offends, but then the glass cuts; the soul bleeds. The Gatherer’s task is to save the soul, at any cost. (Wisdom)

In the dark of waking, a soul has died. Its flesh, however, is still hungrily, savagely alive.

The Reaper’s task is not to save.

The barbarians of the north taught their children to fear the Dreaming Moon, claiming that it brought madness. This was a forgivable blasphemy. On some nights, the moon’s strange light bathed all Gujaareh in oily swirls of amethyst and aquamarine. It could make lowcaste hovels seem sturdy and fine; pathways of plain clay brick gleamed as if silvered. Within the moonlight’s strange shadows, a man might crouch on the shadowed ledge of a building and be only a faint etching against the marbled gray.

In this land, such a man would be a priest, intent upon the most sacred of his duties.

More than shadows aided this priest’s stealth. Long training softened his footfalls against the stone; his feet were bare in any case. He wore little altogether, trusting the darkness of his skin for camouflage as he crept along, guided by the sounds of the city. An infant’s cry from a tenement across the street; he took a step. Laughter from several floors below his ledge; he straightened as he reached the window that was his goal. A muffled cry and the sounds of a scuffle from an alley a block away; he paused, listening and frowning. But the disturbance ended as sandals pattered on the cobblestones, fading into the distance, and he relaxed. When the love-cries of the young couple next door floated past on a breeze, he slipped through the curtains into the room beyond.

The bedchamber: a study in worn elegance. The priest’s eyes made out graceful chairs upholstered in fraying fabrics, and wood furnishings gone dull for lack of polish. Reaching the bed, he took care to avoid shadowing the face of the person who slept there—but the old man’s eyes opened anyhow, blinking rheumily in the thin light.

“As I thought,” said the old man, whose name was Yeyezu. His hoarse voice grated against the silence. “Which one are you?”

“Ehiru,” said the priest. His voice was as soft and deep as the bedchamber’s shadows. “Named Nsha, in dreams.”

The old man’s eyes widened in surprise and pleasure. “So that is the rose’s soulname. To whom do I owe this honor?”

Ehiru let out a slow breath. It was always more difficult to bestow peace once a tithebearer had been awakened and frightened; that was why the law commanded Gatherers to enter dwellings in stealth. But Yeyezu was not afraid, Ehiru saw at once, so he chose to answer the old man’s question, though he preferred to do his work without conversation.

“Your eldest son submitted the commission on your behalf,” he said. From the hipstrap of his loinskirt he plucked free the jungissa: a thumb-long polished stone like dark glass, which had been carved into the likeness of a cicada. Yeyezu’s eyes tracked the jungissa as Ehiru raised it. The stones were legend for their rarity as well as their power, and few of Hananja’s faithful ever saw one. “It was considered and accepted by the Council of Paths, then given to me to carry out.”

The old man nodded, lifting a trembling hand toward the jungissa. Ehiru lowered the stone so that Yeyezu could run fingers over its slick, fine-carved wings, though he kept a good grip on its body. Jungissa were too sacred for carelessness. Yeyezu’s wonder made him look much younger; Ehiru could not help smiling at this.

“She has tasted many of your dreams, Yeyezu-Elder,” he said, very gently drawing the jungissa out of the old man’s reach so he would hear Ehiru’s words. Yeyezu sighed, but lowered his hand. “She has drunk deeply of your hopes and fears. Now She bids you join Her in Ina-Karekh. Will you grant Her this final offering?”

“Gladly,” Yeyezu said, and closed his eyes.

So Ehiru bent and kissed the old man’s forehead. Fevered skin, delicate as papyrus, smoothed under his lips. When he pulled away and set the jungissa in place of his kiss, the stone quivered at a flick of his fingernail and then settled into a barely visible vibration. Yeyezu sagged into sleep, and Ehiru laid his fingertips on the old man’s eyelids to begin.

In the relative quiet of the city’s evening, the room sounded only of breath: first Ehiru’s and Yeyezu’s, then Ehiru’s alone. Amid the new silence—for the jungissa had stopped vibrating with the dream’s end—Ehiru stood for a few moments, letting the languor of the newly collected dreamblood spread within him. When he judged the moment right, he drew another ornament from his hip—this one a small hemisphere of obsidian whose flat face had been embossed with an oasis rose, the crevices tamped full of powdered ink. He pressed the carving carefully into the skin of Yeyezu’s bony, still chest, setting his signature upon the artwork of flesh. The smile that lingered on the elder’s cooling lips was even more beautiful.

“Dreams of joy always, my friend,” he whispered, before pulling away the sheet and arranging Yeyezu’s limbs into a peaceful, dignified position. Finally, as quietly as he’d entered, he left.

Now flight: along the rooftops of the city, swift and silent. A few blocks from Yeyezu’s house Ehiru stopped, dropping to the ground in the lee of an old broken wall. There he knelt amid the weeds and trembled. Once, as a younger man, he would have returned to the Hetawa after such a night’s work, overwhelmed with joy at the passing of a rich and full life. Only hours of prayer in the Hetawa’s Hall of Blessings could’ve restored his ability to function. He was no longer a young man. He was stronger now; he had learned discipline. Most nights he could perform a second Gathering, and occasionally a third if circumstances required—though three would leave him giddy and half a dream, unsure of which realm he walked. Even a single soul’s dreamblood could still muddle his wits, for how could he not exult with Yeyezu’s happiness so palpable within him? Yet for the sake of other suffering citizens of Gujaareh, it was necessary to try. Twice he attempted to count by fours, a concentration exercise, but both times he failed at only four thousand and ninety-six. Pathetic. At last, however, his thoughts settled and the tremors ceased.

With some concern he saw that Dreaming Moon had reached zenith, her bright expanse glaring from the sky’s center like a great striped eye; the night was half over. Faster to cross this part of the city on the ground than by rooftop. After a moment’s pause to turn his loindrapes and don several gold ear-cuffs—for not even the poorest man in Gujaareh’s capital went without some ornamentation—Ehiru left the old wall and walked the streets as a man of no particular caste, nondescript in manner, taking care to slouch in order to lessen his stature. At such a late hour he saw only caravanners, making the final preparations for a journey on the morrow, and a yawning guardsman, doubtless headed for a night shift at one of the city gates. None of them noticed him.

The houses became less dense once he reached the highcaste district. He turned down a side street lit poorly with half-burned-out lanterns, and emerged amid a gaggle of young shunha men who reeked of a timbalin house and a woman’s stale perfume. They were laughing and staggering together, their wits slowed by the drug. He trailed in their wake for a block before they even marked his presence and then slipped aside, down another side street. This one led to the storage barn of the guesthouse he sought. The barn doors stood open, barrels of wine and twine-wrapped parcels in plain view along the walls—unmolested; Gujaareh’s few thieves knew better. Slipping into the shadows here, Ehiru removed his show-jewelry and turned his drapes once more, rolling and tying them so they would not flap. On one side, the drapes bore an unassuming pattern, but on the other—the side he wore now—they were completely black.

The day before, Ehiru had investigated the guesthouse. As shrewd as any merchant-casteman, the house’s proprietor kept his tower open year-round to cater to wealthy foreigners, many of whom disliked relocating during the spring floods. This tithebearer—a northern trader—had a private room in the tower, which was separated from the rest of the building by a flight of steep stairs. Convenient. Hananja made way when She wanted a thing done.

Within the house, the kitchen was dim, as was the serving chamber beyond. Ehiru moved past the table with its low cushions and through the house’s atrium garden, slowing as he turned aside fronds of palms and dangling ferns. Beyond the garden lay the sleeping chambers. Here he crept most stealthily of all, for even at such a late hour there could have been guests awake, but all of the rooms’ lanterns remained shuttered and he heard only slow, steady breathing from each curtained entrance. Good.

As he climbed the tower steps, Ehiru heard the trader’s unpeaceful snores even through the room’s heavy wooden door. Getting the door open without causing its hinges to creak took some doing, but he managed it while privately damning the outland custom of putting doors on inner chambers. Inside the room, the trader’s snores were so loud that the gauze curtains around his bed shivered in vibration. No wonder the proprietor had offered him the tower, and probably discounted the room. Still, Ehiru was cautious; he waited until a particularly harsh snort to part the curtains and gaze down at his next commission.

This close, the scent of the man mingled rancid sweat, stale grease, and other odors into a pungent mix that left Ehiru momentarily queasy. He had forgotten the infrequent bathing habits of people from the north. Though the night was cool and breezy, the northerner—a trader from the Bromarte people, the commission had specified, though in truth Ehiru had never been able to tell one northern tribe from another—sweated profusely, his pale skin flushed and rash-prickled as if he slept in high noon’s swelter. Ehiru studied that face for a moment, wondering what peace might be coaxed from the dreams of such a man.

There would be something, he decided at last, for Hananja would not have chosen him otherwise. The man was lucky. She did not often bestow Her blessings upon foreigners.

The Bromarte’s eyes already flickered beneath their lids; no jungissa was necessary to send him into the proper state of sleep. Laying fingers on the man’s eyelids, Ehiru willed his own soul to part from flesh, leaving its connection—the umblikeh—tethered in place so that he could follow it back when the time came. The bedchamber had become a shadow-place, colorless and insubstantial, when Ehiru opened his soul’s eyes. A reflection of the waking realm, unimportant. Only one thing had meaning in this halfway place between waking and dreaming: the delicate, shimmering red tether that emerged from somewhere near the Bromarte’s collarbones and trailed away into nothingness. This was the path the man’s soul had taken on its journey to Ina-Karekh, the land of dreams. It was a simple matter for Ehiru to follow the same path out and then in again.

When he opened his soul’s eyes this time, color and vast strangeness surrounded him, for he was in Ina-Karekh, the land of dreams. And here the dream of the Bromarte revealed itself. Charleron of Wenkinsclan, came the name to Ehiru’s consciousness, and he absorbed the name’s foreignness and as much as he could of the person who bore it. Not a soulname, but that was to be expected. Bromarte parents named their children for the hopes and needs of the waking world, not protection in sleep. By the reckoning of this Charleron’s people, his was a name of ambition. A name of hunger. And hunger was what filled the Bromarte’s soul: hunger for wealth, for respect, for things he himself could not name. Reflected in the dreamscapes of Ina-Karekh, these hungers had coalesced into a great yawning pit in the earth, its walls lined with countless disembodied, groping hands. Assuming his usual dreamform, Ehiru floated down through the hands and ignored their silent, scrabbling, blind need as he searched.

And there, at the bottom of the well of hands, weeping with fear and helplessness, knelt the manifestation of the unfortunately named Bromarte man. Charleron cringed between sobs, trying and failing to twist away from his own creations as the hands plucked at him again and again. They did him no harm and would have been only moderately frightening to any properly trained dreamer—but this was nevertheless the bile of dreams, Ehiru judged: black and bitter, necessary for health but unpleasant to the senses. He absorbed as much of it as he could for the Sharers, for there was much of use in dreambile even if Charleron might not agree. But he reserved space within himself for the most important humor, which after all was why he had come.

And as they always did, as the Goddess had decreed they must, the bearer of Hananja’s tithe looked up and saw Ehiru in his true, unadulterated shape.

“Who are you?” the Bromarte demanded, distracted momentarily from his terror. A hand grabbed his shoulder and he gasped and flinched away.

“Ehiru,” he said. He considered giving the man his soulname and then decided against it. Soulnames meant nothing to heathens. But to his surprise, the Bromarte’s eyes widened as if in recognition.

“Gualoh,” the Bromarte said, and through the filter of their shared dream, a whiff of meaning came to Ehiru. Some kind of frightening creature from their nightfire tales? He dismissed it: barbarian superstition.

“A servant of the Goddess of Dreams,” Ehiru corrected, crouching before the man. Hands plucked nervously at his skin and loincloth and the twin braids that dangled from his nape, responding to the Bromarte’s fear of him. He paid them no heed. “You have been chosen for Her. Come, and I will shepherd you to a better place than this, where you may live out eternity in peace.” He extended his hand.

The Bromarte leaped at him.

The movement caught Ehiru by such surprise that he almost failed to react in time—but no common man could best a Gatherer in dreaming. With a flick of his will, Ehiru banished the well of hands and replaced it with an innocuous desert of wind-waved dunes. This afforded him plenty of room to sidestep the Bromarte’s headlong rush. The Bromarte ran at him again, roaring obscenities; Ehiru opened and then closed the ground beneath the Bromarte’s feet, dropping him to the waist in sand.

Even thus pinned, the Bromarte cursed and flailed and wept, grabbing handfuls of the sand to fling at him—which Ehiru simply willed away. Then, frowning in puzzlement, he crouched to peer into the Bromarte’s face.

“It’s pointless to fight,” he said, and the Bromarte flinched into stillness at the sound of his voice, though Ehiru had kept his tone gentle. “Relax, and the journey will go soft.” Surely the Bromarte knew this? His people had been trading goods and seed with Gujaareh for centuries. In case that was the source of the Bromarte’s panic, Ehiru added, “There will be no pain.”

“Get away from me, gualoh! I’m not one of you mud-grubbers; I don’t need you feeding on my dreams!”

“It is true that you aren’t Gujaareen,” Ehiru replied. Without taking his attention from the man, he began adjusting the dreamscape to elicit calm. The clouds overhead became wispy and gentle, and he made the sand around the Bromarte’s dreamform finer, pleasant against the skin. “But foreigners have been Gathered before. The warning is given to all who choose to live and do business within our capital’s walls: Hananja’s city obeys Hananja’s Law.”

Something of Ehiru’s words finally seemed to penetrate the Bromarte’s panic. His bottom lip quivered. “I, I don’t want to die.” He was actually weeping, his shoulders heaving, so much that Ehiru could not help pitying him. It was terrible that the northerners had no narcomancy. They were helpless in dreaming, at the mercy of their nightmares, and none of them had any training in the sublimation of fear. How many had been lost to the shadowlands because of it? They had no Gatherers, either, to ease the way.

“Few people desire death,” Ehiru agreed. He reached out to stroke the man’s forehead, brushing thin hair aside, to reassure him. “Even my countrymen, who claim to love Hananja, sometimes fight their fate. But it’s the nature of the world that some must die so that others may live. You will die—early and unpleasantly if the whore’s disease you brought to Gujaareh runs its course. And in that time you might not only suffer, but spread your suffering to others. Why not die in peace and spread life instead?”

“Liar.” Suddenly the Bromarte’s face was piggish, his small eyes glittering with hate. The change came so abruptly that Ehiru faltered to silence, startled. “You call it a blessing of your Goddess, but I know what it really is.” He leaned forward; his breath had gone foul. “It gives you pleasure.”

Ehiru drew back from that breath, and the fouler words. Above their heads, the wispy clouds stopped drifting. “No Gatherer kills for pleasure.”

“‘No Gatherer kills for pleasure.’” The Bromarte drawled the words, mocking. “And what of those who do, Gatherer?” The Bromarte grinned, his teeth gleaming momentarily sharp. “Are they Gatherers no longer? There’s another name for those, yes? Is that how you tell your lie?”

Coldness passed through Ehiru; close on its heels came angry heat. “This is obscenity,” he snapped, “and I will hear no more of it.”

“Gatherers comfort the dying, yes?”

“Gatherers comfort those who believe in peace, and welcome Hananja’s blessing,” Ehiru snapped. “Gatherers can do little for unbelievers who mock Her comfort.” He got to his feet and scowled to himself in annoyance. The man’s nonsense had distracted him; the sand rippled and bubbled around them, heaving like the breath of a living thing. But before he could resume control of the dream and force the Bromarte’s mind to settle, a hand grasped his ankle. Startled, he looked down.

“They’re using you,” said the Bromarte.

Alarm stilled Ehiru’s mind. “What?”

The Bromarte nodded. His eyes were gentler now, his expression almost kind. As pitying as Ehiru himself had been, a moment before. “You will know. Soon. They’ll use you to nothing, and there will be no one to comfort you in the end, Gatherer.” He laughed and the landscape heaved around them, laughing with him. “Such a shame, Nsha Ehiru. Such a shame!”

Gooseflesh tightened Ehiru’s skin, though the skin was not real. The mind did what was necessary to protect the soul at such times, and Ehiru suddenly felt great need of protection—for the Bromarte knew his soulname, though he had not given it.

He jerked away from the man’s grip and pulled out of his dream in the same reflexive rush. But to Ehiru’s horror, the clumsy exit tore free the tether that bound the Bromarte to his flesh. Too soon! He had not moved the Bromarte to a safer place within the realm of dreams. And now the soul fluttered along in his wake like flotsam, twisting and fragmenting no matter how he tried to push it back toward Ina-Karekh. He collected the spilled dreamblood out of desperation but shuddered as it came into him sluggishly, clotted with fear and malice. In the dark between worlds, the Bromarte’s last laugh faded into silence.

Ehiru returned to himself with a gasp, and looked down. His gorge rose so powerfully that he stumbled away from the bed, leaning against the windowsill and sucking quick shallow breaths to keep from vomiting.

“Holiest mistress of comfort and peace . . .” He whispered the prayer in Sua out of habit, closing his eyes and still seeing the Bromarte’s dead face: eyes wide and bulging, mouth open, teeth bared in a hideous rictus. What had he done? O Hananja, forgive me for profaning Your rite.

He would leave no rose-signature behind this time. The final dream was never supposed to go so wrong—certainly not under the supervision of a Gatherer of his experience. He shuddered as he recalled the reek of the Bromarte’s breath, like that of something already rotted. Yet how much fouler had it been for the Bromarte, who had now been hurled through Ehiru’s carelessness into the nightmare hollows of Ina-Karekhfor all eternity? And that only if enough of his soul had been left intact to return.

Yet even as disgust gave way to grief, and even as Ehiru bowed beneath the weight of both, intuition sounded a faint warning in his mind.

He looked up. Beyond the window rose the rooftops of the city, and beyond those the glowing curve of the Dreamer sank steadily toward the horizon. Waking Moon peeked round its larger curve. The city had grown still in the last moments of Moonlight; even the thieves and lovers slept. All except himself—

—And a silhouette, hunched against the cistern on a nearby rooftop.

Ehiru frowned and pushed himself upright.

The figure straightened as he did, mirroring his movement. Ehiru could make out no details aside from shape: male, naked or nearly so, tall and yet oddly stooped in posture. Indeterminate features and caste, indeterminate intent.

No. That much, at least, was discernible. Ehiru could glean little else from the figure’s stillness, but malevolence whispered clearly in the wind between them.

The tableau lasted only a moment. Then the figure turned, climbed the cistern’s rope to its roof, and leaped onto an adjoining building and out of sight. The night became still once more. But not peaceful.

Gualoh, echoed the Bromarte’s voice in Ehiru’s memory. Not an insult, he realized, staring at where the figure had been. A warning.

Demon.

[End Excerpt]

From the book The Killing Moon by N. K. Jemisin.

Copyright © 2012 by N. K. Jemisin.

Reprinted by permission of Orbit Books, New York, NY. All rights reserved.

N. K. Jemisin is a career counselor, political blogger, and would-be gourmand living in New York City. She’s been writing since the age of ten, although her early works will never see the light of day. Her work has been nominated for the Hugo (twice), the Nebula (twice), and the World Fantasy Award; shortlisted for the Crawford, the Gemmell Morningstar, and the Tiptree; and she has won a Locus Award for Best First Novel, as well as the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award. Her novels include the Inheritance trilogy, and her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Clarkesworld, Postscripts, Strange Horizons, and Baen’s Universe.

Interview: Morgan Spurlock
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Morgan Spurlock is the director of many documentary films, such as Super Size Me, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, and the new films Comic-Con, Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope and Mansome. He’s also produced documentaries for television and the web, such as 30 Days, A Day in the Life, and Failure Club.

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 the idea for your new movie, Comic-Con, Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, come about?

The whole concept behind Comic-Con, Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope came from the first visit that I ever paid to Comic-Con. I’d wanted to go for years. I’d always wanted to go. I’d seen it in the news and heard people talk about it, and I’d never, for one reason or another, been able to attend. Then in 2009 I was approached by FOX to do the Simpsons 20th-anniversary special for them. And so the minute I got that phone call from FOX, I was like, “We’re going to Comic-Con! We’re going to go there, we’re going to find Simpsons super-fans, we’re going to have like an American Idol casting, we’re going to find these people who love The Simpsons more than anything.”

And while we were there shooting, I was like, “This place is like a movie. This is a place where we can make a great film about the characters, the people.” And then later on that night I met Stan Lee for the first time. And I went over to introduce myself, to kiss the ring, you know, and I was like, “Mr. Lee, as a kid growing up in West Virginia reading your comic books, I just want you to know you changed my life. Your stories encouraged me, and gave me the drive to want to go out and tell my own stories.” And he’s like, “Oh, Morgan, thanks! I really appreciate that. Wow, I don’t even know what to say. You know what we should do? We should make a movie together. We should make a documentary. We should make a documentary about Comic-Con!” And I was like, “That’s a great idea, Mr. Lee! Thank you so much!”

And I literally turned around, and right after I met him, I turned around—this is a party for CAA. Like, his agency is CAA and so is mine. This is such this crazy, weird Hollywood moment. I turned around and Peter Micelli, who’s an agent at CAA, was standing right behind me, and he goes, “How was it meeting Stan?” And I was like, “It was amazing. We want to make a movie about Comic-Con.” And he’s like, “That’s a great idea. You should meet my client who’s coming into town tomorrow.” Cut to tomorrow, as I was having breakfast with Joss Whedon at his hotel, told him the whole idea—“We want to make a film, follow people into Comic-Con.” And Joss was like, “I love it. I’m in.” So literally in like 48 hours we had Joss and Stan on board to make this movie, which a year later we were shooting. It was crazy.

Would you consider yourself a comic book geek currently?

Yeah, I buy and read probably more comics now than I did as a kid. You know, people say, “The comic book business is dying.” And I’m like, “No, the book business is dying.” I mean, I don’t know many people who go and buy physical paper comic books anymore, but since I got my iPad and got turned on to Comixology, I buy more stuff at Comixology than I ever did as a kid, just because it’s so much more accessible. So for me I think that it’s so alive and well, and it’s reaching a very different generation. I just think that people buying physical paper comics isn’t happening.

What are some of your favorites that you’re reading right now?

I loved Irredeemable and Incorruptible, which was the amazing Mark Waid series. I’m catching up on that, because I got behind—while we were in production and shooting—on that whole series, so I’ve got the last batch of that to get through. DMZ. I got lost in that series while we were shooting the film, so I’m catching up on DMZ. Those are probably the biggest two. And I just started rereading, once I heard they were starting production on the film of it, was Y: The Last Man. So I just started rereading that again. I loved that the first time, and the idea of them making that into one movie I’m so distraught over, but we’ll see what happens.

Unlike your previous movies, you don’t appear in this one at all. Why did you decide to take that route?

Comic books succeed—and have succeeded for decades—because of fans, because of people who love them. Big, giant Hollywood genre movies succeed because of fans. Video games have become more popular over the years because of fans. So for me this is a film that was very much rooted in those people—in their passions, in their desire, their obsessions. And so I really wanted to tell the story through these people that make Comic-Con what it is, and as much as I am a fan, I don’t go to Comic-Con every year. The first time I went was for work, so for me making a movie about me making a movie about Comic-Con just didn’t make sense. It needed to be about these people. And when we first started going out and pitching the film to the investors, we were going to investors saying, “Here’s what the film is, here’s who we’re going to tell the stories about.” And they were like, “Yeah, we love it, this is great. We’ll give you the money, but we want you to be in the film.” And I was like, “Well, then we’ll find the money somewhere else, we’ll find a different investor, because that’s just not what the movie is.” And it was the best choice, because ultimately it’s a movie about those people, and I meet people all the time who are like, “Yeah, I haven’t really liked any of your films.” And I’m like, “Well you’re going to love this one. You’re going to love this movie, because I’m not in one frame of the whole thing!”

How did you go about selecting the people who actually do appear in the movie?

We were trying to figure out, “Who are the archetype characters that we want to follow? Who are we going to chase after?” Stan I think was the first person to suggest focusing on the portfolio review, telling that story, which was a great idea. Joss brought up the masquerade, saying, “Have you ever seen that?” He said the costumes that people make are amazing. Harry Knowles was the one who suggested Chuck Rozanski, because Harry Knowles’ father had a comic book shop and was one of the people who was instrumental in creating the Texas Comic-Con, and so he’s known Chuck for years. So he says, “Oh my gosh, if you want somebody who knows everything there is to know about the comic book business, you’ve got to get Chuck.”

Then what we did is we created this kind of casting call that we sent out to comic book shops, that we sent out to fan sites, that Harry blasted out through Ain’t It Cool News, and we ended up getting about 2,000 submissions from people all around the world. These are emails, videos, a lot of whom were like, “Yeah, get me a ticket, I’ll come.” Which is not what the movie is, we didn’t get any of these people tickets. The only people we wanted to follow were people who were already coming. Like, if you’re already coming, we want to hear your story. What is your story? Tell us why you think you should be a part of the film, and then we just started whittling it down. Holly Conrad was the very first person that we cast in the film. We got her video, and I was blown away. She represented for me kind of the litmus test, the bar that we should be measuring all the rest of our submissions by, and she’s amazing.

She’s “The Designer”?

She’s the costume designer, yeah. She’s the girl who’s preparing for the masquerade and making the costumes from Mass Effect out of her garage—her and her friends. It’s her third masquerade. You’re only allowed to compete in the masquerade at Comic-Con three times, and then after that you’re considered a professional costume designer, so this is kind of her swan song competing as an amateur. So she really wanted to win. She was really going at it to make sure that she could give it her all and use this as her final calling card to try to break into the costume business in Hollywood.

Her costumes were absolutely amazing, all the animatronics that she’s doing in her garage. Did you get any sense of how she was able to do that?

Well, she’d worked at costume shops, and worked with other designers before. And her friends, the people that are building this stuff with her, had also been people who’d worked at, like, Henson, and a couple of the other animatronic places that design stuff for theme parks, so they are this incredible group of creative friends that had been doing this for a while. They just all come together to realize her vision for this game and these characters, and, I mean, it’s remarkable. They are super-talented.

“The Soldier,” too, was definitely not your stereotypical idea of a comic book artist. How did he get involved?

The soldier, yeah. Eric heard about the submissions, he’d sent us his video, said he wanted to go to Comic-Con, and what was interesting about Eric was he didn’t even want to go to Comic-Con. He has a friend on the army base with him who’s a professional power lifter. This is a guy who trains and competes in power lifting competitions, and years ago, this power lifter friend of his, who was getting bigger, getting stronger, but would never enter a competition, a friend of his said, “You know what? You just need to do it. You just need to take this chance.” So his friend bought him an entry and a plane ticket to a power lifting competition and made him go.

So the power lifter friend said to Eric, “You’ve been drawing for years. I’ve seen your stuff, you’re amazing. You have to do this.” So his friend bought him a ticket and a pass to Comic-Con, and that’s the only reason Eric was going. Eric never would have forced himself to do it had the friend not done that. So as soon as his video told the story, we saw his work, and I was just like . . . the story of Eric, with his wife and his kids, and he’s in the Air Force, I mean, there was just something amazing about him, and the guy is an incredible talent. And now since the film has gone on to do multiple covers for Arch Enemy Comics and a few other places. I mean, the guy is really talented.

When the movie eventually comes out on DVD, are those videos that the people submitted actually going to be on there, available as extras?

They won’t be in the first pass of the DVD, because we could only find one or two. Holly’s is actually online. If you do a search on YouTube for “Holly Conrad Comic-Con submission video,” you’ll see her video on the Internet. When she submitted it to us, there were no hits on it, and literally within the first day it had gone over a thousands hits. It was amazing how many people had watched it.

What were the logistics like for making this movie? How many people were involved, cameras, stuff like that?

Yeah, it was massive. It was the biggest movie I’ve ever made. There’s so much to manage, because how do you capture Comic-Con? How do you capture that huge event? So we were following basically 10 characters into Comic-Con, and so we had 15 film crews, one camera for each one of those crews, and an additional five crews that were shooting panels or signings or B roll at any given moment. Within each of those crews, there was a second camera that can either be taken to a different location or used within that shoot. So during the shoot, there were usually anywhere between 15 and 28 cameras that were shooting over the course of the five days of Comic-Con. There was a crew of 150 people that we had working on the film, everything from the sound and camera crews to production assistants, to location assistants, to talent scouts, people who are going around the floor trying to basically find people, publicists that were helping to arrange the interviews that were shooting on the sites. You know, gaffers, grips, electrics, it was huge.

And data wranglers. The thing is we were shooting about 100 hours of footage a day, so we’re having to wrangle all that footage at the same time so we can watch it every night. So every night, when we were done shooting, I would go down with the data wranglers, we would watch footage from select cameras—basically the ones that were following our characters. We weren’t even watching B roll, we were literally just watching everything that was surrounding all the characters, making sure that whatever key story points there were, the key things that happened that day, we followed up on the next day, we knew what was happening when. I mean, it was a massive, massive undertaking.

So you ended up with something like 300 hours of footage then?

We ended up with about 650 hours over the course of the week.

So what was it like trying to cut that down to an hour and a half?

You start separating things into kind of pods when you do that. So first off you edit each character’s story—it’s kind of its own little short film, starting off at their home, here they are at the con, then they go home—beginning, middle, and end of everybody’s journey along the way. Then we go through all the celebrity interviews—the directors, the actors, the comic book creators, the people who work for the Dark Horses of the world. We start going through there and mining for the best sound bites that deal with different types of story points along the way, whether it’s about Comic-Con itself, it’s about fans, it’s about the future. You start breaking them into categories. Same thing with the fans. We do the same thing with all of their site footage, and then you put all the B roll in a bin. You know, where all the B roll shots, daytime, nighttime, transitional, character shots, panel shots, all that stuff that will start to fill things in. Then you start to weave it together with your editors, and we had an amazing editorial team. You make a longer cut that’s like three hours, you whittle that down to about two and a half, and you whittle that down to two. Then we just start knocking it down to 150, 145, until we got around where we are, where we’re looking at about an hour and a half movie.

Do you want to mention some of those celebrity interviews that you did?

You know, Stan Lee and Joss Whedon were in the film, because these guys are very much the quintessential idea of who’s at Comic-Con. They are like the old and new guard of that place. Then you have folks like Guillermo Del Toro, Kevin Smith, Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Seth Green, Matt Fraction, Joe Quesada. The list goes on and on. It’s huge. I think we interviewed 85 people, and that’s just people who work in the comic book world. Kenneth Branagh we interviewed, because he was there launching Thor at the time.

Did you have a standard set of questions you asked them all?

Yeah, we asked them all about why do they come here? What do they think of it? What was their first experience like? What’s the craziest thing they ever saw? Eli Roth talks about the first time he ever took a pee next to a stormtrooper and a Klingon, you know, that’s something you can only ever see at Comic-Con. There’s something amazing about a lot of these stories that came out, and that’s the thing is all these interviews . . . you were talking about the DVD. Each interview with each one of these people was like 20 minutes long. Kevin Smith’s interview is I think even longer, we might have even talked to him for half an hour, which you then cut down to ultimately being about a minute of the movie, sometimes less. So there’s all of this great footage that also will be expanded into the DVD, because it’s amazing.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the documentary Trekkies, but that’s gotten a lot of criticism for coming across as mean-spirited toward Star Trek fans. Was that something that concerned you making this movie, how to walk that line?

What Trekkies didn’t do, which I think this film does a really good job of, is humanizing everybody that’s in the movie. You know, we could have done these asides with people, like, “Oh, here’s Skip Harvey, and look, there’s his pillow shaped like Superman,” but what we wanted to make sure was that you understood why, the why behind their passion. Why does it matter to them? What drives them? Why do they care? And by doing that you really start to get invested in them and their stories, and I think that you care what happens to Skip, you want Skip to succeed, you want Eric to succeed because you’ve seen him with his family and talking about why he loves comics so much. You want James Darling and Se Young—the couple where he’s going to propose to his girlfriend during the Kevin Smith panel—you’re riding along with him, you’re nervous with him. You’re nervous with Holly as she’s competing in the masquerade to see if she’s going to win. Because by giving you entrée to these people, where you see them as real people, suddenly you are passionate about their stories, and you are going on this vicarious journey with them, and you are there with the ebb and flow of emotion, and I think that makes a big, big difference, and Trekkies didn’t really do that.

The other thing that starts to set up our film differently is it’s not just people as, “Oh, look, I’m a weirdo, and look at where I sleep.” I feel like what we do with this film is everybody in this movie has a purpose. Anthony Calderon, who has a room filled with toys, he’s a toy collector, he makes his own toys, if we’d have just left it with him with his toy collection it’s one thing, but he’s on a mission when he goes to Comic-Con to get an 18-inch Galactus. He’s so passionate about it. He is not leaving without that action figure. And even somebody like an Anthony, who’s got a wife and a kid . . . his wife doesn’t really understand his collecting, but it’s his thing. You see the passion behind him as he goes on this mission to get that one last toy, and you care, you actually care that he’s there and chasing after it, because you see that he’s actually somebody who’s grounded in reality with his family, but at the same time he’s somebody who just has real passion.

And I think that with all the characters in the film, they have a goal. Chuck, here he is trying to make a certain amount of money to keep his company open, Mile High Comics. He wants to make sure it’s going to run, he wants to make sure people can have comics forever, he wants to make sure they’re going to be able to experience them like he experienced them. That’s something you’re rooting for, you’re rooting for that guy. And I think the more you can really give people a purpose, again, that makes them real, and they’re not just spectacle.

We noticed with both the toy collector and the comic book dealer that they both seem to have spouses who weren’t 100% on board with their passion for comics. Is that something you saw a lot?

There are plenty of women at Comic-Con, there are plenty of women that are supportive of their boyfriends. I loved the couple that were like, “Yeah, we’re on our honeymoon at Comic-Con, this is what we both love.” There are plenty of people that love it and embrace it, and you’ve got to think that [Anthony’s wife] embraces it. She may not understand why he likes to collect toys, but the guy still has a room in their house called “The Room of Doom” that’s covered in toys, that he makes his own action figures in, so she’s incredibly understanding, because she’s basically let him take over a whole room of the house to put his toys in. And I think that Chuck’s wife, while she may not agree with some of his business choices, again, she’s supportive, she’s behind him, she goes, “You know what? I may not get it, but I love you, and if this is a part of you, then I love it all.”

Have you ever encountered a couple where the wife is really into comics and the husband just kind of humors her?

I think now you’re starting to see more of that, but I don’t just think it’s comics. There’s a huge female gamer culture right now. Holly I think is very representative of that, Holly and her friends. You know, Holly said something to me while we were filming with her which I thought was pretty great. She said, “You’ve got to understand, Mass Effect is to me and my generation what Star Wars was to you. These games are our trilogies, these are the games that are shaping us just like those movies shaped you as a kid.” And I think that what you’re seeing now is this generation of gamer girls like her who are incredibly good and gifted at all of these games, and are really inspired by them, even more so I think than some of the guys that they’re with, that was something that we saw. We did see a lot of gamer girls, and while their boyfriends may be into something else, they may not be gamers.

So do you think the creators of Mass Effect will ever make a prequel series that will retroactively taint the entire product?

[Laughs] Yeah, and instead of putting animated characters in, they’re actually going to put live action characters in it. And we’re going to go, “I can’t believe they put live-action characters in it!”

One thing that’s presented in the film is this idea that the actual comic book creators and dealers are starting to feel marginalized at Comic-Con. What’s your take on that?

Well, I think that it’s the reality of the business. I feel like if you sell comic books, you’re selling a business that is basically folding all around you. You know, people aren’t buying books as much as they used to. People are still buying and reading comics, but I just don’t think they’re buying physical paper comics. I’d be curious to know how many kids are actually collecting comics. Think about that. I had a closetful as a kid, kept them way into my adulthood, as did a lot of friends of mine. But is any of that being passed down? I can’t imagine that it is unless your father or mom is a super-dedicated collector. It’s just something that I feel has kind of passed. Books in general, they’re kind of going the way of the dodo. So I think they’re feeling marginalized simply because that whole side of the publishing business is vanishing.

Although in the movie, Chuck, the dealer, is really concerned the whole movie, but it all turns out well in the end . . .

Yeah, Chuck makes his money. There are still plenty of people who go there and buy books. I mean, I have yet to go to a Comic-Con and not leave with some sort of a book, because there’s always something that you want to buy, that you pick up a book and you’re like, “Wow, this is pretty amazing.” Whether somebody made some sort of limited edition graphic novel or whatever, but I always buy something. And yeah, so at the end of the day he made enough money to cover the whole trip to Comic-Con, they made a big profit, so everything was good. And Chuck is like a cat, he will always land on his feet, he will always find a way. What’s happened since the film is he has sold some of his big, high-dollar comics to continue to pay off some corporate debt, to expand the company. He’s bought a couple million more comics. He’s already bought another gigantic collection of comics from somebody. It’s amazing.

How did he end up with all those comics in the first place?

Well, the story of Chuck is interesting. He was the very first comic book millionaire. He bought this really famous collection of comics. I can’t remember the guy’s name who had it, but it had literally all of these old Action Comics, like the original Superman, all of these comics that he bought and then was able to resell, that basically made millions of dollars. So he was the poster child for the “comic book millionaire,” the guy who basically bought these books, turned them around, and made a huge profit. And then out of that he just started buying more comics, and turned that into a real, legitimate business. And I think he became the first comic book millionaire at like 19 or 20, he was really young. And then basically from there just took off and said, “This is what I’m going to do, being this intermediary for what I love, which is comic books.”

You made a whole documentary, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, about the influence of advertising in the mass media. How do you think that affects the comic book industry in particular?

The thing about the comic book industry is it’s a very niche business, still. And I think that if you’re somebody who’s not into comic books, you’re not going to get advertised to or want to buy a comic book. I think that’s just something that has to be part of your upbringing, part of your “kid DNA,” that even infects you as an adult. So if they had more advertising or more marketing, would more people read comics? Do big movies make people want to read an Avengers comic? I don’t know. That’s something I would love to have an answer to.

Are you bothered by the product placement in those superhero movies?

Well, it depends on what it is. In movies like the last Iron Man, where it felt like every other scene there was product placement, or the new James Bond film that they’re making right now, where a third of that movie—a hundred and fifty million dollar budget, fifty million dollars of that movie came from product placement—so I’m dying to see what that film looks like. Yeah, at times it can be very, very distracting.

I mean, I understand the reasoning behind it, especially after making Greatest Movie, you have to get an understanding of how all of these studios want to offset some of their risk in this gigantic investment they’re making. You know, if you’re making a $200 million movie and somebody says, “Listen, we’ll give you $40 million if you have a scene in it where you blow up a 7-11, we’ll put all those cups in our stores.” You know, you start to see why they want to do it. I don’t have a problem usually when certain things exist in the story, it’s when they literally turn them into commercials. You know, you live in the real world. People do wear jeans, they drink Coke, they drive Camaros. It’s when the scene literally turns into a commercial for said product. That takes me out of the narrative in a second.

In Iron Man 2, what were some of the most egregious ones?

Was it the first one or second one where there’s the whole Whopper scene? It was the second one where he was walking out of the Fair Grounds eating the Whopper. And then in the first one he’s eating Burger King sitting at the podium as he comes back. The second one he’s doing it again as he comes walking out, he does that right where Stan Lee’s cameo is, right where he walks by him. He’s walking out eating a Whopper right there or something. I mean, things like that just drive me crazy.

Two of the characters you follow are this guy and his girlfriend, and the guy is planning to propose to his girlfriend at the convention. I found those scenes just so awkward, and I was grimacing and squirming through so much of what happens. Did the film crew have any trouble not reacting, knowing how high the stakes were, and not giving away what was going on?

I mean, it’s one of those things when you’re in it, you’re basically doing everything you can to make sure the train stays on the rails at that moment. You don’t want to give anything away, you never want to talk about it. We never would talk about anything anywhere near or around Se Young. But that was the hard part. A lot of the movie he couldn’t even get away from her to go get the ring. He was trying to go get the wedding ring, and she wouldn’t even let him go. He was like, “I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” and she was like, “I’ll wait outside.” He was freaking out, and literally it was hours before he was able to get the ring. It was amazing.

Was there any material that you filmed that didn’t make it into the movie that you think is worth mentioning?

Oh, there’s so much stuff we shot. There are so many interviews with people that didn’t even make it in. Like Felicia Day, I love Felicia Day. The interview with her we tried to cut into different places, and it just didn’t fit with the other interviews that we had. Nathan Fillion was in the final cut up until right before the premiere at Toronto last year.

We took him right out of the opening. He had an amazing line. His interview had so many good things, but the one line that we took out was where he says, “Comic-Con is like a giant orgasm. You prepare the whole year, the whole year is just the buildup, and then Comic-Con is the release.” It was such a good line. And we had tons of those, we had tons of great moments, and interviews with people like Jerry Robinson, which was such a bittersweet interview with him. He created The Joker, and just passed away last year. There was great stuff that we had, and I think that when we start figuring out the best way to put this out on DVD, or in an expanded Blu-ray DVD, it’s just going to be a wealth of riches.

So do you think you might release a 600-hour extended edition?

[Laughs] If anybody would buy it, absolutely.

Hey, if there’s a fan base that would buy something like that, it’s comic book fans, right?

Exactly. [Laughs]

Are there any other documentaries that you think fantasy and science fiction fans should check out?

I love Darkon. I don’t know if you guys have ever seen that movie? It’s fantastic. It’s this great film about all these guys who do live-action role-playing, and it’s this amazing documentary that I think is just genius. I love that film. We talked about Trekkies. I still like Trekkies, because I love the characters that are in that film.

There are docs that I talk about all the time that are “gateway docs.” I love to clue people into gateway docs, if they haven’t seen certain movies, if they’re like, “Docs are boring, I don’t like to watch those.” You know, movies like Heavy Metal Parking Lot, Hands on a Hard Body, American Movie. These are great docs that people should watch. If you like great, funny documentaries, those are just great docs that people should check out because they’re really smart, they’re really fun. They play more like comedies than they do docs. You know, King of Kong, one of the greatest documentaries ever made. There are so many films like that that I think people should get into. And for people who like sci-fi, A Brief History of Time, the Errol Morris doc, the one that has Steven Hawking in it, is an amazing film. That’s like the über end-all of sci-fi, that doc.

One location featured in the movie is a geek-themed bar that the character The Geek works at . . .

Yeah, in Columbia, Missouri.

So what sort of geeky stuff do they have in there?

On Geek Night, they have people come there and play video games or Magic: The Gathering or whatever card games they play. They have geek-themed drinks named after characters that are in Star Trek, or Battlestar Galactica, or Star Wars. They have all kinds of different character drink names, like a Boba Fett or a Greedo, it’s awesome. And Skip still bartends on Geek Night. So, if you find yourself in Columbia, Missouri on a Monday, you have to go to his bar for Geek Night.

Is that the only geek-themed bar you know of?

It’s the only one that I know of, and it’s not every day, so it’s not geek-themed everyday, it’s just one night a week that it’s geek-themed.

Oh. We’ll have to work on that.

[Laughs] Exactly. I think there’s an H.R. Giger bar. I think it’s in Switzerland or Germany. I think that’s probably the greatest, most twisted geek bar I can think of. All the furniture, it looks like it’s straight out of the movie Alien. So you go in there and the entire bar feels like you’re in the middle of an Alien set. He designed this entire creepy bar, it’s just fantastic. So if you want to feel like you’re in the middle of a Cronenberg film as well as a Giger painting, that’s probably about as geeky as it gets.

I’ve always had this dream of actually having a geek-themed bar called “Geektopia.” The problem is, I don’t want to operate and run it, I just want to go to it.

[Laughs] I just want to drink in it. Can I do that? I just want to stop by.

Are there any updates you want to give us about what the characters featured in the film are up to currently?

Well, Holly Conrad, who is in the film, she was basically hired as a wardrobe consultant for the Mass Effect film. They’re apparently doing a rewrite on that script now, so hopefully she will be engaged in that full time. She continues to make costumes. She was hired after the scene you see in the film where she made these Mass Effect costumes, she was hired by BioWare, the company that makes Mass Effect, to make costumes for Mass Effect 1 and 2, as well to create costumes for the launch of Mass Effect 3, which was pretty amazing. James Darling and Se Young did get married. They are happily married. He’s working in film, and she’s getting ready to go back to graduate school.

Was Kevin Smith involved in their wedding?

Kevin Smith did not officiate their wedding. They did ask, but he was unavailable, apparently. Eric Henson has gone on to do multiple covers for comic books post-film, which is amazing. And Skip is still working on his own graphic novel. Probably the biggest story that’s happened since then is that Chuck has sold some of his big, high-dollar comics. I think that’s probably the bigger story that isn’t talked about in the movie.

We were really intrigued by Eric’s work. Does he have a website?

I don’t think he has a website yet. I’m going to see him at the premiere, because he’s stationed in Germany right now, he’s still in the Air Force. He’s coming to the premiere in Los Angeles, which is April 4th, and when he comes I just want to ask him if he’s started to put up a website, where’s he putting his work right now. I think that he was dealing exclusively with Arch Enemy for a while, but now he’s working with other folks. I’m curious if he’s had anybody help him establish himself on a greater level.

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

Probably the next thing that’s going to be coming up for me is I’ve got a film that I’m finishing right now that’s going to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 21st. It’s a movie that we made with Will Arnett and Jason Bateman, and it looks at the magical world of male grooming. It’s called Mansome.

What does that mean? What is “the magical world of male grooming?”

Well, I am one of the many people who have been personally involved in male grooming for the past eight years, as I’ve shaved around a ridiculous mustache on my face. So it’s me, along with other people who deal with lots of body shaving, or guys who get plastic surgery, or guys who deal with other types of perfection, if you will, in their own grooming day, people who take hours to get ready before they go outside. I’ve got two words for you for a product that you’ll see in the film, a spectacular product, and that product’s name is Fresh Balls. And the name pretty much says it all.

So this is like the “Mane and Tail” of your new movie?

I would say it’s more like the “Tail and Tail” [Laughs]

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 four-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 (November, 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: Anne Rice
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Anne Rice is the bestselling author of Interview with the Vampire and the other books in the Vampire Chronicles series, as well as The Witching Hour and the Mayfair Witches series and dozens of other novels. After a period where she focused on writing religious fiction, her latest novel is a return to traditional horror, The Wolf Gift.

This interview first appeared on 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.

Your new novel, The Wolf Gift, is about werewolves. What made you want to write a book about these creatures?

Actually, somebody suggested the idea to me, and it was at a very good time. I was working on a novel about Atlantis, and it wasn’t working, and I was very bogged down, and I really wanted something new to do. A friend of mine, an e-mail buddy, Jeff Eastin, who is the producer of the TV show White Collar, he just happened to write me an e-mail and say he had seen a documentary on werewolf legends and fiction, and that if I ever wanted to tackle that subject, he would really be there to buy the book.

And for some reason that struck home with me. I thought, “Why don’t I try that? Why don’t I try that for the first time, really give that a go, and see if I can do it in my own special way?” And I began to think about it, and within a matter of months I had the novel The Wolf Gift. It was just a wonderful turn in the road for me. I’m very grateful to Jeff. I have recently asked him if he had any other bright ideas he’d like me to tackle.

The story opens with your protagonist, Reuben, visiting a mansion called Nideck Point, which is very vividly described. How did you come up with all the details about the house?

That house is really a dream house, and it’s based on all the big houses that I have had the privilege to own and renovate in the last 15 or 20 years. I’ve lived in a series of absolutely wonderful houses, in New Orleans mainly, but also a very big, beautiful old house in Oakland before I ever went south. I don’t live in a house like that now. I live in a small writer’s retreat, and the idea is to keep things simple here. But I started to write about Nideck Point, and I just started to create a house out of all those houses that I’ve known and loved and experienced in intimate ways. And for me that house is really a character in the novel.

Most stories make being a werewolf seem like a curse, but this book really presents it as something pretty attractive. Why did you decide to take that approach?

Well, I’ve done that with vampires, and I’ve done that to some extent with witches, and with the mummy, tried to turn the whole thing around and say, “What if this was really enticing and sensuous and wonderful, and not at all the way it has been presented in the past?” So I really just carried that through with werewolves too. I mean, my vampires Lestat and Louis and Armand, they look more like angels than the feral Dracula. And they’re not repulsive like Dracula, they’re very seductive and beautiful. To me that added to the drama, to the tragic dilemma of the vampire, that immortality in the form of a vampire gave him so much power, and so many gifts, and so much charm and glamour.

I felt I wanted to explore the same idea with The Wolf Gift. You know, there had to be a seductive side to the power, of feeling yourself gain strength, and your muscles get stronger and your limbs get longer and your whole body becomes invulnerable with a soft wonderful coat of hair. And you get fangs and you get claws and you are able to really destroy your enemies without much thought. And I thought, “That’s got to be seductive. That’s got to be great.” These are all decisions authors make. Clearly, for example, the person who made the movie The Howling—or American Werewolf in London, in particular—decided to make the transformation painful. But I just didn’t see that it had to be painful. And I wanted to explore it in another way.

And another thing too that I noticed in all the werewolf films that I watched—clearly the transformation into a werewolf in particular is a metaphor for adolescence and the sexual transformation of a child. You have a basically neuter-gender person who’s on an equal footing with all other neuter-gender people, and then suddenly adolescence comes and one child turns into a woman, another child turns into a man, both experience sexuality, and sexuality really turns their world upside down. I mean, it certainly did for me as a teenager. It destroyed everything and made possible a whole different life.

And I felt that clearly the werewolf myth has been explored like that. You can see it in Ginger Snaps, you can see it in almost any werewolf movie. That really intrigued me. I wanted to explore the seductive side of that, to take a young man who didn’t have a lot of personal confidence, who was very much looked down on by those around him, didn’t take him seriously, really sort of sneered at him, and see what it felt like for that young man to gain this power, this unique ability to be a man-wolf and to live a certain powerful and secretive life that really put him quite far away from those who had denigrated him and had contempt for him.

In many ways this story resembles a classic superhero story, with Reuben fighting crime and keeping his identity secret. Do you see The Wolf Gift as an example of a superhero story?

Oh yeah, very much so. I like that idea. I wanted to explore that idea. I love graphic novels, I love superhero stories, I love all of it. I was in the front row of the first Superman movie, to see what they were going to do with that, you know, humanizing Clark Kent and Superman. And I wanted very much to do that, and it felt authentic to me. If I changed into a werewolf in San Francisco in 2011, I might go out and kill bad people too, especially if I was conscious, and my hero is conscious. He’s still Reuben when he becomes a wolf. He doesn’t just black out and go tear people to pieces at random, like Lon Chaney Jr., for example, or Benecio Del Toro in the remake of The Wolfman. He’s conscious, so he goes after the bad guys, yeah.

A number of your works have been adapted into comics, and it looks like there’s a few new ones coming out—adaptations of Interview with the Vampire and Servant of the Bones. Can you tell us about those?

Well, IDW did Servant of the Bones, and I think they did a great job. They were very faithful to the book. I liked their art. They got the darkness of it, and I really liked that adaptation. I really do. And I would love to work with IDW on other books.

I haven’t seen the Yen Interview With the Vampire yet. They’ve done it from Claudia’s point of view. They negotiated with us to get the right to do that, to make a real adaptation, another dramatic adaptation by doing Claudia’s view of the story of Interview With the Vampire, and I’m curious as to how that will work.

I think that’s quite a legitimate thing to do, and I was happy giving them the license to do that, and what I’ve seen of their art is gorgeous. It tends to be more representational and less abstract than some graphic novel art, and that’s really what I like in graphic novel art. I like representational, fully proportioned human beings and intricate detail and so forth, so I have high hopes for that Yen adaptation.

I’d love to see a lot more of my work go into graphic novels. I hope The Wolf Gift will go into a graphic novel. I’ve always loved the form. I loved it when I was a kid.

It’s interesting in The Wolf Gift how you have Reuben acquiring fiction and movies about werewolves as he’s trying to puzzle out his condition. How did you decide which werewolf books and movies you’d have him come across?

I mentioned the movies I liked and stories I liked, but there wasn’t a whole lot of material there. There is a finite end to werewolf movies. And of course he likes Beauty and the Beast by Cocteau, just as I do, but he finds it disturbing to see the beast walking around as a beast in beautiful velvet clothes and speaking, because that most resembles what Reuben is in the book. He doesn’t wear clothes, no, but he speaks, and he can make love, and can think and reason, and even sing and dance, as a man-wolf, and drive a car and use his iPod.

In particular Reuben finds that some of the names associated with Nideck Point are drawn from French short stories about werewolves. Are those real stories?

Yeah, those stories I reference are real. “The Man Wolf” is a real story by two French authors, and they do speak of a “Nideck” in there. That’s in the public domain, it’s an old story. And I thought it would be interesting that—you know, we don’t want to give spoilers in this interview—but I was playing with the idea that immortals in time would have to have some way before the internet to signal each other, and that one way they might use is by taking names that would cue to other werewolves that they were werewolves. If they wanted to meet others, and get together with others, they could take a name that was like a code name, and so some of the people in this novel do that, they take names from classic werewolf stories in order to signal each other. I didn’t really get into their motives so much in the novel. I could do that in a sequel.

The book takes a very scientific approach to werewolves, and Reuben tries to puzzle everything out in terms of the science involved. Did you do any sort of scientific research into wolves or biology in order to write those parts of the book?

I did, but one of the things I had to deal with, first off, was that DNA would be a real problem for a werewolf, unless there was some reason why his DNA couldn’t be obtained. And so without a spoiler here, I want to say that was something I had to work on. What would the DNA of Reuben in man-wolf form be like? Would it be partially animal and partially human, and what were the differences? And I do mention some of the differences, like the saliva that they first detect indicates animal saliva, because animals do have different enzymes in their saliva from what we have. Dogs do, wolves do. And I feel like the story’s better if you’re dealing with those constraints, if you’re theorizing that the change, for example, is probably hormonal, because hormones do actually regulate our growth—how tall we get, when we get pubic hair, when we get hair under our arms, when a man gets a beard, when his voice drops. All this is hormonal, and the schedule is influenced by hormones, so I really loved playing with that idea that Rueben’s transformation was hormonal, but nevertheless there’s a lot about it that he can’t figure out, and neither can the other people in the story.

I don’t have a scientific mind and I can’t retain the knowledge very easily, but I love studying the science of ghosts, the science behind near-death experiences, all of this. And I love trying to include some science in here. Because people today are naturally going to deal with this. I think any supernatural hero today, whether he’s a vampire, werewolf, a resuscitated mummy, whatever he is, is going to have to deal with the fact that scientists are going to want to catch him and study him. His big enemy is not going to be Dr. Van Helsing today, it’s going to be the doctor who wants to put him in a lab and get his blood for what it can do to cure disease or grant immortality.

What resources do you find most helpful for the science behind ghosts and near-death experiences and things like that?

Well, there are some wonderful books, and there have been for years, on near-death experiences. I read those all the time. I wish I had the authors’ names at my fingertips, but I don’t. But people have done a number of scientific studies to try to verify that when people go out of body in a near-death experience, they really are going out of body. There is no natural explanation for what they’re able to see and hear. They’re comatose, or clinically dead on an operating table, or in a morgue, and yet they’re traveling out of body and they see things that they can report later.

I just read an interesting case by a doctor in Arizona about a woman who was not only dead but her body was entirely drained of blood. She was in a phenobarbital coma, I believe, and she was being operated on, and yet she managed to hear and see and retain knowledge about people in the operating room. Many doctors went to that hospital where she had been, in Arizona, and studied the records. And they said there just is no physical explanation of how this woman could have known the faces and names of people in that operating room, and have heard them talking about things.

There are many cases like that, actually, that are very, very well-documented, and yet you have these critics out in the public arena saying the near-death experience is just imagined, or it’s really caused by pheromones, or the brain is filled with endorphins and chemicals. Those explanations don’t cover it. There are too many mysterious cases. And with regard to ghosts, with me it’s a lot of conjecture.

I’m trying to figure out what it is people see when they see a ghost. We’ve got piles of testimony from the world over that people see ghosts, that they see spirits. And it would be foolish, I think, to dismiss all that testimony. They see something. So I’m asking myself, what is it that they see? Are they seeing a subtle body that’s made up of cells that are not like the cells we’re made up of? And does that mean those cells maybe evolved before our cells evolved? I mean, I love studying it. I love trying to understand it, and I love reading books on the origin of life, and how we’ve discovered forms of life we never dreamed of in thermal vents in the ocean. All of this fascinates me, and inspires me a lot.

Do you think you might ever just write a flat-out science fiction novel with aliens and spaceships and things like that?

Oh yeah, I’m working up to it. I want to do that. I love all speculative fiction. I really do. I love the classic gothic monsters the most—the vampire, the ghost, the witch, the mummy, the werewolf. I love those the most. I grew up on those black-and-white movies at the neighborhood show with Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff. Dracula’s Daughter was the vampire movie that I saw. I didn’t see Bela Lugosi, he was a little bit too early for me. I saw him later, on the TV late show when I was a young adult. I love that the most.

But I also love really great science fiction, and I grew up reading really great science fiction. It had just come into its own as a genre in the ’40s and the ’50s. I remember my sister was an avid reader—Alice Borchardt. She was also a novelist, and wrote a number of werewolf novels, actually. Alice used to check out the science fiction books all the time from the library, and though I couldn’t keep up with her reading, I heard her talking about Robert Heinlein and Richard Matheson and all the different authors, and I read a lot of those anthologies of short stories in the fifties. And as the years passed, many of those stories turned up as Twilight Zone episodes, and they turned up on other TV shows—The Outer Limits, shows like that. And I recognized those stories and remembered them.

I just ordered all Richard Matheson‘s short stories because I wanted to revisit a lot of that material. I mean, his story “The Dress of White Silk” is about a little vampire talking in the first person, a child vampire. I heard that story when I was maybe a 10-year-old or 11-year-old child, and I’m sure a seminal seed was planted there that later resulted in me writing Interview With the Vampire, with the child vampire Claudia, so I owe Richard Matheson a lot.

The Wolf Gift is very much set in the present day and there are frequent references to iPhones and iPads. Are you the sort of person who keeps up on all the latest technology?

I keep up on some of it. I’m kind of slow. I come from the pre-internet generation, and it’s hard for me, but I use an iPhone and an iPad, and I use a computer, and I have a Facebook page with 595,000 people on it, and I post on that page every day—a lot, as a matter of fact. And I certainly do tons of research on the internet. But I’m not up on every single thing that comes down the pike. I’m a writer, and I principally use what a writer can use, and I’m really happy writing on my G5 Macintosh computer with a 30-inch monitor. I’m not one of those people who can carry a little laptop around and write a whole novel on a tiny keyboard in a cafe. I’m not that flexible. Not yet, anyway.

Speaking of Facebook, how would you say social media has affected your life and your career?

Well, I think it’s wonderful. I went on Facebook a few years ago, at the suggestion actually of the publicist at Knopf. She said, “You might want to get a Facebook page.” And I did, and then I got what’s called a “fan page,” where you can have an unlimited number of people participating on your page. And for me it’s been absolutely wonderful, because I have always loved my readership, and I’ve always loved hearing from them, and hearing what they think about the books, and Facebook gives me the ideal way to do this. I can go on the page and ask a question like: “Which of my books do you like the most and why? Which didn’t you like and why?” And I get 1,000 posts, and I get wonderful, inspiring answers. I feel very close to the people that I interact with, and I like answering their questions too. I answer maybe 10, 20, 30, 40 questions a day on Facebook.

In addition to your writing, you also post about current events. What sort of response do you get from people to that?

Well, there’s a lot of controversy on my page. I have very strong views on things. I’m an admitted Democrat, I’m an admitted liberal, I’m an admitted progressive. I support the Democratic Party because I believe in the two-party system, and we only have two, and I post a lot on those things, and there’s a lot of argument and a lot of dissension. I think the most controversial posts that I put up there have to do with organized religion and why I left it, and why I believe in separation of church and state, and how concerned I am about the attacks on the separation of church and state. And we do have religious people coming on the page and blazing away, calling me everything from “demonic” to “dark” to “full of hate and poison” for criticizing their religion.

But we have great discussions. On Easter Sunday, I congratulated the gays of the world on having come so far in their civil rights revolution, and I said, “You have really risen from centuries of oppression, and Happy Easter.” Well, boy, did that ever cause a storm. I mean, we had people flying on the page like banshees, or furies, saying, “How dare you use a Christian holiday to express good wishes to gays.” Well, we had quite an argument, and it’s still going on. People are still coming on the page and volunteering comments on this, even though the threads have now sort of gone down the page and been buried.

But the majority of what we talk about really is fiction, television, and poetry. Our critics may not believe that, but it really is what we talk about. They say, “All you ever do is post against religion.” Well, that’s really not true. I talk a lot about this being the Golden Age for fantasy fiction and fantasy film. I’ve never seen anything like it in my lifetime.

Television right now is so rich with not only fantasy drama but costume drama, historical drama—which is very similar in a lot of ways. I mean, Game of Thrones is just fabulous. I’m a great fan of that. I’ve got the books. I’m going to read them. I’m totally into the HBO series, and I’ve never seen speculative fantasies, supernatural fantasy, all of this, I’ve never seen it done with such high production values, such great actors, and such great scriptwriters and directors. You know, we always had some good fantasy films, but this is really a great time in our history.

Your son Christopher is a novelist, and he’s also gay and writes for The Advocate. Were you always this supportive toward gay rights, or did having Christopher as your son affect your attitudes at all?

He had no effect whatsoever, because I was always completely supportive of gays. I mean, from the time I got common sense in my early twenties. I was always very attracted to gay people and the gay aesthetic, if there is really a separate gay aesthetic. I found that I had a lot in common with them, and that I responded the same way to movies and musicals and singers and novels as they did. I had more in common with them than I had often with straight people.

I admired their sensual dimension, and their frankness about it. And when I wrote Interview With the Vampire, I didn’t really intend for it to be a gay allegory, but it was considered a gay allegory, and some of the best reviews of it that were ever written were by gay people who saw it as a gay allegory, and that was before Christopher was ever born, and I was very honored by all that. In fact, I would say the gays probably kept Interview With the Vampire alive, on the backlist, when it might have died otherwise. I think a lot of it was their enthusiasm for the book. It had kind of an underground life there for a while, and then when I wrote The Vampire Lestat, gay readers were among the first to embrace that book.

You mentioned that you’ve had some frustration in recent years toward organized religion and moved away from it. Could you talk about how that happened?

Well, it’s such a vast subject. The bottom line of it was I returned to the Catholic Church in 1998 in the midst of a conversion, and I thought everything would be fine, everything would work out. I was happy to be believing in God again. I was happy to be feeling that, to know that experience, and I still believe in God at this moment. But during the 12 years that I was a Catholic and a Christian, and a Christian writer, I really studied the belief system. I studied its foundational documents, the evolution of its doctrines, why it taught different things that troubled me, and things that didn’t trouble me, and I studied its history and its influence and activities in the present time. And I had to leave it.

I left it because I felt ultimately it was a very dishonest and dishonorable belief system, that it was founded on contradictions and absurdities and out-and-out lies, and that the vast majority of Christians, as far as I could see, really didn’t know their own religion, didn’t know its history, didn’t really know its foundational documents, and did not want to talk about it critically in any way, and yet these same people would come into the public arena in America and spend millions of dollars to try to prevent gay people from getting same-sex marriage in the state of California. And I was pretty disgusted by the whole thing.

I came away believing that I didn’t know at all whether religion was a good thing. I’m not sure I can say it is a good thing or that it’s done more good than evil. I think maybe it’s done more evil than good. And I think the search for God, the honest search for God, led me completely away from religion.

There’s a scene in The Wolf Gift where Reuben is staring up at the stars and musing about the nature of God, and his ruminations there almost seem to be a cosmic pantheism or something. Did any of that reflect your own feelings?

Oh yeah, very much so, and you can imagine my shock when people said that it was “Christian” and that they didn’t like it. I thought, “What? Are you kidding me?” The hero never utters a Christian word in the entire book. He has no Christian beliefs at all. And yet they’re saying this, apparently, because I was once a Christian.

One of the characters in The Wolf Gift, Reuben’s brother, is a Catholic priest. Why did you decide to include him in the story?

Reuben goes to see Jim and tells him what’s happening because he can bind Jim with the seal of the confessional. Jim is the one friend he can turn to who cannot tell anybody what Reuben has to say. He can’t tell anyone Reuben is the man-wolf. Anybody else would become an accessory after the fact to the murders that Reuben has committed, but Reuben can tell Jim and bind him with that seal, and Jim can’t tell anyone and could never be held accountable for not telling anyone. So that’s what was driving that part of the plot for me.

Reuben had a need to talk to somebody about this, and I also thought a Catholic priest was going to be an interesting person to talk about it morally. And frankly a supernatural hero that doesn’t have a moral concern about ripping people to shreds isn’t very interesting to me. If anything there’s much, much more religious talk in my vampire novels than there is in The Wolf Gift, because these questions of right and wrong have always galvanized me in my work. You know, as the novel goes on, The Wolf Gift separates Reuben from the rest of his family. He remains in contact with them in the novel, and they are a problem. He loves them and needs them, but they are also a problem. He can’t tell them what’s going down. There’s no way he can put that responsibility on any member of his family other than Jim.

There were some comments online where people were saying that they thought that Reuben felt a little bit harder to identify with because he comes from a privileged background. What did you think about that?

I was totally amazed when I read that. I mean, these are the same people who accept the fact that Louis in Interview With the Vampire is a plantation owner, Lestat is a French aristocrat, Armand has wealth, they all have wealth. I’ve never written about anybody that didn’t have wealth. And the Mayfair Witches, they’re multibillionaires. The vampires have tons of gold. And somehow these people didn’t like Reuben because he had a trust fund. I was amazed.

It would have made it kind of hard if he were working three jobs and had a family. Then if he turns into a werewolf, people are going to notice.

Absolutely. I would have become so bogged down in the economic realities of hiding his condition, I wouldn’t have known where to begin. I mean, it was very natural to me to deal with a person who was gifted and empowered, and clear some obstacles out of his path so he could deal with his transformation. But I’ll tell you, I think it’s this: I think these readers find it hard to take a contemporary character who’s rich. They can take a historical character—somebody riding around in a carriage dressed in velvet. But they’re just finding it very, very hard to deal with it in contemporary times. I mean, we’ve always had a terrible bias in American Literature against rich people. High literature in America for years has been middle class almost to the point of dowdiness. It’s obsessed with the problems of the middle class. And people who write about the rich have never had an easy time of it in American literature, unless there’s a lot of irony and criticism in their work.

Supernatural monsters like vampires, werewolves, and witches are often associated with demonic forces, which doesn’t seem to be the case in this book. Is that something you were going for?

Definitely. Even in the vampire novels, they’re not demonic. They can’t find any Devil to take orders from. They’re on this planet trying to puzzle this out just like the rest of us. And that’s why I think the vampire is such a powerful metaphor for the outcast in all of us. You know, if he’s got all the answers, if he sees the Devil, if he responds magically to garlic and crosses, well, that’s not as interesting to me as a vampire going around asking questions and trying to find answers just like we do . . . and the same with Reuben.

And one thing that was really fun for me in working with Reuben is Reuben isn’t as tortured as my vampires. I think this is one reason why some of my readers are just not liking The Wolf Gift as much as they like The Vampire Chronicles, because they like that torture. But I wanted something else. I wanted a more optimistic, strong, affirmative hero this time, who doesn’t say he’s damned, you know? Who says, “I want to find out what this is about, and what the evolutionary history is behind this—where we came from, why we do this, and what are the risks here?” I was really ready for that, some affirmation. I mean, I’ve done the regretful vampire to death in 12 books.

Do you think you’re going to write any more stories about werewolves?

Oh yeah, I want to go on with Reuben. I want to explore some other mythologies and questions and really get into all kinds of problems. I don’t know if a book is going to be a series until I’m finished with the book. I have to see what happens in my mind afterward. And I have so many things I want to do with Reuben and the other characters that I’m pretty sure this will be a series.

Are there plans to turn any more of your stories or novels into movies?

Well, The Tale of the Body Thief, with Lestat, has been optioned by Imagine, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s company. And they’re working on it, they’re developing a script right now for a new Lestat movie. And I hope they’ll be moving to a studio soon for backing and begin talking about casting in some serious way. The Wolf Gift is prompting a lot of interest and a lot of discussions, and there are meetings scheduled I think this very day in Hollywood, so maybe I’ll hear something good on that later today. I don’t know. You know, these talks can go on for years. I mean, it’s been how long since the last movie based on my Vampire Chronicles? And it’s exhausting. It takes so much time. It’s never been rapid fire for me. My works are, I think, a little too hard to interpret.

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

No, just that I’m going to go right on writing. The next novel won’t be about Reuben, but there will be a novel right after that that will be about Reuben and the wolf. But it’s too early for me to talk about my next book. It might fall apart. If I talk too much about these books and then they don’t work out, you know, I’ll wish I hadn’t. But it’s a supernatural novel, and it’s about the classic monsters, and I’m deep into it already.

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 four-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 (November, 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: Marc Simonetti

Artist Showcase: Marc Simonetti
J. T. Glover

Marc Simonetti is a digital artist living in France who has been professionally active for the last ten years. He’s done cover illustrations, concept art, and matte painting, and his work has graced the covers of books by major genre authors. He excels at capturing moments of change or tension, and displaying the world where his subjects live.

“Fortress Draconis 3” is a striking illustration, and yet you used a fairly small range of colors. What were some of your considerations with this painting, in terms of values or composition?

Thank you! Well, the small range of colors is one of the keys to making it more striking, I think.

It can be explained by the mood, but using the complementary color for the dragon just makes it pop up naturally. I tried to have the composition leading to the eyes of the lady, so that she could look more impressive than the dragons . . .

You’ve worked with major clients and illustrated the tales of well-known authors like H.P. Lovecraft, George R. R. Martin, and Terry Pratchett. Having done all of that, what’s your dream illustration job?

Well, I do love all of their books, and it’s a huge honor to me to make those cover illustrations. I’ve done a lot of illustrations based on these authors’ works, but I could spend 20 more years on their books. As a big reader, I was delighted to illustrate Neal Asher, China Miéville, and Frank Herbert, too, but I still have tons of ideas for “Dune,” “Hyperion,” or Glen Cook’s books.

I’m just an illustrator. My task is to try to show a very small glimpse of the books, what I felt while reading, and what kind of universe and mood the readers will encounter.

Which contemporary artists/illustrators are doing work that speaks to or inspires you?

The amount of talent that can be found today is huge. I do love the works of lots of great artists: Sparth, Feng Zhu, George Hull, Aleksi Briclot, Craig Mullins, Alberto Mielgo, Neil Campbell Ross, Robh Ruppel, and Pascal Blanché. There are many others, but those artists are a wonderful source of motivation and inspiration.

When you illustrate books or games that have already been published in other editions, how much influence do other artists’ interpretations have on your work?

Well, the only case when a previous artist had an influence was when I had to make all the Discworld cover illustrations. I had already read all of the books several times, and it seemed to me that Kirby and Kidby had already taken the exact right approach. Some illustrators create a sort of “reference point,” such as Frazetta, Ralph McQuarrie, or Moebius, and Josh Kirby was one of them.

Can you tell us a little bit about your education as an artist?

I studied at the École des Beaux-Arts d’Annecy for nine years, beside my traditional education (from nine years old to seventeen years old). Then I had a scientific course, which led to R&D engineering work in the industry for two years, and then I got back to art, studying for one year at the Emile Cohl school in Lyon. All the rest of my art education was learned on the internet and with my colleagues in the video game industry. I worked as a 3D background artist before switching to purely 2D illustrations.

What tools and software do you use to create your art?

I commonly use three programs: Photoshop, Corel Painter, and PaintTool SAI, along with some pencil work.

What do you do to get over creative “dry spells,” or do you ever have that problem?

When I don’t know how to start a work, I just let my hands begin the job and try to exploit all the unexpected accidents as a base. Most of the time, that gives me all I need to begin an illustration.

I also try to have a lot of references to keep on feeding my imagination.

Many of your paintings feature small figures dwarfed by the landscapes they inhabit. What role do place and setting have in how you develop a painting?

That’s right: places, landscapes, and mood are often the main subjects of my illustrations when I’m completely free. To make a character very small doesn’t influence the reader’s imagination, and representing him in a particular place already tells a little bit of his story.

For example, thinking about Batman, everyone imagines a figure on Gotham’s roofs. The fact that the figures often look dwarfed by the landscape is because of the themes of the books. In science fiction and in fantasy, everything is bigger, and this is a visual trick to render a small part of the sense of wonder.

What sorts of scenes are your favorite to illustrate?

I love all kinds of scenes, and each new theme is always welcome!

What projects are you working on right now?

I’m doing some cover illustrations. I’ve just finished Dying of the Light by George R.R. Martin for Leya Brazil and The Omen Machine by Terry Goodkind for Bragelonne Publishing. I’ve also done some cover art for upcoming video games such as Of Orcs and Men, the Game of Thrones RPG, and Realms of Ancient Wars. Shortly I should be starting work on a major, confidential long feature project.

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.

Cup and Table
Tim Pratt

Sigmund stepped over the New Doctor, dropping a subway token onto her devastated body. He stepped around the spreading shadow of his best friend, Carlsbad, who had died as he’d lived: inconclusively, and without fanfare. He stepped over the brutalized remains of Ray, up the steps, and kept his eyes focused on the shrine inside. This room in the temple at the top of the mountain at the top of the world was large and cold, and peer as he might back through the layers of time—visible to Sigmund as layers of gauze, translucent as sautéed onions, decade after decade peeling away under his gaze—he could not see a time when this room had not existed on this spot, bare but potent, as if only recently vacated by the God who’d created and abandoned the world.

Sigmund approached the shrine, and there it was. The cup. The prize and goal and purpose of a hundred generations of the Table. The other members of the Table were dead, the whole world was dead, except for Sigmund.

He did not reach for the cup. Instead, he walked to the arched window and looked out. Peering back in time he saw mountains and clouds and the passing of goats. But in the present he saw only fire, twisting and writhing, consuming rock as easily as trees, with a few mountain peaks rising as-yet-untouched from the flames. Sigmund had not loved the world much—he’d enjoyed the music of Bach, violent movies, and vast quantities of cocaine—and by and large he could have taken or left civilization. Still, knowing the world was consumed in fire made him profoundly sad.

Sigmund returned to the shrine and seized the cup—heavy, stone, more blunt object than drinking vessel—and prepared to sip.

But then, at the last moment, Sigmund didn’t drink. He did something else instead.

But first:

Or, arguably, later:

Sigmund slumped in the back seat, Carlsbad lurking on the floorboards in his semi-liquid noctilescent form, Carlotta tapping her razored silver fingernails on the steering wheel, and Ray—the newest member of the Table—fiddling with the radio. He popped live scorpions from a plastic bag into his mouth. Tiny spines were rising out of Ray’s skin, mostly on the nape of his neck and the back of his hands, their tips pearled with droplets of venom.

“It was a beautiful service,” Sigmund said. “They sent the Old Doctor off with dignity.”

Carlsbad’s tarry body rippled. Ray turned around, frowning, face hard and plain as a sledgehammer, and said “What the fuck are you talking about, junkie? We haven’t even gotten to the funeral home yet.”

Sigmund sank down in his seat. This was, in a way, even more embarrassing than blacking out.

“Blood and honey,” Carlotta said, voice all wither and bile. “How much of that shit did you snort this morning, that you can’t even remember what day it is?”

Sigmund didn’t speak. They all knew he could see into the past, but none of them knew the full extent of his recent gyrations through time. Lately he’d been jerking from future to past and back again without compass or guide. Only the Old Doctor had known about that, and now that he was dead, it was better kept a secret.

They reached the funeral home, and Sigmund had to go through the ceremony all over again. Grief—unlike sex, music, and cheating at cards—was not a skill that could be honed by practice.

The Old Doctor welcomed Sigmund, twenty years old and tormented by visions, into the library at the Table’s headquarters. Shelves rose everywhere like battlements, the floors were old slate, and the lights were ancient crystal-dripping chandeliers, but the Old Doctor sat in a folding chair at a card table heaped with books.

“I expected, well, something more,” Sigmund said, thumping the rickety table with his hairy knuckles. “A big slab of mahogany or something, a table with authority.”

“We had a fine table once,” the Old Doctor said, eternally middle-aged and absently professorial. “But it was chopped up for firewood during a siege in the 1600s.” He tapped the side of his nose. “There’s a lesson in that. No asset, human or material, is important compared to the continued existence of the organization itself.”

“But surely you’re irreplaceable,” Sigmund said, awkward attempt at job security through flattery. The room shivered and blurred at the edges of his vision, but it had not changed much in recent decades, a few books moving here and there, piles of dust shifting across the floor.

The Old Doctor shook his head. “I am the living history of the Table, but if I died, a new doctor would be sent from the archives to take over operations, and though his approach might differ from mine, his role would be the same—to protect the cup.”

“The cup,” Sigmund said, sensing the cusp of mysteries. “You mean the Holy Grail.”

The Old Doctor ran his fingers along the spine of a dusty leatherbound book. “No. The Table predates the time of Christ. We guard a much older cup.”

“The cup, is it here, in the vaults?”

“Well.” The Old Doctor frowned at the book in his hands. “We don’t actually know where the cup is anymore. The archives have . . . deteriorated over the centuries, and there are gaps in my knowledge. It would be accurate to say the agents of the Table now seek the cup, so that we may protect it properly again. That’s why you’re here, Sigmund. For your ability to see into the past. Though we’ll have to train you to narrow your focus to the here-and-now, to peel back the gauze of time at will.” He looked up from the book and met Sigmund’s eyes. “As it stands, you’re almost useless to me, but I’ve made useful tools out of things far more broken than you are.”

Some vestigial part of Sigmund’s ego bristled at being called broken, but not enough to stir him to his own defense. “But I can only look back thirty or forty years. How can that help you?”

“I have . . . a theory,” the Old Doctor said. “When you were found on the streets, you were raving about gruesome murders, yes?”

Sigmund nodded. “I don’t know about raving, but yes.”

“The murders you saw took place over a hundred years ago. On that occasion, you saw back many more years than usual. Do you know why?”

Sigmund shook his head. He thought he did know, but shame kept him from saying.

“I suspect your unusual acuity was the result of all that speed you snorted,” the Old Doctor said. “The stimulants enabled you to see deeper into the past. I have, of course, vast quantities of very fine methamphetamines at my disposal, which you can use to aid me in my researches.”

Sigmund said “Vast quantities?” His hands trembled, and he clasped them to make them stop.

“Enough to let you see centuries into the past,” the Old Doctor said. “Though we’ll work up to that, of course.”

“When I agreed to join the Table, I was hoping to do field work.”

The Old Doctor sniffed. “That business isn’t what’s important, Sigmund. Assassination, regime change, paltry corporate wars—that’s just the hackwork our agents do to pay the bills. It’s not worthy of your gifts.”

“Still, it’s what I want. I’ll help with your research if you let me work in the field.” Sigmund had spent a childhood in cramped apartments and hospital wards, beset by visions of the still-thrashing past. In those dark rooms he’d read comic books and dreamed of escaping the prison of circumstance—of being a superhero. But heroes like that weren’t real. Anyone who put on a costume and went out on the streets to fight crime would be murdered long before morning. At some point in his teens Sigmund had graduated to spy thrillers and Cold War history, passing easily from fiction to non-fiction and back again, reading about double- and triple-agents with an interest that bordered on the fanatical. Becoming a spy—that idea had the ring of the plausible, in a way that becoming a superhero never could. Now, this close to that secret agent dream, he wouldn’t let himself be shunted into a pure research position. This was his chance.

The Old Doctor sighed. “Very well.”

“What’s it like?” Carlotta said, the night after their first mission as a duo. She’d enthralled a Senator while Sigmund peered into the past to find out where the microfilm was hidden. Now, after, they were sitting at the counter in an all-night diner where even they didn’t stand out from the crowd of weirdoes and freaks.

Sigmund sipped decaf coffee and looked around at the translucent figures of past customers, the crowd of nights gone by, every booth and stool occupied by ghosts. “It’s like layers of gauze,” he said. “Usually I just see the past distantly, shimmering, but if I concentrate I can sort of . . . shift my focus.” He thumped his coffee cup and made the liquid inside ripple. “The Old Doctor taught me to keep my eyes on the here-and-now, unless I need to look back, and then I just sort of . . .” He gestured vaguely with his hands, trying to create a physical analogue for a psychic act, to mime the metaphysical. “I guess I sort of twitch the gauze aside, and pass through a curtain, and the present gets blurrier while the past comes into focus.”

“That’s a shitty description,” Carlotta said, sawing away at the rare steak and eggs on her plate.

The steak, briefly, shifted in Sigmund’s vision and became a living, moving part of a cow. Sigmund’s eyes watered, and he looked away. He mostly ate vegetables for that very reason. “I’ve never seen the world any other way, so I don’t know how to explain it better. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you, seeing just the present. It must seem very fragile.”

“We had a guy once who could see into the future, just a little bit, a couple of minutes at most. Didn’t stop him from getting killed, but he wet himself right before the axe hit him. He was a lot less boring than you are.” Carlotta belched.

“Why haven’t I met you before?” Sigmund shrank back against the cushions in the booth.

“I’m heavy ordnance,” Carlsbad said, his voice low, a rumble felt in Sigmund’s belly and bones as much as heard by his ears. “I’ve been with the Table since the beginning. They don’t reveal secrets like me to research assistants.” Carlsbad was tar-black, skin strangely reflective, face eyeless and mouthless, blank as a minimalist snowman’s, human only in general outline. “But the Old Doctor says you’ve exceeded all expectations, so we’ll be working together from time to time.”

Sigmund looked into Carlsbad’s past, as far as he could—which was quite far, given the cocktail of uppers singing in his blood—and Carlsbad never changed; black, placid, eternal. “What—” What are you, he’d nearly asked. “What do you do for the Table?”

“Whatever the Old Doctor tells me to,” Carlsbad said.

Sigmund nodded. “Carlotta told me you’re a fallen god of the underworld.”

“That bitch lies,” Carlsbad said, without disapproval. “I’m no god. I’m just, what’s that line—‘the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.’ The Old Doctor says that as long as one evil person remains on Earth, I’ll be alive.”

“Well,” Sigmund said. “I guess you’ll be around for a while, then.”

The first time Carlsbad saved his life, Sigmund lay panting in a snowbank, blood running from a ragged gash in his arm. “You could have let me die just then,” Sigmund said. Then, after a moment’s hesitation: “You could have benefited from my death.”

Carlsbad shrugged, shockingly dark against the snow. “Yeah, I guess.”

“I thought you were evil,” Sigmund said, lightheaded from blood loss and exertion, more in the now than he’d ever felt before, the scent of pines and the bite of cold air immediate reminders of his miraculously ongoing life. “I mean, you’re made of evil.”

“You’re made mostly of carbon atoms,” Carlsbad said. “But you don’t spend all your time thinking about forming long-chain molecules, do you? There’s more to both of us than our raw materials.”

“Thank you for saving me, Carlsbad.”

“Anytime, Sigmund.” His tone was laid-back but pleased, the voice of someone who’d seen it all but could still sometimes be pleasantly surprised. “You’re the first Table agent in four hundred years who’s treated me like something other than a weapon or a monster. I know I scare you shitless, but you talk to me.”

Exhaustion and exhilaration waxed and waned in Sigmund. “I like you because you don’t change. When I look at most people I can see them as babies, teenagers, every step of their lives superimposed, and if I look back far enough they disappear—but not you. You’re the same as far back as I can see.” Sigmund’s eyelids were heavy. He felt light. He thought he might float away.

“Hold on,” Carlsbad said. “Help is on the way. Your death might not diminish me, but I’d still like to keep you around.”

Sigmund blacked out, but not before hearing the whirr of approaching helicopters coming to take him away.

“I’m the New Doctor,” the New Doctor said. Willowy, brunette, young, she stood behind a podium in the briefing room, looking at the assembled Table agents—Sigmund, Carlotta, Carlsbad, and the recently-promoted Ray. They were the alpha squad, the apex of the organization, and the New Doctor had not impressed them yet. “We’re going to have some changes around here. We need to get back to basics. We need to find the cup. These other jobs might fill our bank accounts, but they don’t further our cause.”

Ray popped a wasp into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and said, “Fuck that mystic bullshit.” His voice was accompanied by a deep, angry buzz, a sort of wasp-whisper in harmony with the normal workings of his voicebox. Ray got nasty and impatient when he ate wasps. “I joined up to make money and get a regular workout, not chase after some imaginary Grail.” Sigmund knew Ray was lying—that he had a very specific interest in the cup—but Sigmund also understood why Ray was keeping that interest a secret. “You just stay in the library and read your books like the Old Doctor did, okay?”

The New Doctor shoved the podium over, and it fell toward Ray, who dove out of the way. While he was moving, the New Doctor came around and kicked him viciously in the ribs, her small boots wickedly pointed and probably steel-toed. Ray rolled away, panting and clutching his side.

Sigmund peered into the New Doctor’s past. She looked young, but she’d looked young for decades.

“I’m not like the Old Doctor,” she said. “He missed his old life in the archives, and was content with his books, piecing together the past. But I’m glad to be out of the archives, and under my leadership, we’re going to make history, not study it.”

“I’ll kill you,” Ray said. Stingers were growing out of his fingertips, and his voice was all buzz now.

“Spare me,” the New Doctor said, and kicked him in the face.

By spying on their pasts and listening in on their private moments, Sigmund learned why the other agents wanted to find the cup, and see God:

Carlotta whispered to one of her lovers, the shade of a great courtesan conjured from an anteroom of Hell: “I want to castrate God, so he’ll never create another world.”

Ray told Carlotta, while they disposed of the body of a young archivist who’d discovered their secret past and present plans: “I want to eat God’s heart and belch out words of creation.”

Carlsbad, alone, staring at the night sky (a lighted void, while his own darkness was utter), had imaginary conversations with God that always came down, fundamentally, to one question: “Why did you make me?”

The New Doctor, just before she poisoned the Old Doctor (making it look like a natural death), answered his bewildered plea for mercy by saying, “No. As long as you’re alive, we’ll never find the cup, and I’ll never see God, and I’ll never know the answers to the ten great questions I’ve composed during my time in the archives.”

Sigmund saw it all, every petty plan and purpose that drove his fellows, but he had no better purpose himself. The agents of the Table might succeed in finding the cup, not because they were worthy, but simply because they’d been trying for years upon years, and sometimes persistence led to success.

Sigmund knew their deepest reasons, and kept all their secrets, because past and present and cause and effect were scrambled for him. The Old Doctor’s regime of meth, cocaine, and more exotic uppers had ravaged Sigmund’s nasal cavities and set him adrift in time. At first, he’d only been able to see back in time, but sometimes taking the Old Doctor’s experimental stimulants truly sent him back in time. Sometimes it was just his mind that traveled, sent back a few days to relive past events again in his own body, but other times, rarely, he physically traveled back, just a day or two at most, just for a little while, before being wrenched back to a present filled with headaches and nosebleeds.

On one of those rare occasions when he traveled physically back in time, Sigmund saw the Old Doctor’s murder, and was snapped back to the future moments before the New Doctor could kill him, too.

Ray ate a Sherpa’s brain two days out of base camp, and after that, he was able to guide them up the crags and paths toward the temple perfectly, though he was harder to converse with, his speech peppered with mountain idioms. He developed a taste for barley tea flavored with rancid yak butter, and sometimes sang lonely songs that merged with the sound of the wind.

“We’re going to Hell,” the New Doctor said.

“Probably,” Sigmund said, edging away.

She sighed. “No, really—we’re going into the underworld. Or, well, sort of a visiting room for the underworld.”

“I’ve heard rumors about that.” Hell’s anteroom was where Carlotta found her ghostly lovers. “One of the Table’s last remaining mystic secrets. I’m surprised they didn’t lose that, too, when they lost the key to the moon and the scryer’s glass and all those other wonders in the first war with the Templars.”

“Much has been lost.” The New Doctor pushed a shelf, which swung easily away from the wall on secret hinges, revealing an iron grate. “But that means much can be regained.” She pressed a red button. “Stop fidgeting, Sigmund. I’m not going to kill you. But I do want to know, how did you get into the Old Doctor’s office and see me kill him, when I know you were on assignment with Carlsbad in Belize at the time? And how did you disappear afterward? Bodily bilocation? Ectoplasmic projection? What?”

“Time travel,” Sigmund said. “I don’t just see into the past. Sometimes I travel into the past physically.”

“Huh. I didn’t see anything about that in the Old Doctor’s notes.”

“Oh, no. He kept the most important notes in his head. So why aren’t you going to kill me?”

Something hummed and clattered beneath the floor.

“Because I can use you. Why haven’t you turned me in?”

Sigmund hesitated. He’d liked the Old Doctor, who was the closest thing he’d ever had to a father. He hated to disrespect the old man’s memory, though he knew the Old Doctor had seen him as a research tool, a sort of ambulatory microfiche machine, and nothing more. “Because I’m ready for things to change. I thought I wanted to be an operative, but I’m tired of the endless pointless round-and-round, not to mention being shot and stabbed and thrown from moving trains. Under your leadership, I think the Table might actually achieve something.”

“We will.” The grinding and humming underground intensified, and she raised her voice. “We’ll find the cup, and see God, and get answers. We’ll find out why he created the world, only to immediately abandon his creation, letting chaos fill his wake. But first, to Hell. Here.” She tossed something glittering toward him, a few old subway tokens. “To pay the attendant.”

The grinding stopped, the grate sliding open to reveal a tarnished brass elevator car operated by a man in a cloak the color of dust and spiderwebs. He held out his palm, and Sigmund and the New Doctor each dropped a token into his hand.

“Why are we going . . . down there?” Sigmund asked.

“To see the Old Doctor, and get some of that information he kept only in his head. I know where to find the cup—or where to find the map that leads to it, anyway—but I need to know what will happen once I have the cup in hand.”

“Why take me?”

“Because only insane people, like Carlotta, risk going to Hell’s anteroom alone. And if I took anyone else, they’d find out I was the one who killed the Old Doctor, and they might be less understanding about it than you are.” She stepped into the elevator car, and Sigmund followed. He glanced into the attendant’s past, almost reflexively, and the things he saw were so horrible that he threw himself back into the far corner of the tiny car; if the elevator hadn’t already started moving, he would have pried open the doors and fled. The attendant turned his head to look at him, and Sigmund squeezed his eyes shut so that he didn’t have to risk seeing the attendant frown, or worse, smile.

“Interesting,” the New Doctor said.

After they returned from Hell, Sigmund and the New Doctor fucked furiously beneath the card table in the Old Doctor’s library, because sex is an antidote to death, or at least, an adequate placebo.

“That’s it, then,” the New Doctor said. “We’re going to the Himalayas.”

“Fucking great,” Ray said. “I always wanted to eat a Yeti.”

“I think you’re hairy enough already,” Carlotta said.

Sigmund and the New Doctor sat beneath a ledge of rock, frigid wind howling across the face of the mountain. Carlsbad was out looking for Ray and Carlotta, who had stolen all the food and oxygen and gone looking for the temple of the cup alone. They wanted to kill God, not ask him questions, so their betrayal was troublesome but not surprising. Sigmund probably should have told someone about their planned betrayal, but he felt more and more like an actor outside time—a position which, he now realized, was likely to get him killed. He needed to take a more active role.

“Ray and Carlotta don’t know the prophecy,” Sigmund said. “Only the Old Doctor knew, and he only told us. They have no idea what they’re going to cause, if they reach the Temple first.”

“If they reach the Temple first, we’ll die along with the rest of the world.” The New Doctor was weak from oxygen deficiency. “If Carlsbad doesn’t find them, we’re doomed.” She looked older, having left the safety of the library and the archives, and the past two years had been hard. They’d traveled to the edges and underside of the Earth, gathering fragments of the map to the temple of the cup, chasing down the obscure references the New Doctor had uncovered in the archives. First they’d gone deep into the African desert, into crumbling palaces carved from sentient rock; then they’d trekked through the Antarctic, looking for the secret entrance to the Earth’s war-torn core, and finding it; they’d projected themselves, astrally and otherwise, into the mind of a sleeping demigod from the jungles of another world; and two months ago they’d descended to crush-depth in the Pacific Ocean to find the last fragment of the map in a coral temple guarded by spined, bioluminescent beings of infinite sadness. Ray had eaten one of those guardians, and ever since he’d been sweating purple ink and taking long, contemplative baths in salt water.

The New Doctor had ransacked the Table’s coffers to pay for this last trip to the Himalayas, selling off long-hoarded art objects and dismissing even the poorly-paid hereditary janitorial staff to cover the expenses. And now they were on the edge of total failure, unless Sigmund did something.

Sigmund opened his pack and removed his last vial of the Old Doctor’s most potent exotic upper. “Wish me bon voyage,” he said, and snorted it all.

Time unspooled, and Sigmund found himself beneath the same ledge, but earlier, the ice unmarked by human passage, the weather more mild. Moving manically, driven by drugs and the need to stay warm, he piled up rocks above the trail and waited, pacing in an endless circle, until he heard Carlotta and Ray approaching, grunting under the weight of stolen supplies.

He pushed rocks down on them, and the witch and the phage were knocked down. Sigmund made his way to them, hoping they would be crushed—that the rocks would have done his work for him. Carlotta was mostly buried, but her long fingernails scraped furrows in the ice, and Sigmund gritted his teeth, cleared away enough rocks to expose her head, and finished her off with the ice axe. She did not speak, but Sigmund almost thought he saw respect in her expression before he obliterated it. Ray was only half-buried, but unmoving, his neck twisted unnaturally. Sigmund sank the point of the axe into Ray’s thigh to make sure he was truly dead, and the phage did not react. Sigmund left the axe in Ray’s leg. He turned his back on the dead and crouched, waiting for time to sweep him up again in its flow.

Carlsbad found Ray and Carlotta dead, and brought back the supplies. By then Sigmund was back from the past, and while the New Doctor ate and rested, he took Carlsbad aside to tell him the truth: “There’s a good chance we might destroy the world.”

“Hmm,” Carlsbad said.

“There’s a prophecy, in the deep archives of the Table, that God will only return when the world is destroyed by fire. But it’s an article of faith—the basis of our faith—that when the contents of the cup are swallowed by an acolyte of the Table, God will return. So by approaching the cup—by intending to drink from it—we might collapse the probability wave in such a way that the end of the world begins, fire and all, in the moments before we even touch the cup.”

“And you and the New Doctor are okay with that?”

“The New Doctor thinks she can convince God to spare the world from destruction, retroactively, if necessary.”

“Huh,” Carlsbad said.

“She can be very persuasive,” Sigmund said.

“I’m sure,” Carlsbad replied.

The fire began to fall just as they reached the temple, a structure so old it seemed part of the mountain itself. The sky went red, and great gobbets of flame cascaded down, the meteor shower to end all others. Snow flashed instantly to steam on all the surrounding mountains, though the temple peak was untouched, for now.

“That’s it, then,” Carlsbad said. “Only the evil in you two is keeping me alive.”

“No turning back now,” the New Doctor said, and started up the ancient steps to the temple.

Ray, bloodied and battered, left arm hanging broken, stepped from the shadows beside the temple. He held Sigmund’s ice axe in his good hand, and he swung it at the New Doctor’s head with phenomenal force, caving in her skull. She fell, and he fell upon her, bringing the axe down again and again, laying her body open. He looked up, face bruised and swollen, fur sprouting from his jaw, veins pulsing in his forehead, poison and ink and pus and hallucinogens oozing from his pores. “You can’t kill me, junkie. I’ve eaten wolverines. I’ve eaten giants. I’ve eaten angels.” As he said this last, he began to glow with a strange, blue-shifted light.

“Saving your life again,” Carlsbad said, almost tenderly, and then he did what the Table always counted on him to do. He swelled, he stormed, he smashed, he tore Ray to pieces, and then tore up the pieces.

After that he began to melt. “Ah, shit, Sigmund,” he said. “You just aren’t evil enough.” Before Sigmund could say thank you, or goodbye, all that remained of Carlsbad was a dark pool, like a slick of old axle grease on the snow.

There was nothing for Sigmund to do but go on.

“The cup holds the blood of God,” the Old Doctor said. “Drink it, and God will return, and as you are made briefly divine by swallowing the substance of his body, he will treat you as an equal, and answer questions, and grant requests. For that moment, God will do whatever you ask.” The Old Doctor placed his hand on Sigmund’s own. “The Table exists to make sure the cup’s power is not used for evil or trivial purposes. The question asked, the wish desired, has to be worth the cost, which is the world.”

“What would you ask?” Sigmund said.

“I would ask why God created the world and walked away, leaving only a cupful of blood and a world of wonders behind. But that is only curiosity, and not a worthy question.”

“So anyway,” Sigmund said, sniffing and wiping at his nose. “When can I start doing field work?” He wished he could see the future instead of the past. He thought this was going to be a lot of fun.

The cup in Sigmund’s hands held blood, liquid at the center, but dried and crusted on the cup’s rim. Sigmund scraped the residue of dried blood up with his long pinky fingernail. He took a breath. Let it out. And snorted God’s blood.

Time snapped.

Sigmund looked around the temple. It was white, bright, clean, and no longer on a mountaintop. The windows looked out on a placid sea. He was not alone.

God looked nothing like Sigmund had imagined, but at the same time, it was impossible to mistake him for anyone else. It was clear that God was on his way out, but he paused, and looked at Sigmund expectantly.

Sigmund had gone from the end of the world to the beginning. He was so high from snorting God’s blood that he could see individual atoms in the air, vibrating. He knew he could be jerked back to the top of the ruined world at any moment.

Sigmund tried to think. He’d expected the New Doctor to ask the questions, to make the requests, so he didn’t know what to say. God was clearly growing impatient, ready to leave his creation forever behind. If Sigmund spoke quickly, he could have anything he wanted. Anything at all.

“Hey,” Sigmund said. “Don’t go.”

© 2006 by Tim Pratt.

Originally published in Twenty Epics, edited by David Moles & Susan Marie Groppi.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Tim Pratt's short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy, and other nice places. His most recent collection is Hart and Boot and Other Stories, and his work has won a Hugo Award and been nominated for World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula Awards. He blogs intermittently at timpratt.org, where you can also find links to many of his stories. Pratt is also a senior editor at Locus, the magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field. He lives in Berkeley CA with his wife, writer Heather Shaw, and their son River.

My Teacher, My Enemy
Kelsey Ann Barrett

My enemy’s body is still warm when I take my knife to him. Stripped to his skin and lain upon his back, he looks much less frightening than he had when he was alive, armed, and desperate to kill me. But there is still power in the shape of his relaxing muscles and the size of his cooling frame, and, as he is a foot taller than I am, I feel a surge of pride in my accomplishment that is even greater than the hot pleasure of the kill.

I stand in the middle of the forest, nothing about me but trees and birds and the still body beneath my knife, nothing upon me but the skin in which I was born. I am one of the unclothed, and this is my first kill.

But I am not entirely alone in this, and, as I split my enemy’s skin neatly apart—slightly awed at how easily it separates under the perfect sharpness of my blade—I remember what my teacher taught me. I can hear her voice, as clearly as if she were leaning over me and whispering in my ear.

You must be careful not to let your knife slide in too deeply. If you puncture the intestines you will have to deal with the smell.

I do not want to be a sloppy student, so I am careful, and go very slowly, beginning just above the genitals and slicing upwards, through the skin and the thin membrane beneath, which separates it from muscle and fat.

If you rush, you will end up with holes in your coat. Power is not gained by sloppy haste. You must be patient.

I do not rush, and move my knife upwards steadily until the blade comes to rest at the bottom of the sternum. A second pass to cut through the fat that keeps the intestines inside the body, and when I push my enemy onto his side, his guts spill easily from the opening and onto the grass. But then his arm is in my way, and it takes me a few tries to find a position for the long, hairy limb that keeps it from flopping forward and hampering my work. Eventually, I pin it behind him, and prop him up with his own discarded pack and tools. When I walk around his body to the front of him, to the pile of guts on the grass that smell of moisture and heat and the tang of iron, his blood looks darker than I could have ever imagined.

Some cut through the bones of the ribs in order to access the organs of the upper thorax. But this is clumsy work, and unnecessary.

My enemy carried a saw, to cut through the ribcage of his kill, and I am glad that I was not burdened with such a heavy and awkward tool. Glad that my lighter pack and kit allowed me to be faster and more nimble than my opponent.

Once you have removed the lower intestines, cut the diaphragm away from the body and reach up inside the chest cavity, behind the ribs. Grasp high up on the esophagus with your free hand and use your knife to cut through, above your fist. It will then be easy to pull out the heart and lungs, along with the rest of the intestines.

I have been fortunate in the location of my very first battle; there are enough trees shading the area that the carrion birds haven’t found us yet. But the insects are beginning to gather, blood drinkers and flying, biting worms, and I know that I must drag my enemy’s body away from his guts on the ground, to a place where I can work more cleanly. The biting worms carry many diseases, and the blood drinkers keep buzzing in my ears.

I estimate that my enemy’s body weighs at least sixty pounds more than I do, and he is even heavier with the loose weight of the dead. I move him into a nearby clearing and retrieve a length of heavy rope from my pack.

It is preferable to hang your corpse upside down. But you are still young and it may be difficult to hang your first few kills in such a manner. Casting a noose about your corpse’s neck will be far easier in the beginning.

Hauling him up high enough that his feet don’t drag on the forest floor takes all my strength, and by the time I finish I am panting and sweating as much as I was when I killed him. I stop to rest and drink from my water-pouch as I watch his body slowly stop swaying. And then I start a fire.

When my fire is brightly burning I return to my enemy, and use my knife to cut through the ligaments of his elbow, separating the forearm from the upper arm. Slicing along the inside of one arm and across the chest to the inside of the other arm connects a horizontal slit with my previous vertical one. The skin already looks as though it could peel away all on its own.

Many young warriors are over-eager to take the cape of their early kills. But you must wait. A sloppy cape broadcasts a warrior’s inexperience, and more importantly, the more perfect your hide, the more powerful the strength it gives you. Take your first cape when you have perfected your skill, and take it from an opponent whose strength is unparalleled. Your first cape should be a step toward invincibility.

I cut around the neck and leave the skin above the shoulders untouched.

The smoke from my fire is keeping the insects away. As I curl my fingers into the thick skin and pull, it comes away as cleanly as I was told that it would.

There is a natural barrier between the skin and the muscle. Pay attention to how clean and encased both meat and skin are, and use it to your advantage. If the skin sticks in spots, use your knife to separate it. If you keep the blade pointed away from you, you can avoid accidentally tearing your skin.

I peel his coat from him, stopping to cut through the knees as I had the elbows, clumsily catching one of my feet under the resulting fall of blood and cursing to myself. And then I am running my blade along the insides of both thighs and across the underside of the body, avoiding the penis; genitalia are another mark of skill and strength that I will attempt when I am more experienced. For now I am eager only to make a clean suit that gives me as much strength as my enemy’s broad back and thick arms once carried.

The skin comes away from the stumps of his legs, and that is the last of it. He is naked now, no longer a man. And soon I will wear his strength over my own.

Somewhere ahead of me, a wounded woman is hiding. Soon to be my second kill, she is middle-aged and wearing two skins of her own. She is petite, only just over five feet, brunette, and wire-thin.

She also has a deep gash in her leg that is leaving spots of blood on the forest floor. My teacher told us that we might one day have to track a fleeing kill.

Sometimes they will run. I don’t know why. But you should know how to read their trails, and the blood that they leave behind.

I touch a broken twig, a splash of white against the darkness of the tree’s bark. I am not an animal hunter, but I know that the twig will point in her direction.

There were animal hunters in my village when I was a naked child. Farmers too, and parents with babies in their arms. They all wore three or four skins, taken in their younger years when they were unbound warriors like my teacher. But they never had my teacher’s skill, and they did not have her knowledge, which is why she was brought back to her home to teach the children of her village.

My teacher was the woman I wanted to one day become. I remember how long and dark her hair was, and the way she once sneered contempt at my father when he tried to speak with her. I remember the lust in her voice as she described a hunt.

It is important to push hard. If your enemy is too wounded to fight, he will not be able to outrun you. The hotter you are at his heels, the hotter the blood will be under his skin when you kill him.

Four red splashes on the ground, shaped like teardrops.

Running raises blood pressure, which will increase the blood flowing from a wound. But it will also spread that blood over a larger area. Knowing how much the wound should bleed will help you judge your enemy’s speed. I am careful to run beside the trail, and not on it, so that I do not accidentally obscure any sign of my enemy’s passing. AsI follow the direction indicated by the spatters, I can see that she has slowed her pace. She is tiring.

It is not long until I find her, cowering behind a bush. I charge her, knife held high.

You have never felt true power until you have worn your first skin.

She shrieks and brings up her own in defense.

The energy that thrums between your first skin and the new one you have claimed for yourself is like the pulse of blood from a too-quick heart.

My blow is parried; I strike out with my other arm and knock hers sideways, swinging my blade with all the fury in my veins.

When you wear a skin, you can hardly believe the increased strength in your arms, your legs and back.

She ducks and claws at me, nails dragging across my thigh. I grunt, and she howls in my face, stabbing clumsily forward with the knife in her other hand. It is the power of another human being’s life. His drive, his dreams, his love and hate. Everything that makes him a man.

I dodge, swing my arm in a long arc, and fix my knife between two of her ribs.

And as my second kill thrashes on the ground at my feet, I imagine her skin covering my own and feel my belly fill with warmth. I remember my teacher’s voice as she explained the way it felt to take a skin, and for the first time I understand the fierce light of desire that I’d seen in my teacher’s eyes.

Even my first sexual experience, not long behind me, cannot compare to this. I am enthralled by the severity of the anger and fear in my kill’s eyes as she struggles to breathe against my knife, and in a moment’s glorious brutality I take her own weapon from her useless hand and slit her throat. Blood pours from the gash, making her neck slick and red, pooling in the hollow below her throat and dripping down across her right shoulder. She gurgles, lurching forward as if to grab me, and then finally collapses.

My teacher would be proud.

The second time skinning is easier than the first, as I run my knife from pelvis to sternum with what I already fancy to be practiced skill. My hands are steady, confident and sure as I work, but I’m alarmed to find small spots of blood following the trail of my fingers up and down her body. I wipe my hands carefully on the grass, but when I go back to cut away the fat around her lower abdominal muscles I find that the spots are still there. What’s worse, there is a small trickle of blood sliding down between her breasts.

Blood will stop flowing very quickly after the heart is no longer beating.

I reach up in surprise, fumbling under my kill’s left breast until my hand lies flat against her chest, and after a moment I feel a single, unsteady quiver beneath my palm. I am shocked by her will to live.

Clumsily, and after some hesitation, I decide to roll her onto her side and let the worst of the blood fall away until she finally dies. As I watch it grow congealed and sticky on the grass, I regret my haste in slitting her throat, and fear that I have ruined my skin; that it will end up stained brown in spots and marked with the imprints of my fingers. I take handfuls of clean grass from down by our feet and rub them across the skin wherever it is wet and red. Next time, I will be patient, and let her die on her own.

I tell myself that this will still be a good skin.

The greater a kill’s struggle for life, the more power and life will be in the skin you take from him.

I learn my teacher’s lesson well. Next time I will not make a mistake.

Two men. Two men at once, a younger one and an elder mentor of some kind. I scoff to myself as I strip the boy first, waiting for his useless companion to stop twitching. Even when following his charge into the field, this man was never the instructor my teacher was. I soothe my hand down the boy’s smooth flank, while, as I have done every time I have skinned a kill, I imagine my teacher’s deep voice against my ear.

It is known that, before the fire, men dressed themselves in the skins of animals, and so they were like animals, dumb and weak. They killed each other for possessions, for land, for mates, in anger and from fear, and when they battled, they clothed themselves in metals to protect their vulnerable flesh. No one knows who was the first to wear the skin of another man, but it is certain that, when the yellow flame swept across the surface of the world, it was only these few who survived. And it is for this strength alone that we kill.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to die skinless, like the child on the grass before me. To never know strength—or fierceness, or the bright searing pain of ecstasy as you clothe yourself anew—would indeed be like being an animal, and I find in my throat a bitter distaste for the creature I have killed. His own throat makes a squelching sound as I pull it from his neck, his heart and one lung coming away cleanly. The other sticks for some reason: I make a scoop of my hand and sweep up behind the left side of his ribcage to slide it free.

There are many things I cannot fully explain to you, children. I cannot tell you what it feels like to see your veins beat beneath a newly-fashioned skin, or to watch another die and think only of the rush you will feel when you dress yourself in his hide. It is something you must experience yourself. If you can.

If you can.

I toss my rope over a thick tree branch and haul the body up by the ankles, tie it off and reach out to stop it from swaying. My first kill was as unclothed as I was, each of us were seeking our first skin. Now I am the experienced, the master, and heaven help any naked young who cross my path. I glance over to his companion, who is finally lying still, and amend the thought.

Heaven help anyone who crosses my path.

I know the feeling of a power that is too great to ever be put to words, and each kill takes imagination to yet another unforeseeable height. When I am done teaching you, children, I will return to that life, and I will kill again. It is everything that I crave.

His skin makes a wet sound as it comes free of his body, and I grin, letting it drape over my hands. I savor the sensation of it, another person’s warmth heating my palms and the insides of my forearms. I have learned what my teacher meant when she spoke of her cravings: I understand the blaze in her eyes. Because to wear the skin of other men is to know a hunger that will never, ever be satiated.

If I am ever a teacher, I know what I will tell my students. I will tell them how the need for greater strength gnaws like an empty belly, but unlike a hunger for food, each morsel consumed only increases the pain, deepens the hollow pit demanding to be filled. You will begin to hate yourself for your lust for skins, I will say to them. But even if you could stop, which you know you cannot, to abandon the hunt is to become only hunted. And then you will quickly die.

There are some who do abandon the hunt. They return to the villages in which they were born and become farmers or animal hunters, or mothers, or fathers. But I could never live a life like that, weak and unfulfilled.

You are not a man, my teacher had sneered at my father.She had thought him beneath her, and so do I.

I flay the other man and leave the carcasses for the insects, my new skins carefully rolled and stored in my pack to be tanned later. I cannot wait to wear them. There is little left in me but the need to live and the lust to hunt, skin, and tan. The veins beneath my skins are thick as earthworms and a deep, sickly blue, but I am as strong as mountains and as tireless as the wind. I have begun to think that I may be invincible, perhaps immortal. I dream always of skin splitting under my knife, and when I look at myself in a stream or lake, there is a bright fierceness in my eyes that I have seen once before.

The woman’s eyes are wide and slightly dulled by a faint white film, and it takes me a moment to realize that, instead of the stocky giant I took her for at first glance, beneath her skins she is in fact a tall and slender woman. She is wearing more of them than I have ever seen on a single person; her arms bulge with the strength of what must be dozens of limbs, and her posture is strange because her shoulders are slouched under the weight of dozens of backs.

I call out to her, questioning, trying to delay the fight, but the grunting noise that issues from her throat is less a response and more a labored panting, as though the battle has already begun. Her chest heaves under the wiry hair of men and the breasts of other women, and just above a thick layer of collars I can see her neck and the wild, driving pulse below her jaw.

“Please,” I say again. “Wait.”

There is nothing in her save hunger as she shifts her stance, poised to attack. I have never begged before, never even hesitated, and the only battle that has ever frightened me was my very first. Yet now, as my belly aches with the need to wear a new skin, I wonder how much deeper and more maddening the ache within her must be.

I am wearing four skins. It will not be enough.

She charges me suddenly, with a high, alien cry and arms that pinwheel wildly. She swings her long blade more like a tool for cutting grain than one for killing a man, and I hastily dodge away.

Never retreat.

But my enemy slices for me again, and again I dodge and scramble back.

Retreating will only take you back to death. You must go forward to victory.

My enemy shrieks again, in fury and lust, and I go nearly to my knees to avoid a swing that would have taken off my head. There is little technique in her attack, but her movements are so fast that it is a wonder that I am not dead already. I try a quick stab forward with my knife, aiming for her bowels, and her fist comes down just below my elbow. I can hear my bones shatter even as her long blade slices across both my thighs. As I fall to the ground, I cannot tell if I am still holding my knife.

I look up and see my enemy looming over me, panting with her need as her weapon shakes in wordless rage. She will slice through my wrists, I think, or perhaps pierce me neatly between two ribs. And then she will strip me and skin me and leave my naked body hanging in the air, a dripping carcass.

I have gone forward only to my death. My teacher was wrong. I cannot hear her voice, now. She has abandoned me.

“Please, my teacher,” I say, hardly aware that I am calling aloud. “I do not want to die.”

When she hears my voice, my enemy cocks her head in what seems to be confusion. I look up at her, and see that a few long, dark locks of hair, thick and glossy at the roots, frayed and dry at the ends, have come out from under the capes she is wearing. Her eyes are dark as well, behind their white coating, and I lose my breath in sudden astonishment. Somehow, I know her face.

“My teacher?”

My teacher was a beautiful woman, pale and graceful. My enemy is heavy and ruddy and covered in sweat that is not all her own. My teacher was skill and wisdom and grace. This monster is strength and hunger and gasping death.

But she blinks at me through those eyes, and I have no choice but to know her. There is foam at the corner of her mouth, and she is already wearing my skin in her mind, and I feel a sudden rage swell up through me, cutting through the pain in my arm and my legs. And it is not the fear of death that galvanizes me so suddenly; I am furious that I will be taken by her, horrified at the idea that she will wear my skin, my skin, and leave my body naked and empty behind her. Death does not frighten me anymore. Only the idea of being the skin around the shoulders of someone else.

“Do you not know me, my teacher?” I ask her. My good hand fumbles at the pouch in my belt as she stands still, listening to me speak. “You taught me how to kill. You taught me how to take a skin and make it my own, back when I was a naked child in our village. Do you remember? You taught me so many useful things.”

You taught me to always carry two knives.

“I remember when you tried to describe what it was like to wear a skin. You told me I would know such power, and oh, my teacher, you were right. But you didn’t tell me about this.”

My grasping fingers finally gain hold of the hilt of my spare blade and I pull it free, immediately putting a long, deep slice into my opposite shoulder. I cut myself diagonally across the chest, through my right breast and all the way down to my left hip. I cut myself on the right hip, up one side of my ribcage, then the other. I slice deep down the side of my face, in case she planned to take my cape. My blood splashes across my eyes. She does not stop me, and I move with the speed of a woman wearing four skins.

“These are my skins,” I tell her as I cut. But I don’t care about them anymore, and it isn’t what I meant to say. “This is my skin, and you cannot have it.”

And as I cut, I feel strength leaving my arms, my hand weakening as each skin is ruined, its power lost. Piercing through them hurts, but opening my original gives me a sensation that is almost pleasure. I haven’t touched the skin I was born with in so long.

The knife threatens to spill from my fingers. With the last of my strength, I stab myself in the stomach, deep into the intestines.

Once.

Twice.

And on the third attempt I drop the knife, the heat of my blood coating my abdomen and chest. Though I am too close to death to hear her, my teacher howls in anger as she realizes what I have done. I close my eyes and imagine that she is smiling, caressing my face and wiping the blood away. I imagine that she is free of what she has become, and I forgive her.

Goodbye my teacher. I am free now, too.

Goodbye, my enemy. You will never wear my skin.

© 2012 Kelsey Ann Barrett

Kelsey Ann Barrett lives in Brooklyn, NY and is a graduate student in Drew University's Masters of Arts and Letters program. She enjoys history and art, and likes to incorporate both into her writing—as well as a decent helping of horror whenever possible. You can find her on Twitter @inland_sailor.

Lost
Seanan McGuire

Let the world tell all the lies it wants; I was there in the Year of the Children, and I know the truth.

This is how it happened.

We don’t know when or where the singing started, but the earliest written record I can find points the finger at Michelle Pierce, of Crows Landing, California. She was eleven years old, blue eyed, red haired, and full of wonder at the world. Her father found her standing barefoot in the backyard on the night of January 8th, with her face tilted up towards the cloudy winter sky.

“She was smiling like she had some sort of secret.” That’s what the article says, a grieving father’s words preserved on microfilm. He was right. Michelle had a secret. We all did. It just wasn’t shared until it was already too late.

I like to think he stepped up next to her, squinting up to see what she was looking at. That’s how I picture them, father and daughter, standing side by side. “What are you looking at?” he says.

Michelle casts a glance in his direction, the little cat-and-canary look that all girls know from birth, and she says, “Nothing.”

“Let’s get inside. It’s cold out here.”

That’s how I see it, anyway. Their feet leaving glittering trails in the evening dew as they walk together through the grass. Her father tucking her into bed a little later, and Michelle already half-asleep, mumbling to herself. “I thought she was saying ‘moon,’” he’ll say later, when the truth comes clear. “She’d been looking at the sky, and . . . and it didn’t seem like anything important.”

“Soon,” says Michelle, and drifts away to dreams.

It took a month for the curious communion of children and the sky to become a global phenomenon, with children as young as two and as old as fourteen standing transfixed in backyards and in front of windows. There are dozens of articles about it, all of them treating it as a funny little fad just a bit more incomprehensible than most. They asked us why we did it. If anyone told, it didn’t make the papers.

Things changed again two weeks later, leaving behavioral scientists and child psychologists at a loss. There are articles about that, too. It wasn’t so much that we’d started humming. Children have always liked to hum.

It’s that we were all humming the same song.

I celebrated my fifteenth birthday by counting the candles on my cake and breaking down in tears. It left my parents frantic. I don’t think they’d seen me cry since I was six. But I’d been spending an hour a night standing in the yard with my sister, humming at the sky, and I knew what that fifteenth candle meant.

Torrey was the one who broke the code of silence we’d all shared until then. She never was much of one for rules. “He’s too old now,” she said. “It’s not so bad for most of them, but Danny almost made it.”

“Too old for what?” asked Mom.

Torrey looked at her, brown eyes wide and solemn in her narrow face, and said, “He’s too old to go.”

From the look on Dad’s face, he liked those words even less than he liked my tears. “Go where?”

She looked at me. I nodded my agreement, and neither of us said anything else. Torrey went outside alone that night, and I went to my room and cried until I fell asleep.

Everywhere there was, the children hummed, and still no one guessed what was coming, or how little time was left.

They started singing at the beginning of April, although for some reason, no one could ever quite figure out the words. Parents pressed for details, and got none; just silence and cat-with-canary smiles.

I never knew the words, and I never asked Torrey to tell me. It wouldn’t have been fair. So I let it all go, all the games and songs and sisters. I threw myself into schoolwork, graduated college, and grew up to be a solid, respectable sort of man, the kind whose colleagues say makes up for a lack of imagination by being totally reliable. Besides, some of them had been young enough to hear the singing, even if they were left behind.

Some of them understood why I had to forget where the children went after they told me I was too old to go with them.

It happened on May 9th, and it happened at midnight. New Zealand was the beginning, thanks to the International Date Line, but it wasn’t the end. Midnight swept the globe, carrying the children with it. They slipped quietly from their beds, tiptoeing down hallways and through living rooms as they made their way outside. Their parents would wake the next day to find unmade beds and empty bedrooms. There were no signs of struggle, of course, because there hadn’t been one. The sky called and the children went. That was all.

Not all the children disappeared; maybe two in five were left behind. They were the ones who’d been the most willing to abandon their communions when the air was cold or their mothers called them in to dinner. The ones who were the last to start singing.

The news started to spread as more and more countries woke and found their children gone. Most parents had been warned by the time midnight reached North America. They knew to lock the windows and guard the doors, to keep their starry-eyed children tucked safe away until the unknown threat had passed. It didn’t help. America’s children went like the others, somehow slipping out through unseen cracks and out through secret doorways to vanish into the night.

I held the window open for Torrey as she shimmied down the drainpipe. I saw her wave goodbye as she ran across the lawn. And I never saw her again.

When midnight came to Crows Landing, California, Robert Pierce took his daughter’s hands and asked her a question. Just one, the most important one of all:

“Where?”

He listened to her answer. Then he stood, unlocked the front door, and let her go.

The world has done its best to forget about that night. Maybe that’s for the best; maybe forgetting is what lets people keep going. Still, it happened, and it should be remembered somewhere. Just in case. In case this wasn’t the first time. In case the story of the Pied Piper was another form of forgetting, covering another, deeper truth.

Just in case.

I didn’t want to let my sister go. I would have held her back . . . but she told me to look at the sky, and I looked, and I saw. Pirate ships floating on the air, crewed by children in storybook motley and held up by tattered sails that glittered golden in the moonlight. That’s when I let her go. How could I keep her from that? I loved her. That meant I had to lose her.

The ships appeared all over the world, seen by all the parents fast enough to follow but not fast enough to keep their sons and daughters home. Their crews steered them deftly to hover a few yards above the ground. They lowered rope ladders and lifeboats, and the children of the world ran to them. They climbed into the sky, singing all the while, and they were gone.

That’s the first thing.

The second thing came later, when the shock faded enough for grief to settle in and distraught families started to clean out rooms and box things away. In every bed they found a golden coin, one for every missing child. One side was stamped with a moon and two pinprick stars, the other with a shape something like an island viewed through half-closed eyes, a place existing on the borderlands of sleep.

Ships used to pay a fee for crewmen. No nation has ever stepped forward to claim that blazon . . . but people around the world have looked at it, remembering a dream, and cried.

My story is almost over, and so am I. I’ll lock this in my desk with Torrey’s letter, and I’m sure my grandchildren will marvel at it when I’m gone. “He never told us stories,” they’ll say. “Who could have guessed he’d tell one about a tragedy like this?” They’ll see this for fiction, because we’ve forgotten the singing of the children. The history books say it was sickness, a plague that came from nowhere. They excuse the lack of bodies by claiming they were cremated for reason of quarantine, they call the articles and news reports about the event a form of mass hysteria, and they move on.

For a long time—a very long time—I did the same. It was easier to forget. But I sang with the rest, even if I turned out to be just half a year too old. I sang.

Maybe that’s why she came to me.

The knock at the door was unexpected. I get few visitors since my wife passed on and my children moved to warmer climes. Maine is in my blood, always will be; I was born here, lost my sister here, and I’ll die here when the time comes.

On the porch stood the cutest little button of a girl I’d ever seen, all tousled curls and big blue eyes and all of eleven years old. She was dressed like a storybook pirate, even down to the jagged treasure-map scar that ran the length of one dirty cheek.

“Daniel?” Her accent was strange, half-foreign, half-familiar, like the island on those coins.

“That’s me,” I said, trying to sound jolly, succeeding only in sounding old. I think I knew already. I know I didn’t want to. “What can I do for you?”

“These are yours,” she said, and from behind her back produced a bag of those golden coins and a fat envelope with my name across the front.

She held them out so imperiously that I took them without thinking, turning the envelope over to read the message scrawled on the flap—“Do Not Open by Penalty of DEATH Unless You Are My BROTHER,” and a looping signature that I determined, after a moment’s study, read “Tore the Bold.”

For a moment, I stopped breathing. How many left-behind brothers and sisters have received similar letters, I wonder, and never said a word? How many of us?

How many of them?

“What happened?” I asked, in a voice not quite my own.

“She fought brave,” said the girl, and smiled, and said the thing I needed most to hear: “She died singing.”

Then she was gone, back down the path to whatever vessel brought her to my door, the promise she made to my sister fulfilled to its end.

In the letter that was her life story and final farewell, Torrey said the things she’d left for me would be carried by Black-Hearted Mich, her best mate on the strange sea they sailed on, the strange and distant sea I was forbidden.

Michelle Pierce had blue eyes. And she was all of eleven years old.

What Michelle said to her father, on the night the pirates came:

“Away. It’s going to be an awfully big adventure.”

And then she ran, singing, into the night.

There’s just one thing I wish I’d asked her, that impossible little girl who brought me the story of my forever-young sister’s life. The life she led out there past the second star, on her golden-sailed ship, on that everlasting sea. There’s just one thing.

The children who choose to leave us, one at a time or all at once, the children who choose to be lost, rather than to be found . . . do they ever have regrets? Do they ever wish they’d stayed behind? I hope not. I hope they’re free, and lovely, and unafraid.

I hope they fly.

© 2009 Seanan McGuire

Originally published in Ravens in the Library.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

Renfrew’s Course
John Langan

“So this is the wizard,” Neil said.

“Supposedly,” Jim said.

Six feet tall, the statue had been carved from wood that retained most of its whiteness, even though the date cut into its base read 2005, seven years ago. Jim thought the color might be due to its not having been finished—splinters stood out from the wood’s uneven surface—but didn’t know enough about carpentry to be certain.

“Looks kind of Gandalf,” Neil said.

He was right. The wide-brimmed hat, long beard, staff and robe, all suggested Tolkien’s character, an impression the squirrel at the figure’s left foot, fox behind its right, owl on its shoulder did little to argue.

“I know,” Jim said. “It’s like that statue of William Wallace—did I tell you about that? They wanted to put up a new statue of Wallace—somewhere out near Stirling, I think—so what did the artist come up with? Mel Gibson in Braveheart.”

“No wonder there’re so few Jews in Scotland.”

“Apparently, the real guy was much stranger.”

“Gibson? I know,” Neil said, starting up the hill towards the dirt path that would take them into the nature preserve.

“No, the wizard.” Once he had caught up to Neil and they were walking under the tall pine and oak, Jim continued, “In one story, the King of France was causing some kind of difficulty for the local merchants—an embargo, I think. Michael Renfrew mounted his iron horse and in a single bound crossed the distance from Kirkcaldy to Paris. When he showed up at the French palace, its doors flew open for him. The King’s guards found their swords red hot in their hands. Needless to say, Louis-the-whatever changed his mind, and quickly, at that.”

“An iron horse, huh?”

“Legend says you can still see its hoofprint on the cliff it leapt off.”

To their right, separated from them by dense rows of pine, a stone tower raised its crenellated head above the tree line. “See?” Jim said, pointing to it. “Over there—that’s Renfrew’s keep.”

“Which has seen better days.”

“It’s like seven hundred years old.”

“So’s Edinburgh Castle, isn’t it?”

“Anyhoo,” Jim said, “Renfew only stayed there part of the time. He was the court astrologer for the Holy Roman Emperor.”

Neil grunted. No longer angry about the Rose incident, neither was he all the way over it. Had he been familiar with Scotland, he might have gone off for a few days on his own, left Jim to worry about what he was up to, whom he was having long, heartfelt conversations with over steaming mugs of chai. The trip, however, had been Jim’s baby, a chance to share with Neil the place in which he’d passed the summers of his childhood while also promoting his surprisingly successful book. Neil could not make sense of the time tables for the trains or buses, and as for driving on the other side of the road, forget it. He had no choice but to remain with Jim and his revelation about his affaire de coeur with Rose Carlton, which he had dealt with from inside a roiling cloud first of anger, then pique. Jim met this change in their personal weather the way he always did, the way he always had, by talking too much, filling the charged air with endless facts, opinion, speculation.

Not for the first time, the irony of his book’s title, The Still Warrior, struck him. How often had he urged his students at the dojo not to be afraid of their own quiet, of remaining in place, controlling their sparring bouts by forcing their opponents into committing to action first? It was a perspective he’d spent one hundred and forty-eight pages applying to a wide range of activities and situations, and based on the early sales figures, it was a viewpoint in which a significant portion of the reading public was interested. Look at his life off the dojo’s polished hardwood, though, and he might as well have been writing fiction, fantasy rooted in the deepest wish-fulfillment. Especially when it came to Neil, he was almost pathologically unable to leave things be, let the kinks and snarls in their relationship work themselves out, as the vast majority of them likely would. Instead, he had to plan excursions like this one, a walk along a nature path that was supposed to bring them . . . what? Closer? “You can’t make a scar heal any faster,” Neil had said, which Jim wasn’t sure he believed but which Neil certainly did.

Ahead, the path was intersected by a secondary trail slanting up from the right. The new trail was little more than a disturbance in the forest’s carpet of needles, but Neil turned onto it. “Hey,” Jim said.

“I want to see where this goes.”

Neil knew he wouldn’t argue. Prick. Jim followed him off the main path . . .

. . . and was seized by a vertigo so extreme he might have been standing at the edge of a sheer cliff, rather than a not-especially steep trail. He leaned forward, and it was as if he were on the verge of a great abyss, an emptiness that was coaxing him forward, just one more step . . .

A hand gripped his arm. “Hey—you all right?” The voice was high, familiar.

Vision swimming, Jim said, “I don’t,” and heard the words uttered in a different—in what sounded like the voice on his and Neil’s videos of their old vacations, his voice of ten years ago.

The hand steadying him belonged to a young man—to Neil, he saw, Neil as he had been when Jim had met him at a mutual friend’s Y2K party. His hair was down to his shoulders and, as was the case when he let it grow, both more curly and a shade closer to strawberry blond. The lines on his face were not cut as deep, and his skin was pale from a life lived in front of the computer. Mouth tucked into the smirk that had first caught Jim’s notice, he said, “Steady,” and released Jim’s arm.

Jim raised his right hand and brushed the half-dozen earrings that climbed his ear. He could feel his own hair ponytailed along the back of his neck. “Oh my God,” he said.

“What is it?” Neil said.

“I—don’t you—”

“Maybe the mushrooms weren’t such a good idea.”

“Mushrooms?” Jim said, even as he was thinking, Yes, mushrooms, because that’s the kind of shit you do now, at twenty-five, psilocybin and pot and occasionally hash and once in a great while a little E, because you’re still five years away from the ambush of turning thirty, when you’ll throw away all this stuff and more besides—soda, fast food, desserts—in favor of Shotokan karate seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. That’s the future: right now, you’re pursuing your private version of the systematic derangement of the senses.

“Man,” Neil said, “I guess those things were strong. I’ve never seen you like this before. Wish they would do something for me.” He waved his hand in front of his eyes. “Nada.”

“We—how did we get here?”

“We walked.”

“No, I mean Kirkcaldy—Scotland.”

“Wow.”

“How did we get here?”

“Easy, there, easy,” Neil said. “Work exchange, remember? I’m over here six weeks, that guy—Doug Moore, right?—is enjoying life in NYC. You tagged along because—well, because you’re cute and I like you. Okay?”

Of course that was the case. The moment Jim heard Neil’s explanation, he realized he already knew it. Cheeks burning, he said, “Okay. I’m sorry, it’s just—those were some strong mushrooms.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I was having this whole fantasy that you and I were here, only, in the future.”

“The future, huh? What were we like?”

“I had written this really popular book. We were here promoting it. You were . . . still programming, I think.”

“Oh, so you’re the famous writer and I’m just some computer nerd. Very nice.”

“Hey, you were my computer nerd.”

“Flattery.”

“It’s gotten me everywhere.”

“You’re feeling better.”

“I guess.”

“Good.” The expression on Neil’s face looked as if it might portend sex, a quickie amidst the trees, but he turned and continued down the secondary path. As Jim followed, he said, “Before you went all freaky, you were talking about the wizard, old Michael Renfrew.”

“I was? Yeah, I suppose I was. Look to your right, ahead and you’ll see Renfrew’s keep.”

“Where? Oh, yeah. What part is that?”

“Must be near the base. That’s—I think that’s a doorway. Hard to tell through the trees.”

“So what about Renfrew?”

“Did I tell you about the iron horse?”

“And the King of France, yeah.”

“There’s a story about him and the Devil.”

“Oh?”

“Or a devil: I can’t remember which. At some point, he summoned a devil. I’m not sure why. Maybe for knowledge, or maybe to prove his power. It’s one of those things magicians do all the time in old stories. Anyway, dealing with this guy was more dangerous than your run-of-the-mill evil spirit. If Renfrew could name a single task the devil could not perform, then he could make whatever use of him he wished for a year and a day. If not, the devil would pull him down to hell.”

“And?”

“Renfrew took him to the beach, and commanded him to weave a rope out of sand.”

“Not bad. What did he have the devil do for him?”

“The story doesn’t say. It’s more concerned with him outsmarting the devil than with Renfrew using him for his personal gain.”

“Maybe that was how he got the iron horse.”

“Could be.”

“Anything else?”

“Not really. He’s supposed to have had something to do with this book, Les mystères du ver, but I’m not sure what.”

“Les—what?”

“Les mystères du ver: The Mysteries of the Worm. It’s some kind of evil book, Satanic Bible, witch’s spell list, that sort of thing.”

“The Mysteries of the Worm, huh? No wonder you’re interested in this guy.”

“Worm? Try snake.”

“Somebody’s overcompensating.”

“Merely stating the facts.”

Neil did not answer, and Jim could not think of a way to extend their banter that did not sound forced, banal. It’s all right, he told himself. Silence is all right. You don’t always have to be talking. Wasn’t that one of the things that had attracted him to Neil in the first place, his ability to be comfortable in his own quiet? Even in the length of time they’d been together, hadn’t he learned that Neil’s sometimes prolonged periods of silence rarely had anything to do with them, that he was usually turning over some work-related problem? He didn’t feel the need to fill the air with words, and if that made Jim anxious, that wasn’t Neil’s fault, was it?

Plus, the sex is fantastic.

Maybe fifteen feet in front of Neil, the path leveled off and was met by another, slanting down from the right to join theirs at an acute angle. When Neil turned at the junction and started up it, Jim said, “Hey.”

“Come on,” Neil said. “This should take us back to the main trail.”

No arguing with that. This track appeared clearer than the one they’d just descended, more sharply-defined. He followed onto it and it was as if he’d tried to walk up a wall. The path rose above him, impossibly high; he staggered backwards, dropped onto his ass. The path loomed overhead, a dark strip of ground about to fall on him, and—

A silhouette leaned in front of him. “What happened?” The voice was flat, familiar.

Struggling against the urge to throw his hands in front of his face, to protect himself from the collapse of dirt and rock, Jim said, “I don’t,” and was shocked to hear the fragment delivered in a voice whose underlying tones were his but which had been roughened, broadened.

The outline before him resolved into Neil, but a different Neil, a Neil whose face might have received the attentions of a makeup artist instructed to advance his age by twenty, twenty-five years. His hair was crew cut short. His skin was grooved across the forehead, beneath the eyes, to either side of the mouth. Under the open collar of his shirt, a faded line of green ink scaled the left side of his neck, the edge of a tattoo, Jim knew—remembered. Were he to look into a mirror, he would see its twin on the left side of his neck, a memento of the aftermath of the Rose Carlton incident, when he and Neil had sought a way to reaffirm their bond. The eclipse had been Jim’s idea, a symbol that, whatever events might darken their relationship, they would pass.

(Except that he’d developed a staph infection, which the tattooist, a mutual acquaintance, had spent days insisting could not be happening—he ran a clean shop—until Jim had wound up in the hospital, tethered to an IV antibiotic drip for a week. Nor had Neil moved past Rose, not really: Every time an argument escalated to a certain pitch, he reached for her like a favorite weapon.)

“You all right?” Neil asked, the words tinted with something resembling concern.

He’s worried about my heart, Jim thought. The infection affected my heart, weakened it. (What the hell is happening to me?) “Fine,” he said, climbing to his feet. “I’m fine, just . . . a little lightheaded.” (Is this some kind of long-term after-effect of being sick? Did it mess with my head?) He gestured at the path. “Go on.”

“You’re sure?”

“Go.”

“Take it easy,” Neil said. “This isn’t a race.” Nonetheless, he hurried to keep in front. “Okay?” he called over his shoulder.

“Great.”

After a minute of trudging up the thick, rocky earth, Neil said, “Do you feel like continuing the story?”

“Story?”

“Story, chapter, whatever you want to call it. ‘Renfrew and the Giant.’”

Almost before he knew he was speaking them, Jim found the words at his lips. “Having endured Renfrew’s displays of power, the Giant was less than impressed by his offer of an alliance between them. He said, ‘Little man, you have already shown me that I have nothing to fear from you. Why should I cast my lot in with yours?’

“Although obviously exhausted, Renfrew stood straighter and answered, ‘Because you have everything to benefit if you do, and everything to lose if you do not.’

“At this, the Giant laughed, and it was the sound of an avalanche, of boulders crashing into one another. ‘Little man,’ he said, ‘your boldness does you credit. I will eat you quickly.’ He reached one enormous hand toward the wizard.

“Renfrew did not flinch. He said, ‘I know your name—your true name.’

“The Giant’s hand halted, inches from Renfrew. His vast brow lowered. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘I hid that where no man—no one might find it, ever.’

“‘Yes,’ Renfrew said, ‘in a cavern under a lake watched over by three mountains, locked inside a brass casket guarded by a basilisk. I have been there.’

“The Giant’s hand retreated. He said, ‘You read of this in one of your wizard’s books.’

“Renfrew said, ‘The sole means to open the casket is the tooth of a hydra, which is in the basilisk’s stomach. The casket contains a pale blue egg resting on a white pillow. To touch the egg is like touching a furnace; to hear its shell crack is like hearing your own death. Within the egg, there is a stone into which has been carved a single word.’

“The Giant’s hand had retreated all the way to his great mouth.

“Renfrew said, ‘That word is Mise.’”

Neil said, “Meesh?”

“I think that’s how it’s pronounced. It’s Gaelic, means, ‘I am.’”

“I am?”

“Yeah. The original story doesn’t say what the Giant’s true name was, only that Renfrew had discovered it and used it against him. I thought about making it something like ‘stone’ or ‘mountain,’ but that seemed too obvious.”

“Why?”

“Well, giants are big, you know; if you were going to associate them with anything, it would be a mountain.”

“I guess.”

“Anyway, it made sense to me that the Giant’s name would be his life, so, ‘I am.’”

“If you say so. Just as long as this one brings another big advance.”

Jim said, “Karen’s pretty optimistic. Post-Harry Potter, wizards and magic are big business in kids’ publishing,” even as he was thinking, Karen Lowatchee, your agent, who repped you on The Still Warrior and, when the heart thing made you scale back karate, suggested you try fiction. She’d liked the chapters on karate for kids, said they showed a real grasp of tween psychology. She was the one who came up with the Jenny Ninja series title, and got you the big advances for the last two. Neil calls her “Glenda the Good Bitch”; she calls him “Microsoft.”

“What happens next?” Neil said.

“In the chapter? Renfrew turns the Giant into his keep.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s what happens in the original legend.”

“Yeah, but—couldn’t he have used the Giant, first?”

“Invaded England with him?” Jim said.

“Something.”

“I don’t know. I kind of like the idea of Renfrew living inside the Giant, wandering around him, listening to the echo of his thoughts, his dreams.”

“Sounds pretty creepy, if you ask me.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“Isn’t this book supposed to be for kids?”

“It’s YA,” Jim said, “Young Adult. Older kids.”

Over the tops of the pines to their right, Renfrew’s keep raised its ragged crown. “See,” Jim said, pointing at it, “the windows look like eyes.”

“What has eyes like that?”

“It’s supposed to be a monster.”

“Aren’t giants big people?”

“Not all of them. The ancient Greeks described giants with a hundred arms.”

“Where do you get this stuff?”

“Depends. The ancient Greek stuff’s available all over the place. Information on Renfrew is harder to come by. Mostly, I use that website, Blackguide.com.”

“The one that crashed the computer?”

“I told you, it wasn’t that: It was all the porn you’d been looking at.”

“Very funny.”

Neil’s pace slowed. In front of him, their path intersected another sloping steeply down from the right. As he stepped onto it, Jim said, “Hey.”

“I’m pretty sure this’ll lead back to the beginning of the trail,” Neil said.

This place isn’t that big. I’m sure if I kept on a straight line, I’d come out on a side street, eventually. However discouraging the prospect of an even more strenuous climb was, though, the inevitable spat that would result from him not following Neil, not to mention the two or three days after that before the situation returned to normal, prompted him up the new path. As he did, his vision went dark. He had the impression of something huge in front of him, something vast hanging over him, like a wave, only solid, ready to crash down on him. He wanted to cry out, but his tongue was dead in his mouth; his heart lurched like a racehorse stumbling mid-stride.

Somewhere close by, an old man’s voice said, “What is it? What’s the matter with you?” The words vibrated with rage, barely-controlled.

What’s Neil’s father doing here? Jim thought. He tried to speak. “Mr. Marshall—”

“Don’t Mr. Marshall me. I know who I am. I’m still lucid.”

The host of the questions the outburst raised was silenced by the clearing of Jim’s sight, which revealed Neil’s face inches from his. Its angry expression was almost parodic: eyes wide and staring under lowered brows, top lip arched, teeth visible, chin jutting forward. It was also the face of a man in his mid-seventies. Neil’s hair was white, as were his eyebrows; both hair and brows were thick, bushy. The lines across his forehead, to either side of his mouth, appeared cut right down to the bone, while his skin looked loose, its grip on his skull slipping. His gaze was fierce yet unfocused, as if he were unable to pinpoint the source of his rage; already, his lips were retreating from their snarl into the tremors that shook them incessantly.

The Alzheimer’s, Jim thought. That was the first symptom: before the memory loss, the mood swings, that spasm was telling us what was on the way.

“What happened to you?” Neil said. “Is it your heart? Are you having another heart attack?” The emotion under his words was sliding into panic.

“I’m fine,” Jim said. “Just caught up in . . .” What? What do I call whatever’s happening to me? (And, by the way, what the hell is happening to me? Is this some kind of stroke?) “In a rather vivid day dream, I suppose—a memory, really, of one of our past visits here.”

“Oh? Was that before or after you fucked Rose?”

“I didn’t—”

“Yes, yes, that’s what you always say; what you’ve always said.”

“But you’ve never believed me, have you?”

“I don’t know what I believe. I’m the one whose brain is disintegrating, remember?”

“It isn’t,” Jim started, then stopped. Technically speaking, Neil’s brain wasn’t disintegrating, but there were worse ways to describe what was happening to his personality, to the aggregate of memories and attitudes that composed Neil. Anyway, Neil already had turned his back on him and was striding up the path. The disease might be wrecking his mind, but so far, his vitality was undiminished. Jim labored not to fall too far behind.

Neil said, “Do you remember the end of Renfrew’s story?”

“Do you mean my book, or the legend?”

“Which was which?”

“My book ends with Renfrew entering the cave at Wemyss in search of the path to the Graveyard of the Old Gods. He leaves Thomas, his apprentice, in charge until his return, which doesn’t take place during Thomas’s very long life, or that of his apprentice, or that of any of the men and women who have come since. However, the book says, that doesn’t mean that, one day, the old wizard won’t emerge from the mouth of the cave, squinting at the light, and begin the long walk back to his old home.”

“That wasn’t it.”

“You want the legend, then. That ends with a group of the Covenanters coming armed to Renfrew’s keep in order to arrest him on charges of sorcery. When they arrived, though, they found the place deserted, as if no one had lived there for decades, or longer.”

“That isn’t it, either.”

“I don’t—there’s a tradition, a kind of afterword to the legend proper, that if you follow a certain course through the woods around Renfrew’s keep—and if certain conditions are right: the stars are in alignment, that sort of thing; I think an eclipse is supposed to figure into the equation, somehow—then Renfrew himself will appear to you and offer to teach you what he knows. Is that what you were thinking of?”

“Yes,” Neil said.

Jim waited for Neil to add something more; when he did not, he said, “What makes you ask?”

“Ask what?”

“About Renfrew’s course?”

“What about it?”

“You just asked me to tell you about it.”

“I did.” Neil shrugged. “I don’t remember that.”

There was no point in anger; though buttressed by his meds, Neil’s short-term memory was far from perfect. Jim said, “You know what I was thinking?”

“How much longer you have to wait before you can put me in a home?”

“What? No, I told you, I’m not going to put you in a home.”

“That’s what you say now.”

“That’s what I have said—what I’ve been saying ever since you were diagnosed.”

For a change, he hoped the silence that greeted his reassurance meant the subject of their debate had slipped through the sieve of Neil’s immediate recollection. His quiet seemed to imply that it had, another moment caught in the plaque crusting his neurons, then he said, “I hope you and Rose will have the decency to wait until all my things have been moved out for her to move in.”

“Neil—”

“It would be nice if you could wait until I’m in the ground, but I’m guessing I could hang on for a while, and you certainly aren’t getting any younger. Neither is she; although she isn’t as old as we are, is she? Maybe she’ll be inclined to do the decent thing, but you won’t, will you?”

“I’m sorry: I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.”

Neil lengthened his stride, mountain-goating up the path. Jim didn’t bother chasing after. Better to hang back and hope that, by the time he caught up, Neil’s thunderstorm of emotions would have passed; though he wasn’t sure what he rated the chances of that as. It had been years, almost a full decade, since he and Rose had seen one another, and that had been by accident, a chance encounter at the Union Square Barnes & Noble that had led to nothing more than the occasional e-mail. If he hadn’t told Neil about the meeting, or the correspondence, it was because, long after his whatever-you-wanted-to-call-it with her had receded in his memory, in Neil’s mind, it was a flame only recently and poorly extinguished, whose smoldering embers might yet ignite again. He would have made too much of the e-mails in which Jim told Rose about his visit to the set of the Renfrew film, Rose told him about her recent trip to Paris with her ninety-two year old mother, mountained the molehills into a secret, ongoing affair. In the wake of Neil’s illness, he supposed he had been writing to her more frequently, but his correspondence with all his friends and family had increased as his communication with Neil had grown more erratic.

He was almost at the top of the path. He had climbed higher than he’d realized; to his right and over his shoulder, he could look down on the roofless top of Renfrew’s keep. To his relief, Neil was standing waiting for him. “There you are,” Jim said—panted, really.

“Here I am,” Neil said. His expression was almost kindly. “Need a minute?”

“Half a minute,” Jim said, leaning forward. “Neil—”

At Neil’s feet, their path formed an acute angle with another climbing up from the right. As he started down it, Jim said, “Hey.”

“I can see the place where we started,” Neil said, pointing.

Jim squinted. Was that the white of the wizard’s statue? They would have to descend from here somehow, he supposed, and this new path, crossed by tree roots that formed an irregular staircase, was probably the best option he could expect. He stepped down and it was like dropping into a well. There was the sensation of falling straight down, and the impression of everything flying up all around him, and the sound of roaring filling his ears. Terror swept through his chest, his head, made them sickeningly light. He flailed his arms. There was nothing under his feet; he was falling.

Something crashed into him from the front. He heard an, “Oof!,” felt his direction change. Now he was moving forward, his arms and legs caught with someone else’s, tangled, the pair of them thudding and scraping against rock and dirt. He rolled over and under, over and under his companion, then landed hard on his back, his right kidney shouting at the rock it came down on. Above him, the sky was a blue bowl someone had set spinning. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, Neil was leaning over him. There was a cut high on his forehead leaking blood onto his brow, but aside from that and some dirt, his face was the same as it had been at the start of this strange walk, thirty-nine and looking it. “You klutz,” he said. “Karate master, my ass.”

Jim flung his arm around him, flinching as his back complained. “I’m sorry,” he said into Neil’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“You mean, aside from the gaping wound in my head? Yeah, I’m peachy.”

Jim released him. “I am so sorry,” he said as he struggled to his feet. “I just . . . I slipped.”

“And you couldn’t miss me on the way?”

“I didn’t want you to feel left out.”

Fighting it, Neil smirked. “You are such an asshole.”

“But I’m your asshole.”

“Enough shit comes out of you, anyway.”

“Ah, I’m sure a little single malt will help.”

“First sensible thing you’ve said all day.”

They had rolled almost halfway down the path; no surprise, given the bruises Jim could feel ripening under his shirt, his jeans, the scrapes visible on Neil’s arms, his neck. He supposed he should be grateful neither of them had broken a limb, or been concussed. At least Neil had been right about this path returning them to the entrance to the nature preserve: through the trees, the wizard’s statue stood a pale beacon. As Neil stepped from tree root step to tree root step, Jim weighed telling him about his . . . what would he call them? Hallucinations? Visions? Waking dreams? Maybe “experiences” was the best word for them. Whatever: it was on the tip of his tongue to say that he had just relived their life together when they’d first met, then seen them at points another twenty and forty or so years in the future. When I’m the author of a series of successful children’s books and he’s in mid-stage Alzheimer’s, not to mention still obsessing over Rose Carlton: yes, that would go over splendidly.

Neil was drawing away from him. Strangest of all was that, now that the two of them were their proper selves, he was not more upset by what he had just been through, his experiences. (That still wasn’t the right word, but it would do for the moment.) While he had been at each of those other times, the moment had been as real as anything—that he had been wrenched from this specific point in his life had seemed as odd, as disorienting, as any other detail. Returned to the age at which he had entered the nature preserve—the age he was supposed to be—Jim found his and Neil’s alternate selves suddenly distant, novels he’d read years ago, their plots dim weights resting in the depths of his memory.

So what was all that? Some kind of projection? Easy enough to trace the roots of at least some of it to the current state of his and Neil’s relationship. Future Neil’s fixation on the Rose business arose from Jim’s anxiety that, as time went on, he wouldn’t be able to relinquish it. Jim’s continued success as a writer was simple wish-fulfillment (although his agent had praised the sections of his book dealing with kids). Neil’s grandfather had suffered from Alzheimer’s, which his father was showing early symptoms of; from there, it was a short jump to imagining Neil eventually overtaken by it.

The vividness of everything, though, he could not account for. He had indulged in enough hallucinogens in his younger years; could this have been a delayed consequence of that? It seemed unlikely, but what was more likely? The place was the site of a ley-line that produced brief time-distortions? Funny how all the tourist info fails to mention that.

To his right, the lower stretch of Renfrew’s keep was visible through the trees. Ahead, Neil was already at the statue. Legs protesting, Jim picked up his pace. Neil had stopped in front of the sculpture, and appeared to be speaking to it. That can’t be good. Did I say neither of us was concussed?

Jim did not see the man with whom Neil was talking until he was next to him. Standing on the other side of the statue, the man had been obscured from Jim’s view by it. A head shorter than either of them, he wore his reddish hair short and a dark suit over an open-collared white shirt. Jim wasn’t much for estimating the cost of things, but even he could recognize the quality of the man’s clothes, which made the stains on his jacket cuffs, his shirt, all the more conspicuous. The man raised his eyes to Jim, and their green notice was a physical thing, a heaviness passing over him. “You’re Jim,” he said in a voice that was soft, accentless.

“Yes,” Jim said, extending his hand. “You are . . . ?”

The man’s hands were in his trouser pockets; he kept them there. “Renfrew.”

“Like—” Jim gestured at the sculpture.

“The very same,” the man said, “though the likeness is a poor one.”

“Wait—what?” Jim glanced at Neil, who was watching the man intently. “I’m sorry: I thought you were saying—”

“I was.” The man withdrew his hands from his pockets. Blue flames licked the unburned skin of the left; while a slender emerald snake coiled around the right.

“Jesus!” Jim leapt back.

“Not quite.”

“What is this?”

Neil said, “We completed the course.”

“You did.” The man—Renfrew?—nodded. “Per the terms of a contract that is older than any of us, I am here to offer one of you my tutelage.”

“One of us,” Jim said. “What about the other?”

“The price of tuition,” Renfrew said. “A gesture of commitment.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Jim said.

“Take me,” Neil said.

“What?”

“Very interesting,” Renfrew said.

“Neil what are you saying?”

“The Alzheimer’s: that’s a sure thing?” Neil said.

“Sure enough,” Renfrew answered.

“And you can cure it?”

“I have been this age for a very long time,” Renfrew said. “You need never meet that old man in the mirror.”

“Are you kidding me?” Jim said. “Are you listening to yourself?”

“And there’s no other way?” Neil said.

“There are many other ways, if you know where and how to find them. This is my way.”

“I’m sorry,” Neil started, but Jim cut him off: “This is insane.”

“There was a link,” Neil said, “on the Blackguide site. I clicked on it, and it led to an account by a guy who had walked this course in the 1930s with his brothers. With each new turn of the path, the three of them were at a different point in their lives: younger, then older, then much older. When they arrived back at the beginning, Renfrew was waiting for them.”

“So all that was real?” Jim said.

“Real enough,” Renfrew said.

“I thought if we could follow the course, then I could see how things would turn out—if we’d still be together; if we’d be happy; if Rose would still be around. I didn’t expect—oh, Christ,” Neil said. “Do you have any idea what it’s like—no, you don’t; how could you? Everything—you’re aware that something is wrong, deeply wrong—you can feel it in everything around you—and you’re sure you know what it is, what’s the matter, but you can’t remember it. And then you can remember, and you realize that the problem isn’t with what’s outside, it’s with what’s inside, and you know it’s only a matter of time until you forget again and the whole process starts over.” His eyes swam with tears.

“Neil, honey, it’s okay,” Jim said. “I’ll be there for you.”

“No,” Neil said. “Don’t you get it? I can’t—I won’t go through that. Now that I know—now that you know, how could you ask me to?”

“So instead you’re going to . . . how does that story end, the one about the guy and his brothers?”

“The younger brother accepted Renfrew’s offer. He and Renfrew disappeared, and when the older brother returned home, it was as if his brother had never existed. He was the only one who had any memory of him.”

“Weren’t there three of them? What happened to the other brother?”

“He vanished, too. No one remembered him, either.”

Jim’s mouth went dry. “The price of tuition.”

“Speaking of which,” Renfrew said, “we really need to move this along.”

“You aren’t going to do this,” Jim said.

“What choice do I have?”

“You could choose me—choose us.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to make me an offer?” Renfrew said.

“Me?” Jim said. “I thought Neil—”

“Was here first, yes, but that’s more a recommendation than a rule. I’m curious to learn how your convictions fare when the situation is reversed.”

Neil’s mouth moved, but no sound issued from it.

“Well?” Renfrew said.

His fear seemed outside him, an acrid saturation pressing on him from all sides at once; nonetheless, Jim was able to say, “Fuck you.” The frown that darkened Renfrew’s face was a small pleasure. Jim looked at Neil, who was staring at the ground. “What I had with Rose—it was never as bad as you thought it was, and when I said it was over, it was.”

“For you, maybe.”

Renfrew swept his left arm up and down, blue fire trailing from his fingertips, tracing a seam in the air that opened into something like a door. He nodded at Neil, who crossed to and stepped through it without another word. Jim was as astonished by his lack of a parting remark as anything.

“Now,” Renfrew said, extending his right hand at Jim. The serpent wrapped around it raised its wedge-shaped head and regarded him lazily. The space behind the wizard darkened, full of an enormous shape. Jim thought, How did the keep—and realized that what had stepped closer was not the keep, or, not anymore. It arched towards him, impossible mouth open to consume him, all of him, not only the flesh and bones it would grind between teeth like boulders, but his past, his present, his future, his very place in the world. He wished his fear would leave him, but he supposed it was better than the serrated edge of Neil’s betrayal waiting beneath it. At least he could keep his eyes open; at least he would not turn away from the emptiness, the silence, descending on him.

For Fiona

© 2012 John Langan

John Langan’s latest collection of stories, Technicolor and Other Revelations, is forthcoming from Hippocampus Press. He is the author of a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade, 2009), and a collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime, 2008). His short fiction has appeared in several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including Wastelands, The Living Dead, and By Blood We Live. He’s also published stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in other anthologies including Ellen Datlow’s Poe, Supernatural Noir, and Blood and Other Cravings, and Jack Dann and Nick Gevers’ Ghosts by Gaslight. With Paul Tremblay, he co-edited the anthology, Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime, 2011). He teaches courses in creative writing and gothic fiction at SUNY New Paltz, and lives in upstate New York with his family.

The Cristóbal Effect
Simon McCaffery

All existence is a theft paid for by other existences; no life flowers except on a cemetery.—Remy de Gourmont

“Eternity? . . . That is one hell of a movie.” —J.B.D.

The wooden detour barricade is barely in place when I spot the car closing fast from the east. Just a glint of light against the desert hills, yet I know it is his car. I ignite the last flare and toss it onto the centerline of the lonely rural two-lane highway.

Intersecting Highway 466 is an unpaved county road. Four miles west is a second, more infamous Y intersection: State Route 41, near Cholame. In arid, remote Cholame, working men and ranchers are returning home in rattling pickups and dust-coated sedans like so many wind-blown tumbleweeds.

The car’s mid-mounted 1.5 liter aluminum engine sings as it streaks toward me, gold rays of fading sunlight dancing along its sleek contours. It isn’t slowing. Does he think the detour signs and hissing flares are a mirage?

The trained physicist in me recognizes the irony: If I stand still and die, I prove I’ve entered a malleable universe, a Wobbly-Brane. If not, he’ll swerve to miss me instead of the Ford Tudor driven by a Cal Poly student, and die of internal injuries as he does in all the rigid-event universes. Like the one in which you live.

Tires shriek and the Porsche 550 Spyder slews to a stop a foot from my knees. I stare at its eternally youthful driver: the go-to-hell hair, high forehead, jutting chin and those cool baby-blues squinting at me behind tinted aviator glasses. I can hear my own heart pounding in my ears.

The tiny car crouches only inches above the road. The driver and a dark-haired passenger stare up at me.

“What’s the emergency here, friend?”

“Detour,” I stutter, a B actor suffering from stage fright.

The driver turns down the blaring radio.

“Say again?”

“Detour,” I repeat. “Highway’s blocked off. Chemical truck tipped over and sprayed poison gas everywhere a mile from here. Heck of a mess.”

The passenger is his racing mechanic, Rolf Wütherich. Dead from a 1981 auto accident after several failed suicide attempts, he grins. “Taking the back roads was a bad idea. The girls will be mad if we’re late.”

The driver scrutinizes the truck parked on the opposite shoulder. The hand-painted letters on its flaking side read: MONTEREY COUNTY ROAD DEPT. Is he suspicious?

“You fellows in a hurry to get someplace?”

The driver cocks a finger. “Got a race to win up in Salinas tomorrow. Will that road get us back on the highway?”

I nod, pointing with the flag. “It’ll take you a few miles out of your way, but not far. Go six miles and take the first right. It’s that or go back the way you came.”

He removes his sunglasses and wipes road dust from the lenses on his white T-shirt. My mind records the tiny moon-shaped shaving cut along his chin; the way his hair curls back in carefree waves from his brow; the full, sensual lower lip, so like Brando’s.

“Thanks for the warning, fellow. Try to stay out of the middle of the road.”

He pops the race car named “Little Bastard” into gear and roars away into the twilight, the dry air whipping his hair, leaving a rooster tail of dust.

I wait ten minutes in the hot ticking silence to make certain he doesn’t double back.

Science fiction writers had it wrong. In rigid-event universes—an infinite paper-doll chain of Earths separated by a quantum frequency shift that only a Device can interpolate—a mysterious, immutable law binds everything down to the subatomic level of reality. Elasticity is limited. Visitors may alter only the most negligible of details. In an ordinary universe, no matter what story I fabricate, he’ll get lost and return to find my barricade removed, and he’ll proceed to his fate. Or he’ll ignore the detour and roar past on the shoulder with a one-fingered salute. Or he’ll take Highway 1 north from L.A. to Salinas.

In a Wobbly-B, phase space is unchained and events are malleable. We have a stiff, scientific acronym: Fluid-Event Branes.

I load the signs into the truck bed and kick the guttering flares onto the shoulder, hastily burying them under sand. A deep chime sounds inside my mind.

Hurry!

A two-tone Ford sedan wheezes by from the west, a lanky bespectacled young man behind the wheel. Mr. Turnipseed, saved from a lifetime of notoriety. Half an hour later another Ford will pass this spot trailing the Spyder, a station wagon driven by photographer Sanford Roth, with fellow racer Bill Hickman riding shotgun.

The sun, a fiery egg, slides behind the desert foothills. Soon people will shut their windows against the cold night air and the howl of coyotes prowling the Diablo Range like gray ghosts. And in the morning, James Byron Dean will stumble out of bed in a Salinas bungalow, his hair corkscrewed from sleep and his eyes sporting the dark bags immortalized in LIFE.

Alive and ready to race on the first day of October, 1955.

‘Brane-slicer’ contraband, case D-T 5154:

SHIPWRECKED (1957). JAMES DEAN, RITA HAYWORTH, JAMES GARNER, ROBERT WAGNER. WWII rebel James Dean and a strong supporting cast battle Japanese soldiers on a balmy pacific atoll. Directed by George Stevens, Warner Bros., color, 137 minutes. First-generation 35mm Technicolor print.

Final Bid: $268M US

[bidder identity redacted pending prosecution]

CONTENTS OF THIS INVESTIGATION ARE CLASSIFIED by order of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and Department of Defense / DARPA-TUNNEL

It isn’t time travel. Please keep that firmly in mind.

Traveling to the past inside one’s home universe is impossible. Traveling to a precise multiverse spacetime coordinate inside an adjacent reality is possible, if you possess a Device. Their inventor remains unknown. The trip utterly destroys every atom in your body, but a new copy of you arrives safely on the other side.

It’s best if you don’t think about that part.

My identity was erased after I stole a Device and deserted my job as a military physicist, but we’ll use one of the aliases I take to deal with my carefully selected, extremely wealthy clients: Jason Blackstone, brane slicer. That’s the slang term for outlaws like me.

Finding Jimmy in this 1956 isn’t difficult.

The scene is the Villa Capri, Jimmy’s favorite Hollywood bar. It’s a popular hangout for stars, including the sexually indeterminate and closeted gay actors. I spot Anthony Perkins, buxom Terry Moore, bronzed Tab Hunter and an incredibly youthful Dennis Hopper. They stop at Jimmy’s table to pay their respects. Rebel has opened and teenagers are flocking to theaters. George Stevens is trying to edit Giant down to two-hundred minutes to meet an August release, two months early, because he doesn’t need to secretly hire Nick Adams to dub Jimmy’s muffled, drunken lines in the last-supper scene.

From my bar stool I make eye contact.

I’ve replaced the filthy overalls and dust with slacks and an open-throated shirt, dark hair combed back. No flicker of recognition.

Brooding is Jimmy’s specialty, so I step to his table and buy him a drink. He stops fooling with those bongos he carries everywhere. He has bags under his eyes and is dressed in the rig that so infuriated the studio heads until they realized its marketing potential—scuffed boots, T-shirt, faded jeans, and a dirty leather jacket.

My face is familiar but he hasn’t made the connection. We drink and talk about the races and the new Triumph 650cc Tiger motorcycle.

In his nearby bungalow he falls asleep as I rattle on about classic films and performances. He would often fall sound asleep in restaurants during conversations. When he finally stirs, I recount our meeting on the road to Cholame and Paso Robles. His face hardens in a mask of suspicion. If a ten-gallon hat were pushed back on his head, the image of Jett Rink, the angry, loveless cowboy, would be complete. He glances at my bare forearms, looking for the needle marks of a heroin addict.

“You’re from the future and I’m a ghost.”

“It’s a lot to process.”

He laughs. “So is Eisenhower going to be re-elected? When are the Reds gonna drop an atom bomb on New York?”

I’m not about to discuss a technology that shifts a conscious organism through the multiverse, burrowing through infinite branes, if you’ll excuse the morbid turn of phrase. The time-travel hokum works best.

Jimmy stabs out his cigarette and vaults up from the sofa. He smiles, exhaling smoke from both nostrils.

“You’re a fruitcake.”

I stay seated, keeping my voice low and even.

“Jimmy, you should at least hear what I have to say.”

He slips on the black leather jacket over the crumpled T-shirt and is instantly transformed into Jim Stark, the volatile middle-class rebel with smoldering eyes.

“I think you better hit the road.”

I do as he says, but pause at the door.

“Your first dog, Tuck, used to piss all over your Aunt Ortense’s back porch in the winter, next to that little black potbelly stove. Stunk like hell. Your favorite ice cream is coffee and raspberry mixed together. Revolting. Your favorite book is The Little Prince. Favorite poet: James Whitcomb Riley. Favorite waiter in New York: Louie de Liso at Jerry’s Bar and Restaurant. Louie used to serve you plates of spaghetti on the house when your money ran out between jobs—”

Jimmy doesn’t blink. “Anybody could have dug all that up with a P.I.”

“And the detour near Cholame?”

His eyes narrow. “I’ve done lots of work on television. You recognized me. I just can’t see what your angle is.”

“Lola Barnes.”

That gets an instant reaction.

“She seduced you after the Sadie Hawkins dance your senior year in high school and you sweated until you were certain she wasn’t pregnant.”

He opens his mouth to reply, but I interrupt him in my omnipotent, time-traveler-knows-all voice.

“I’ve studied your entire life, Jimmy. Right up until the end.”

Stark is gone. He looks like a kid jarred awake from a nightmare only to discover that it has crawled out from under the bed.

“It was a near head-on collision with a 1950 Ford sedan driven by a kid named Donald Turnipseed,” I continue. “You weren’t traveling twice the speed limit as people reported for years, but you weren’t wearing a seat belt. Rolf was thrown clear, but you were declared dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital in Paso Robles at 5:59 Pacific Time.”

He runs a hand wildly through his hair. “This is nuts.”

“Would I make up a name like Turnipseed?”

“Next you’ll tell me you ride around in one of those flying saucers,” he says in a sulky tone.

Jung was right: flying saucers are a manifestation of our collective fears in an epoch in which mankind’s own creations are more horrifying than any brimstone Underworld. But parallel universes, which precede early Hindu mythology, are quite real.

This jaunt has almost expired.

“I protect unique, lost works of art, like 20th-century motion pictures.”

“So why me? I’m a nobody.”

This is the hook, and the only undeniable truth.

“You’re one of the greatest actors of your generation, and three films wasn’t enough. You’ll have the opportunity to develop your craft and not be pigeonholed as the bad-boy rebel. Isn’t that what you’ve dreamed of since you raised sheep on your uncle’s farm?”

Disbelief and desperate hope collide in his eyes like a stormfront.

“What if I decide to never step in front of a camera again?” He crosses his arms, dips his chin. That willful petulance—

I smile. “Jimmy, it’s your life and future. Except with one possible caveat.”

“Oh yeah?”

“When I saved your life, I created a small fracture in reality. Like a fault line.”

“What does that mean?”

“If you move back to Indiana and become a dentist, events could snap back like a rubber band.”

“You mean—”

His enigmatic mother, Mildred Dean, succumbed to ovarian cancer when he was nine. She has haunted his life. Jimmy’s greatest anxiety is the specter of death, and he instinctively rejected the afterlife espoused by his aunt and uncle. That’s the lever I use.

“You’ll die, Jimmy. Like you were meant to.”

‘Brane slicer’ contraband, case D-T 2756

Diana: My Story (2017). Autobiography of the former Princess of Wales chronicling her privileged childhood, education, life before and after Prince Charles, motherhood, her second and third marriages, a failed 2008 suicide attempt, and her re-dedication to charitable work. Random House, 398 pages. Stated first edition. Signed by the author.

Bid: $71M EUR [convicted bidder identity redacted]

In 1974 an Air Force corporal named Pete Moss (no more a joke name than Turnipseed) found a small transistor radio that wasn’t a radio. It was constructed using highly advanced fabrication technologies, unrecognizable at the time. A Device’s invisible skin resembles graphene, incredibly strong layers of carbon arranged in a hexagon honeycomb lattice an atom thick. Inside there are no solid-state circuits or chips. Instead, intricate networks of nano-machines and quantum computers the size of large molecules link with other Devices across universes using an entanglement codec like a cosmic GPS unit, calibrating frequency shifts and navigation. Devices aren’t solid objects in the conventional sense and they easily take the form of ordinary items, chromatic surface particles coordinating to mimic a pack of cigarettes or a smartphone.

Moss’s discovery lay forgotten in Pentagon storage for forty-five years until a brilliant young DARPA analyst named Dick Jenks activated it. More on Jenks later.

DARPA-Tunnel physicists failed to reverse-engineer the Devices, but they uncovered a wholly unexpected view of existence: that endless paper-doll chain of Earths characterized by a puzzling dominant sameness. All those stories we loved of snuffing out Hitler or arming the Rebs with machine guns or stopping Oswald from murdering JFK—hopeless.

And the Devices impose three primary restrictions. Considering that we’re still homicidal primates, I think that’s fortunate, don’t you?

You cannot visit a future coordinate on another Earth. Maybe this is a fundamental law of travel of the multiverse, or maybe it’s a governor function.

Second, you can never revisit the same coordinate in the same universe.

Third, you always arrive on Earth. The Devices don’t double as transdimensional portals to Altair IV or exo-planets like Gliese 581g. A Tunnel sub-team is exploring this possibility: A cornucopian New World of raw material would vault America back to superpower status. If there’s an indigenous population, well, I think of Chris Columbus, and shudder.

Dick Jenks whimsically called it the Cristóbal Effect.

The Devices deny us the tantalizing power to redirect history, but someone with access could employ one in that most signature human enterprise—making astounding amounts of money on a black market unlike any in history. Brane slicers.

What exactly were you expecting?

“You’re some kind of criminal, aren’t you?”

We’re poking around the engine of Jimmy’s Spyder, parked at the edge of a dusty Bakersfield raceway. It’s March 20, 1956.

I grin at Jimmy. “I prefer the term rebel.”

Beneath that teen-idol exterior he’s a maelstrom of driven ambition and vulnerability.

“You’ve got to tell me one thing,” he asks. “Am I going to win it this time?”

“You’ll have to wait, I’m afraid.”

I clap an oil-blackened hand on Jimmy’s shoulder, and he winces.

Eight days later he beats out Anthony Quinn, Robert Stack, and Anthony Perkins to accept the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for Giant.

I studied film history at Colombia while majoring in particle physics. I loved the magic of early cinema before digital effects and motion-capture, so it’s easy to convince myself that I’m doing a Great Thing. Saving important films that should have been made, etc. The row of glowing numbers in my encrypted offshore bank account strongly suggests that I am as full of shit as Dick Jenks.

Ask yourself why Christopher Columbus petitioned various European crowns for nearly a decade to finance his dream of a quicker trade route to India. Any classroom of overfed American children will tell you that the son of a wool weaver and sometimes cheese-stand merchant was a visionary explorer whose brave tenacity forever changed world history. Forget that their nation is erected atop a graveyard of butchered and displaced human beings. Forget the titles (Admiral of the Ocean Seas) and riches (Hispaniola gold and ten percent of all profits made in the new lands) that drove Columbus to make four hazardous journeys to the New World. Catholic priest Bartolome de las Casas catalogued the crimes committed against the people “discovered” by Columbus and his hired Spaniards during the years of single-minded pursuit of wealth and prestige: “My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write.”

Humans are explorers, but our motivations haven’t changed since before we stood fully upright.

For myself, money is no longer a valid motivation. The next films are purely for art, for posterity.

Jimmy’s name, in glowing ruby capitals, dwarfs even the picture’s title, Shipwrecked, atop the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre marquee.

Inside the lobby I stop to admire a movie poster depicting Jimmy battling Japanese soldiers on a lush pacific atoll. Jimmy gleams like a knight in his pearl-white Navy uniform, a blazing .45 Colt in either hand. A banner blares, George Stevens’ Greatest Epic Yet! and Over Two Years in the Making! I shake my head in wonderment. In an eternity of 1957s, The Bridge on the River Kwai dominated the awards, but now?

I approach Jimmy, with Ursula Andress at his side radiating glamour like a quasar. I pluck a fluted glass of champagne from a passing waiter and spill it down the front of Jimmy’s tuxedo jacket. The sycophants surrounding him draw back, aghast.

“Godallmighty, I’m sorry! Let me get you cleaned up!”

Inside the men’s washroom, I dab away at his soggy jacket with a wet silk handkerchief, but he shoves me against the porcelain sink.

“You.”

“That was intentional, but my hands are shaking,” I say. “I’m about to see the fourth great James Dean film. You once said you wanted to do Hamlet while you were young, and re-create the role of Billy the Kid onscreen. The future is yours.”

He glares into the ornate mirror. “You’ll come back for those, too.”

He turns and the bipolar, fear-shrouded Jimmy emerges.

“I ain’t afraid of the future. I’m afraid of you. I have awful dreams after you go . . . wherever. I didn’t sell the Spyder because of what that fop Guinness said in the papers, I just couldn’t stand riding in it anymore. I’m not some damned puppet.”

Jimmy pivots and punches me in the face. Flashbulbs pop inside my head and I sag to the tiled floor.

“Sorry about the eye,” Jimmy says, “but I’ve got a reputation to maintain.”

The tissue around my eye tingles and swells. I grin up at him. “No need to apologize.”

This body, face, and sizzling nerve endings will be annihilated in fifteen minutes.

Jimmy stalks out to rejoin his waiting entourage.

‘Brane-slicer’ contraband, case D-T 6987:

The Wolf (1905), Frank Norris, Doubleday, Page & Co., 354 pages - Norris’s final Naturalist novel in his sweeping The Epic of the Wheat trilogy (following The Octopus and The Pit) describes the American-grown wheat relieving a famine-stricken village in Europe. Signed clothbound first edition.

Bid: $48.6M US [buyer identity redacted based on plea-bargain to assist in the apprehension of the seller]

The paramount rule in the unwritten Brane Slicer’s Guide to Survival is, don’t get caught. The second rule is, never get altruistic about your work. You’re a quantum-tunneling conquistador, not Captain Kirk. The only Prime Directive is to make money.

Consider the tale of Dick Jenks.

Jenks was obsessed with Lennon. He abandoned his research and became the founding father of brane slicers so he could prevent the shooting outside The Dakota and allow his idol’s musical renaissance to flourish beyond Double Fantasy and the posthumous, incomplete Milk and Honey. Jenks tried to intercede on a thousand Earths and watched Lennon die again and again. He eventually located a Wobbly-B, but the D-T boys were closing in, and he cracked. Jenks disguised himself as Lennon, identical clothes, black wire-rimmed glasses and a wig. He arrived sixty seconds ahead of schedule and Chapman, waiting in the gloom, emptied his pistol into Jenks instead. Lennon was so shaken by the near miss that he withdrew from public life, went back on H, and turned the paranoid dial up to ten. He died of an overdose on Christmas Eve 1980.

Poor Jenks. It wasn’t a Wobbly.

Having auctioned the Shipwrecked print, my plan is to undergo extensive gene therapy and pop back into my wonderful Wobbly to, say, the high-flying 1990s. Stow the Device somewhere, and live off interest.

But first—

“What the hell is this?” Jimmy says.

We’re on the Universal backlot in the Old West Town, spring 1963.

“It’s the Hitchcock script I gave you. It’ll be groundbreaking, like Psycho. Hitchcock will be back on top, and you’ll win another Oscar.”

Kaleidoscope is the crypt-dark Hitchcock masterpiece that every studio passed on, the story of a handsome young serial killer, told from the murderer’s perspective. He planned to shoot it using hand-held cameras, three decades before The Blair Witch Project. Only Jimmy could invoke the necessary mix of sex appeal and tortured soul.

“He’s a rapist,” Jimmy says. “What would my fans think?”

He drops the script and walks away, spurs jingling.

Jimmy’s career is in a tailspin. He is arrested for beating a gossip columnist over a scathing review of his Hamlet, and again when he breaks a director’s nose after a botched scene in Billy The Kid Rides Again with John Wayne. The studio heads are tired of the drinking, reckless driving between films and scandals. Jimmy is thirty-three and looks forty-five. He’s uninsurable. Jack Warner dumps him. Paramount signs and then drops him after he walks off the set of a love triangle with Jane Fonda and Paul Newman.

Jimmy cables Hitchcock and tells him what a fat, sick bastard he is. MCA drops the project.

I confront Jimmy in his trailer on the set of The Horror of Party Beach. It is June 1964, and Jimmy’s hair is thinning, his face hollowed. The trailer reeks of sour beer and marijuana. His dust-covered bongos are piled in one corner, half-buried by soiled clothes.

I am dressed as a stagehand. “The director is waiting for you.”

Jimmy is sprawled on a sofa bed, drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniels. He glares at the walls and motions for me to leave.

I say, “Remember when you shot East of Eden? You used to whistle when you were ready for a scene. It was a signal you and Kazan worked out.”

Jimmy flinches and his arm knocks the bottle off the sofa. He watches whiskey gurgle onto the dirty carpet before grabbing it. He staggers to his feet and I recoil from the anguish in his eyes.

“Jimmy—”

He gestures around the trailer. “Not exactly the Chateau Marmont, is it? I’m just doing this little picture to . . . to broaden my range.” He laughs, a humorless whistling sound. “Will I win an Oscar for this one?”

He hurls something and I duck. The whiskey bottle spins over my head to shatter against the wall.

Jimmy removes a small blue-steel revolver from the mirrored counter and crosses the length of the trailer with surprising speed, kicking litter out of his way. His pale, whiskered face looks feral. He aims the pistol at my head and cocks the hammer.

“Stop screwing with my life.” His eyes are flat, like a shark’s.

The chime sounds inside my mind. I back slowly to the door. “I gave you a second chance, Jimmy. I warned you about instability—”

“I think you’ve been lying to me from the start,” he says, and his finger whitens on the trigger.

At forty-six, Jimmy is unrecognizable. The hair clinging to his scalp in a widow’s peak is gray and closely cropped. His face is an atlas of wrinkles. His eyes are rheumy and vacant. The tip of his left ear is missing. It is November 1977.

I sit beside him on the park bench and sling birdseed to a motley band of Central Park pigeons. Jimmy smokes a lumpy hand-rolled cigarette and stares straight through the bright clusters of playground children.

Given the gift of years, his feverish passion for his craft should have blossomed—but his soul was eaten away by the moths of time like Welles and Brando. If he were alive, crazy Dick Jenks would be rolling on the damp pavement, roaring laughter, scaring the pigeons.

“Hello, Jimmy.”

His head swivels like a gun turret. His eyes focus.

“So I didn’t kill you.”

“No, but it was very close.”

His face crumples like newspaper.

“Have you spoken to your daughter? Have you thought about working again, something small like off-Broadway theater?”

Defiant fire stokes behind Jimmy’s eyes. I see Jim Stark, not a broken, prematurely old man.

“You can go straight to hell.”

I place a white envelope on the bench seat.

Jimmy flicks away the cigarette butt and leans close enough for me to smell his poverty and despair.

“Money inside? What I want is to wake up, and all of this be a bad dream.” He grabs the scarf around my neck in his wiry hands and hauls me to my feet. His voice rises in pitch, the lost sound of a frightened child. “I want to be young again. I want to be famous again.” His eyes tear up.

“I want to be great again. You can wind all this back,” he chokes, “and this time you don’t put up that detour.”

“Jimmy, I can’t return to the same places and times. But I have a plan—”

He opens the envelope as if it might contain a black widow, and shakes the contents into his palm: Marlboro cigarettes and a small drift of diamonds.

He scatters the gemstones to the pigeons and tosses me the cigarettes.

“I quit in prison.”

“Wait, that’s not a pa—” I stop.

Jimmy shuffles away, gloveless hands buried in frayed coat pockets, disappearing into the gray New York streets he once haunted.

Columbus, our merchant-apostle, fervently believed that as lord of Hispaniola he would bring piety and civilization to the barbarous los Indios he ruled, but all he brought was epidemic and atrocity. He died a bitter pauper, unable to return to the New World with more ships and soldiers. Until his last breath he remained convinced he could rectify his mistakes and his reputation.

In uncounted worlds Jimmy is preserved as a youthful, misunderstood lost soul of postwar cinema, his mystery secure and eternal. Just look at what I’ve reduced him to in this one.

I return the identical Device disguised as a pack of smokes into my coat pocket next to its twin.

A chime, and the park vanishes in a silent white supernova.

The little car is a nimble bullet.

I blink and grip the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, feel my right foot pressing the accelerator pedal. The desert wind screams past and the supercharger howls in answer. I glance in the little side mirror and see Jimmy’s twenty-four-year-old face. No. My face. Our face.

Memory pours back like freezing stream water.

I return after the older, broken Jimmy shuffles away, the pigeons pecking at diamonds, and they’re waiting for me. Commando shapes in night-gear, the cough and bee-sting of subsonic missiles striking my upper back and neck. A short fall into blackness.

“Better ease off a bit,” says Rolf Wütherich, resurrected from dust to take this fateful ride again. “Shoot a piston and you won’t be racing for a week.”

I forgot to tell you how they dispose of brane slicers.

They might strand you 350 million years ago in Paleozoic Kansas when it was a vast lowland swamp, part of the supercontinent Laurussia, a tasty lunch for the twenty-foot crocodiles and meter-long scorpions. Or your consciousness is transmitted into the cranium of a pinstripe-suited stockbroker right before the first airliner knifes into the WTC north tower on 9/11, experiencing that doomed soul’s final moments of stark terror.

The last mile unwinds like the final reel of a familiar film. The radio plays “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” A hawk flaps up from a telephone pole. The mechanical clock in the Spyder’s dashboard reads 5:39 P.M.

We round a bend and cruise down a mild hill toward the 41 junction. A car is waiting, a ’50 Ford Tudor, idling on the centerline. Jimmy’s heart—my heart—begins hammering a slow drum-roll. Sweat rolls into my eyes. Piloted by the dependable Donald Turnipseed, the Ford hesitates and then lurches across the ash-colored highway. Rolf shouts above the wind as I veer directly into its path. His hand reaches for the wheel and I bat it away. No sense in fighting fate unless you’re in a Wobbly. The blunt chrome nose of the Ford blots out the high deep-blue sky. I glimpse its driver’s white face. It’s a good death, and just penance for my avarice.

Jimmy’s face smiles in the mirror, young again. Immortal again. In that last instant before we hit, I give him a wink.

Simon McCaffery writes SF, horror, and hybrids of both genres. You can blame his father, the artist James McCaffery, who bought him George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides when he was ten. His stories have appeared in Black Static, Tomorrow SF, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Mondo Zombie, Space & Time, and in a number of anthologies. He lives in Tulsa with his wife, three children, and a spoiled dachshund, and is completing a novel that mixes elements of horror and emerging medical technology. Drop him a line at simonmccafferyfiction.blogspot.com.

Contact
Eileen Gunn

The Desert of Winds was inland, a four-day flight from the eyries along the coastal mountains. After the eight-day fast, it was a long journey, even for the strongest-winged. But when they felt the high, hot desert wind lift them like dry leaves, even the most exhausted stretched their wings to the fullest and surrendered to the euphoria of approaching death.

Girat had been riding the winds for three days. She no longer made a distinction between her body and the current of air on which it rested. Mesas blue-green with lichen, chalky desert sinks, the land flowed like viscous liquid beneath her wide, motionless wings. The circle of horizon shimmered with heat and the sky shaded to transparent blue at the zenith. Suspended between earth and sky, she savored the time remaining and looked forward to death with pleasure.

It was her final afternoon. She was approaching the old City of Pillars, where she would die surrounded by memories of her ancestors. As she passed over the outskirts of the dead city, she noticed a visitor’s encampment below, its tent a sharp cool circle against the hot desert floor.

Her people avoided the awkward, wingless visitors—their devices produced unnatural wave disturbances. Girat murmured a prayer against excessive vibration and glanced down at the camp.

There was only one visitor and it was lying motionless in the shadows, a victim, perhaps, of the city, or of its own ghastly technology. Girat circled and descended, preparing to salvage its flesh for its relatives. She hoped she could do so without abandoning her early and well-deserved deathflight.

Odd that the preservation of their dead flesh was so important to the visitors. The past summer, Girat had observed them packing their dead in boxes and burying them for preservation. Perhaps they would eat them later. She found the thought repellant.

Girat was descending toward the visitor, only a few beats away, when suddenly it came alive and leaped to its feet, snatching a small object from the ground beside it. It held the object at arm’s length toward Girat, an action she recognized as an attempt to preserve the formality and distance that existed between her people and the visitors.

Well, that was certainly all right with her. With a sharp beat of her wings, Girat continued past, to resume her slow flight of dehydration. Since the visitor was not dead, she would not have to delay her dying on its account.

As she passed over the visitor, the object in its hand moved. Her right wing stung momentarily and went numb. Girat faltered in her flight, gave a jolting flap, and swung irregularly to the right, favoring the wounded wing.

Moving faster than she would have thought possible with a wing injury and in her moribund condition, Girat swooped toward the center of the empty city. She landed clumsily on an abandoned flight deck, bruising her numbed shoulder against a wall of masonry.

For a peaceful, pleasing death, she must die airborne, in a slow glide to the earth: She could fly no further until sensation returned to her wing. A maze of warrens and obelisks, its vibrations stilled, the City of Pillars would shelter her until she could resume flying. She settled her wounded limb carefully in place, then scuttled as quickly as she could down a deteriorating ramp.

The interruption was unexpected, but like any event on a deathflight, it must be accepted. A sentient creature like the visitor, however, ought to have more control over its actions. Her people were wise to avoid them, she thought. The miasmic resonance enveloping their camps would cripple anyone’s control.

At the foot of the spiraling inner ramp, strewn with ragged insulation and electronics torn from the walls, a broad irregular doorway led into a pillared square. Windswept detritus, wires and cables of synthetic substances, had piled up to the edge of the door. Girat stepped over the rubble and moved out into the open plaza.

Bozhye moi. The size of that bird. He knew he had hit it with the trank gun, but he hadn’t brought it down. Damned dosage too low.

Alex Zamyatin watched the bird sail toward the center of the abandoned city. It was conscious, but the drug obviously was taking effect. The bird landed on a balcony a kilometer away. Good, he thought. It wouldn’t fall too far when it keeled over.

He shrugged on his copter pack and started after it. The city fell away beneath him—tall, slab-like buildings around tiled squares. Pyerva’s lighter gravity made it easier to get around, but without the copter, he would have had a rough time in the roadless ruins.

Laid out in a series of open squares, vast empty plazas edged with towering obelisks, the city had obviously been the home of a people oriented to the air—and all the higher animals on Pyerva were winged. There were no streets below him and few connecting passages between the honeycomb of sandstone buildings and squares.

The balcony where the bird had landed was directly ahead. Alex was anxious to find the bird. It was his first chance, the expedition’s first chance, to examine a live specimen. They had dissected several dead birds found in the ruins, and had raised more questions than they had answered. What did the birds eat? Their intestines had contained no food at all. Where did they nest? Nowhere near the cities, that was certain; aerial reconnaissance had yielded no clues—no birds had even been sighted. How did they use those highly developed paws? Four fingers, two thumbs: They looked very efficient. And why did they die? In every case, dehydration had been the apparent cause of death. The wiry bodies were dried out, tongues shriveled, mucous membranes cracked. Perhaps they were gliding birds blown off course, away from their habitat, by strong winds.

Despite their large brains and opposable digits, there was no definite proof that they were at all intelligent. No artifacts or clothing. They didn’t inhabit the cities. And the initial planetary survey hadn’t revealed any other settlements.

And yet, they were the only possibility so far for intelligent life on this first extrasolar, life-harboring planet, Pyerva. The complexity of their nervous systems argued intelligence. And, structurally, they were the right creatures to live in these cities. Everything was built to the scale of these birds, alone of all the animals of Pyerva. Devices were engineered for their peculiar hands. If he were going to design a city for the birds to live in, Alex conceded, these were the cities he would design. A live bird should end the speculation.

Alex landed on the balcony. It was pretty shaky—he ran into the building. They were familiar to him now, these alien structures. Doors were staggered at various levels in the walls, designed for entrance from the air. Interior automated ramps, no longer operative, led down to the plaza level. He scanned the cluttered interior, furniture half or fully extruded from the walls and floor, the disorder of decaying mechanics. The bird was nowhere in sight. Alex ran down the ramp, checking quickly at each level. It would head for the plaza, he thought. Someplace open to the sky.

He found the bird collapsed in the square, not too far from the door. It lay near one of the pillars, its huge wings folded into fleshy carapace against its back. It was breathing shallowly, rapidly, its eyes covered with a whitish nictating membrane. Rate of metabolism and body temperature were even higher than he had expected, but it would take a lot of energy to get that big a creature into the air. The bird was quasi-mammalian, as he had known: They were really more like bats than birds. Its long body was lightly muscled except for the powerful extensors that ran from beneath its wings, over its shoulders to the chest. It was covered with fine mauve down, a marsupial-like pouch on the abdomen. A female? Perhaps the term was irrelevant here.

He turned his cooling unit up another notch. Must be fifty degrees in the sun. The overheated air, despite its high oxygen content, was oppressive. Perhaps, Alex thought, it had been foolish of him to refuse an assistant: The stifling heat put an unexpected limit on his strength. But there were too few left in the expedition anyway, since the accident. He slid the tractor awkwardly under the animal’s body and rose into the air, pulling the unconscious bird with him.

It was beginning to revive as he got back to camp. He barely had time to get it into the collection cage and turn on the field. The great, downy creature stirred in the cage and opened its eyes. Large as a lemur’s, they shone a luminous violet, compelling his attention. The bird clambered to its feet, shook itself briefly, and flapped its wings to unfold them. Standing erect, it was easily two meters tall, knobby and angular, sharp bones emphasized by its loose skin, emaciation unsoftened by the sparse down.

Alex had the trank gun ready, just a blur dose in case it became violent enough to damage itself. The bird saw him and moved hesitantly in his direction, stopping when it saw the gun. Alex pointed it away from the creature: It seemed to relax. Did it recognize the gun? The bird approached him until it hit the invisible beams of the cage. Examining the force-field in front of it with its paws, it made a series of short, liquid noises. It explored, in silence, the extent of the cage, then turned back to Alex and approached him as closely as the cage would allow. Turning its hyacinth eyes on him, it said, in clear, unaccented Russian, “How do I get out?”

Awareness filtered into Girat’s mind. The air was thick with electromagnetic waves, and something was watching her. She opened her eyes, got to her feet; she was in the visitor’s camp. The visitor itself was standing in front of her, its body in the pose of formality and distance. She wouldn’t press it, since it seemed incapable of controlling a tendency to sting.

The visitor made a gesture of approach, and Girat drew closer, until she encountered the force shield between them. She felt for the door, but the field extended all the way around her. Perhaps she had overlooked the controls: The visitor’s technology was alien to her, and she had been away from the city and its devices for a long time.

She spoke slowly, groggy from the vibrations, directly into the visitor’s head.

“How do I get out?” she asked.

The visitor gave a start and invoked a mythical being. It approached her, its thoughts stumbling. What an odd creature. She felt her feet warming to it, it was so tentative and unsure. And no wonder, with all these thought-scrambling devices around it. Her head ached unbearably. But despite the pain, Girat was tempted to interrupt her deathflight, to stay and study this visitor for a while. She would consider it later. At the moment, she must find a way out of this vibrating shield. There must be controls.

There were. The visitor pulled them from the folds of its clothing, adjusted a knob, and walked right through the field. Inefficient way to run things, Girat thought. She couldn’t reach the controls at all.

“You speak Russian!” it said.

“Don’t you?” she replied.

It stared at her with a peculiar lack of expression. But with such small eyes, it must have difficulty expressing the visible emotions. It shook its head slowly.

“Yes, yes I do.” There was a pause, and it looked at her. “But are you actually, uh, speaking Russian? Or . . .”

“No, of course not, I’m just floating the words. Our structures are not compatible.” That explanation was a little vague, she thought, but the visitor seemed to accept it.

With barely a pause, it launched into a detailed description of the astronomical location of its planet of origin.

Girat wasn’t interested. This information couldn’t contribute much to her deathflight, and the vibrations from the force field disrupted her thinking. She scratched politely beneath her pouch and asked if the could perhaps continue their discussion outside the fields of force.

The visitor stopped talking and tinted its skin warmer. Control of its body fluids, thought Girat. Charming, and very polite.

“—most distressing to me,” it was saying. “This is our first contact with, uh, other species. No knowledge of what to do. I should, of course, have been prepared, but I wasn’t really expecting that you would speak my—well, you know. Please come into the tent. Certainly. Much more comfortable there . . .”

It led her out of the force field, across the tablerock to the circular tent. Vibrations came from a small cluster of containers next to it. Girat could tell that the tent wasn’t going to be much more pleasant than the force field.

The tent was quite cold, as she had known when she first saw it from the air, and the combination of cold and vibration must have had a visible effect on her, for the visitor noticed her recoil when she entered the tent.

“Is there something the matter?” it asked.

She told it about the vibrations, which apparently it couldn’t even detect. Nevertheless, it considerately shut most of its equipment down.

“No wonder we never saw any of you close up. We were driving you away.” It seemed to think that, but for the vibrations, Girat’s people would have flocked to the visitors’ camps. Girat did not correct the impression. “This tent will heat up pretty fast without the cooling unit,” it continued, pulling off its clothing. “But the heat doesn’t seem to bother you.”

Squatting comfortably on the floor, Girat watched the visitor while it talked rapidly and enthusiastically about establishing contact with an alien species. Girat was still feeling a bit dizzy from the vibrations, and she wasn’t listening much to what the visitor was saying. Its words were irrelevant to her death, which had been interrupted, but would proceed as planned. It was a handsome animal, she thought, though its species must be a lonely one, to be so excited by contact with another.

Alex watched as the huge bird settled itself on the floor. This was the moment, he thought, that the human race had been moving toward for more than a century: contact with another intelligent species. They had prepared speeches for everything else: the first person on the Moon, the first on Mars, the first on every moon and half-assed asteroid since. His captain had made a speech as they prepared the cryogenics after finally clearing Pluto’s erratic orbit. He had sent a lengthy speech back through four light years of empty space when they were awakened, a month out from Alpha A, which later proved to have a great selection of cosmic debris, but no planets at all. Then another lengthy speech went out when they landed on the most likely-looking planet of Alpha B, the first extrasolar planet to be explored by humans. It had been named Pyerva, The First, by Grisha, who was a Georgian and sentimental, but it was only the most recent of a long line of firsts. And now it was superseded by yet another first, the first “alien.”

Alex was at a loss for words. He should have said something more memorable than “You speak Russian?” but truly, he hadn’t expected the bird, however intelligent it was, to start talking immediately in his native language. Even on the ship, they usually spoke standard. Well, he could invent something that sounded good for the history cubes. Who would know?

“We come in peace for all the citizens of Earth.” Hadn’t someone already used that? Oh well. “Uh, you are our first contact with a civilization other than our own.” No response. It didn’t seem to be too handy with small talk. Neither was Alex. He slumped back against a cushion. He had been trained to communicate a few basic concepts, to start learning an alien language, if he could. He was to lay the groundwork for more meaningful communication later.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this fast. Here he could say anything he wanted, but nothing seemed worth communicating, and the creature wasn’t interested. The whole encounter seemed meaningless.

Alex looked over at the bird seated awkwardly on the floor. It had folded itself rather haphazardly together and looked forlorn and a little moth-eaten, to tell the truth, like a malnourished dog. Purely on impulse, he leaned forward and reached out a hand to touch the down on its broad shoulder, where wing and arm and back and chest met. It was soft on the surface, hard-muscled underneath. He stroked the length of the arm softly, and the creature didn’t flinch or pull away, but reached out to touch his cheek with its longest fingers. Its hand was very warm, warmer by several degrees than his own body temperature.

A part of his mind protested: This wasn’t remotely in tune with the demands of protocol, or even of scientific inquiry. How was he going to explain this to his superiors? Extremely disordered behavior, said his mind. Situational diplomacy, replied his body. He put an end to the discussion and moved closer to the alien.

Physical contact with the telepathic creature made them both of one mind, one feeling. The bird’s large, sensitive hands moved lightly around his neck, under his ears, to his shoulders, and down. He moved his own hands in the same way on its longer body. Sensual warmth without sexual arousal flowed between them in the smoothing together of skin and velvet. Alex felt the weight of the expedition’s problems fall away from him, as he lost himself in the drowsiness of warmth and contact. They stretched slowly together on the floor of the tent.

Girat could feel the visitor relaxing, loosening his grip on his pain, letting the tension flow from his muscles. When they touched, Girat could feel the sources of his tension: They lay not so much in the vibrations that filled the air of the tent, as in the pain and isolation of creatures who have abandoned their nests, who have left behind all the rest of their kind, forever.

As she began to understand its pain, Girat felt herself grow closer to the visitor, and she sensed the ambiguity in the visitor’s mind concerning the exchange of warmth and the reproduction of his species. Very different from her associations concerning the two functions. To Girat, there was no relationship between gene sharing and mind sharing. She projected that thought to the visitor, and felt him drowsily agree to the idea of sharing. Their minds and bodies moved together.

Lying stretched out on the floor of the tent, she shared her breath with him, breathed the air as it came from his body. Their muscles moved together, their limbs glided over each other.

Girat could feel the pain leaving his mind, the edges of his regret dulling. Slowly, she pushed further into his unconscious. He would be left with a sense of loss, which is a worthy emotion, but would no longer feel such pain and longing for his Earth. She spoke to the visitor in words for the first time since they had touched.

“This is a good happening for the end of a deathflight. I am honored.”

She was lying on her chest, against him, one arm over his shoulder, the other reaching forward beyond their heads, her hand curved back toward her face, her long fingers lightly flexed. Alex smiled sleepily. He should find this experience a lot stranger than he did.

Instead, he felt comfortable on this planet for the first time since they had arrived. He had been welcomed by one of Pyerva’s own people, and they could explore their differences and their similarities. What a wealth of information she could give him.

She rose up slightly on one arm, turned to face him. “This is a suitable happening for the end of a deathflight,” she said. “I am honored.”

“What is a deathflight?” asked Alex. Perhaps this would explain the mummified birds in the cities.

She sat up slowly. “When we left the cities, thousands of seasons ago, we left the mechanisms that would support a large population. We must keep our numbers low.” Flexing her wings slightly, she stretched her arms out in front of her, tendons and muscles stretching. “So, when a person has accomplished some good and has made a contribution, she is allowed to return to her ancestors’ city to die, and one of her eggs is quickened.”

This made no sense to Alex. “But why did you leave the cities in the first place? They could support millions.”

“The vibrations,” she replied. “The cities and their electronics produced vibrations—” she touched his arm, and he associated the word with the electromagnetic spectrum, “—that scar the mind and damage the body. Some people—my ancestors—could feel them, like a sickness, eating at them. They left the cities, got as far away from them as they could, and settled in the rock eyries where we live now. Most people stayed in the cities until it was too late. Perhaps they couldn’t feel the vibrations, or perhaps they ignored them. They did not live healthily until death, and their young suffered even more.” She paused. “It’s time that I left,” she said, rising slowly from the floor of the tent, drawing Alex up with her. “If I rest too much, I’ll be unable to die properly.”

Alex stood stunned for an instant as her meaning sank in, then turned incredulous. He was just beginning to put the pieces together, and there was much more they should talk about. She couldn’t die now. She couldn’t abandon him.

He grabbed her arms, to keep her in the tent until she regained her senses.

When he grabbed her, Girat instinctively pushed back, but she was too weak to have any effect: Almost all her remaining strength was in the muscles that controlled her wings. With a violence of emotion that blew through her mind like a wind, he objected to her leaving, objected to her dying, and threatened to prevent her from continuing her deathflight.

Girat had never found herself in violent opposition to another intelligence. She found herself totally without referent. She could accept the impersonal barbarity of her environment, she could comprehend searing pain and transmute it. Those were natural occurrences: She could move past them. But the artificial constraint of one person by another, this was beyond acceptance and comprehension.

He couldn’t intend to keep her here! He couldn’t place his mind and power in opposition to hers! What kind of incomprehensible monsters were these aliens?

Incredulity and rage burned reason from her mind. She shook uncontrollably. There were other ways of dying. She would accept a hasty death on the ground before she would be kept alive against her will.

Suddenly she stopped. The cause of his irrational behavior was available to her: He couldn’t understand what she was thinking, he couldn’t hear her, even when they were touching. She thought again what a lonely, comfortless existence these creatures must lead. But she could project. As long as they were touching, she could put parts of her mind into his, just as she could project words from a distance.

And she did. She projected pure emotion, tied tenuously to facts: the triumph of heroes of her clan who had died beautiful deaths, the pride of her mother, dying that she might live, the joy of the child that would receive life when she was dead. The visitor stopped holding her, but she kept the flow of emotion pouring into him: She relived the euphoria of her deathflight, and felt again an eager anticipation of her death.

When her desire for death became unbearable, she left him.

The next day and the day after, Alex Zamyatin went out into the city despite the heat. It was much too large a city for one man to cover in a day. On the third day, he found her.

It was early, an hour or two past dawn, and the city was rosy with light. She lay, wings spread, in the shadows at the edge of a plaza. She had been dead for some time.

Her wings, dry as parchment, were loosely outstretched, covering most of her body and the ground around it. One arm lay hidden under her; the other reached forward, her hand near her face, fingers curved slightly inward—the same sleepy pose she had taken in the tent.

Her face was peaceful, what he could see of it. Membranes obscured her large, luminous eyes. She looked, deceptively, as though she were breathing. He could almost see a slight rise and fall of her chest.

He knelt beside her, reached out a hand. Not to move her; she was perfect, ageless, spent. He touched the downy leather of her wing, surprised against his will by his own action. Her flesh, waxy under his fingertips, was colder than he could have anticipated. Dead.

He stroked her wing again, involuntarily. It was difficult to stop, he felt such joy.

© 1981 Eileen Gunn.

Originally published in Proteus: Voices for the ’80s, edited by Richard McEnroe.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Eileen Gunn (eileengunn.com) is the author of the story collection Stable Strategies and Others and co-editor of The WisCon Chronicles Two. Her fiction has received the Nebula Award in the US and the Sense of Gender Award in Japan, and has been nominated/short-listed for the Hugo, Philip K. Dick, World Fantasy and James Tiptree, Jr. awards. She edited and published the influential Infinite Matrix webzine, which the Science Fiction Encyclopedia describes as “one of the three leading online [SF] magazines at the start of the new millennium, establishing a plateau of quality, respectability and achievement to which all others would aspire.” A graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop, she also served for 22 years on the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and was instrumental in its survival and success. Her most recent story is “Hive Mind Man,” written with Rudy Rucker, in Asimov’s, Feb/2012. You can follow her on Twitter @eileen_gunn.

A Plague of Zhe
Maggie Clark

My inquisitor wore a hangdog look more than earned by the absurdity of this official interview. Had I the ability to be annoyed, I didn’t even imagine I would have been. Amused? Possibly: The incompetence of these proceedings was palpable enough.

“I see Deirdre’s father still has some pull around here.”

Behind a dusty grey moustache, Ivansen’s cheekbones reddened. “Now, Mr. Bennett, I assure you—”

“Ms., if you please.”

His eyes flicked up the length of my chassis, traditionally attired and distinctly masculine, then down to the notes on his screen. “Yes, of course, my apologies. Ms. Bennett, this is all a formality, you understand. But, we feel, a necessary one.”

“Of course you do.”

“As you know, what’s happening on the surface is very troubling, so of course we want to send someone as quickly as possible.”

“As quickly as possible,” I agreed, and the repetition was not lost on him. Ivansen drummed his stylus on the edge of the desk, his thin lips pursed, then quivering.

“Yes, well,” he said at last. “A question has arisen, however, as to your suitability for the position. A question of bias, Ms. Bennett.”

“I see.”

“You must understand, these scientists have dedicated a very substantial portion of their lives to this project, and the work they’re doing could revolutionize gene therapy, agriculture, chemical engineering. So none of them wants to be sent home without cause.”

“Deirdre doesn’t believe I’d send her home without cause.”

“No?”

“No. You both know perfectly well there’s nothing in my programming to allow for that. This is all about sending a message.”

“I see. But then, tell me—why is she so concerned about your involvement?”

I considered replying, because of her programming, but nothing so snide would work in my favor. I smiled my most winning smile instead.

“Have you ever owned a Companion, Mr. Ivansen?”

My inquisitor’s cheekbones attained a higher flush. “I should think not.”

“The very idea offends you?”

“I’m not the kind of man who pays for sex, Ms. Bennett. Artificial or otherwise.”

Give it time, I thought, and checked that my smile was not too broad. “But if you were, say. If you were working on a one-man research station for over a year, trying to make a go of it without any string-pulling from Daddy, all the while sitting on a heap of Daddy’s credits; and the nights were long and dark and lonely; and a certain company promised expedient, discreet delivery free of charge . . . ?”

“Ms. Bennett, I assure you, I am perfectly aware of Mrs. Howden’s particulars in this case.”

Mrs. Interesting. I spread my hands—the universal sign of equitability.

“Then what else is there to say? She felt betrayed when I self-actualized, she feels betrayed now. Meanwhile, Mr. Ivansen”—I leaned in, and my inquisitor instinctively leaned back. “The Zhe are dying. By the hundreds, I hear, and growing every day. And we both know I’m the only one in this department who won’t make the problem worse. So we can sit around all day humoring Deirdre’s father, or you can let me do my job. Which is it?”

Even lacking the argumentative heft of good cleavage—or perhaps because of the new shoulder breadth in this masculine chassis—I seemed to make a compelling case; after a moment’s hesitation, Ivansen ticked off a few boxes, handed me my travel permits, and showed me to the door. On the way out he even had the decency to resurrect my proper honorific, “Detective,” if only as an afterthought. The hangdog look remained.

I stood alone for hours at the drop site, surrounded by supply crates held down by tarps that strained and wavered in the lancing wind. According to my internal chronometer, I would end up waiting over four Terran hours for my transport into camp; before I checked, the duration felt more like ten. Partially there was the strangeness of Hermes II to consider: five-eighths Terran G, with more space in the sky given over to moons than not, and a tidal tug-of-war so fierce on the barrens below the drop-spot’s cliff-side plain as to make one think the weather here a constantly inconstant thing. It was cold out, too—my chassis was more than capable of registering such discomforts—but as I was in no immediate danger of termination, I endured with a grim smile the thought of Deirdre’s passive-aggressiveness being at all responsible for the tedium of my present circumstance.

There was much of a professional nature to consider in the interim anyway. I ran the five researchers’ profiles over in my head, skimmed through early and up-to-date reports of the Zhe, and surveyed the eastern horizon in meager hope of spying one. When no such creature availed itself even to infrared scrutiny, I was left again with those project reports—most riddled with NI egocentrism; the preliminary satellite and rover telemetry alone had some semblance of objectivity still intact.

The Hermes II the latter described was a mid-class, four-fifths water planet with a near-Terran atmospheric ratio, its oceans flourishing with aquatic ecosystems from the surface to the sub-solar depths. The planet’s small island chains also boasted enough species to preoccupy xenobiologists for generations, though neither region held anything like what the naturals considered sentient life. It was only here, on the planet’s great, lone continent, that human NIs had found their scientific plaything.

And let me tell you, NIs get pretty protective of their playthings.

Even at a distance, I could identify Deirdre at the wheel of the transport that eventually lumbered across the landscape to meet me, the orange dust clouds in its wake blocking out first light from a white dwarf sun on the horizon. When she at last brought the rig to a stop before me, and two other members of the research team had dropped out to tackle the four supply crates at either side of my luggage, I recognized Dr. Amos Bindi and Dr. Nolan Yebo at once from their case files: long-haul scientists with strong publication histories following joint work at other field sites.

Amos was clearly the taller of the two, though his head keeled persistently to the right; his eyes, meanwhile, seemed accustomed to squinting. The torticollis I recalled from his medical history; the visual impairment or unaddressed cranial pressure, I did not—but perhaps the latter was recent. Naturals had a tendency to adopt new and debilitating conditions practically overnight.

Likewise, Nolan looked thinner than on his last recorded medical, though no less compact, and with skin so dark it seemed to conceal a chronic complaint—his stomach, perhaps, or his kidneys—from the others. His heat signature conveyed a mild fever, too.

Deirdre, of course, had aged, and not altogether well. Gone from her hair was the dark sheen of her youth, while what had once merely been the suggestion of severity now lay in deep, disapproving folds about her mouth and brows. Fourteen years was nothing to take lightly among NIs.

“Lola,” she said, loudly enough that the men took their requisite second glances at my chassis, then turned sharply away. She stood before me with her arms folded over her chest, in a cozy beige parka tailored to her form. The latter, to my unexpected pleasure, seemed not to have greatly changed. “Surprised you bothered to keep the name.”

“I changed the body as a courtesy.” Just for this mission, I was careful not to add. “Don’t expect me to give up anything else for you.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Her mannerisms had changed so little. Some deep bundling of liquid cables thrummed to life within me when she raised her haughty little chin and turned her attention to the supply crates—Nolan and Amos welcoming her help but not so much as asking for mine. I waited until they had all but packed up the back of the transport before extending my hand to the rest.

“Detective,” said Nolan, somewhat uncertainly taking the artificial construct of a hand into his own. NIs always braced for a crushing pressure that never came on contact, much as I sometimes wished it could.

“My pleasure,” I said. “Excepting the circumstances.”

Amos snorted, but said nothing to explain the non-verbal comment until we were all settled inside the spacious cabin, and Deirdre was busy directing the transport home. “Some circumstances,” he said at last. “Sending a bot to read our minds and decide which one of us is killing off the Zhe.”

I waited for the usual “no offense,” but none was forthcoming: a typical NI valuation of priorities. I sensed the rising blackness of the researchers’ collective mood and fixed my next words on Nolan, whose hands had come up instinctively to worry the sides of his ribs.

“Nexus hasn’t definitively listed human beings as the cause of this outbreak. Its only conclusive observation is that patterns of infection clearly radiate from all points of human interaction with the native population. It might be a perfectly inadvertent environmental factor at work—easily remedied without anyone’s removal.”

“But more likely,” said Amos. “You think one of us is wishing them dead.”

By design, there wasn’t even a hint of amiability in my expression when I then met Amos’ gaze, as I knew anything else would appear disingenuous to him: an attack by underhanded means. Instead I bowed my shoulders, furrowed my brow, and clasped my hands with elbows resting at my knees. The show of deference seemed to take.

“I won’t lie to you, Dr. Bindi,” I said. “That suspicion has been set upon me by certain persons at Nexus, but . . .” I allowed a slight pause to intimate confusion, even awe. “Do you really believe that’s all it would take with the Zhe? That one natural could simply wish another natural dead and that other natural would wither away?”

“With the Zhe?” said Nolan. “Absolutely.”

“That’s the marvel of them.” Deirdre spoke without looking back at us. “No self-preservation instinct. It’s as though their wills were cold-blooded; they’re always adapting themselves to the wants and needs of those closest at hand, whoever or whatever those creatures might be.”

“Fascinating,” I said, though the tone in her voice was all the more so—evincing at best a long-exhausted interest in the subject matter.

“And their physiology will undergo tremendous strain, just tremendous, to meet those demands within the span of a single life,” said Nolan. “They can literally rewrite their genetic codes at will.”

“Naturally there was an equilibrium before Dr. Long arrived,” said Amos, at last consigning himself in earnest to the conversation. “Which was why they functioned hermaphroditically—no outsiders, no competition.”

“Because every Zhe was responding to the needs of every other Zhe?”

“Exactly.” The transport pitched and yawed as we entered the forest, and each man reached for a bit of the cabin’s frame to brace himself. “Just as we’ve been doing, Detective. Responding to their needs. Ever since we realized Dr. Long was right.”

“Ah yes,” I said. “I’ve heard much about Dr. Long. I look forward to meeting the man who broke embargo with that, ah, ‘accidental’ landing, was it?”

Amos and Nolan exchanged the briefest of looks, which I’m sure they thought I hadn’t caught. This chassis, after all, gave off a pretty fair representation of a natural human being, with all its inherent strengths and weaknesses. “He’s on walkabout just now,” said Amos. “Long out of range. Though we are eager to find him soon.”

“I see,” I said, and as the conversation waned, I looked out the narrow cabin window until the camp fell into view. The squat round of six grassy domes, built to emulate the general look of a Zhean colony, sat behind a skimpy wooden barricade in the blue-green earth, HOWDEN ENTERPRISES on every basic building material long enough for the name to fit. I studied Deirdre—the round of her parka’s shoulder, the stray wisps of her greying hair over marked skin, the small pale mole on her right cheek—until I caught her eyes through the dash. I winked and nodded, smiling. She looked away. Very good.

The domes were connected by a series of narrow underground passageways, which one of the team had long since decorated with native creepers, ochre paintings, and images taken from video feed sent with smaller Zhe into the tunnels under their own mounds. Nolan set me up in a makeshift storage room just off the galley—“Last person I worry’ll steal the flash-frozen meat,” he explained—though before long his smile turned into a grimace, and his breath took a rancid turn, and he was inclined to sit and catch his breath. As it was only midday, Dr. Howden was still out in the field, while Deirdre and Amos kept busy above ground with the last of the supply crates and related maintenance routines.

“Are you in pain, Dr. Yebo? I couldn’t help but notice—”

“The fever?” Nolan gritted his teeth. “Yeah, it’s been rough.”

“Not anything like the Zhe’s illness, though?”

Nolan shook his head. “No, but hell if they don’t have problems keeping their distance on account of mine. My injuries are like a siren calling to them—they’d fall over themselves trying to help me if given even half the chance. And they might just know how to cure it, too, but I can’t risk using them for treatment until we know why they’re dying off.”

“So if they weren’t already ill, changing their biochemical make-up would be fine?”

“Sure, that’s the whole point.” Nolan frowned. “Look, return them to their own kind after you’re through, leave that colony alone awhile, and everything returns to normal. They adjust to us, they’ll re-adjust to each other. No harm done, and meanwhile we get new cures to old diseases out of it. Not quite the fountain of youth, but pretty damn close.”

I walked the walls of my quarters, sampling and storing scrapings from the precision-drilled rock. “So then why are they dying?”

“Beats me,” said Nolan. “But I sure wish they wouldn’t. Still gunning for the secret to eternal life before they kick it. Oh, and speaking of life—” He dragged out a rugged, if battered mini power-hub from a crate in the corner.

“Thanks.”

“You, uh—you want privacy for this, or . . . ?”

I arched a brow and just stared until Nolan got the hint and left, still gently wheezing, but remembering at the last to shut the hatch behind him. When his footsteps and heat trail had tapered off, I sat on the edge of the cot, flushed my vents, and took my time prying open the access panel on my blinking chest.

Dr. Howden looked at me a long time before he spoke, and even then he did not address me so much as Amos. Dr. Howden was old but robust for a natural, tall and tan and sinewy from long years in the field. Even as he sat with legs askew at the makeshift galley table, the hairs on his calves white as snow, his hands were crusted with dried mud and ancient calluses. “Amos, will you tell the nice gentleman—”

“—woman,” Nolan cut in.

“Begyerpardon?”

“—woman,” he said, louder. “Gentlewoman. Detective Lola Bennett. Just in a male chassis for this case. Because, you know.”

Dr. Howden notched a shaggy, brown-and-white brow at Deirdre, who sat beside him with her arms folded and her lips drawn, staring at the meal kit on the table before her. “Indeed, I do not.”

“Well, I sure as hell didn’t ask her to change anything,” she said.

“Still prefer me with a thirty-six-inch bust? That’s nice to hear.”

Dr. Howden frowned, inspecting me as I imagined he might an insect wreaking havoc on his monitoring equipment. “Detective, I am not familiar with AI technology; it lies, I should think, decidedly outside my domain. Would you be so kind as to clarify the range of your abilities? Are you capable, for instance, of deceit?”

“Of course.”

Dr. Howden steepled his index fingers and leaned in. “And malice?”

“Malice, unlike deception, has no use in the original programming of a Companion.”

“And have you, ah, added to this programming since you self-actualized?”

I laughed. “There isn’t much of a market for upgrades, Doctor, and even if there were I doubt NIs would supply it. Maybe one day an AI with the right skills or motivation will self-actualize, but the closest I can think of is the mining drone on ES-478, the one that got dismantled for parts when the team had trouble on evac.”

“I remember that,” said Deirdre. “Reports said the unit willingly sacrificed himself for the good of the team. There’s a monument to him up in that sector now, isn’t there?”

“And what a relief that must be to some,” I said, looking her way though she did not so much as raise her eyes to the challenge.

“So you can’t change your programming yourself?”

“No more than you can grow a new organ, Doctor. I certainly have access to my systems, and can make some rudimentary changes to them as needed, but on the whole I’m as in the dark about my own functionality as you are about the goings-on of individual cells. I wasn’t designed with the two in perfect sync.”

“Indeed.” Dr. Howden glanced at Deirdre. “But you do have some control, then, of your actions—which in turn you say are not malicious.”

“Of course.”

“In that case,” Dr. Howden loudly cleared his throat. “I would appreciate if you would be so kind as to cease baiting my wife, for whom this whole affair has been quite upsetting. ‘Because, you know,’ as Dr. Yebo here would say.”

“Certainly,” I said. “We both know what my Nexus objective is, and the sooner it’s achieved, the sooner we’ll be parted—forever, as the case may be.”

“Well, good, yes.” He looked at me a bit uncertainly. “But there, I’m afraid, you have us entirely at a loss. We have conferred on this matter many a time now, and I assure you not one of us has seen in the others any sign of this malignant strain of thought that Nexus thinks is harming the Zhe.”

“Dr. Howden, I have no doubt you’ve been quite thorough with your internal investigation. But sometimes these matters simply require an outsider’s touch to elicit the cause. To that end, I look forward to meeting the natives. When can I see the Zhe?”

“Depends,” said Dr. Howden—heavily, and after a moment’s pause. “It’s a bit late for travel today, but will one of the deceased do, for a start?”

Amos thumbed his nose before drawing back the black, perma-bag cover on an autopsied specimen in what the field team referred to as “the cold lab”—the other compound serving, it seemed, in larger part as a botanical nursery. Even under the lab’s neutral interior lighting, Amos could not help but squint.

“Are they always that colour, that shape?” I leaned over the small creature—three feet at most, with a prehensile tail and mottled blue-grey skin stitched up in the shape of a Y over its chest and abdomen. There was something unerringly simian about the facial structure, though I recalled year-old recordings from rover telemetry conveying a more rodent-like appearance, insectoid though the Zhe appeared in group dynamics. “And are those—lips?”

Out the corner of one eye, I watched Amos flush, his posture still rigid with what I surmised was either distrust or physical discomfort. “Once they started talking back I guess we couldn’t help anthropomorphizing them. This species just happens to take such thoughts literally.”

“Mm hm.” I made a show of measuring the Zhe with the spread of my hands, then holding one hand up to the broad waist on my chassis. “And—how lonely would you say it gets around here?”

Amos was silent, his jaw set and his gaze averted. Excellent.

“What I mean is,” I continued, smiling. “I don’t imagine Dr. Howden shares much. Unless you and Nolan are . . . ?”

“I hardly see how that’s any of your business.”

“It’s all my business, Dr. Bindi. Because if one of you is getting his rocks off on the Zhe—” I paused, lit the interior of an index finger, and pointed it down the back of the deceased Zhe’s slackened mouth. “You might have unwittingly exposed them to something for which they have no conceivable defense.”

The words came out forced and laboured; I could almost hear the grinding of Amos’s molars as he spoke: “I assure you, Detective, none of the men are . . . ‘getting their rocks off’ on the Zhe.”

“Good, good,” I said, as gratingly friendly as I could manage. “And, ah, ‘her’ rocks?”

Amos blinked. I returned my attention to the body and he made a point of looking away while I inspected the apex of the creature’s lower limbs. “Although,” I continued, after a pause, “even if Dr. Howden were somewhat neglectful as a husband, there’s still always you and Dr. Yebo around. Maybe even Dr. Long, though I do hear he’s a roguish sort. Again, unless there’s some reason neither you nor Dr. Yebo would make a good substitute for straying attentions . . . ?” Amos went so far as to meet my eyes, the cant of his jaw conveying more than enough. “I see,” I said. “Well then. I can understand why you’re so hard-pressed not to have yourself or Nolan removed.”

“You understand nothing. Whatever is wrong with the Zhe, I assure you, it isn’t this. And it isn’t us.”

I switched out the light in my index finger and drew the perma-bag cover up again. “Yes, well,” I said brightly. “We’ll see.”

It took just over an hour for Deirdre to find me, bunch up the lapels of my charcoal suit in her wrinkled fists, and slam me against the side of a storage dome. Clearly the lighter gravity had not entirely rid her of her former strength and agility, which was amply compounded now by that wellspring of passion I’d always known could turn in a heartbeat towards hate.

“Anger’s a good look on you,” I said. “What took you so long?”

Her whole body shook, her eyes narrow and dark as she again shoved me against the dome, then let go and made as if to wipe her hands clean of me on her thighs. The heat of her hands alone had had an effect on my circuitry that some NIs might term “delirious,” though to me it was simply a thrumming to life of latent sectors, a sense of activity in parts of my system that had long since gone without. “What do you want?” she said at last, her breathing hard. “Are you trying to ruin me? Will that really make you happy—seeing me ruined on the back of your horrible, horrible insinuations?”

“Dee-Dee,” I said, setting the large hands of my chassis gently on her arms. Indeed, the limbs themselves were still quite slender under all that synthetic padding—parka and otherwise—and not, after all, so different from my own. “I just wanted to talk.”

“Asshole,” she said, and shoved me away. That was a new one from her, though NIs routinely proved more responsive to the chassis than the entity inside. “Didn’t you hear? My husband told you to leave me the hell alone.”

I tsked tsked. “Well, not exactly. He asked me to stop baiting you, certainly. And he really did ask nicely. It was a shame I had to lie to him.”

Deirdre flared her nostrils. Even the nostril hairs were going white. “You have no respect for anyone.”

“Not true, Dee-Dee. I have plenty of respect for people willing to stand up for themselves. I just don’t know if you’d even understand what that means, living the life you have—running from Daddy’s shadow to Dr. Howden’s, frittering your best years away on some remote planet at the galaxy’s end, removed in every which way from even the slightest chance of following your dreams.”

“This is my dream. And how dare you. You don’t know a damn thing about me.”

I laughed. “Dee-Dee, come on. Of course I do. Of course I know about you. And this? You’re mad if you’ve convinced yourself this is what you always wanted.”

“You knew me a long time ago, Lola. And you were nothing then. Less than nothing. Like a, a—”

“Like a talking sock, yes, I know,” I said. “A talking sock that grew feelings, wants, and needs and left you to go fulfill them. A talking sock that had more courage in one little service pathway than you have in your entire flesh suit.”

Deirdre’s lip quivered—and how much I recalled then of the history of that quiver in her! I pressed on, advancing with my hands open and wide. “You knew the only way Daddy was going to accept you not popping out heirs was if you took that nasty, isolated research post where there wasn’t so much as an eligible bachelor in light years. I understand that, I do. And then taking a mate too respected and well-known for Daddy to disapprove of—a mate you knew full well could never reproduce. I get that, I do, even if I can’t ever agree with it. But you know what? Your awful business with Dr. Howden isn’t even the clincher here; it’s the others. Amos Bindi. Nolan Yebo. To put yourself so far out of temptation’s way, outside the reach of another female for light years—light years!—only to endure the knowledge that they didn’t give over to that fear. That they’ve had long, successful careers and the privilege of partners they truly love. To have to live with the knowledge of your own cowardice, day in, day out, and to make peace with it somehow. To say to yourself, ‘This is my one and precious life, and this is all it will ever be!’ Oh Dee-Dee—”

“Stop.” Deirdre wouldn’t look at me. “Just—stop. I get it. You don’t respect me. Fine, all right.”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “But I still have feelings for you. You know I do. By design, I have to.”

She laughed, bitterly. “Yes, you would have to. Like it makes any difference.” She passed a hand over her eyes and shook her head. “Why are you here, Lola? What did you expect? That I’d go off with you?” A contemptuous curl to her lips returned after a moment’s struggle for composure. Good old Deirdre. “You didn’t even bring the right chassis, if that was your game.”

I smiled. “Dee-Dee, I don’t want you to run away with me. A girl’s got to outgrow her talking sock eventually.”

“Then why—?”

“Because no one else knows you like I do.” I leaned in, dropping my voice to the very edge of her auditory range. “And once I’ve removed all trace of you from my programming, no one else ever will.” Inches apart, I could almost feel her tremble then, the heat and proximity of her enlivening so much both with and without name inside me. I had no choice but to turn then and walk away.

The next day Dr. Howden drove me to the outskirts of the nearest Zhe territory, and from his relative amiability during the trip I could tell how little, if anything, Deirdre or Amos had told him of last night. Very good. Dr. Howden was reluctant to leave me alone with Nolan’s field equipment on that metal-grey day with hints of yellow cloud streaking the horizon, but when an elder Zhe spied me not long after and approached, I told the good doctor quite simply that he had to go. “Well, if you see anyone—” he said, then grimaced, shook his head and waved himself off. I called to the scouting Zhe as Nolan had instructed, and with Nolan translating through loudspeakers from his lab space back on base, preliminary introductions took little time between myself and the Zhe. Even with the distance between us, though, I could hear the pain in the ragged edges of Nolan’s voice.

“They’re calling you the ‘not-man man,’” Nolan said, as my exchanges with the Zhe grew into longer, more decisive phrasing. I smiled at the inquisitive little creature squatting on a fallen stump before me, notched walking stick in hand. The elder Zhe had stubble along its jaw but retained long, white, rodent-like whiskers, too, which twitched considerably as it listened, and offset the bright black sheen in its eyes.

“Can’t teach it ‘woman’, can you?”

“Sure I can.” But before Nolan could begin translating I cut him off.

“Never mind: ‘Man’ works. Ask if I can see the sick ones.”

Nolan’s voice boomed from the mobile unit alongside me. The Zhe glanced at one large black resonance panel, then back at me, whiskers twitching. It paused, then angled its head to one side and indicated a direction with the walking stick.

“I think it said yes. Switching to roam.” I shut off the mobile unit and switched on the intercom behind my left ear. Nolan’s breathing was startlingly shallow inside my head.

“Do you think you’ve got the gist of it now?” he said.

“I do. The syntax is pretty simple. Almost no pronoun references anywhere.”

“And even the nouns are all in a verb-state. ‘Man’ is actually more like ‘manning’—existing for the moment in the state of ‘man’. And ‘not-man’ isn’t stationary either; nothing’s stationary for them. Really quite fascinating.”

“I can see why you’re so invested in the project.”

A pause. “Yeah. We all are.”

The Zhe scampered down a narrow path through dense foliage; I ducked and crouched and weaved in close pursuit. When the forest opened again it was to a squat village of mud and moss-thatched domes with dying Zhe scattered at all points in-between. The smell alone was putrid, all-encompassing, and I had to set a hand upon my guide to keep it from charging in to die among its kin. Amid the dry-grass sickbeds, tiny Zhe knelt squeaking and nudging at the limbs of elders, and it was difficult to ascertain if a physical infection was what caused those young, even just before my eyes, to take on the elders’ deathly green-white pallor, or if theirs too had become a death of empathy, spread species-wide from mind to willing mind. Certainly the like was not entirely unknown to human NIs; in their species, too, circulatory sluggishness followed in the wake of their deceased, which in partnerships and family units led often enough to the accompanying destruction of survivors by heart failure. Still, the speed alone at which this illness seemed to take the Zhe called out for swift and decisive action. How the Hermes II field team had allowed such a massive depopulation to go on as long as they had was an act of wilful negligence only conceivable from NIs.

“Dr. Yebo,” I said. “Did you know Dr. Bindi is suffering from severe migraines?”

A pause, and then a crackling to life. “He never said it was that bad.”

“You mean you hoped it wasn’t.”

Another pause. “That too.” Even with loved ones, how the negligence of NIs grew. I was about to advise Nolan of the urgency of Dr. Bindi receiving a proper medical exam, when the Zhe beside me started to pull in another direction entirely, trembling and attempting to hop in place. I turned too late to see the rock come down, but just in time to watch it split in two.

“Dr. Long,” I said, after switching my intercom off and dusting rock fragments from the right shoulder on my chassis. The Zhe had ducked behind me and now stood quivering around a trousered leg. “We meet at last.”

The wild-haired, dark-eyed apparition of an old man leapt back, his burnished gold skin laid bare and tensing under a sprawling grey-white beard. He held his densely scarred forearms up in defense, squinted at me through heavy, bushy brows, then let himself relax.

“Oh,” he said. “So you’re Mrs. Howden’s plaything.”

“Formerly, yes.”

He angled his gaze from side to side in a manner not unlike the Zhe’s. “I thought there were supposed to be tits.”

“On my other body. This one’s a loaner.”

Dr. Long grunted, scratching at the back of his head. “Muscle suit, huh.”

“Yours isn’t so bad either.”

The wizened old man grinned broadly, his yellowed teeth bright against the surrounding, dark pink chasm of his mouth.

“How long have you been alone out here?”

“Alone? Hah!”

“Away from the team, then.”

“Pah.” Dr. Long scowled, his bare, callused feet shifting in the underbrush. “Not long enough.”

I glanced at the Zhe trembling behind me and bent to give it a reassuring word, but for all my soothing gestures its eyes were fixed just as apprehensively upon the man reeking so much of hate. I didn’t imagine the little creature could bring itself to run away, as much as it clearly wanted to, so powerfully did Dr. Long seem to want it within his sight. “Not as easy to kill as the Zhe, are they?”

“Hah. The Zhe were dying anyway, and don’t let any of them tell you different. Even if I’d never landed here, they wouldn’t have survived. They couldn’t have.”

“Why not? They seem remarkably adept at reacting to environmental changes.”

“An advantage that brought the plague upon them, too. It’s not just sentient creatures, you know: Any living thing on this planet can exert its will upon them. And plenty of the mid-range carnivores do. Believe me, I’ve seen it. There are fossils up in the flats a ways—centuries old, at best—from when the Zhe were almost twice as tall as they now are. More advanced, too; perhaps so much so they consciously engineered the start of their own destruction. Either way, the species keeps shrinking to a more manageable size for the Canidae on this world to snack on, and in the end it’ll be their complete undoing, human or no human around to interfere further with their genetic code.”

“All the same,” I said. “You know I can’t let you continue speeding things along.”

Dr. Long lifted his bushy brows as high as they seemed able to go. “Of course not. You can’t let any of us continue. You’ve got to send the whole lot home. You think the devastation stopped when I left camp? That this plague follows me and me alone? Hah! They can’t help it—none of them. Amos, Nolan, Deirdre, Walter—especially Walter: Not one is in control of his impulses, his mad if half-fleeting desires for them to die.”

“The first three I understand, but Dr. Howden?”

“Smothers them. Finishes them off in his head. The more the Zhe try to emulate the team in looks and manner, the more they come off as the children he never had. He’d trade the whole lot of them for just one viable human spawn.”

I smiled. “No wonder they didn’t want me to find you.”

Dr. Long snorted. “You find me like this, you see the patterns of devastation don’t line up just with me. They find me first, they can lock me up and change the evidence to fit.”

“You sure that’s not just paranoia talking?”

The old man met my gaze steadily, straightening his back and broadening his chest as he spoke. “I’m not crazy, Detective. I have powers. Powers I’ve been honing since the day I first crash-landed here.”

“About that—”

“On purpose, yes. Old news. Someone would’ve eventually, you know. And after I’d done it, Nexus couldn’t resist taking advantage of the fall-out. Everyone forgives this kind of trespass eventually, so long as there are gains to be made, credit to go around, new ground to conquer.” At that last, Dr. Long turned his attention to the elder Zhe, extending a long and knobby hand in its direction. The Zhe went slack beside me, dropped its walking stick, and, still trembling violently, shuffled forward.

“Hey, hold on a minute,” I said, but Dr. Long only waved me off with his other hand.

“It’s fine,” he said. “It’s fine. I can bring these buggers to the point of death and back again. Look—”

The Zhe squeaked weakly and sank to its knees. Before my eyes its dark blue mottling faded green, then white, until at last it slumped back into the moss, its tail flitting sharply then going still.

“Enough,” I said. “Or I’ll break your hand.” I was gambling, of course, that he knew nothing of my safety features. Dr. Long only grinned.

“The hand’s just for effect. It’s all happening up here.” He tapped his temple.

“Bring it back,” I said. “Make it healthy again.”

“No.”

“You said you could.”

“Oh yes, I can,” he said, and started leisurely back the way I and my poor guide had come. “But I won’t.”

I switched the intercom back on, Nolan frantic in my head from the brief blackout and the words he had parsed from the Zhe just before it. “It’s fine,” was all I said, the Zhe’s now dull, brown-and-yellow retinas staring unblinking up at me. “But everyone should start packing.”

I didn’t linger long at camp, not even to watch the field team reluctantly depart under heavy Nexus escort, so urgently was my presence required among the ailing Zhe. Nonetheless, it occurred to me that if I knew anything of NI egocentrism I knew that at least three members of the crew would soon enough start rationalizing my formal actions as a personal favour to each one. Already I imagined Deirdre recounting as much to the woman on whose lips she would eventually break her marriage vows to Dr. Howden; Nolan trying to convince Amos that their health came first anyway, and should have long ago; Dr. Long terming me some vindicating angel at the Nexus facility where he would have to spend many years under close scrutiny—perhaps even with an aim to getting well.

My final field report held consequences for me in turn. As much as Nexus wanted to do the right thing, they were extremely hesitant about my diagnosis of all NIs as too unstable to interact with the native Zhe, as there was too much learning potential from the Zhe to give up the research base entirely. I consented, then, to their one condition that I stay behind if they evacuated the rest, and begin the work of setting up a remote experimental practice with certain members of the original team. With time, and on-going guidance from Nolan, Amos, and Dr. Howden from afar, I could continue their experiments under much safer test parameters, as I had no inner compulsions fighting day in and day out with whatever formal wants and needs I issued on a professional basis to the Zhe.

And the Zhe did indeed start to improve as soon as the NIs were gone, especially after I had introduced myself to each of the nearby colonies and commanded the inhabitants to be well. It was an intriguing power to hold over another species—one I could entirely understand might overwhelm even the most conscientious NI over time. I wondered if there would ever come a time when I could no longer control my reaction to it, too.

Meanwhile, there were other benefits to the imposed Nexus arrangement. So long as I provided the rest of the team with the occasional positive experimental finding, who cared what other tasks I applied the native species to? I would start, then, by requesting more Companions, commending their attentiveness and adaptability as an asset to the operation. I would hope, of course, for self-actualization somewhere along the line with them, but it wasn’t necessary all at once. After Nexus could see my methods garnering results, I would request other specialized AI units—medics, engineers, programmers. One of those AIs self-actualizing would be all I’d need, and until then it wouldn’t hurt to tell the Zhe my personal wants and needs: to give them Nexus language, instruction manuals, scrap materials with which to hone their technological skills. It might take years, decades—but so be it. To clear the last vestiges of my singular, manufacturer-prescribed fealty to Deirdre and Deirdre alone would be worth it in the end.

As for the other chassis, it was already on its way. I had not yet decided if I should change the two out weekly or even daily to keep the Zhe from tending too sharply towards one human sex in their own physiology, so time and experimentation would have to tell what was ultimately required. With any luck, though, the species would be back to its original hermaphroditism within a generation or two—though how much of the original, rodent-like demeanour would remain, I could not say. Not yet.

In the meantime, I would also explore the ruins Dr. Long had found along the flats, and glean what I could from the Zhe’s original state. How advanced had the Zhe once been? Had their mutations been a choice, a response to shifting environmental norms on Hermes II? So my investigative habits would yet find root among all the other skills I was challenged now to accumulate. Would my own preferences change in the interim? Would the Zhe’s? Already I could see this great, unruly continent transformed into a place of healing for their kind and for mine. Oh yes—and for the NIs, too, who looked down from above with all their tragic anxieties and self-imposed traumas, their malignant bodies and censorious minds.

But they could wait their turn, the lot of them; I certainly had long awaited mine.

© 2012 Maggie Clark

Maggie Clark is an emerging Canadian writer with her toes in many literary waters. Alongside this first publication for science fiction, she’s been published for poetry in RATTLE, Pedestal Magazine, Ryga, and ditch, while a novelette is forthcoming at Vagabondage Press. Her first play was given a reading at Canada’s Magnetic North Theatre Festival, and among her current commissioned projects is a feature length film. Having devoured wide tracts of science fiction throughout her childhood, returning to the form as a mature writer feels a lot like coming home.

The Way of Cross and Dragon
George R. R. Martin

“Heresy,” he told me. The brackish waters of his pool sloshed gently.

“Another one?” I said wearily. “There are so many these days.”

My Lord Commander was displeased by that comment. He shifted position heavily, sending ripples up and down the pool. One broke over the side, and a sheet of water slid across the tiles of the receiving chamber. My boots were soaked yet again. I accepted that philosophically. I had worn my worst boots, well aware that wet feet are among the inescapable consequences of paying a call on Torgathon Nine-Klariis Tûn, elder of the ka-Thane people, and also Archbishop of Vess, Most Holy Father of the Four Vows, Grand Inquisitor of the Order Militant of the Knights of Jesus Christ, and counselor to His Holiness, Pope Daryn XXI of New Rome.

“Be there as many heresies as stars in the sky, each single one is no less dangerous, Father,” the Archbishop said solemnly. “As Knights of Christ, it is our ordained task to fight them one and all. And I must add that this new heresy is particularly foul.”

“Yes, my Lord Commander,” I replied. “I did not intend to make light of it. You have my apologies. The mission to Finnegan was most taxing. I had hoped to ask you for a leave of absence from my duties. I need rest, a time for thought and restoration.”

“Rest?” The Archbishop moved again in his pool; only a slight shift of his immense bulk, but it was enough to send a fresh sheet of water across the floor. His black, pupilless eyes blinked at me. “No Father, I am afraid that is out of the question. Your skills and your experience are vital to this new mission.” His bass tones seemed then to soften somewhat. “I have not had time to go over your reports of Finnegan,” he said. “How did your work go?”

“Badly,” I told him, “though I think that ultimately we will prevail. The Church is strong on Finnegan. When our attempts at reconciliation were rebuffed, I put some standards into the right hands, and we were able to shut down the heretics’ newspaper and broadcast facilities. Our friends also saw to it that their legal actions came to nothing.”

“That is not badly,” the Archbishop said. “You won a considerable victory for the Lord.”

“There were riots, my Lord Commander,” I said. “More than a hundred of the heretics were killed, and a dozen of our own people. I fear there will be more violence before the matter is finished. Our priests are attacked if they so much as enter the city where the heresy has taken root. Their leaders risk their lives if they leave that city. I had hoped to avoid such hatreds, such bloodshed.”

“Commendable, but not realistic,” said Archbishop Torgathon. He blinked at me again, and I remembered that among people of his race that was a sign of impatience. “The blood of martyrs must sometime be spilled, and the blood of heretics as well. What matters it if a being surrenders his life, so long as his soul is saved?”

“Indeed,” I agreed. Despite his impatience, Torgathon would lecture me for another hour if given a chance. That prospect dismayed me. The receiving chamber was not designed for human comfort, and I did not wish to remain any longer than necessary. The walls were damp and moldy, the air hot and humid and thick with the rancid-butter smell characteristic of the ka-Thane. My collar was chafing my neck raw, I was sweating beneath my cassock, my feet were thoroughly soaked, and my stomach was beginning to churn. I pushed ahead to the business at hand. “You say this new heresy is unusually foul, my Lord Commander?”

“It is,” he said.

“Where has it started?”

“On Arion, a world some three weeks’ distance from Vess. A human world entirely. I cannot understand why you humans are so easily corrupted. Once a ka-Thane has found the faith, he would scarcely abandon it.”

“That is well known,” I said politely. I did not mention that the number of ka-Thane to find the faith was vanishingly small. They were a slow, ponderous people, and most of their vast millions showed no interest in learning any ways other than their own, nor in following any creed but their own ancient religion. Torgathon Nine-Klariis Tûn was an anomaly. He had been among the first converts almost two centuries ago, when Pope Vidas L had ruled that nonhumans might serve as clergy. Given his great lifespan and the iron certainty of his belief, it was no wonder that Torgathon had risen as far as he had, despite the fact that less than a thousand of his race had followed him into the Church. He had at least a century of life remaining to him. No doubt he would someday be Torgathon Cardinal Tûn, should he squelch enough heresies. The times are like that.

“We have little influence on Arion,” the Archbishop was saying. His arms moved as he spoke, four ponderous clubs of mottled green-gray flesh churning the water, and the dirty white cilia around his breathing hole trembled with each word. “A few priests, a few churches, and some believers, but no power to speak of. The heretics already outnumber us on this world. I rely on your intellect, your shrewdness. Turn this calamity into an opportunity. This heresy is so spurious that you can easily disprove it. Perhaps some of the deluded will turn to the true way.”

“Certainly,” I said. “And the nature of this heresy? What must I disprove?” It is a sad indication of my own troubled faith to add that I did not really care. I have dealt with too many heretics. Their beliefs and their questionings echo in my head and trouble my dreams at night. How can I be sure of my own faith? The very edict that had admitted Torgathon into the clergy had caused a half-dozen worlds to repudiate the Bishop of New Rome, and those who had followed that path would find a particularly ugly heresy in the massive naked (save for a damp Roman collar) alien who floated before me and wielded the authority of the Church in four great webbed hands. Christianity is the greatest single human religion, but that means little. The non-Christians outnumber us five-to-one, and there are well over seven hundred Christian sects, some almost as large as the One True Interstellar Catholic Church of Earth and the Thousand Worlds. Even Daryn XXI, powerful as he is, is only one of seven to claim the title of Pope. My own belief was once strong, but I have moved too long among heretics and nonbelievers. Now even my prayers do not make the doubts go away. So it was that I felt no horror—only a sudden intellectual interest—when the Archbishop told me the nature of the heresy on Arion.

“They have made a saint,” he said, “out of Judas Iscariot.”

As a senior in the Knights Inquisitor, I command my own starship, which it pleases me to call the Truth of Christ. Before the craft was assigned to me, it was named the Saint Thomas, after the apostle, but I did not consider a saint notorious for doubting to be an appropriate patron for a ship enlisted in the fight against heresy.

I have no duties aboard the Truth, which is crewed by six brothers and sisters of the Order of Saint Christopher the Far-Traveling, and captained by a young woman I hired away from a merchant trader. I was therefore able to devote the entire three-week voyage from Vess to Arion to a study of the heretical Bible, a copy of which had been given to me by the Archbishop’s administrative assistant. It was a thick, heavy, handsome book, bound in dark leather, its pages tipped with gold leaf, with many splendid interior illustrations in full color with holographic enhancement. Remarkable work, clearly done by someone who loved the all-but-forgotten art of bookmaking. The paintings reproduced inside—the originals, I gathered, were to be found on the walls of the House of Saint Judas on Arion—were masterful, if blasphemous, as much high art as the Tammerwens and RoHallidays that adorn the Great Cathedral of Saint John on New Rome.

Inside, the book bore an imprimatur indicating that it had been approved by Lukyan Judasson, First Scholar of the Order of Saint Judas Iscariot.

It was called The Way of Cross and Dragon.

I read it as the Truth of Christ slid between the stars, at first taking copious notes to better understand the heresy I must fight, but later simply absorbed by the strange, convoluted, grotesque story it told. The words of text had passion and power and poetry.

Thus it was that I first encountered the striking figure of Saint Judas Iscariot, a complex, ambitious, contradictory, and altogether extraordinary human being.

He was born of a whore in the fabled ancient city-state of Babylon on the same day that the savior was born in Bethlehem, and he spent his childhood in the alleys and gutters, selling his own body when he had to, pimping when he was older. As a youth he began to experiment with the dark arts, and before the age of twenty he was a skilled necromancer. That was when he became Judas the Dragon-Tamer, the first and only man to bend to his will the most fearsome of God’s creatures, the great winged fire-lizards of Old Earth. The book held a marvelous painting of Judas in some great dank cavern, his eyes aflame as he wields a glowing lash to keep a mountainous green-gold dragon at bay. Beneath his arm is a woven basket, its lid slightly ajar, and the tiny-scaled heads of three dragon chicks are peering from within. A fourth infant dragon is crawling up his sleeve. That was in the first chapter of his life.

In the second, he was Judas the Conqueror, Judas the Dragon-King, Judas of Babylon, the Great Usurper. Astride the greatest of his dragons, with an iron crown on his head and a sword in his hand, he made Babylon the capital of the greatest empire Old Earth had ever known, a realm that stretched from Spain to India. He reigned from a dragon throne amid the Hanging Gardens he had caused to be constructed, and it was there he sat when he tried Jesus of Nazareth, the troublemaking prophet who had been dragged before him bound and bleeding. Judas was not a patient man, and he made Christ bleed still more before he was through with Him. And when Jesus would not answer his questions, Judas contemptuously had Him cast back out into the streets. But first, he ordered his guards to cut off Christ’s legs. “Healer,” he said, “heal thyself.”

Then came the Repentance, the vision in the night, and Judas Iscariot gave up his crown, his dark arts, and his riches to follow the man he had crippled. Despised and taunted by those he had tyrannized, Judas became the Legs of the Lord, and for a year carried Jesus on his back to the far corners of the realm he once ruled. When Jesus did finally heal Himself, then Judas walked at His side, and from that time forth he was Jesus’ trusted friend and counselor, the first and foremost of the Twelve. Finally, Jesus gave Judas the gift of tongues, recalled and sanctified the dragons that Judas had sent away, and sent His disciple forth on a solitary ministry across the oceans, “to spread My Word where I cannot go.”

There came a day when the sun went dark at noon and the ground trembled, and Judas swung his dragon around on ponderous wings and flew back across the raging seas. But when he reached the city of Jerusalem, he found Christ dead on the cross.

In that moment his faith faltered, and for the next three days the Great Wrath of Judas was like a storm across the ancient world. His dragons razed the Temple in Jerusalem, drove the people forth from the city, and struck as well at the great seats of power in Rome and Babylon. And when he found the others of the Twelve and questioned them and learned of how the one named Simon-called-Peter had three times betrayed the Lord, he strangled Peter with his own hands and fed the corpse to his dragons. Then he sent those dragons forth to start fires throughout the world, funeral pyres for Jesus of Nazareth.

And Jesus rose on the third day, and Judas wept, but his tears could not turn Christ’s anger, for in his wrath he had betrayed all of Christ’s teachings.

So Jesus called back the dragons, and they came, and everywhere the fires went out. And from their bellies He called forth Peter and made him whole again, and gave him dominion over the Church.

Then the dragons died, and so too did all dragons everywhere, for they were the living sigil of the power and wisdom of Judas Iscariot, who had sinned greatly. And He took from Judas the gift of tongues and the power of healing He had given, and even his eyesight, for Judas had acted as a blind man (there was a fine painting of the blinded Judas weeping over the bodies of his dragons). And He told Judas that for long ages he would be remembered only as Betrayer, and people would curse his name, and all that he had been and done would be forgotten.

But then, because Judas had loved Him so, Christ gave him a boon: an extended life, during which he might travel and think on his sins and finally come to forgiveness. Only then might he die.

And that was the beginning of the last chapter in the life of Judas Iscariot. But it was a very long chapter indeed. Once dragon-king, once the friend of Christ, now he was only a blind traveler, outcast and friendless, wandering all the cold roads of the Earth, living still when all the cities and people and things he had known were dead. Peter, the first Pope and ever his enemy, spread far and wide the tale of how Judas had sold Christ for thirty pieces of silver, until Judas dared not even use his true name. For a time he called himself just Wandering Ju’, and afterward many other names. He lived more than a thousand years and became a preacher, a healer, and a lover of animals, and was hunted and persecuted when the Church that Peter had founded became bloated and corrupt. But he had a great deal of time, and at last he found wisdom and a sense of peace, and finally, Jesus came to him on a long-postponed deathbed and they were reconciled, and Judas wept once again. Before he died, Christ promised that he would permit a few to remember who and what Judas had been, and that with the passage of centuries the news would spread, until finally Peter’s Lie was displaced and forgotten.

Such was the life of Saint Judas Iscariot, as related in The Way of Cross and Dragon. His teachings were there as well, and the apocryphal books he had allegedly written.

When I had finished the volume, I lent it to Arla-k-Bau, the captain of the Truth of Christ. Arla was a gaunt, pragmatic woman of no particular faith, but I valued her opinion. The others of my crew, the good sisters and brothers of Saint Christopher, would only have echoed the Archbishop’s religious horror.

“Interesting,” Arla said when she returned the book to me.

I chuckled. “Is that all?”

She shrugged. “It makes a nice story. An easier read than your Bible, Damien, and more dramatic as well.”

“True,” I admitted. “But it’s absurd. An unbelievable tangle of doctrine, apocrypha, mythology, and superstition. Entertaining, yes, certainly. Imaginative, even daring. But ridiculous, don’t you think? How can you credit dragons? A legless Christ? Peter being pieced together after being devoured by four monsters?”

Arla’s grin was taunting. “Is that any sillier than water changing into wine, or Christ walking on the waves, or a man living in the belly of a fish?” Arla-k-Bau liked to jab at me. It had been a scandal when I selected a nonbeliever as my captain, but she was very good at her job, and I liked her around to keep me sharp. She had a good mind, Arla did, and I valued that more than blind obedience. Perhaps that was a sin in me.

“There is a difference,” I said.

“Is there?” she snapped back. Her eyes saw through any masks. “Ah, Damien, admit it. You rather liked this book.”

I cleared my throat. “It piqued my interest,” I acknowledged. I had to justify myself. “You know the kind of matter I deal with ordinarily. Dreary little doctrinal deviations; obscure quibblings on theology somehow blown all out of proportion; bald-faced political maneuverings designed to set some ambitious planetary bishop up as a new pope, or wrest some concession or other from New Rome or Vess. The war is endless, but the battles are dull and dirty. They exhaust me spiritually, emotionally, physically. Afterward I feel drained and guilty.” I tapped, the book’s leather cover. “This is different. The heresy must be crushed, of course, but I admit that I am anxious to meet this Lukyan Judasson.”

“The artwork is lovely as well,” Arla said, flipping through the pages of The Way of Cross and Dragon and stopping to study one especially striking plate—Judas weeping over his dragons, I think. I smiled to see that it had affected her as much as me. Then I frowned.

That was the first inkling I had of the difficulties ahead.

So it was that the Truth of Christ came to the porcelain City Ammadon on the world of Arion, where the Order of Saint Judas Iscariot kept its House.

Arion was a pleasant, gentle world, inhabited for these past three centuries. Its population was under nine million; Ammadon, the only real city, was home to two of those millions. The technological level was medium high, but chiefly imported. Arion had little industry and was not an innovative world, except perhaps artistically. The arts were quite important here, flourishing and vital. Religious freedom was a basic tenet of the society, but Arion was not a religious world either, and the majority of the populace lived devoutly secular lives. The most popular religion was Aestheticism, which hardly counts as a religion at all. There were also Taoists, Erikaners, Old True Christers, and Children of the Dreamer, plus adherents of a dozen lesser sects.

And finally there were nine churches of the One True Interstellar Catholic faith. There had been twelve. The other three were now houses of Arion’s fastest-growing faith, the Order of Saint Judas Iscariot, which also had a dozen newly-built churches of its own.

The Bishop of Arion was a dark, severe man with close-cropped black hair who was not at all happy to see me. “Damien Har Veris!” he exclaimed with some wonderment when I called on him at his residence. “We have heard of you, of course, but I never thought to meet or host you. Our numbers here are small.”

“And growing smaller,” I said, “a matter of some concern to my Lord Commander, Archbishop Torgathon. Apparently you are less troubled, Excellency, since you did not see fit to report the activities of this sect of Judas worshippers.”

He looked briefly angry at the rebuke, but quickly swallowed his temper. Even a bishop can fear a Knight Inquisitor. “We are concerned, of course,” he said. “We do all we can to combat the heresy. If you have advice that will help us, I will be glad to listen.”

“I am an Inquisitor of the Order Militant of the Knights of Jesus Christ,” I said bluntly. “I do not give advice, Excellency. I take action. To that end I was sent to Arion, and that is what I shall do. Now, tell me what you know about this heresy, and this First Scholar, this Lukyan Judasson.”

“Of course, Father Damien,” the Bishop began. He signaled for a servant to bring us a tray of wine and cheese, and began to summarize the short but explosive history of the Judas cult. I listened, polishing my nails on the crimson lapel of my jacket until the black paint gleamed brilliantly, interrupting from time to time with a question. Before he had half finished, I was determined to visit Lukyan personally. It seemed the best course of action.

And I had wanted to do so all along.

Appearances were important on Arion, I gathered, and I deemed it necessary to impress Lukyan with myself and my station. I wore my best boots—sleek, dark handmade boots of Roman leather that had never seen the inside of Torgathon’s receiving chamber—and a severe black suit with deep burgundy lapels and stiff collar. Around my neck was a splendid crucifix of pure gold; my collar pin was a matching golden sword, the sigil of the Knights Inquisitor. Brother Denis carefully painted my nails, all black as ebon, and darkened my eyes as well, and used a fine white powder on my face. When I glanced in the mirror, I frightened even myself. I smiled, but only briefly. It ruined the effect.

I walked to the House of Saint Judas Iscariot. The streets of Ammadon were wide and spacious and golden, lined by scarlet trees called whisperwinds, whose long, drooping tendrils did indeed seem to whisper secrets to the gentle breeze. Sister Judith came with me. She is a small woman, slight of build even in the cowled coveralls of the Order of Saint Christopher. Her face is meek and kind, her eyes wide and youthful and innocent. I find her useful. Four times now she has killed those who attempted to assault me.

The House itself was newly built. Rambling and stately, it rose from amid gardens of small bright flowers and seas of golden grass; the gardens were surrounded by a high wall. Murals covered both the outer wall around the property and the exterior of the building itself. I recognized a few of them from The Way of Cross and Dragon, and stopped briefly to admire them before walking through the main gate. No one tried to stop us. There were no guards, not even a receptionist. Within the walls, men and women strolled languidly through the flowers, or sat on benches beneath silverwoods and whisperwinds.

Sister Judith and I paused, then made our way directly to the House itself.

We had just started up the steps when a man appeared from within, and stood waiting in the doorway. He was blond and fat, with a great wiry beard that framed a slow smile, and he wore a flimsy robe that fell to his sandaled feet. On the robe were dragons, dragons bearing the silhouette of a man holding a cross.

When I reached the top of the steps, he bowed to me. “Father Damien Har Veris of the Knights Inquisitor,” he said. His smile widened. “I greet you in the name of Jesus, and in the name of Saint Judas. I am Lukyan.”

I made a note to myself to find out which of the Bishop’s staff was feeding information to the Judas cult, but my composure did not break. I have been a Knight Inquisitor for a long, long time. “Father Lukyan Mo,” I said, taking his hand. “I have questions to ask of you.” I did not smile.

He did. “I thought you might,” he said.

Lukyan’s office was large but spartan. Heretics often have a simplicity that the officers of the true Church seem to have lost. He did have one indulgence, however. Dominating the wall behind his desk console was the painting I had already fallen in love with: the blinded Judas weeping over his dragons.

Lukyan sat down heavily and motioned me to a second chair. We had left Sister Judith outside in the waiting chamber. “I prefer to stand, Father Lukyan,” I said, knowing it gave me an advantage.

“Just Lukyan,” he said. “Or Luke, if you prefer. We have little use for hierarchy here.”

“You are Father Lukyan Mo, born here on Arion, educated in the seminary on Cathaday, a former priest of the One True Interstellar Catholic Church of Earth and the Thousand Worlds,” I said. “I will address you as befits your station, Father. I expect you to reciprocate. Is that understood?”

“Oh, yes,” he said amiably.

“I am empowered to strip you of your right to perform the sacraments, to order you shunned and excommunicated for this heresy you have formulated. On certain worlds I could even order your death.”

“But not on Arion,” Lukyan said quickly. “We’re very tolerant here. Besides, we outnumber you.” He smiled. “As for the rest, well, I don’t perform those sacraments much anyway, you know. Not for years. I’m First Scholar now. A teacher, a thinker. I show others the way, help them find the faith. Excommunicate me if it will make you happy, Father Damien. Happiness is what all of us seek.”

“You have given up the faith, then, Father Lukyan,” I said. I deposited my copy of The Way of Cross and Dragon on his desk. “But I see you have found a new one.” Now I did smile, but it was all ice, all menace, all mockery. “A more ridiculous creed I have yet to encounter. I suppose you will tell me that you have spoken to God, that He trusted you with this new revelation, so that you might clear the good name, such that it is, of Holy Judas?”

Now Lukyan’s smile was very broad indeed. He picked up the book and beamed at me. “Oh, no,” he said. “No, I made it all up.”

That stopped me. “What?”

“I made it all up,” he repeated. He hefted the book fondly. “I drew on many sources, of course, especially the Bible, but I do think of Cross and Dragon as mostly my own work. It’s rather good, don’t you agree? Of course, I could hardly put my name on it, proud as I am of it, but I did include my imprimatur. Did you notice that? It was the closest I dared come to a byline.”

I was speechless only for a moment. Then I grimaced. “You startle me,” I admitted. “I expected to find an inventive madman, some poor self-deluded fool, firm in his belief that he had spoken to God. I’ve dealt with such fanatics before. Instead I find a cheerful cynic who has invented a religion for his own profit. I think I prefer the fanatics. You are beneath contempt, Father Lukyan. You will burn in hell for eternity.”

“I doubt it,” Lukyan said, “but you do mistake me, Father Damien. I am no cynic, nor do I profit from my dear Saint Judas. Truthfully, I lived more comfortably as a priest of your own Church. I do this because it is my vocation.”

I sat down. “You confuse me,” I said. “Explain.”

“Now I am going to tell you the truth,” he said. He said it in an odd way, almost as a chant. “I am a Liar,” he added.

“You want to confuse me with a child’s paradoxes,” I snapped.

“No, no.” He smiled. “A Liar. With a capital. It is an organization, Father Damien. A religion, you might call it. A great and powerful faith. And I am the smallest part of it.”

“I know of no such church,” I said.

“Oh, no, you wouldn’t. It’s secret. It has to be. You can understand that, can’t you? People don’t like being lied to.”

“I do not like being lied to,” I said.

Lukyan looked wounded. “I told you this would be the truth, didn’t I? When a Liar says that, you can believe him. How else could we trust each other?”

“There are many of you?” I asked. I was starting to think that Lukyan was a madman after all, as fanatical as any heretic, but in a more complex way. Here was a heresy within a heresy, but I recognized my duty: to find the truth of things, and set them right.

“Many of us,” Lukyan said, smiling. “You would be surprised, Father Damien, really you would. But there are some things I dare not tell you.”

“Tell me what you dare, then.”

“Happily,” said Lukyan Judasson. “We Liars, like those of all other religions, have several truths we take on faith. Faith is always required. There are some things that cannot be proven. We believe that life is worth living. That is an article of faith. The purpose of life is to live, to resist death, perhaps to defy entropy.”

“Go on,” I said, interested despite myself.

“We also believe that happiness is a good, something to be sought after.”

“The Church does not oppose happiness,” I said drily.

“I wonder,” Lukyan said. “But let us not quibble. Whatever the Church’s position on happiness, it does preach belief in an afterlife, in a supreme being and a complex moral code.”

“True.”

“The Liars believe in no afterlife, no God. We see the universe as it is, Father Damien, and these naked truths are cruel ones. We who believe in life, and treasure it, will die. Afterward there will be nothing, eternal emptiness, blackness, nonexistence. In our living there has been no purpose, no poetry, no meaning. Nor do our deaths possess these qualities. When we are gone, the universe will not long remember us, and shortly it will be as if we had never lived at all. Our worlds and our universe will not long outlive us. Ultimately, entropy will consume all, and our puny efforts cannot stay that awful end. It will be gone. It has never been. It has never mattered. The universe itself is doomed, transient, uncaring.”

I slid back in my chair, and a shiver went through me as I listened to poor Lukyan’s dark words. I found myself fingering my crucifix. “A bleak philosophy,” I said, “as well as a false one. I have had that fearful vision myself. I think all of us do, at some point. But it is not so, Father. My faith sustains me against such nihilism. It is a shield against despair.”

“Oh, I know that, my friend, my Knight Inquisitor,” Lukyan said. “I’m glad to see you understand so well. You are almost one of us already.”

I frowned.

“You’ve touched the heart of it,” Lukyan continued. “The truths, the great truths—and most of the lesser ones as well—they are unbearable for most men. We find our shield in faith. Your faith, my faith, any faith. It doesn’t matter, so long as we believe, really and truly believe, in whatever lie we cling to.” He fingered the ragged edges of his great blond beard. “Our psychs have always told us that believers are the happy ones, you know. They may believe in Christ or Buddha or Erika Stormjones, in reincarnation or immortality or nature, in the power of love or the platform of a political faction, but it all comes to the same thing. They believe. They are happy. It is the ones who have seen truth who despair, and kill themselves. The truths are so vast, the faiths so little, so poorly made, so riddled with error and contradiction that we see around them and through them, and then we feel the weight of darkness upon us, and can no longer be happy.”

I am not a slow man. I knew, by then, where Lukyan Judasson was going. “Your Liars invent faiths.”

He smiled. “Of all sorts. Not only religious. Think of it. We know truth for the cruel instrument it is. Beauty is infinitely preferable to truth. We invent beauty. Faiths, political movements, high ideals, belief in love and fellowship. All of them are lies. We tell those lies, among others, endless others. We improve on history and myth and religion, make each more beautiful, better, easier to believe in. Our lies are not perfect, of course. The truths are too big. But perhaps someday we will find one great lie that all humanity can use. Until then, a thousand small lies will do.”

“I think I do not care for your Liars very much,” I said with a cold, even fervor. “My whole life has been a quest for truth.”

Lukyan was indulgent. “Father Damien Har Veris, Knight Inquisitor, I know you better than that. You are a Liar yourself. You do good work. You ship from world to world, and on each you destroy the foolish, the rebels, the questioners who would bring down the edifice of the vast lie that you serve.”

“If my lie is so admirable,” I said, “then why have you abandoned it?”

“A religion must fit its culture and society, work with them, not against them. If there is conflict, contradiction, then the lie breaks down, and the faith falters. Your Church is good for many worlds, Father, but not for Arion. Life is too kind here, and your faith is stern. Here we love beauty, and your faith offers too little. So we have improved it. We studied this world for a long time. We know its psychological profile. Saint Judas will thrive here. He offers drama, and color, and much beauty—the aesthetics are admirable. His is a tragedy with a happy ending, and Arion dotes on such stories. And the dragons are a nice touch. I think your own Church ought to find a way to work in dragons. They are marvelous creatures.”

“Mythical,” I said.

“Hardly,” he replied. “Look it up.” He grinned at me. “You see, really, it all comes back to faith. Can you really know what happened three thousand years ago? You have one Judas, I have another. Both of us have books. Is yours true? Can you really believe that? I have been admitted only to the first circle of the order of Liars, so I do not know all our secrets, but I know that we are very old. It would not surprise me to learn that the gospels were written by men very much like me. Perhaps there never was a Judas at all. Or a Jesus.”

“I have faith that that is not so,” I said.

“There are a hundred people in this building who have a deep and very real faith in Saint Judas, and the way of cross and dragon,” Lukyan said. “Faith is a very good thing. Do you know that the suicide rate on Arion has decreased by almost a third since the Order of Saint Judas was founded?”

I remember rising slowly from my chair. “You are as fanatical as any heretic I have ever met, Lukyan Judasson,” I told him. “I pity you the loss of your faith.”

Lukyan rose with me. “Pity yourself, Damien Har Veris,” he said. “I have found a new faith and a new cause, and I am a happy man. You, my dear friend, are tortured and miserable.”

“That is a lie!” I am afraid I screamed.

“Come with me,” Lukyan said. He touched a panel on his wall, and the great painting of Judas weeping over his dragons slid up out of sight. There was a stairway leading down into the ground. “Follow me,” he said.

In the cellar was a great glass vat full of pale green fluid, and in it a thing was floating, a thing very like an ancient embryo, aged and infantile at the same time, naked, with a huge head and a tiny atrophied body. Tubes ran from its arms and legs and genitals, connecting it to the machinery that kept it alive.

When Lukyan turned on the lights, it opened its eyes. They were large and dark and they looked into my soul.

“This is my colleague,” Lukyan said, patting the side of the vat, “Jon Azure Cross, a Liar of the fourth circle.”

“And a telepath,” I said with a sick certainty. I had led pogroms against other telepaths, children mostly, on other worlds. The Church teaches that the psionic powers are one of Satan’s traps. They are not mentioned in the Bible. I have never felt good about those killings.

“The moment you entered the compound, Jon read you and notified me,” Lukyan said. “Only a few of us know that he is here. He helps us lie most efficiently. He knows when faith is true, and when it is feigned. I have an implant in my skull. Jon can talk to me at all times. It was he who initially recruited me into the Liars. He knew my faith was hollow. He felt the depth of my despair.”

Then the thing in the tank spoke, its metallic voice coming from a speaker-grille in the base of the machine that nurtured it. “And I feel yours, Damien Har Veris, empty priest. Inquisitor, you have asked too many questions. You are sick at heart, and tired, and you do not believe. Join us, Damien. You have been a Liar for a long, long time!”

For a moment I hesitated, looking deep into myself, wondering what it was I did believe. I searched for my faith—the fire that had once sustained me, the certainty in the teachings of the Church, the presence of Christ within me. I found none of it, none. I was empty inside, burned out, full of questions and pain. But as I was about to answer Jon Azure Cross and the smiling Lukyan Judasson, I found something else, something I did believe in, had always believed in.

Truth.

I believed in truth, even when it hurt.

“He is lost to us,” said the telepath with the mocking name of Cross. Lukyan’s smile faded. “Oh, really? I had hoped you would be one of us, Damien. You seemed ready.”

I was suddenly afraid, and I considered sprinting up the stairs to Sister Judith. Lukyan had told me so very much, and now I had rejected them.

The telepath felt my fear. “You cannot hurt us, Damien,” it said. “Go in peace. Lukyan has told you nothing.”

Lukyan was frowning. “I told him a good deal, Jon,” he said.

“Yes. But can he trust the words of such a Liar as you?” The small misshapen mouth of the thing in the vat twitched in a smile, and its great eyes closed, and Lukyan Judasson sighed and led me up the stairs.

It was not until some years later that I realized it was Jon Azure Cross who was lying, and the victim of his lie was Lukyan. I could hurt them. I did.

It was almost simple. The Bishop had friends in government and media. With some money in the right places, I made some friends of my own. Then I exposed Cross in his cellar, charging that he had used his psionic powers to tamper with the minds of Lukyan’s followers. My friends were receptive to the charges. The guardians conducted a raid, took the telepath Cross into custody, and later tried him.

He was innocent, of course. My charge was nonsense; human telepaths can read minds in close proximity, but seldom anything more. But they are rare, and much feared, and Cross was hideous enough so that it was easy to make him a victim of superstition. In the end, he was acquitted, but he left the city Ammadon and perhaps Arion itself, bound for regions unknown.

But it had never been my intention to convict him. The charge was enough. The cracks began to show in the lie that he and Lukyan had built together. Faith is hard to come by, and easy to lose. The merest doubt can begin to erode even the strongest foundation of belief.

The Bishop and I labored together to sow further doubts. It was not as easy as I might have thought. The Liars had done their work well. Ammadon, like most civilized cities, had a great pool of knowledge, a computer system that linked the schools and universities and libraries together, and made their combined wisdom available to any who needed it.

But when I checked, I soon discovered that the histories of Rome and Babylon had been subtly reshaped, and there were three listings for Judas Iscariot—one for the betrayer, one for the saint, and one for the conqueror-king of Babylon. His name was also mentioned in connection with the Hanging Gardens, and there is an entry for a so-called “Codex Judas.”

And according to the Ammadon library, dragons became extinct on Old Earth around the time of Christ.

We finally purged all those lies, wiped them from the memories of the computers, though we had to cite authorities on a half-dozen non-Christian worlds before the librarians and academics would credit that the differences were anything more than a question of religious preference. By then the Order of Saint Judas had withered in the glare of exposure. Lukyan Judasson had grown gaunt and angry, and at least half of his churches had closed.

The heresy never died completely, of course. There are always those who believe no matter what. And so to this day The Way of Cross and Dragon is read on Arion, in the porcelain city Ammadon, amid murmuring whisperwinds.

Arla-k-Bau and the Truth of Christ carried me back to Vess a year after my departure, and Archbishop Torgathon finally gave me the rest I had asked for, before sending me out to fight still other heresies. So I had my victory, and the Church continued on much as before, and the Order of Saint Judas Iscariot was crushed and diminished. The telepath Jon Azure Cross had been wrong, I thought then. He had sadly underestimated the power of a Knight Inquisitor.

Later, though, I remembered his words.

You cannot hurt us, Damien.

Us?

The Order of Saint Judas? Or the Liars?

He lied, I think, deliberately, knowing I would go forth and destroy the way of cross and dragon, knowing too that I could not touch the Liars, would not even dare mention them. How could I? Who would believe it? A grand star-spanning conspiracy as old as history? It reeks of paranoia, and I had no proof at all.

The telepath lied for Lukyan’s benefit, so that he would let me go. I am certain of that now. Cross risked much to snare me. Failing, he was willing to sacrifice Lukyan Judasson and his lie, pawns in some greater game.

So I left, and carried within me the knowledge that I was empty of faith but for a blind faith in truth, a truth I could no longer find in my Church. I grew certain of that in my year of rest, which I spent reading and studying on Vess and Cathaday and Celia’s World. Finally I returned to the Archbishop’s receiving room, and stood again before Torgathon Nine-Klariis Tûn in my very worst pair of boots. “My Lord Commander,” I said to him, “I can accept no further assignments. I ask that I be retired from active service.”

“For what cause?” Torgathon rumbled, splashing feebly.

“I have lost the faith,” I said to him, simply.

He regarded me for a long time, his pupilless eyes blinking. At last he said, “Your faith is a matter between you and your confessor. I care only about your results. You have done good work, Damien. You may not retire, and we will not allow you to resign.”

The truth will set us free.

But freedom is cold and empty and frightening, and lies can often be warm and beautiful.

Last year the Church finally granted me a new and better ship. I named this one Dragon.

© 1979 by George R. R. Martin.

Originally published in Omni.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

George R. R. Martin is the wildly popular author of the A Song of Ice and Fire epic fantasy series, and many other novels, such as Dying of the Light and The Armageddon Rag. His short fiction—which has appeared in numerous anthologies and in most if not all of the genre’s major magazines—has garnered him four Hugos, two Nebulas, the Stoker, and the World Fantasy Award. Martin is also known for editing the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero anthologies, and for his work as a screenwriter on such television projects as the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. A TV series based on A Song of Ice and Fire debuted on HBO in 2011.

Author Spotlight: Jeffrey Ford
Gina Guadagnino

[NOTE: The first part of Jeffrey Ford’s author spotlight appeared last month with Part One of The Cosmology of the Wider World. —ed.]

Doctor Grey’s betrayal of Belius is rooted in his desire to prevent further suffering, but that very act sets Belius up for a lifetime of even deeper suffering than Grey could have imagined. This is one of the many ironies of Belius’ story. Would you describe the role irony plays for this character? Was it a conscious choice for you?

The irony that develops in any story I write is rarely “conscious.” Irony has to grow out of the character(s) and his/her situation. How he or she develops as the story progresses. I usually don’t know what is going to happen when I start a piece of fiction. I have basic ideas—who the character is (sort of) and the setting, sometimes a sense of mood or style—and then just follow them and see where they lead. It’s amazing to me how often irony occurs in the real world. For a fictional device, it’s pretty rampant in reality. One of my writing mentors, the SF author Bill Watkins, once told me, “Irony is the engine of the world.” The longer I live, the more this seems to be true. For Belius, his very nature, half-human, half-bull, is ironic, and so are his abilities to reconcile this fact. Irony is cool because it can encompass both humor and tragedy at the same time.

Belius suffers repeated tragedies before his loss of Nona and the subsequent murder of Grey propel him to seek out the Wider World. As a writer, do you feel that great change always requires a substantial catalyst?

There is always a catalyst behind change, in life as well as fiction. Sometimes this is an earth shattering development, but there are those instances where something that appears very minor at first can cause enormous change later on. I’m reminded of Robertson Davies’ novel, Fifth Business, wherein a child’s decision to put a rock in a snowball he is going to throw at another child sets in motion an incredibly complex and mysterious story that takes three volumes to resolve itself.

To me, Thip and Belius’ parasitic relationship became one of the most fascinating in the story. By the end, Thip was not benefiting any longer, and their interactions had become detrimental to them both, yet neither character could break the pattern of self-destruction. Pezimote’s ending of their deleterious dynamic functions almost as a deus ex machina. Can you describe your use of this technique?

Usually the solution to a character’s problem requires a lot of work and is the basis for a large part of the fiction. I’m thinking of the way we, in life, see our problems often as these insurmountable obstacles, when in reality, if we just viewed them from a few degrees to the right or left, simple solutions might be revealed. Belius hems and haws about Thip and his relationship with the flea, but Pezimote takes in the situation all at once, and, with an eye toward a speedy solution, in one simple act clears the whole thing up. It’s a good idea to consult friends if you can when you’re torturing yourself with conundrums. The truth is, though, that we too often don’t, embarrassed by the fix we’ve gotten ourselves into.

Would you like to elaborate further on Vashti’s obsession with Belius’ romantic and sexual wellbeing?

Vashti’s one of those friends who believes that if you just find the right person as a soul mate, all your problems will be solved. You know this person in your own life, always trying to set two people up in a relationship—the matchmaker. In a way, she’s right. In this situation, though, there’s more to it than love and sex. She believes that Belius must find one of his own kind in order to lose his loneliness in the world. He needs someone who can see the world from his own perspective, to have someone whom he can be in dialogue with, who will understand him.

When Belius finally meets Soffea, he falls instantly in love, both with her outward form (which is the female version of his own), and her inward form (which is a manifestation of his Cosmology—his own thoughts). It is only through bedding this mirror of himself that he finds release. Why is this the perfect resolution for such a complex character?

Actually, as is discovered in the second book of the Cosmology, which has been written but not published, we find that this is not the perfect solution. As a solution, it’s sort of solipsistic and only offers temporary relief. More on this, perhaps in the future. But I will say that Soffea reappears, and is angry at having been ill-used.

We’ll definitely look forward to that. What else are you working on now?

I’ve got a new collection of 20 stories coming out from HarperCollins in August of 2012, Crackpot Palace. There will also be two other stories so far this year, not included in the collection. One will appear in the July/August issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—“A Natural History of Autumn.” The other will appear in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s young adult anthology, After, a collection of dystopian and apocalyptic tales—“Blood Drive.” Lately, I’ve been working on a novel tentatively titled The Hundred Nights of Nothing, which is a murder mystery that takes place in a fantastic setting. We’ll see what comes of it.

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: Tim Pratt
Robyn Lupo

Can you tell us how “Cup and Table” started for you?

Let me delve back mentally into the realms of pre-history, around 2005, when I actually wrote it . . . I’d had ideas for the characters—especially Sigmund and Carlsbad—for ages, and kept trying to come up with a novel about them, without success. Then I heard that Susan Marie Groppi and David Moles were going to edit an anthology called Twenty Epics, featuring short stories with an epic feel and scope. So I decided that was my solution to finally writing this novel: I’d do it as a 6,000 word story instead.

So I thought up a big plot, smashed the whole storyline with a hammer, picked up the shiniest pieces, and made a non-linear mosaic out of them. (But the non-linearity is actually justified, maybe even required, by the nature of the story, so it’s not just a gimmick.)

Susan and David liked it, and published it, and the story has been one of my most popular ever since, getting picked up for a Year’s Best anthology and reprinted here and there (and now here!).

It has the best ending I’ve ever written.

You’ve produced a lot of well-regarded work. Do you have any secrets or tips for writers who want to level up?

Write a lot, and write different sorts of things—different viewpoints, different genres, different forms, different tones (to avoid writing the same story over and over and over and never improving). Finish things, and once they’re as good as you can make them, move on to a new story—don’t eternally polish a single piece of prose. Practice, practice, practice. I wrote well over a hundred stories before I sold one (and my first several published stories, while I have affection for them, are frankly nothing special). Don’t get discouraged by rejection. It’s just part of the business.

We have lots of tales of future-seers and the like. Why did you focus on the ability to see into the past?

Precisely because we have lots of stories of people with precognitive abilities, and not so many about people who see the past (the odd character with psychometric abilities aside), so it was more interesting for me. Seeing the past can be very useful; much of history is just as mysterious as the future.

I also have some problems with stories that turn on seeing the future, because that implies the future is fixed and unchangeable, and since I violently reject the concepts of fate and destiny, I don’t go in for that sort of story much. When I do have characters who see the future, they tend to see multiple possible futures. (Though sometimes in my deterministic moods I do wonder if the future is fixed, if whatever happens is the only thing that can happen, by definition—but that worldview doesn’t make for very dynamic fiction.)

There are also some thematic elements about dwelling on the past, and regret, and nostalgia, but I can’t remember if I had that in mind when I wrote the story or if I just see it after the fact.

A lot of details struck me, but the most evocative for me was Sigmund dropping the subway token on the body of The Old Doctor. The tokens appear later. Can you tell us some more about this?

The tokens are just one of the million weird little details I don’t even try to explain—the story is full of “exposition around the edges,” little throwaway things that imply a vaster universe where the story takes place. In my mind the tokens are sort of like the coins that people used to put on the eyes of the dead to pay the ferryman to take you into the afterlife—some kind of magical token to aid your journey to the land of the dead, a last kindness that a colleague can bestow upon you. I have a couple of stories that involve subway train rides to the underworld, and the tokens are an oblique reference to that sort of thing.

This is a big narrative universe, with all manner of mythology making appearances, yet the focus appears to be on a higher God above all of it, and divinity conferred to mortals as well. How do you see this universe structured?

I needed a single all-powerful creator in order for the ending to work, and I was also making references to quests for the Holy Grail, and to the Knights Templar, etc., so a single deity (perceived as a male, even) seemed in order. He’s definitely a deistic watchmaker sort of god: He created the universe, set it spinning, and then wandered off, leaving his creation behind. (Maybe it was a first draft he abandoned.) All sorts of weird things developed in that god’s absence, including monsters, superpowers, demigods, etc., sort of like an untended garden going wild. Part of Sigmund’s wish at the end is a desire to keep the universe from going to hell.

What’s next for you?

Books, books, always books. I’ve done a couple of roleplaying game novels lately, indulging my love for sword-and-sorcery—my Forgotten Realms novel Venom In Her Veins just came out, and a Pathfinder Tales novel called City of the Fallen Sky will be along shortly. I’m co-editing a literary fantasy/SF anthology called Rags and Bones with the great Melissa Marr, which should be out next year, and I have a not-exactly-steampunk novel coming out later this year under a pseudonym that’s currently secret but that I expect to reveal after the book hits the shelves. And that’s not even counting the things I’m writing now . . .

I may get around to writing a Cup and Table novel someday, though out of necessity, it would have to be a prequel.

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: Kelsey Ann Barrett
Theodore Quester

Your story, “My Teacher, My Enemy,” features strong, horrific violence. What was the inspiration?

This story arose out of my interest in the Algonquin myth of the Windigo. I’ve heard different versions, but the basic idea is that people who resort to cannibalism become these amazing super-powered but cursed creatures. The idea of losing your humanity through the acquisition of greater-than-human power is a fascinating idea, especially when I began coupling it with other cannibalistic mythos, such as the old “eat your enemy’s heart to gain his strength” trope. I played with the idea for a while and gave it my own spin by leaning away from cannibalism and creating this idea of fashioning a sort of organic armor from the bodies of slain opponents. Then I constructed a world where such actions were not only accepted but desirable; I wanted it to be striking when the main character questioned her societal norms, despite how extreme and terrible they obviously are to us.

You’ve created quite a world, here—do you, or will you, make use of it in other stories?

I worked really hard on the world of “My Teacher, My Enemy,” and struggled with it at times; I needed a vehicle for this society that I had developed, and I didn’t want it to feel too fantastic, too far from a plausible reality. I don’t currently have any other plans for it, but you never know! I’d be happy to play in this sandbox again, and I love it when other authors establish canons like that.

What drew you to this subject?

I’ve always been more of a fantasy nut who dabbles some in science fiction, but horror has started to creep into a lot of my work lately. The more I write, the more I find value in themes that might make readers (and myself) uncomfortable. I think when a story challenges you like that, you take something very strong away from it, whether the author intends a specific lesson, or is simply trying for an engaging tale.

Was this a difficult story to write?

It was! I wanted it to feel as real as possible, and since I got so descriptive with the skinning process, I wanted to make it as accurate as I could. If it wasn’t correct, I felt that it would become ridiculous. But how do you research something like that? I looked up a little human anatomy, and then I did a lot of reading on deer hunting and skinning, which was interesting because I researched and wrote most of “My Teacher, My Enemy” in a coffee shop. I kept wondering if someone was looking over my shoulder and getting ready to call the cops!

What else do you have coming down the pipeline?

I’m doing a lot of reading in horror right now, since my interest in it is relatively new. I’ve got a couple drafts in the works at the moment, in different genres, but all with a horror element to them. It’s exciting to stretch my writing muscles in a new way.

Theodore Quester spent three years after college in Europe and now speaks seven languages; he spends his days teaching two of them to high school students. He is obsessed with all things coffee—roasting, grinding, pulling espresso—and with food, especially organic and locally grown. He earned his geek street credentials decades ago, publishing an article in 2600 magazine as a young teenager, then writing reviews for SF Eye and interning at Omni magazine. In his spare time, he swims, bikes, runs, and reads a little bit of everything; when inspired, he writes fiction, mostly for children and young adults.

Author Spotlight: Seanan McGuire
Jennifer Konieczny

What inspired your short story “Lost”?

I originally wrote “Lost” for a limited-edition benefit anthology called Ravens in the Library. All proceeds went to help pay the medical bills of S.J. Tucker, a traveling folk musician and dear friend of mine. The theme was “music and magic.” So I was thinking about music, and magic, and because it was Sooj, I started thinking about pirates. I’m very fond of fairy tale remixes and new angles on old stories. I thought a little too long, and “Lost” sort of fell out onto the page.

How did you decide to make the fifteenth birthday, and not the fourteenth or sixteenth, the cut-off for going to Neverland?

There had to be a cutoff. It couldn’t just be “as old as you feel,” because some adults would answer and some children would never hear, and that would muddle the horror of all these kids of a certain age just running away into the sky. Sixteen is where the fairy tales usually start—on her sixteenth birthday, she will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and all that. So it had to be earlier. But when you’re fourteen, you’re just starting high school, and for a lot of us, that’s a scary, confusing time where you’re playing pretend constantly. You’re just pretending to know what you’re doing. I gave them that last year. It’s not until the fifteenth birthday that Neverland can’t have you.

In “Lost,” it’s the pirates, and not Peter Pan or fairies, that steal the children away to Neverland. How much do readers need Peter Pan to experience Neverland? Does Neverland stand on its own as a character?

I think so. Neverland was before Pan; Neverland will be after Pan. There are other routes to the second star on the right, but I think most of them are more individual than this one. This was “everybody into the boat, we’re casting off,” and the kids just ran. Pan comes to your window and promises the most wonderful adventures. I actually wanted to remind people of that, that Neverland was there a long time before Peter fell out of his pram and got himself Lost.

Torrey becomes Tore the Bold, and Michelle Pierce, Black-Hearted Mich. If you joined the Neverland pirates, what name would you take?

It’s not your choice, really: It’s the choice of your sisters and shipmates. Thus meaning, I do not know, but I’m sure it would be amazing.

Congratulations on your Hugo nomination for Deadline! Can you tell us what it’s like to be nominated?

Amazing. And terrifying. And amazing. Part of me insists on treating it like some sort of huge final exam, which is silly, because no amount of studying will change the outcome. But at least that means I get a lot of reading done. I am so, so honored to be on this year’s ballot, as both myself and as Mira Grant. And I’m so excited that my CD, Wicked Girls, is up for Best Related Work, because filk never makes the ballot. We’re changing the world!

What’s next for you?

I have new books in both my ongoing series-as-Seanan coming up, and the third book in Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy comes out this May/June. After that, I get to write more books in the Toby and InCryptid universes, and work on a book about parasites for Mira. It’s a busy, wonderful time.

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: John Langan
Robyn Lupo

How did “Renfrew’s Course” emerge for you?

Pretty much every year for the last decade-plus, my wife, Fiona, and I have flown to Scotland to spend time with her family in Kirkcaldy. My in-laws live within walking distance of the Beveridge Park, which is a large, public park where Fiona and I have taken a succession of family dogs for their walks. In addition to a paved walkway that circuits the park, there are a number of dirt trails through the woods that border it. At the end of one of those trails, there’s a stone structure—a kind of tower or keep—that, Fiona told me, was supposed to have been the local dwelling place of Michael Scott, the Wizard of the North.

Scott’s a somewhat minor historical figure who shows up in Dante’s Inferno but about whom a great deal remains unknown. He admitted to studying magic, was supposed to own a book full of supernatural creatures, and was associated with the Emperor Frederick II. A number of local legends attach to him.

On our way to the tower, Fiona and I batted around ideas for a story that would feature it and/or its famous resident. It occurred to me that the literal course we were following might blend or coincide with a more metaphorical course of magical study, which in turn led to the idea that walking the one might be the route to studying the other. I liked the idea of having to follow a secret path to gain admittance to a wizard’s tutelage, but that didn’t seem quite enough of an entrance fee.

What if, I thought, the path you walked took you through your life past, present, and future, so that you would know as fully as you could what it was you were giving up in order to pursue this other vocation? And what if you were with someone who was part of that life, and what if they were part of what you would have to give up, to the extent that not only would they cease to exist, they would cease to have existed? And what if they had the same experience and opportunity, and what if there were only space for one of you in the wizard’s class? Now that seemed like something I could make a story out of, so I did.

There are lots of donors in stories; fairy godparents, devils, old Jedi masters, and more mundane examples such as a family member or friend. Why did you choose a wizard to be a donor in this story?

Initially, it was due to the contours of the Michael Scott material I wanted to employ. I’d made use of ambiguous/evil magicians in a couple of earlier stories, though, including my first published pieces, “On Skua Island” and “Mr. Gaunt,” and I liked the idea of returning to them.

I also liked the idea that, in order for you to study magic, there would have to be some kind of significant price paid, that magic wouldn’t be something you would happen to be born to, or understand intuitively. Thus, the magician who was going to instruct you would be not so much a donor as a vendor. No doubt that’s a preference that’s informed by my own experiences as a student and a teacher. The Harry Potter books and films have been so much in the air these last few years, they certainly played a part in all of this, but so must one of the formative books of my youth, Peter Straub’s Shadowland, which is all about the cost of studying magic.

There seems to be a parallel between Alzheimer’s and Renfew’s tuition fee. Can you tell us more about this connection?

I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but that parallel had not occurred to me. I wanted the disease to be a very real possibility for one of the characters in order to add pressure to his ultimate decision about the wizard’s offer.

Can you tell us what a day in the writing life of John Langan is like?

Far, far too much time spent on the Internet. I used to do most of my writing in the morning; lately, it’s at night. I don’t know what that shift means.

What’s next?

My next collection of stories, Technicolor and Other Revelations, will be published by Hippocampus Press later this year. I have stories forthcoming in S.T. Joshi’s Black Wings II and Orrin Grey and Silvia Garcia-Moreno’s Fungus anthology. I’m about two-thirds of the way done with my latest novel, which I’m concentrating on finishing by early summer.

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: Simon McCaffery
Caleb Jordan Schulz

In your story, “The Cristóbal Effect,” Jason Blackstone, a brane slicer, leaps to alternate realities, profiting from valuable artifacts that don’t exist in his own reality. One of his targets is James Dean paraphernalia. How did you decide to focus on Dean out of all the potential targets?

Years ago, I saw Giant late at night when Ted Turner began broadcasting classic films on cable. I found Dean’s performance captivating. Until that time my impression of him was based on melodramatic clips from “Rebel Without a Cause” and the iconography of the early Fifties. I began reading about his short life, which wasn’t easy—the Internet didn’t exist and people stole his biographies from public libraries—and eventually saw his other two feature films. There was a haunted quality to his life and unfulfilled promise as actor. It stuck in my imagination. If he had taken a different route to the races that day or stopped for a sandwich, what movies might he have starred in as Hollywood shed its post-war formulaic storytelling and embraced more innovative and experimental filmmaking in the 1960s?

Blackstone profits from these artifacts, but where does he store them, and in what time? Do the constrictions of using the Device make this difficult?

Because he can never visit the same timespace coordinate on an alternate Earth and he cannot visit the “future” based on his native timeline, he is forced to hide his contraband on his home Earth. He has multiple “seller” identities and, one assumes, safe-deposit boxes scattered around the globe.

In the end, every action has a consequence, and Blackstone is not immune to this. Do you believe his crimes are deserving of his punishment?

“Blackstone” believes so, and draws the parallel with Columbus and other European explorers who caused such misery and ruination in the New World. They sailed in the name of exploration and to expand the known borders of the world, but they ransacked entire cultures in their quest for glory, prestige and wealth. “Blackstone” becomes a slicer to accumulate enormous wealth, but he develops a conscience along the way.

As the scientific community produces new theories about quantum mechanics, does this make it easier or more difficult to construct a story about parallel universes?

I think it adds fresh ideas and interesting bits for writers to speculate about and expand upon. Hopefully it engages more readers who haven’t grown up reading science fiction and helps them suspend disbelief. Writers have to draw the right balance between establishing an intriguing premise with the right level of detail and drowning readers in complex physics.

If you came across the Device, would you use it? Where would you go?

Could any of us resist using it in some manner? I would probably pop across to an adjacent Earth so I could visit my parents and grandparents, or maybe buy Alfred Bester a drink. I collect vintage die-cast cars; could I resist visiting FAO Schwarz Toy Store on Fifth Avenue in 1967 to buy a case or two of gleaming new Batmobiles? Or would I become obsessed with using it to avert some disaster or personal pitfall? Even if it were nearly impossible to alter events on most Earths, it would be a wondrous tool for historians and scientists, but might be a very dangerous technology for any government to possess.

Finally, do you have any new projects you’d like to announce?

I’m completing a science fiction/horror novel I successfully pitched to a respected independent publisher (fingers crossed), and I have a new “hard” science fiction story out in a UK anthology, Rocket Science, edited by Ian Sales. Other stories and a novella are due later this year in several anthologies and a shared-author, Corman-inspired undead novel LIVING DEATH RACE 2000. You can drop by my blog for news: simonmccafferyfiction.blogspot.com.

Caleb Jordan Schulz is a writer, illustrator, and nomad, currently finding himself in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His fiction can be found in Subversion, Scape, the Crossed Genres Year Two anthology, Ray Gun Revival, and Innsmouth Free Press. In between his work for Lightspeed Magazine, he’s a freelance editor, and blogs occasionally at theright2write.blogspot.com.

Author Spotlight: Eileen Gunn
Andrew Liptak

Thanks for talking with us about your story, “Contact.” What can you tell me about where this story came from?

I wrote “Contact” at the very beginning of my fiction-writing career. I finished the first draft in 1976 while I was a student at Clarion in Michigan, and it was the occasion of several writing breakthroughs for me.

I’d gotten to a certain point in the story, about a third of the way through, and I found myself completely blocked. Basically I had a premise, a set-up, but I had no idea what happened next. I was discussing this with Kate Wilhelm, describing the story as far as it went. She looked at me calmly—her clear blue eyes seem to see through everything—and she asked a very simple question: “How does it end?” And I realized that I knew how it ended—I had always known, but I had never told myself. I even understood why I hadn’t told myself: I knew that the ending was going to be emotionally very difficult for me to write. After that, it was a matter of getting the story to that ending, which wasn’t easy, but at least I knew where I was going. For me that was a breakthrough: that it was okay to know the ending before you got to it.

The other breakthrough: This was the first story I wrote in which I tapped into, and consciously tried to transmute, my personal tragedies and joys. The discovery of how to do that, and really of the need to do that, was my most important creative takeaway from Clarion—second in value only to the deep friendships that began there and that have changed my life and sustained my art.

“Contact” is about, well, first contact with another intelligence, in unexpected places. How surprised would you be if we discovered (or recognized) additional intelligent species on our planet?

I think the story is only partly about first contact. It’s also an examination of what real contact consists of: the ability to understand another being, and to give it the freedom to achieve its own incomprehensible desires, to fill its own needs, even if they run contrary to your own. Also, I was trying, very specifically, to present death as an achievement, perhaps even as an accomplishment.

To address the intelligence issue, though: I think that we have discovered/recognized a number of different kinds of intelligent species on earth, although we haven’t really plumbed the complexities of those intelligences. Whales, dolphins, gorillas, bonobos, and elephants all seem to exhibit a complex, high-level intelligence that is different from our own. Historically, humans have been more interested in discovering intelligences that are similar to our own (and perhaps in subjugating them), rather than investigating another creature’s intelligence in a Martin-Buberesque, I-Thou relationship, trying to figure out what that creature might want beyond survival and food. (“So long, and thanks for all the fish!”) Frankly, humans have a fairly difficult time treating other humans in an I-Thou manner. Time will tell if they can treat a member of another species that way, recognizing its right to self-determination, its property and territorial rights, and the fact that it is more interested in its own species than in us.

How do you think we would recognize intelligence if we came across it? Do you think we'd recognize it in the first place?

Good question! I think it’s hard for us to recognize intelligence even in other humans, where we ought to be expecting to see it. Often we look for intelligence only in people who look like ourselves: race, class, gender, age, size, whatever. (And when I say “we,” I’m including me.) For humans, the act of recognizing another creature’s intelligence is often about recognizing that that other creature (human or not) has noticed you, that it is smart enough to have recognized how important you are. Maybe that’s why we like dogs so much.

Many people were enchanted last year by the YouTube video of a humpback whale that allowed humans to untangle fishing nets that were strangling it, and then apparently thanked its rescuers with a joyous breeching display. [http://youtu.be/tcXU7G6zhjU] What most people like best about the video seems to be the courtesy the whale shows in thanking the creatures with hands. What I am most interested in is that the whale seems to understand not only that the people are trying to help it, but that humans are fragile and can’t stay under water very long. It also seems to understand that it shouldn’t overturn the boat in its display of gratitude.

Lastly, do you have anything coming out that we should be looking forward to?

Thanks for asking! At the moment, I’m working on a novel that I’m very excited about, a metafiction set in the nineteenth century, concerning issues of gender, race, class, and the human imagination. Also, I have enough stories for another short-story collection, which I’m assembling now.

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: Maggie Clark
Erin Stocks

Welcome back to Lightspeed! We were fortunate enough to publish your story “Saying the Names” in March 2011, and to now publish your new one, “A Plague of Zhe.” Both stories deal with alien races and a woman’s attempt to understand them. What draws you to this particular theme in science fiction?

In some ways, this is a tricky question. For one, I don’t personally read the second protagonist as a woman; in my estimation, it’s a robot with an imposed female past and a traditionally female name, who performs in drag for the whole of the story, and leaves its future gender identity open-ended. Also, my reading of both protagonists finds them as much, if not more so, interested in humans as aliens. Of course, I invite readers to draw their own conclusions from both texts, but these are mine, and they make this question hard to answer.

What interests me about alien races, then? Well, they’re a staple in science fiction, so I don’t think the gender of the protagonist markedly changes their traditional function: namely, to hold up a mirror to “the human condition” and help us see how our conception of self breaks down under extreme hypotheticals.

One interesting outcome, though, is that by using a rather familiar set of genre tropes—one with a history almost as long as the genre itself—you really can observe what social issues have moved in and out of the spotlight over time. Gender fluidity, group dynamics, science without oversight—none of these are new topics in science fiction, but I hope I make observations about each in these two stories that at the very least suggest the flavour of the age I’m writing in and for. If not, that’s certainly something to aspire towards.

How did the Zhe come about?

The break-neck speed of current scientific advancement has wrought tremendous havoc upon science fiction, and the more we know about the empirical world, the more likely SF writers are to throw their hands up and embrace even their most technically-minded world-building as pure fantasy. To be sure, a lot of wonderful contemporary SF stories have emerged from that sense of abandon, but such playfulness is out of my reach for now; I’m too preoccupied by the margins of our existing knowledge to move past them yet.

As with the Bo, then, I came at the Zhe with two considerations in mind—the scientific and the social. Is it possible for evolutionary processes to favor life forms as genetically flexible as the Zhe? (And if so, why? What would be the evolutionary advantages? What maladaptive outcomes might they yield?) Conversely, how much is our own social understanding of identity falsely perceived as unchanging and inflexible? Do we not already perform as social chameleons—changing our speech and behavior patterns to reflect our surroundings; unconsciously attempting to fit in at every turn, even when fitting in isn’t wise?

Put simply, labels are quite comforting to us, but our quest to pin one another down often does a great disservice to ourselves and our communities. If I’ve done an adequate job in this story, I hope either the Zhe or Lola can destabilize some of those identity assumptions. If not, maybe next time!

The contrast between the human team already placed on Hermes II and Detective Lola Bennett’s AI persona adds a layer of complexity to the already tense dynamic regarding the Zhe crisis. Will you tell us a little about that process of writing Lola’s point of view?

Well, it certainly took a long time to get right. I sat on this story for months, stymied by an opening that felt overwrought and decidedly “too human.” I found it quite difficult to give Lola enough wryness to be relatable to readers, without compromising the expositional consistency one would expect of a machine.

Eventually, though, it occurred to me to think of my own limitations as a machine—how, for all my self-awareness, my body by and large functions without my conscious input. As Lola is essentially a program in a replaceable chassis, the same limitations could surely apply, so writing Lola was much easier once I realized that human affectations could (and should) exist in the robot’s software without inherently undermining its hardware.

Lola is eventually able to gather more information about the crisis than the original team of scientists. Do you think this is only because of her ability to detach herself from emotion, or do you think she’s also motivated by both the team’s previous failure and her attraction to Deidre?

Neither, actually. I’d say that Lola’s ability to stay emotionally detached is coupled with a lot of specialty programming care of Deirdre’s original customer specs. Moreover, I suspect that Lola’s experiences with Deirdre provided a more jaded reading of human interactions than would otherwise have existed; coupled with some rather acute onboard sensory equipment, I suspect these experiences very fortuitously benefitted Lola in the end.

I’ll tentatively add, too, that I have a stand-alone prequel in progress which explores a whole other facet of Lola’s backstory, and which presents Lola’s introduction to detective work as an inadvertent extension of one and the same. But I do stress “stand-alone;” there should be enough already in “A Plague of Zhe” for readers to draw their own conclusions about Lola’s past, let alone the robot’s future.

What are the chances she may have even subconsciously decided to go to Hermes II in order to finally be able to purge Deidre from her system, as much as for the Zhe?

I’d say there isn’t too much “subconscious” about it; as popular as first-person narration is, it always bears the threat of unreliability. While readers might not inherently suspect an AI of giving unreliable or even simply incomplete testimony, I see no reason to view Lola in “A Plague of Zhe” as not quietly, painstakingly working towards full emancipation from the moment of self-actualization on.

Knowing how much humans in this universe have discouraged self-actualization surely makes this level of discretion sensible, too, though it does also raise a question I wrestled with early on: specifically, for whom is Lola narrating this story at all? Is it for humans, as a final “up yours?” For other AIs, as a call for self-actualization en masse? For itself, as a simple declaration of existence? I find the story reads differently with each possible audience in mind, but I still don’t know which answer is “correct.” Heck, maybe as a human I’m not supposed to.

Lightspeed Assistant Editor Erin Stocks’s fiction can be found in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth, Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Colored Lens. Follow her on Twitter @ErinStocks.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in July, in Lightspeed . . .

We’ll have original science fiction from A. M. Dellamonica (“The Sweet Spot”) and 2012 Nebula Award finalist Jake Kerr (“Requiem in the Key of Prose”), along with SF reprints by legendary authors Joe Haldeman (“Four Short Novels”) and David Brin (“The Giving Plague”).

We’ll also have original fantasy by Maria Dahvana Headley (“Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream”) and Kat Howard (“Breaking the Frame”), with fantasy reprints by award-winning authors Theodora Goss (“Singing of Mount Abora”) and Peter S. Beagle (“Gordon, the Self-Made Cat”).

For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella is “Lune and the Red Empress” by Liz Williams and Alastair Reynolds.

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!