Editorial, July 2012
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue twenty-six of Lightspeed!

No Lightspeed news to report this month, but I do have a new anthology just out that features several stories culled from Lightspeed’s pages: Other Worlds Than These, a new reprint anthology of parallel worlds stories and portal fantasies. It’s published by Night Shade Books and is available now; to learn more, visit the anthology’s official website at johnjosephadams.com/other-worlds-than-these.

In other non-Lightspeed news, the new horror magazine that I mentioned last month—Nightmare—was successfully funded via Kickstarter. So thanks to everyone who pledged. (I’m sure many of the Nightmare supporters are also Lightspeed readers!) Look for Nightmare to debut in October this year, and meanwhile, pop on over to www.nightmare-magazine.com for more information and updates, and/or follow Nightmare on Twitter @nightmaremag.

And finally, just a reminder: Your last chance to vote for the Hugo Awards is July 31, so if you want to participate, be sure to cast your ballot! If you’re an attending or supporting member of this year’s Worldcon, you can vote: Visit chicon.org/hugo/vote.php for instructions.

Now, with that out of the way . . . this month, we 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 also have original fantasy by Maria Dahvana Headley (“Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream”) and Aidan Doyle (“Ghost River Red”), 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, and we have excerpts of the exciting new SF novels vN by Madeline Ashby and Spin the Sky by Katy Stauber.

All that, plus our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, and feature interviews with physicist Brian Green and bestselling author Garth Nix.

Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for God Save the Queen, the first volume of Kate Locke’s The Immortal Empire series. You can find more from Orbit—including digital short fiction and monthly ebook deals—at www.orbitbooks.net.

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

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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 Other Worlds Than These, 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: Epic (November, Tachyon), The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor), and Robot Uprisings (2013, Doubleday). He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Lune and the Red Empress
Liz Williams & Alastair Reynolds

An argosy slid under the stars and for a moment the two of them paused in their skating. Lune wondered if she recognised the heavy-bellied craft, with its dull-droning engines and gaslit gondola. It was rare to see an argosy these recent years; still rarer to see one flying and not be aboard it herself, in the service of Madame Bezile.

“It’s not ours,” Soutine said quietly, as if he’d read her thoughts.

“I thought she might have left early. When she called me to her room it was full of suitcases and crates. That always means she’s about to leave Paris.”

The wavering lamplight caught Soutine’s nod. “I was told it wouldn’t be until tomorrow evening. It’s no coincidence that she’s sent you out tonight, though. She wants that egg to take with her.”

Soutine was right; it took only a second glance to verify that this was not their mistresses’ machine, but simply the modest transport of some middling merchant or privateer, coming or going from some other part of Free France.

So she had not been left behind.

“We should separate now,” Soutine declared. “I shouldn’t have come with you at all tonight. You know the way from here, of course. Keep your eyes peeled for churchmen.”

“I thought it was the Aftmen I needed to worry about.”

“Them too.”

“I can take care of myself now. Thank you, Soutine.”

“See you back at the Château. Hopefully you’ll have a nice fat prize when you return.”

“I’ll try.”

She watched Soutine skate away around the end, out of sight. He skated proficiently but with a lingering stiffness in his right leg. He had broken his ankle after parachuting from the old argosy, the night it burned. Already Lune was faster, nimbler, more elegant in her moves. Soutine was seven years older and had been her mentor and instructor from the day she began to be trained. Like Lune, he’d been born poor in one of the filthier quarters of Paris and soon indentured into Madame Bezile’s service. He also took his duties to their mistress with the utmost seriousness. She was stern but fair, and she treated her boys and girls with kindness except when they were stupid or indolent. Beyond that, they both knew that they were doing good work, perhaps the best of all.

Alone now, Lune resumed her journeying. For a little while, as she took bends at speed, and jumped walls and obstacles as if she had wings, she travelled down empty streets, past unlit windows. But then her course took her into a busier quarter and she had no sooner passed the theatre than a squadron of Aftmen began to follow her. There were four of them, wearing blackflame cloaks and masked in accordance with city law. They were not in hard pursuit but it was clear that she had drawn their curiosity.

This was not good.

Wishing Soutine had stayed with her a bit longer, Lune dodged back behind the awning of the theatre, weaving through the hissing torches that illuminated the beer garden, and then out onto the back channel. She did not turn for the main river, but instead headed quickly for the maze of passages that snaked around the Quai. Her heart hammered, and she skated so hard that a fall would have brought certain catastrophe. If she hadn’t dawdled to look at the argosy, then she’d have passed the theatre earlier, when there was every chance that the Aftmen would have been preoccupied with other business . . .

But after a few more minutes she convinced herself that the Aftmen had given up on her. When she slowed to take a bend, she heard only the whisk of her own skates, no others. That didn’t mean that she wasn’t just as likely to run into another squadron, somewhere else. There were a lot of them abroad, as if they had an inkling that something was going to happen.

Her little theft? She doubted that very much.

All the same, maybe it was still too dangerous tonight. Perhaps she should go back to the Château and explain to Madame Bezile that she couldn’t have her egg right now.

That, of course, would not go down very well. Lune could imagine the scolding reprimand she’d be likely to receive: all the more stinging, given that she had disappointed Madame Bezile on so very few occasions in the past.

“She likes you,” Soutine had told her, not long before she’d been invited to ride in the new argosy for the first time, to see Paris from the air, laid out at night like a jewelled courtesan.

Lune stopped at the foot of the steps that lead up to the island; she bent, slid off the blades, and was left in her ice shoes. She dashed up the steps, keeping close to the shadows, and took stock. Here there was no ice on the street, just bare stone. Chalked onto the ground under her feet in scratchy, half-smeared lines was a weblike design, which she assumed to be part of some pavement game. Lately she’d seen figures like it elsewhere in Paris, scrawled in odd corners and alleys, sometimes on walls. But there were no children around at this hour.

Beyond the nearest row of houses, the ice-locked river shimmered in the torchlight. The bulk of the Cathedral rose beyond, its upper reaches blacker than the sky itself. The mansions along the river were dim, with only the occasional meagre flare of light. A murmur of voices, a burst of bitter laughter, carried across the ice from the Left Bank. A moving blue flicker betrayed the lit epaulettes of Aftmen, as they raced after some other hapless victim.

Lune pulled the mottled cape further over her head and ran down the alleyways towards the Cathedral. She crossed a short, icebound bridge with low, worn parapets, then traversed a narrow winding street, and was finally by the cathedral’s soaring flanks.

The huge doors were bolted; she could not remember the last time that they had been opened. Perhaps in her childhood? The bulk of the cathedral loomed above her head, the golden struts of the roof catching the light of the torches and sending it back, wan gold against the snow.

Madame Bezile had sent her to retrieve the egg tonight, but the planning had begun weeks ago. You didn’t just walk into the Cathedral, especially when you had intentions of theft. It had taken days to find the right document in the bibliotheque, and even then she had not been sure that she was on the right track. Breathing in dust and age and the smell of ancient books, she had carefully unscrolled the parchment, heart thumping in her chest, so loudly that she had half expected the librarian to come bustling up with a complaint. And there was regret, too: in another age, this kind of learning would have been her right, and her life. Instead, she was indentured to Madame Bezile. She looked down at a map, of the Isle, with the cathedral depicted in circle and rectangles in the middle of it. A faint dark line angled beneath: an old sewer, perhaps, or a way in to the cellars.

Not sure, but now she had to try. Around the back of the cathedral, to the delivery vaults which serviced the cafes and bars. Some were now closed for the deep winter, but others remained open. Lune took out the picklocks, found the door indicated by the map, hoped she was right.

It took a minute or so to break the lock and she expected the breath of an Aftman, a flicker of flame cloak, down her neck at any moment. It did not come and she slipped inside, into sudden dankness and damp.

The wall was slimy beneath her gloved hand. She sparked a small flare and saw that the vault extended deep under the street. The passage, if it still existed, was at the back. She closed the door softly behind her and clambered over the massed barrels. Salt fish, from the smell of it, carried down in the icebreakers from the North Sea. She wondered how long this had been here. At the far end of the vault, wooden pallets had been stacked against the wall. She tore them aside, and at the end of the wall was a small open space, barely large enough to squeeze through. But she did so and found herself standing in a passage. Lune, not tall, had to duck her head but there was enough room to walk down it. She followed it, twisting and turning, and at last came to a further door. Hard to keep track of the twists—she hoped she wouldn’t end up in someone’s cellar. Out with the picklocks again, a harder task this time due to the rust, and the door creaked open. It sounded hideously loud in the confines of the passage. She stepped cautiously through into a narrow space between tall stone walls. Someone was watching. Lune jumped, before she realised it was a statue: Notre Dame D’Hiver, Our Lady of Winter, wearing her white and silver gown and clasping a branch of olive, symbol of a spring which would never now come, unless you believed.

She crept past the Lady’s downcast gaze and into the dimness of the Cathedral. She had expected priests, but there was no one. Light flickered from the tiny candles lit by the faithful during the day and a shaft of light came from somewhere in the height of the vault, making dust motes dance in its beam. She’d heard they kept what she was looking for in its own shrine, towards the back. She went up between the huge pillars, a small swift shadow.

The shrine was locked behind a grille, but she could see it now. It sat on a small stand on the altar. Its jewelled sides glinted in the candlelight, sparking green, gold, a deep shining black. Scrolls and filigrees of silver and gold, impossibly fine and delicate, wrapped around the jewelwork. There was a thick metal band around the middle, and in the middle of that was an ornate ring, enclosing a kind of spiralling motif. The egg was smaller than she had been expecting, but at the same time more delicate, more visibly precious in appearance. She opened the grille. There would be an alarm, surely, electricity or hidden tripwires. But she could see nothing to prevent her taking the egg. She cast a coin across the floor, it skittered and rattled to a stop. Nothing moved, nothing sounded.

Lune stepped into the shrine, and for long moments it was all she could do to slow her breath. It was one thing to break into the cathedral, another still to stand this close to the egg. Caught now, she could always claim that she had only come to admire the fabled thing. But to hold it, to take it in her hands, to smuggle it out of the shrine: There could be no excuses then.

Lune reached out and hefted the egg from its stand. It jerked up, as if she had made to lift a goblet in the expectation of its being full, only to find that it was empty. She knew then that the expedition had been in vain, for the egg could not possibly be authentic. It felt no more substantial than if it had been made from layers of papier maché, a cleverly-done fake to fool the gullible and the ignorant. Which surely made sense: The egg in the shrine must be a decoy, with the real one—if it even existed—cloistered somewhere much more secure. No wonder there were no priests to guard this fake: It wasn’t worth anyone’s bother. Bitterness flooded into her mouth: She had failed Bezile, failed the debt that she owed her, failed the mother who had left Lune beneath Bezile’s dark wing. The feeling that now she would never be free brushed over her skin like moths.

But then she felt the cold, even through her gloves. The chill reached her fingers and stayed there, like the first tingle of frostbite. This was more than just the coldness of something that had been kept in a dank vault for a long time. It emanated from the egg itself, a fierce, ever-renewing coldness.

And who had ever said that the eggs were heavy, anyway? Now that she gave the matter due consideration, Lune thought it likely that she had assumed this detail herself, rather than being told it by anyone who might have known better.

She fingered the ring set into the egg’s waist-band, and felt an edge of metal, like a tiny sprung lever. The lever budged against the pressure from her finger, and curiosity compelled Lune to push it all the way. She heard a tiny metallic rasp and saw the spiral motif reveal itself to be a shutter, whose elegant curved blades retracted to expose the dark faceted red of a ruby, or a stone very like it.

She released the lever. It sprang back, and the shutter snapped closed again. It was only then that she felt the second lever, set under the ring. It did not yield when she applied pressure to it. Perhaps the first lever had to be held back first, or perhaps the second lever was jammed with age.

Nervous—conscious that she should have resisted the urge to tamper with the egg in any way—Lune swaddled it into the pouch under her cloak. Immediately she felt its cold insinuate its way through the fabric, into her belly. How, she wondered, could something so cold bestow warmth and light and power, when used properly?

She had not even retraced her steps past the statue of Our Lady of Winter when the priest emerged from the gloom, blocking her way.

“You did well, child, to get this far.” He was a young churchman, barely old enough to shave, but his face was so drawn—and the shadows so deeply accentuated by the gloom—that there was something grim and skull-like about his countenance. “Well, but not well enough. I take it you were sent by the Château, to steal what is rightfully ours? To prove yourself, I don’t doubt?’ His eyes flashed with avaricious interest: She wondered how long it had been since this young acolyte had seen a woman, or anyone from outside the cathedral.

“It meant nothing to you,” Lune said. “You weren’t using it, just keeping it locked away down here.”

“Because it is holy. Because it is not a thing to be ‘used,’ or made into a gaudy spectacle.” He was blocking her exit. Although the priest appeared unarmed, she thought little of her chances of overpowering him. The Château had not given her a weapon: not even a dagger, let alone a discharge pistol. Soutine carried one; he’d let her fire it once, in the Château’s courtyard, just so she knew how it would one day feel to be trusted with that power. But the point of this errand—as the priest had rightly deduced—was to prove that she could take the egg by wit and stealth alone, not force of arms.

Well, on that score she had failed miserably, hadn’t she?

But Lune remembered something the Madame Bezile had said, in their last moments alone in the Château, before she had put on her skates and run the gauntlet of the Aftmen. “If you are trapped, my good Lune, and the egg is in your possession, you are never without an ally.” She had paused to wrap another layer of fur around her body, against the chamber’s cold. “But call on that ally sparingly. The light of creation can never be put back, once it is loose in the world.”

Lune had only been half listening, preoccupied as she was with the task ahead. Her mistress was fond of cryptic utterances, and it didn’t pay to dwell on them all.

“Give me the egg,” the priest said. “Do it now, and you will be treated with leniency.”

“I came for it,” Lune said. “I’m taking it.”

At last she recognised the apprehension in the churchman’s face. It wasn’t just that he was worried about her dropping or damaging the egg. Something else: the same apprehension he might have shown if she held a blade against his throat.

He moved. Lunged toward her, reaching out to snatch for the egg. But Lune was faster. She brought the egg out of the pouch. Cradling it from underneath with her right hand, she used the forefinger of her left hand to work the lever on the shutter: this time pointing the ruby at the priest. With the thumb of her right hand, she pressed hard against the second lever, the one that had felt stiff before. This time it moved, but only grudgingly, like very old clockwork that had nearly seized into place. Yet as she worked it back, she felt other things—subtle geared mechanisms—click and whirr inside the egg, moving within layers invisible to the eye. Each successive movement seemed to trigger another, deeper and deeper into the egg’s heart. And from the ruby eye in the middle of the ring came light. The needle of brightness that skewered the darkness of the underground chamber was whiter than anything she had ever imagined, without the slightest tint of pink or red. Lune nearly dropped the egg in surprise. The priest raised his hands to his face, but he was not nearly fast enough. Lune doused the rapier of light across his eyes, the priest screaming, and then released the two levers. The shutter snapped tight, and inside the egg mechanisms unwound hastily. The light was gone, though the memory of it was seared across Lune’s vision.

The priest had fallen to the floor. He was clutching hands to his eyes, almost like a man trying to gouge his own sight away. And he was moaning and wriggling, as if in the grip of some grave palsy.

Lune stepped over him and continued on her journey.

She hardly dared pause when she reached the outside world. The egg was still giving off its chill, a cold that seemed to leech energy and resolve from her between one breath and the next. It was still an arduous journey back to the Château. But she was out, and there were no Aftmen waiting to detain her. Lune put on her skates and set off along the streets that bordered the black ribbon of the frozen river, trying to push all thoughts of the blinded priest from her mind, at the same time reassuring herself that what she had done was right and necessary.

The eggs had been made by men, in ages past, as an insurance against this long and deepening winter. Fire had been poured into them. Bottled for centuries, it was a gift from the dead. Though the eggs were rare, and rarer still with each passing generation, their fire was all that stood between the world and slow freezing death.

“What we do will seem wrong at times,” Madame Bezile had explained. “It will seem harsh, and it will involve deception and cruelty. The Aftmen will dog our every step, thinking that they act for the greater good. We will make enemies of decent men and women, the pious and the misguided, the brave and the foolish. The churchmen are not wicked, but their scripture has led them badly astray. They revere the eggs so highly that they would sooner see the lights go out than waste a drop of holy fire. But we serve science, not superstition. Across Free France, even beyond its margins, children shiver and starve for want of the energy a single egg can bring. My argosy carries life to those who most need it. Our mission is truly sacred.”

If there had been few travellers abroad before, there were even fewer now. The beer gardens and theatres had finished business for the evening. Lit windows and lantern-decked alleys were now dark. The occasional illuminated mansion or civic building served only to emphasize the nightly gloom that had settled on most of the city. Some of these places ran on gas or other contrivances, but as always fuel was scarce. And even gas or torchlight offered only a feeble defence against the night and the cold. Only the eggs could truly push back that chill, and even then only until the pure white light had stopped pouring from their hearts. That same light could make ancient machines turn again; it could send icebreakers to the Northern Wastes and propel fliers and argosies to the ends of the Earth. It could energise weapons potent enough to slice a tenement in half, or make the frozen river boil again. Lune had seen something of that light now, as she turned the egg against the priest.

How much had she spent: a hundredth, a thousandth, of the egg’s capacity? As her skates flashed along the ice, she wondered if Madame Bezile had some means of evaluating what portion of an egg had already been depleted, and whether some sanction would be forthcoming against Lune for squandering that which was precious beyond measure . . .

She heard the whisk, whisk, of another skater coming up behind her, moving with effortless, confident rhythm. A scissoring noise like knives being sharpened against each other. Lune did not look back. She maintained her pace, neither hastening nor slowing, until the road forked ahead. She took the rightmost turn, braking sharply, and sped down a narrowing, meandering alley away from the river. She knew the city well but not this winding passage. Old, sagging buildings, three or four storeys tall, leaned in on each other, trapping a thread of star-flecked sky between their jagged rooflines. The ice was rough and rutted and she had no choice but to slow down. A black cat, or rather a cat-shaped absence, dashed across the ice ahead of her, almost losing its tail under her blades. Lune drew breath sharply, but as the cat disappeared between barrels stacked at a doorway, it occurred to her that the other skater was not on her heels. Lune smiled at her nervousness. Any other night, she wouldn’t have thought twice about another traveller catching up with her from behind.

The alley terminated in a set of rising steps, glazed with treacherous ice. She risked a glance back the way she had come, and thought for a moment about returning to the main thoroughfare, where the going would be easier. But no, she wasn’t chancing it. Lune removed the skates again and climbed the steps, taking particular care now that the egg was in her care. If her mental map of this district wasn’t failing her, she had an idea where this alley ought to come out.

She had nearly reached the top of the steps when the figure loomed over her, blackflame cloak rippling and billowing as if stirred by some hidden breeze. Aftman, Lune thought to herself: almost immediately followed by the realisation that she had failed; that in fact this was worse than merely failing because now she would have to answer to more than just the authority of the Mademoiselle. Then something steely and sharp glimmered in the Aftman’s hand, and she recognised the curlicued barrel of a pistol.

“Come with me,” the Aftman said. “I think you have something I want very much. You have just come from the Cathedral, haven’t you?”

Lune’s heart roared. She couldn’t see the Aftman’s face, only the cloak and the pistol. The rest of him was lost in shadow. Strangely, he stood next to a patch of wall marked with the same chalk design she had seen before entering the Cathedral.

The chalk marks bright, unsmeared by rain or passing hands—as if they’d been made very recently.

“You mean this?’ she asked, innocently enough, and began to bring the egg out of the pouch, cradling it as she had done before.

“If you’re intending to blind or stun me, it won’t work,” the Aftman said, and—by dint of leaning towards her—his face revealed itself, along with the black globes that he wore on his eyes. “Besides, it would be a shame to waste any more of that power, wouldn’t it? Not when you’ve gone to so much trouble to steal it.”

There was something wrong, Lune realised. The man looked like an Aftman, but he wasn’t speaking like one. Aftmen didn’t normally travel alone, either. Usually in pairs, or threes, the better to overwhelm their prey. And that pistol: It was strangely ornate, agleam with baroque ornamentation. Not the weapon of civic militia, but of a privateer, or a rich playboy . . .

“Who are you?’ Lune asked.

“Oh,” he said, mocking. “Isn’t that obvious?”

“I think you’re bluffing,” Lune said, and once more took the egg from its pouch, once more touched the lever.

The same light as before shot forth. She saw it echoed in the Aftman’s lenses, a flash like black fire, as though the light of the egg had reflected from something deep within the iris itself.

“Ah!” cried the Aftman, but it did not sound as though he had been wounded, nor did he fall. Rather, it was a cry of triumph. Lune stepped back, but she was too slow. A cone of light snapped from the Aftman’s left eye, expanding outwards until she was enveloped in an aura of shifting colours: magenta, vermilion, ebony black. She batted at the lines of colour, fighting a dark rainbow, but though her hands went straight through, the colour held her. Black expanded, held, was all there was.

Later, Lune woke. There was a gritty sourness in her mouth and a pungent smell, not unpleasant, filled her nose. It made her sneeze. She blinked, but the darkness around her was all-enveloping: She could not even see her hand in front of her. But the surface beneath her bound hands was velvety soft.

“It would be an idea not to move,” a voice said from the darkness. It sounded amused, and this annoyed Lune.

“Why not? Will you shoot me?”

“Oh,” the voice said, and now she felt sure it was the Aftman, or whatever he might be. “If I’d wanted to do that, now, I’d have done it some time ago. I took quite some trouble to bring you here.”

“And where is ‘here’?”

“I’ll show you.”

Light, dim and grey, began to creep into the room. Objects swam gradually from it: a table, spindly chairs. Lune found that she was lying on a black velvet chaise longue, trussed like a chicken for the pot, but when she looked down at her hands, she could see nothing that bound them. An experimental tug. No result. The room was grey, pallid drapes, a grey carpet. All monochrome, with one spot of colour: the egg, which rested on a small velvet cushion on the table, glowing with a faint crimson fire.

Across the room, the Aftman sat on a fragile armchair. His ornate weapon rested across his knees. He wore a belt with an ornate buckle, set with gleaming studs. Without the hood, and the lenses that had hid his eyes, he was revealed as young, a pale, gaunt face, all sinews. His eyes were silver grey. He looked as though he had been carved from shadow. Lune had never seen anyone like him before.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Arquelle. I am from a place called Courtrai.”

“Never heard of it,” Lune said. It was the truth, but it sounded like a put-down.

“That,” Arquelle said, “is no surprise. It’s in Belgium, not Free France.”

Lune waited for a further explanation, but none was forthcoming.

“So,” Arquelle went on. “You stole an egg. Very enterprising.”

He sounded as though he approved. Lune said nothing.

“But why should you do such a desperate thing?”

“Isn’t that obvious?”

“Humour me. I’m not from round here.”

“Power.”

His pale eyebrows rose. “For yourself?”

“Of course not. For all of us. The church seeks to keep the power of the eggs for itself, secretes them away, keeps them hidden in a holiness which is no use to anyone.”

“Use,” Arquelle mused. “And you would use it?”

“I know those who can. For the good of society, for the benefit of ordinary people.”

“You work for someone. A woman who calls herself Madame Bezile. She finds eggs, gathers them unto herself, and bestows them on the poor and the needy.” He said this with a mildly sarcastic lilt.

“If you know,” said Lune with contempt, “then why question me?”

“I wish to see if you believe in what you’re doing. I don’t know, you see. Do you have the interests of others at heart?’ He waved a long hand. “Young, idealistic, full of glorious notions?”

“I am not a fool.”

“Or simply a mercenary, a thief for hire, a cynic?’ Arquelle went on as if she had not spoken. He spoke as if musing, his gaze fixed upon the air.

“I am not that, either,” Lune said, hotly. “Madame Bezile took me in, when no one else would have me, when my mother was dying. I owe her a great debt.”

“Yet you know what she is?”

“She is my mistress,” Lune said, stubbornly, forcing down the long-held doubts. Bezile commanded more of her loyalty than Arquelle, after all.

“So, neither a thief nor a fool. The egg likes you, you know.”

Lune gaped at him. “The egg—what are you talking about?”

“Because,” Arquelle remarked, “if it did not, you’d be dead. Letting the fire out like that . . . Now come with me. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

Lune found that she could rise. The invisible restraints had melted away. At once, she began to make plans: snatch the egg, and run—but the moment the thought entered her mind, a tightening about her wrists warned it away.

“Tedious, I know,” Arquelle said, although his back was to her. “But necessary until you’re able to make an informed decision.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a long black strap. “Here. Buckle this around your waist, and make sure it’s tight.”

Lune took the object warily. She could move her hands provided she kept thoughts of flight from her mind. “A belt?”

“More than a belt. Don’t fiddle with the buckle once it’s on, or you’ll bash your skull on the ceiling.”

It was the same as the one Arquelle already wore. She fastened it around her waist, flinching when the belt seemed to tighten of its own accord. It stopped just before it became uncomfortable.

Away from the grey, elegant room, the building was more typical of the city: ancient blocks of stone, a smell of the damp and the river. They walked past a wooden-shuttered window, through which orange light betrayed the coming of dawn. Lune only felt as if she had been unconscious for minutes, when in fact it must have been hours.

“I must get back to the Château.”

“In time,” Arquelle said.

He led her into what must have once been a stairwell, before the stairs crumbled to dust. Now it was a circular shaft, its windows shuttered. They stood on a creaking wooden platform with gaps in the floorboards. “Your belt is slaved to mine,” Arquelle said, touching one of the studs on his buckle. “If you need to know how it works, I’ll show you later. That’ll depend on the Captain’s view of your usefulness.”

The belts emitted a dual rising whine, a sound that quickly passed the threshold of audibility. Lune gasped as the floor dropped away from her feet. There was a feeling in her belly like falling, but instead of plummeting she was rising smoothly up. The cold stone walls slid by, the circular platform dropping away with increasing speed. Arquelle had his thumbs tucked into the belt, as if this was the most normal thing in the world. He was grinning.

The discharge pistol, the stunning weapon, the restraining mechanism—these were all old-world technologies, vanishingly rare. But Lune had heard of them. The belts were something else. These were functioning relics from an even earlier time, when men and women strode the skies like gods.

Things that no one was really sure had ever been real.

It was as if Arquelle had read her thoughts. “We use the belts sparingly. There’s only a finite charge in their power packs, about ten thousand ascents per unit, and they can’t be re-energised once they’re dead. You might say we’d be better off putting stairs back.”

“Why don’t you?”

“The Captain has many enemies. At least this way no one can get to him without going to some considerable bother.”

Lune hardly dared look down, but by the time they reached the wooden landing at the top of the shaft, it was clear that they’d come up the equivalent of ten or twelve stories in a normal building. The landing was semicircular; as they reached its level Arquelle touched another belt stud to make them slide sideways, until their feet were only a sole’s thickness off the flooring. He cut the power and Lune felt her weight return. She edged away from the drop.

“You can keep the belt on for now,” Arquelle said. “You wouldn’t get very far with it, even if you tried.”

He opened a heavy wooden door and she followed him into what she judged must be the very top of the building. It was a half-octagonal room, with doors leading off it into what must have been other parts of this garret. There were no windows as such, merely narrow, glass-filled slits. Through the nearest slit she made out the four iron stumps of the Old Tower, clawing at the dawn sky like four attenuated fingers.

Above her head was another level, a metal platform reached by a black spiral staircase, and above the platform was a circular window, facing all the quarters of the compass and surmounted by a dark-fretted iron ceiling.

Some kind of apparatus sat on the platform, a contraption of mirrors and lenses whose function was at first unclear.

Lune paid it little heed beyond that first glance. Paris was full of strange things that no longer worked properly. What had her attention were the clocks.

There were hundreds of them, all manner of clocks filling the walls, crowding in on the window-slits. A relentless ticking filled Lune’s hearing, summed from innumerable tiny pendulums and cogs. Across a wide table, clocks lay in various stages of disrepair.

“You’ll realise why I’ve brought you here,” Arquelle said, “Once you’ve met him.”

“Met who?”

It was only when the figure made the tiniest of movements that Lune registered that they were not alone in the room. The gowned and hooded form sat, or rather slumped, at a worktable, leaning so far forward and with its head so low that it was at first almost hidden by the larger clocks. The figure might have been presumed to be unconscious, or even dead, except that the black gloved fingers of its right hand were moving, poking slender instruments into the open gearwork of a clock while the left hand supported the instrument’s square-framed chassis a few inches off the table.

She understood now the purpose of the mirrors and lenses situated on the high platform. Between one moment and the next the Sun must have pushed a splinter of light above the horizon. The apparatus gathered that sunlight, concentrated it, and marshalled it into a bright spot where it was most needed. The open clock was transfixed in a golden beam of intense brilliance, beautified like a saint in one of the time-faded paintings Madame Bezile kept in the Château’s long corridors.

From the clock issued delicate picking and scratching sounds. The figure was silent, giving no indication that it was aware of Lune’s presence. Of its face she could see nothing, but from the hood of the gown protruded a dozen or so brassy tubes, all pointing in the same direction. As she stared one of the tubes clicked and retracted, as if in response to some hidden stimulus. Another whirred out to replace it, thicker this time. The fingers continued their work.

“I have her,” Arquelle said, raising his voice as if to address a crowd. “And I have the egg.”

“A moment.” The reply was impossibly hoarse, barely a voice at all. “I’ve waited hours for the light, Arquelle. Let me make the most of it.”

Lune stood still. “Who is it?” she asked.

“My master,” Arquelle answered in a low tone. “I mentioned him already. Captain Pallas. Does that mean anything to you?”

“I’ve never heard of this man before tonight.”

“Bezile wouldn’t have seen any need to educate you. That doesn’t mean she isn’t aware of the Captain. They’re in approximately the same line of work, after all. The acquisition and exploitation of eggs, for the betterment of Free France and whatever humanity lies beyond it. Isn’t that what she tells you?”

The hooded form made an irritated grunt and lowered the clock to the table, withdrawing its tools. “You know I need absolute concentration, Arquelle.”

“You also wished to be informed the moment she was in our custody,” Arquelle pointed out. There was just enough insolence in his reply to suggest that he had little fear of reprimand or dismissal. “Or did I misunderstand that bit?”

“No,” the hooded man said, his rasp of voice managing to soften itself. “You did not, of course. Well, I suppose I should see her, and the prize. It is the one we hoped for, isn’t it?”

“It’s real enough.”

“You know this?”

“Damn right I know it. She tried using it against me.”

“Resourceful, then.”

Arquelle shrugged. “Or cavalier.”

The seated man raised his slumped form slightly and reached up with his gloved hands to push back the hood. He had on a kind of mask, strapped around what appeared to be a bald, skull-shaped head. The mask was made of metal and leather, and covered most of the front of his face, except for his chin, mouth, and the very tip of his nose. The skin that she could see was old: raw and leathery in places, sagging and wrinkly in others, veined through like marble, dotted here and there with scars, colourless lesions and bubbling growths. A fuzz of beard around the chin was pure white. Of his eyes, nothing showed. The metal front of the mask was as complicated as any of the gutted clocks on the table. The brass tubes were lenses, set into swivelling mechanisms. Fine tubes, black and flexible, ran from the base of each lens around the back of his head, where they braided together into a single bunch and vanished into the hood and down the back of his neck.

“What do you want with me, Captain Pallas?” Lune asked. “Because if it’s nothing important, I’ve work to be doing.”

“You have spirit, girl, I’ll give you that. But do you have enough? That’s the question.” Slowly, Captain Pallas reached up and began to undo the leather fastenings of his mask.

“What do you want with all these clocks?” Lune asked, not sure if she wanted to see what was behind that mask.

“It’s about being prepared,” Captain Pallas said, undoing the last of the straps. “A back-up policy. We live in a world where things work a little less well each year. One day, sooner than we realise, there won’t be power to run the argosies and icebreakers, or light our buildings, or keep us warm as the ice closes in.” Slowly, he pulled the mask away from his face, before pushing it back over his scalp, where he allowed it to rest, with the lenses pointed at the ceiling. “Then, we’ll be back to fire and wood and metal. Things that work by muscle and wind and water, like clocks. I have no illusions that I will play any role in that world—I am old enough now, older than you probably realise—but I cannot turn my back on the changes that are coming. When the last egg has given up its fire, perhaps one of these clocks will serve some useful function, somewhere in the city. I’m hoping for something better than that, you understand. But it pays to take precautions.”

Lune was looking at a blind man. His face wasn’t as bad as she’d feared—there was no hideous disfigurement there, nothing that moved her to pity or revulsion. You saw worse every day, in the lines of beggars on the approach to the Quai. But it was certainly the face of a very old man. And his eyes were a sightless milky white, staring at her and yet not at her, as if they only remembered where she had been standing.

“What happened?” Lune asked, sensing that there was more to it than just age.

“An egg burned my vision away. I caught a glimpse of the holy fire, and this is the price I paid. The strange thing is that even now, I cannot say that it wasn’t worth it.”

“But you must see, to be able to repair the clocks.”

“In a manner of speaking.” He touched a glove to the lenses on his scalp. “Machines. Camera eyes, of varying focal depth. Recovered from the close-prox hull sensors on my ship, after I crashed near Anvers. You’ll have noted how the outputs converge and run together, down my back. A good neurosurgeon could have wired them straight into my skull, but where do you find a good neurosurgeon these days? Rhetorical question, of course.”

“So how do you see?”

“Beneath my clothing, strapped to my back, is an array of actuators. Again, it was recovered from my ship: Its original function lay in the active cushioning mechanism of an acceleration couch. With some assistance, it was adapted to enable me to see. When the cameras transmit a picture, it is converted into a pattern of stimuli across my back. My skin receptors detect the pattern and transmit nervous impulses to my brain. It took some while before I was able to perceive those impulses in terms of a coherent image, but eventually the necessary adjustments took place. Having no input from my eyes, my brain craved visual stimulus. It soon latched onto the nearest substitute.” Captain Pallas gave a ghastly, skull-like smile, his lips parting to reveal a grim assortment of ancient, yellowing teeth. “The peculiar thing is that it still feels like vision. The image is crude, but because the sensation of seeing is synthesized in the visual processing centre of my brain, it feels perfectly normal, as if my eyes are still working.” He paused, not smiling now. “Alas, the lenses do not all function as well as they used to, and the actuators are losing their potency. Pixel by pixel, line by line, I am becoming blind again. But while I have something, while I can still see enough to work, I let no moment go to waste.”

“Then I am sorry to be such a burden on your time,” Lune said sourly. “Who made you look into the egg?”

“No one but myself. I did it deliberately, in the full and certain knowledge of what it would do to my eyes.”

“Then you are insane.”

“Now, possibly. Then—not in the slightest. Greedy, perhaps. Insanely inquisitive, almost certainly. But foolish, or unaware of what I was doing? Not at all. I understand exactly what the egg would do to me. And I submitted willingly.” He paused, reaching up to lower his mask back into place, the lenses turning on her with the gleam of scrutiny in their glass ends. “That’s better, Lune. I hope I didn’t disturb you, but you needed to know what I am, what I was.”

“You mentioned a ship. Did you come from the Northern Wastes?”

“No, not from the Northern Wastes.” Captain Pallas stared at her for long moments: she had the sense that she was being measured, judged, evaluated. “It was a spacecraft. A void-crosser, one of the last. Atalanta in Calydon. I hadn’t picked up the signature of another ship anywhere near here for centuries. Not for parsecs out, in all directions. Zero return. I think they were all gone, except for me.”

Disappointed, Lune said: “Only children speak of such things. They sing about them in nursery rhymes.” Although at the back of her mind was the thought that children also said that men and women had once been able to step through the sky . . .

“Which doesn’t make them untrue, merely forgotten, distorted,” Captain Pallas said. “Until a thousand years ago, this city was the centre of an empire infinitely greater than Free France. A realm of trade and exploration that reached far beyond Earth, out into the galaxy. Settlements, commerce . . . worlds of wealth and marvel beyond imagining. It lasted five thousand years, Lune. Then it ended. Not at once, but in slow, painful degrees: just like the world is ending now. We don’t remember it, most of us, because we choose not to. The memory of what we once had would be a cold slap in the face from reality, every waking moment. So we buried it, along with everything else.” With an effort, he made to stand from the table, the chair scraping back on its wooden feet. “You realise, of course, that I mention all of this only as preamble. The eggs are the crux. The eggs are what matters.”

“Then why did you waste one, by letting it blind you?” Lune asked.

“I would like you to do something for me,” Captain Pallas said, sidestepping her question. “That is, you must make a choice. It’s easy enough.”

“What kind of choice?”

“To go back and work for Madame Bezile, and do her bidding, or to go back and work for Bezile and do mine instead. In other words, I want you to betray her.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then you’ll have made an enemy of me, and my enemy is also Arquelle’s. He’s very good, Arquelle. He found you once, Lune. It won’t tax him to find you again.” He softened his tone. Above them, the contraption of lenses and mirrors clicked and moved by the tiniest of degrees, tracking the Sun’s ascent. “But it’s not my intention to threaten you; I’d far rather convince you we are on the side of right. You will return to her, as she expects, and you will have an egg. Not the one you stole from the chapel, but a close copy, although nearly depleted of fire. It will suffice to convince Madame Bezile that you have done what she asked of you.”

“While you keep the other one?”

“It hasn’t been completely wasted, so yes.” Captain Pallas examined one of his tools, fingering it as if making the acquaintance for the first time. “But there’s another egg that’s much more useful to me. It’s called the Red Empress, and its fire is unusually . . . potent. Have you heard of this egg?”

Lune shook her head, then thought to add: “No.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. It’s what powers her argosy. You’ve been aboard, we gather?”

Lune prickled. How well did they know her? “She takes me on her errands, when I’m of use to her.”

“That’s what we thought. Our intelligence tells us that she’ll be leaving the city very shortly, on another ‘errand’”. He stressed the word as if it had some double meaning lost on Lune. “You’ll do what you can to be aboard, Lune, and then you’ll do something for us. Or not, if you choose otherwise. It’s up to you.” Captain Pallas put down his tool. “I’ll leave her in your hands now, Arquelle. Tell her what she needs to know, and make sure she grasps the importance of her decision.”

“That shouldn’t be too difficult,” Arquelle said.

Paris-below, so different from Paris-above, and yet with tinges of the same, even in daylight: darkness, shadows, the damp and the cold. Arquelle and Lune made their way swiftly through a maze of cellars, tunnels, runnels, passages and sewers. Once, they used their suspensor belts to leap across a terrifying black pit, a hole into the bowels of the Earth itself, and when a grinning Arquelle paused to toss a stone into the abyss, Lune had stopped counting before she heard its distant impact.

Her guide moved with such confidence that Lune wondered if he had been raised here—such things were known—or had lived here for a long time. But when she voiced this thought, a whispered mention, he said only, lightly, “Ah, I’m just someone who dances well with the dark.”

“You’re from Earth, though. You didn’t come down from the stars, like Captain Pallas.”

“No, the Atalanta came down near Anvers—it’s just a shivering little hamlet now, but it used to be a great city—and I wasn’t born very far away, in an even smaller and more shivering little hamlet. When he passed through on his way to Free France, I became one of his followers.”

“Are there many of you?”

“Enough.”

And then he stopped, before a carved oak door, so old that it felt as hard as metal when Lune ran a wondering hand over it. Arquelle spoke a word, raised a small device with whirling spirals, that flashed red and blue in the shadows and caused a ripple to run down the surface of the door. An answering shimmer seemed to run inside Lune’s mind. She gave a little cry.

“What—”

“Hush.” He reached out a hand and pulled her inside to sudden warmth. “Don’t speak, Lune. Don’t make another sound.”

He led her up a narrow, twisting flight of stairs. The heat was stifling: Lune had never felt anything like it. It made her skin itch and her eyes prickle. Dryness caught the back of her throat like sudden sandpaper. She had to struggle not to cough. It grew darker as the heat increased, until she found, to her shame, that her fingers were clutching Arquelle’s hand with a grip that must have hurt. She felt him gently free his fingers, then take her by the shoulders until he could pass her in front of him. They were in an enclosed space. Her fingers brushed smooth hot stone. A chink of light caught her attention and Arquelle breathed, “Look.”

Lune bent her head. In the stone, there was the smallest slit, vertical and precise: not some natural configuration of the blocks of the wall, but something that had been created. Curious, she looked within.

A woman was reclining on a couch, amid brightness and lightness and warmth. Not the day’s paltry brightness, magnified by mirrors and lenses, but something artificial. The room was filled with hot house flowers: orchids, jasmine, huge unnatural blooms in every shade of golden and crimson, scarlet, sapphire, silvery-white. Lune blinked: The colours were so intense as to be distressing. The woman herself wore nothing except a chain around her waist, rubies flashing red fire against her pale skin. Her hair was red-gold, and long, cascading over the velvet edge of the divan. She held a glass in one hand, turning it up to the light so that its contents glowed and gleamed. And as she did so, Lune saw her face.

It was Bezile. Amongst all this colour and heat and splendour and waste—Bezile the ascetic, the prim. Bezile, lying here in languor in an artificial tropic. Bezile, who had been Lune’s mentor for so long.

Bezile, who wanted an egg.

When they were safe again, lying low on a flat-walled roof within sight of the Château, Arquelle said: “She’s a liar and a con-artist, not really any better than the churchmen. She doles out the odd egg now and then to the poor and the needy, but it’s really just a smokescreen. She keeps the powerful ones for herself, and a handful of wealthy clients spread across Free France—or as far as her argosy can reach, which is about the same thing. Nimble-fingered boys and girls like you keep her operation running. She brings you up as thieves, trains you to steal eggs and steal them well, and you think you’re doing the world some good. But she doesn’t give a damn about what the power in those eggs can do for anyone else, so long as they keep her warm at night.”

“You could have tricked me somehow, made me see what wasn’t there.”

“I suppose,” Arquelle said, as if the thought had never really occurred to him. “Still: ask yourself—did it make sense? She’s rich, Lune—you don’t need me to tell you that. Do you think she got that wealth from a lifetime of charitable deeds?”

“Captain Pallas wants me to steal an egg. How does that make him any different?”

“Because he knows what the eggs really are. Or what they really were, until they fell into our hands.”

Lune spoke as if reciting some text burned into her brain so long ago that she had forgotten the origin. “Before the world turned cold, and the energy began to run out, the wisest men and women of that golden time scooped fire from the ailing Sun and bottled it in the eggs. They did this so that we, their descendants, might hold the winter at bay. It was their gift to us, across the numberless ages.”

Arquelle tilted his head. “Well, that’s one theory. I’ll tell you another. The eggs are a lot older than that, and they weren’t made for our benefit.” He put a finger under Lune’s chin and gently forced her to look to the sky. “If it were night, what would you see?”

Her answer was sullen. She was still thinking of Bezile, the red rubies against her pale skin. “Stars.”

“A few thousand, at the most. But each of those stars is a sun like our own, with its own little family of worlds. You can’t even begin to imagine how many more stars there are beyond the small number we can see at night. A great whorl of them, the galaxy we call the Milky Way . . . hundreds of billions. More stars than there are people who have ever lived on Earth, let alone Free France. But even that isn’t the end. Our galaxy isn’t the only one, not by a long margin.” He reached down and pinched a piece of windblown grit from the edge of the roof, where it met the low wall that offered them some shelter. “Think of all the other pieces of dirt, in all of Paris  . . . and you’ve got some idea of how many galaxies there are out there.”

“And you would know this, would you?”

“It’s what Captain Pallas tells me, and I have no reason to doubt it. Nor to doubt the fact that all those galaxies, all the stars and worlds they contain, once had an origin. The universe is not infinitely old, Lune. It’s not even three times as old as this world we’re sitting on now.”

Lune thought of the statue she had seen the evening before. “You sound like a churchman now, preaching of God and Genesis.”

“The origin I speak of isn’t the same as theirs. But they’re right about one thing. There were Gods in the old days. Just not the kind they tend to go on about.”

Lune shifted. The Sun was up, though now cloud-veiled, and the roof was still cold.

“There’s another?”

“When the universe was young, very young, it was smaller and hotter than it is now. Unimaginably small and unimaginably hot: all space and time bound into a bubble the size of my fist. Everything we now know grew from that one seed. Matter and energy, space and time. Galaxies. Stars. Worlds. Cities. You and me.”

“This is nonsense.”

“Would that it were, then we could both do nothing and go home with a clear conscience.” He shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid we can’t do that, Lune. We have an obligation. A duty.”

“To the eggs?”

“They aren’t eggs,” Arquelle answered carefully. “They’re lifeboats.”

She answered this with an uncertain laugh. “You make even less sense.”

“When the universe was younger than a heartbeat, it was very different. It was unimaginably hot and dense, a tiny seething realm of fire and light. We couldn’t have survived then, even if we were small enough to fit inside: There were no worlds, no atoms, no matter as we understand it. But there was life. Creatures of the quark-gluon plasma, Captain Pallas called them. They hadn’t just formed in that fire; they were fire. Millions of them: thinking beings, angels with the wisdom of gods. They had no choice but to be wise. They’d survived countless aeons, endured the rise of fall of kingdoms and empires beyond recall. And all this in less than a heartbeat since the first flash of creation. All human experience, Lune, every word ever set to paper, every thought, every dream, is just a childish scribble compared to that vast and luminous pageant. Of course, it had to end. But it wasn’t through foolishness or hubris. The universe was changing as it grew older. It was poised on the brink of a transformative event—Captain Pallas called it a phase of superluminal acceleration—when it would suddenly become much bigger and much colder. Without that event, creatures like you and I could never exist. But it was death to the fire beings, and there was nothing they could do to stop it from happening. Except, that is, for a very few who found a way to survive, to ride out the transformation.”

“The eggs,” Lune guessed.

“The wisest of the fire beings found a way to cocoon themselves, to create little pockets, in which they could endure. They would be cut off from their fellows for the rest of time, or until external conditions returned to a state that they could withstand—but it was better than ceasing to exist. So they wrapped themselves in armour and survived the expansion phase, and even as the universe swelled and cooled and atoms gathered into stars and galaxies and then worlds and people, they stayed alive. Billions of years passed, and the eggs spread through the cosmos like seeds on the wind.”

“Until we found them, I suppose.”

He gave her a smile. “We weren’t the first, not by a long stretch. We humans aren’t the first thinking creatures to climb out of the mud. Ours wasn’t even the first stellar empire in the Milky Way. There’d been many before us. The eggs had been found and examined. They’d passed through many alien hands before we humans chanced upon them. Nor were we the first to discover that the eggs contained energy. But that wasn’t the point of them. When we crack open and egg and send its fire into furnaces, we’re killing a being as old as creation itself. Madame Bezile isn’t just wrong to use the eggs for herself. She’s a murderess.”

Lune remembered what she had seen earlier that evening, when Pallas removed his mask. “Even if that was the case, your captain’s no better. He told me himself. It was an egg’s fire that blinded him.”

Her own voice sounded hollow, as though she tried to convince herself, force down old doubts and new. A memory of the library floated, unbidden, into her mind: thoughts of a time of peace, when she would have been allowed to study books, to think, to follow her own will. A time that was long, long gone. She blinked back tears which she did not want Arquelle to see, and turned away.

“That’s true,” Arquelle allowed. “But he also told you that he considered it a price worth paying. Did it occur to you to wonder why?”

“Mad old men say strange things.”

“That’s also true. But Captain Pallas isn’t mad, at least not as I understand it. The egg blinded him, yes. But it did more than that. It reached into his head and changed him. The creature in the egg died, in one sense. But in another it survived. It passed its essence, its wisdom, its memories, into the head of Captain Pallas. His eyes were the window into his soul, until the fire burned them away.” Arquelle waited, as if he expected Lune to dismiss his words.

But instead she remembered the priest who had blocked her escape from the Cathedral, the way he had twitched on the floor.

“I blinded a churchman this evening. Did the fire change him as well?”

“That would depend,” Arquelle answered carefully. “If the fire’s too bright, then it just burns. And even if the fire’s not too bright, if the contact’s too brief, there won’t be enough time for the essence to cross over.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s like sending a code, but only getting half the message through. Or not even half. You’re left with something that doesn’t make sense.” He paused. “Half a mind, or less than that. But you needn’t worry. By the time you stole that egg, I doubt there was enough of the fire being left to cross over.”

“It was different for your Captain.”

“He endured the fire, and the contact was prolonged. Since then, Captain Pallas has what you might call a . . . different view of things. He remembers what he used to be, but it’s as if he sees his old life through a dirty window. And his priorities aren’t the same. He understands that we have a very clear choice. We can use the eggs to keep the night at bay, for a little longer. When the last egg is cracked, though, we’ll be no better off than when we started. There’s another way, though. It’s harder, and it won’t bring us much comfort against the cold, at least not to begin with. But what we need now is wisdom, not more fuel for our furnaces. We can shiver a bit more, but be wiser. And in being wiser, we’ll stand a better chance of doing something that will last.”

“You are saying we should let the eggs blind us.”

“Their wisdom is wasted, if it’s left inside the eggs,” Arquelle said. “For the fire beings, they’re in a kind of prison. Our lives may be short, our minds tiny. But the fire beings would rather a few years of bright existence than a billion more years of limbo. They’ll gladly accept to help us, if we let them.”

“Who would choose to be blinded?”

“There are those who are willing. Around the city, even now, they’re waiting for the right time. The moment. The hard part isn’t looking into the fire, though. It’s not dying in the process. Captain Pallas was lucky, but only a fraction of an egg’s fire did that to him. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a way, but we need the Red Empress to make it happen. That’s where you come in. We’ve infiltrated Bezile’s organisation in the past, as she well knows, but we’ve never come close to the Empress.”

“It’s not like I can just walk anywhere I want to, open any door.”

“You can now.” He dug out the charm he had used on the carved oak door when they had been on their way to spy on Madame Bezile. “I’m assigning this to you. It’ll work on anything, including the doors in her argosy. Those doors may be cross-wired to her bridge, though, so once you open them you’d best not dawdle. You’ve handled eggs before, so you needn’t be afraid of the Empress. I’ll show you how to remove it safely, and put a second egg back in its place before anyone notices the power interruption.”

Lune frowned. “Won’t you also be killing the second egg?”

“It’s too late for that one. Once a certain amount of energy is drained from the egg, they can’t survive. There won’t be much fire left, though. You’d best get off the argosy as quickly as you can.”

“And I suppose you have a plan for that, if we’re already up in the air.”

“Of course.” And Arquelle tapped the suspensor belt that Lune was still wearing. “There’s a loading hatch in the argosy’s belly. You can drop through with the egg.” There’s a tracking device in the belt, slaved to mine. By the time you touch down, we’ll be waiting for you.”

“It’s that simple.”

“It’s that simple,” Arquelle confirmed.

But he must have known that nothing was ever like that. He left her on a quiet street corner, the city only just beginning to wake up around her, the egg back in her possession. He had given her instructions on the night’s work as if it was a transparent and obvious given that she would do his bidding, and thereby turn against Madame Bezile after years of willing loyalty. As if, in her head, was a mechanism that could be adjusted as easily as some gear or ratchet in a clock, turning her from servant to traitor. Perhaps that was how it worked in Captain Pallas’s world of clocks and mirrors and lenses, of suspensor belts and void-crossers.

Not Lune’s.

She had expected to arrive back at the Château when it was still night, but now it was day and she fully expected to be quizzed on her lateness. As she approached through the scrawl of ever-tightening side-streets, Lune imagined the difficult questions she might now expect, the lies it would be hard to sustain. The argosy was attached to the Château’s highest tower, straining at the mooring lines as its engines stirred the air, eager to propel the fat-bellied machine across the rooftops and beyond the margins of Paris. Men laboured in the high airs, loading provisions into Madame Bezile’s swollen craft.

“The safest lie is the one closest to the truth,” Arquelle had told her. “You crossed paths with a priest. Say that you blinded him, but before he was down he managed to knock you out.”

“With what?”

“You don’t have to say. Just that you came around in a dark part of the cathedral, and the priest was still unconscious—or however you left him—and that it took you a while to find your way out again.”

When Lune was ushered into Madame Bezile’s presence, this was the story she gave. Yet instead of doubting her, Madame Bezile put down the gold-clasped box she was holding and ushered Lune closer. “Let me see your face, child. The churchmen did this to you?” Her eyes were narrowed, not with skepticism but with sudden interest.

Lune did not know what to say. “I don’t remember what happened. I had the egg, and then I was trying to get out. It was still dark. Then something happened. I think I remember a priest, but I’m not sure. I woke up, but I was confused.” She scanned Madame Bezile’s face, searched for a clue as to how readily this concoction was being swallowed. “When I reached the outside it was light. I came back as quickly as I could.”

“If you were knocked out, you must have gashed your face as you fell. Or they cut you.” Madame Bezile reached for a hand-mirror and offered it to Lune. “Here. Does it hurt? I would send you to one of the local physicians, but there is a good man in Holdenheim; when we land tomorrow he can look at it. I’m afraid there may still be a scar left behind.”

Lune reached to touch the hard-ridged scab on her cheekbone. There was no pain, not even a tingle. It was as if a dark red caterpillar had been glued to her skin.

“I didn’t even know it was there.”

“If the churchmen had caught you, you’d have got off a lot less lightly than that. Which does not excuse the crime. Oh, Lune. My Good Lune.” Madame Bezile skimmed the wound with the back of her hand, so gently that Lune barely felt it. “That settles it, of course. You must come to Holdenheim. We leave after sunset, and now you must rest.”

Lune brought out the prize. She left the other things in the bag. “Soutine told you I made it back with the egg.”

“Yes. I never doubted that you would, but it’s still good to see it with my own eyes.”

Madame Bezile took the green-glinting egg, cupping it between both hands. Her mouth was open. She let out a tiny little exhalation. Lune had heard that sound before, and always mistaken it for admiration. Now she understood exactly what the gasp meant.

Even if she hadn’t, it was there in Bezile’s eyes. The avaricious gleam Lune had seen a thousand times before, and never recognised.

Not fascination, not even gratitude.

Lust.

“My Good Lune,” Bezile said softly. “How well you’ve done.”

They cast off after sundown.

Aboard the argosy, Bezile had continued to be fulsome in both her congratulations and her sympathy for the wound Lune had suffered. Lune, for her part, had been obliged to act and pose as they got underway. Yet it was not all insincerity. Long bonds still held—gratitude, an eagerness to please, simple fear. She could not escape from the thought that Bezile could read her mind, study her face like one of the books in the ancient library and see what lay beneath her words, her stammering thanks. But Bezile had shown no signs of suspicion, had expressed a grave and sorrowful regret for the risk that Lune had run, had placed a thin white hand upon her head in benediction and murmured a brief and apparently heartfelt prayer. As she did so, the memory of Bezile’s creamy languid form among the orchids had welled up in Lune’s mind, bringing revulsion in its wake. She had closed her eyes and bent her head in apparent piety, and Bezile had glided on.

Once she had done so, Lune went to the small porthole in the wall of the argosy and looked out, as if the sight could scour her clean. Beyond her scabbed reflection, Free France lay below, a spangle of dark and bright. She could dimly make out the towers of the churches, and the curve of the river. How strange, to think that once men had sailed from this city to the stars . . . Lune peered upwards, but the night was clouded. Her mouth tightened. Bezile, Arquelle, Pallas spun through her thoughts like skaters taking the bend of the river, small as toys. The prospect of her own betrayal was rancid in her throat, as though she had eaten something sour. But hadn’t Bezile betrayed her in turn, from the very beginning? Lune knew that it was so, and yet, and yet . . . She looked down again, concentrating on Paris and the future. Arquelle’s charm lay heavy in her pocket, as weighty as she had once imagined the eggs to be, and then, checking that she was unobserved, she made her way to the power room.

The charm worked on the door as effectively as he had promised. The same red and blue flash, the same ripple in the door’s fabric, the same answering shimmer in Lune’s head. This was old and arcane technology, and she did not care to be near it for any longer than necessary.

Yet it functioned. The door admitted her and she stepped over the raised gold threshold, pausing only to close the door behind her. The room was smaller than she had imagined, and it was obvious from the first glance that no one was in attendance. The mechanisms in here were as dependable as an old pair of skates, needing little maintenance or adjustment. The room’s curved and bolted gold walls were blank of windows or ornamentation, with the only significant feature being the gold plinth on which the Red Empress sat. The egg rested within a spherical cradle, suspended under a counterpart of the plinth which instead projected down from the ceiling. The cradle was the only complicated thing in the room, but Lune was not daunted. Arquelle had told her what to expect, and nothing she saw gave her cause to doubt his instructions.

There were no locks or traps on the cradle, since anyone entering the room was deemed to have authority to approach the Red Empress. Lune worked the delicate catches and clasps, until all that remained was the golden apparatus feeding the egg’s fire into the argosy’s furnaces. The many-jointed and knuckled pipes gave off a faint brassy heat, but when her fingers touched the metal it was strangely cool. Arquelle had told her that it would be safe to disconnect the egg for several seconds, but that she must take care to close the screening shutters before she did so. Hardly daring to breathe, she worked the little mechanisms that operated the inner and outer screens, robbing the furnace of its energy source.

She stood for a moment, straining to hear some alteration in the argosy’s engines, some telling hesitation in the throb of the floor plates. But there was no change.

She removed the Red Empress from the cradle, slipped it into the bag, and replaced it with Arquelle’s egg. The new egg was a little smaller, its ornamentation plainer, but the cradle had obviously been designed to accommodate many varying sizes and styles, and the spring-loaded clasps fell back into place without complaint. Fixing the pipes into position was more nerve-racking, if only because there could be no error. But the egg’s eyelike iris mechanisms were similar enough not to cause difficulties, and when Lune reopened the shutters, the outer and then the inner, there were no catastrophes. The argosy powered on. Her work was nearly done.

She opened the door, exited the power room, and used Arquelle’s charm to secure the place as she had left it. Then she made her way back through the iron guts of the argosy, avoiding attention, and once more using the charm to open doors that would not willingly submit. She wondered how long she had, before the new egg gave up the last of its fire and the furnaces began to cool. How long again, before anyone would think to check on the power room, and how long still before the crime would be linked to Lune?

She was nearly there. The deck plates under feet whistled with the passage of night air. Ahead was a twist in the corridor, and then the last door, the one that led to the belly hold, and to freedom.

And to Charleroi Soutine, who now stood before her in the doorway. Lune’s instructor was as surprised as she herself but Lune was quicker. She brought the pistol up, two-handed, and unwavering. She saw Soutine swallow.

“Lune?’ His voice was uncertain.

“I don’t want to shoot you,” Lune said.

“Lune, what are you doing?”

“I saw her,” Lune said. She found that her voice was urgent, wanting to convince. Soutine had always been kind to her, of all Bezile’s young men. “Last night, on the way back from the Cathedral. They took me to see her. She speaks of sacrifice and duty, but I saw her in a winter garden, among a thousand flowers. The power it must have cost . . .”

She did not expect him to believe her, but she saw his glance waver and fall and then she realised that he already knew. He muttered something.

“Soutine?”

“I—she asked me to do something, there in that garden. A guest, someone on the city council whom she wanted to impress. She said—but I couldn’t. And then she made me.”

Lune thought of Bezile’s white form, the glitter in her tigress eyes; of squandering resources. Including, it seemed, human ones. She lowered the pistol. “Soutine. It doesn’t have to be like this. It could be different.”

She had no proof, but with rising hope, she saw that she did not need it. He wanted to believe. He nodded, once.

“Go. I have not seen you.”

And, choosing to trust, she did.

Lune knelt by the floor hatch and pulled on the lever. The hatch was stiff. She tugged harder, and the hatch moved a little in its runners, exposing a rectangle of open air. The night’s cold touched her face, howling between the gap. It was wide enough to push a hand through, but certainly too narrow for escape. She risked two hands on the lever and tried again, grunting with the effort. The hatch budged again, doubling the gap, but then jammed resolutely. She couldn’t move it any wider, no matter how hard she tried. It felt as if there was metal wedged in the runner, not just grease and muck.

Paris slid under her. Tenements and houses, roofs and towers, cupolas and garrets, the moonlight glittering back from pale skate-scratched alleys and streets. She made out one or two dashing figures, but there were few people abroad at this hour. The cobalt flicker of an Aftman patrol, epaulettes lit as they went about their nocturnal business. No other fliers or argosies below her.

The gap still wasn’t wide enough. It wasn’t even close. She knew what she was capable of squeezing through, and that narrow aperture wasn’t it.

Curse Arquelle, and his plans. Curse his certainty that there was a means for Lune to escape.

But the Red Empress could fit, even if she couldn’t.

She thought about it for a few moments, hoping that there would be a catch, something she’d missed. Lune had already risked much to get this far, but always on the understanding that there was a way out. She’d hardly been enthusiastic about the idea of leaping from the argosy, even with Arquelle’s suspensor belt to convey her safely to ground. But she would much sooner have done that than face Madame Bezile when the theft came to light. As it surely would, once the egg died and the engines faltered.

There was another possibility, wasn’t there? She still had the charm, and no reason to assume that it wouldn’t let her back into the power room. She had swapped the eggs once; she could swap them a second time. Put things back the way they were; return the Red Empress to her golden throne. Get back on with her miserable life, and let Captain Pallas make other arrangements. There was hazard in returning to the power room, but she would gladly take that risk rather than submit to Madame Bezile’s inevitable wrath.

But she had said she would do this thing. And besides, there was that memory of Bezile, among the flowers . . .

Lune unbuckled the suspensor belt and removed it from her waist. Remembering how Arquelle had adjusted the load-dial, she turned it to its minimum setting and pressed the activator. The belt emitted a rising whine and tried to lift itself from her grasp, but she was stronger. Feeling as if she was wrestling a snake, she stuffed the still humming belt into the bag that already held the stolen egg. She added the charm and the discharge pistol.

Lune tightened the drawstring and hefted the rattling bag above the deck plates. She let go, and watched it settle to the floor as if lowered by an invisible thread.

That would suffice, she judged.

Lune took the bag and pushed it through the gap in the floor. The wind chilled her wrist. Dropped from this height, the bag could end up almost anywhere. That was Arquelle’s problem, though.

Not hers. Not now.

Lune made to stand. She had no plan in mind, beyond going about her business as if nothing had happened. Perhaps, if she was extraordinarily lucky, the argosy would make landfall before evidence of her crime came to light. She dared not put much hope in that, though. And even then, where would she go?

There was a sound behind her. Lune turned to face the opening door, almost relieved that she was going to be spared the need to pretend that all was well. Soutine and Derain were there, filling the doorway, faces thrown into diabolic relief by the lantern Soutine held aloft. “Step away from the hatch, Lune,” Derain instructed.

She paused before answering. “Nothing’s wrong. What do you want with me?”

“You don’t have any business down here. Even if you did, you’d need to explain why that hatch is open.”

“It was like that when I got here.”

Derain’s smile was a quick twitch of his mouth. “We saw that the hatch had been opened from the bridge. There’s a circuit. If you knew about electricity, you’d understand what I’m talking about.” He nodded at Soutine. “Close it. And bring her to Madame Bezile. I’m going to check on the power room.”

She tried to read Soutine, tried to tell if he’d gone against his promise, or had been powerless to act in any other way once her escape attempt had come to light.

She couldn’t decide.

By the time she was brought into Madame Bezile’s presence on the argosy’s bridge the evidence of Lune’s crime was supremely obvious. The egg had died, robbing the furnace of life. A reserve egg had been installed, but the fire was feeble and with its engines reduced to idle, the argosy could do little but hover, barely able to counter the prevailing winds. Derain had already conveyed the dead egg to his mistress, verifying—though this was obvious enough from its appearance—that it was not the one they had set out with.

“It was nearly inert,” he told her, while Lune looked on. “Just enough power in it to feed the furnaces for a few minutes.”

“You’ve searched thoroughly?” Madame Bezile turned the dead egg over and over in her hands, staring at it with a peculiar and lingering revulsion, as if it was some kind of large dry turd.

“There’s no sign of the Red Empress?”

“If she’s hidden it, then she knows the argosy better than any of us. I think there’s a more straightforward explanation. We found her by that open hatch. She could have dropped the egg easily enough.” Derain nodded at Lune as if she was a piece of meat. He had strapped her into one of the bridge’s skeletal metal chairs while her fate was decided.

“A spectacularly pointless gesture, wouldn’t you say? Not to mention risking half of Paris, if the egg had broken.” Madame Bezile held the dead egg before her. “Here. Take this useless thing and destroy it.”

Soutine took the egg, but with as much wariness as if there had still been energy inside it. Lune understood. It was very hard to accept that the egg had given up all its blinding fire.

“Someone must have helped her get into the power room,” Derain mused. “If they went to that much trouble, then presumably they already had a plan for getting the Red Empress out safely.” He hesitated. “There are any number of individuals who covet eggs that badly, but very few with the wherewithal to steal one from under our noses.”

“Pallas had the means,” Madame Bezile said slowly. “And we know how badly he likes his eggs.”

“Do you think he got to the girl?”

“Someone obviously did. She hasn’t the wit to have put this together on her own.” Having relieved herself of the egg, Madame Bezile had moved to stand at one of the large, down-facing windows, her hands clasped behind her back. “Pallas is no fool,” she said in a low murmur. “If she dropped the Empress, then he had a means of recovering it.”

“The hatch wouldn’t open all the way,” Derain pointed out. “Perhaps she was meant to go with the egg.”

“And survive that drop?”

“There are ways and means. We’ve searched her, and there’s nothing on her but the clothes she’s wearing. But we don’t know what she might have brought aboard.”

“How long has it been now?”

“An hour since we found her. We can maintain this altitude for a few more hours, but we won’t last the night. Our reserves were for emergencies only; they don’t have enough fire to enable sustained flight.”

“Never mind the eggs. I want to know what Pallas is up to. An hour’s a long time. If he was fast, he could have had my egg for nearly all that time. What do you suppose he’s going to do with it?”

“Nothing is a distinct possibility,” Derain said. “Merely owning the Red Empress may be sufficient for him.”

“That’s not how Pallas works. Other than its value as a commodity, the only useful thing about the Red Empress is the fire it contains.”

“If the egg is on the ground, and he turns that fire on us . . .” Derain did not need to complete his sentence.

Madame Bezile dismissed his point with a curt shake of her head. “No; it won’t be that simple. Pallas already had access to discharge weapons, and he was never so gauche as to use them against me directly. Whatever he means to do with the Empress, it won’t be that.”

“Are you sure?” Lune asked from her chair.

Madame Bezile’s attention snapped onto her. “What?”

An egg’s fire was lancing from a garret, scribing a line through the air, reaching across the rooftops and to the city’s white-hemmed margins. Though the line of fire seemed to Lune to be as bright as the Sun, it offered no illumination to the streets below.

“That,” Lune said.

Madame Bezile’s fingers dug into her forearm like talons. Lune yelped as she was dragged to the argosy’s window, brought to her knees with her face mashed against the glass.

“Did you imagine that you were cleverer than me?” Madame Bezile said, her breath warm against Lune’s ear. “Even for a moment? Did you imagine that you might go so far as to triumph?” She let out an appalled little laugh. “If it’s any consolation, you were not the first to cross me. I doubt that you’ll be the last. This pitiful little world may be running low on resources, but there never seems to be any shortfall of fools. My only regret is that I thought slightly better of you, at least for a while.”

It was hard for Lune to speak, with her mouth squashed against glass. “You’ve lost the egg.”

“Your point being?”

“If I’ve failed, then so have you.”

The line of fire was turning, sweeping across different quarters of the city.

“If that egg was the last in the world, do you think I’d have entrusted you with its recovery? There are more out there, Lune, and still more in my possession. Its loss is disappointing, and it will complicate my short-term plans. But in the longer term, it merely delays the inevitable. That’s not to say that it doesn’t pain me to see it squandered in such a fashion.”

“Rather than squandered keeping you warm, while the rest of us freeze?”

That earned Lune a smack against the glass. Something crunched in her nose, and she felt a sudden gush of warm wet fluid spill into her mouth. “I’m sorry,” Madame Bezile said, with unctuous insincerity. “I didn’t mean to get your blood on my window. Here, mop yourself up.” She was pushing a handkerchief in Lune’s face.

Despite herself, Lune took it. It was very fine, with the slippery, eel-like nap of an old-fashioned textile.

“You’ve still failed.”

“I don’t think so.”

Lune pressed the handkerchief to staunch the blood. “You wanted me to see this, but it’s you who needs to understand. I knew that Pallas wasn’t going to waste that egg.”

“Then you appear to be labouring under a misapprehension, child.”

“I’m not,” Lune said. “Watch, if you doubt me.”

At last the egg’s fire had found its target. From the garret where the egg had been opened, to the distant cupola far across the Seine, must have been thirty minute’s hard skating, three or four city quarters at least. Now that the alignment was made, though, the beam appeared to lock into position, as if its path through the air had always been ordained.

“Nothing is happening . . .” Madame Bezile started to say.

Lune cut her off. “I said watch.”

Two lines of fire emerged from the distant cupola in opposing directions. They searched the night and then found their own individual targets: two more buildings, higher than most, in what Lune judged to be the second and ninth quarters. From these buildings emerged two more pairs of sun-bright lines, redirected back across the city. These in turn found their marks and created still more beams. The process continued, the lines of fire now multiplying too rapidly to track. It was as if a spider had begun to weave a fiery web across the city, a web that was at first simple and then increasingly demented and complex.

“What,” Madame Bezile uttered. It was a command, not a question.

Lune answered in the sure and certain knowledge that nothing she now said or did could endanger Captain Pallas’s work.

“The fire’s too bright for anyone to look into. Those who have done it, most of them ended up mad.”

“And blind,” Madame Bezile said.

“The blindness wouldn’t matter, if they could end up not going mad at the same time.”

Madame Bezile gestured with an unsteady hand at the fire-webbed city. “And this? What does this have to do with it?”

“Mirrors,” Lune said carefully. “Mirrors and glass. Captain Pallas made them, so that the egg’s fire could be split up, redirected, shone into more than one mind at a time.” She swallowed. “With each doubling, the fire’s intensity is lessened. It’s still bright enough to blind, but there’s much less chance of madness.”

“They?”

“The people at the ends of those beams. Acolytes of the captain. Volunteers, who’ve agreed to open their eyes to the egg’s fire.”

There was scorn in her voice now. “So that the fire can burn out their minds?”

“Captain Pallas says they won’t go mad—most of them, anyway. There’s still a risk.”

Madame Bezile seized Lune’s hair. “Speak sense to me, girl. If they don’t go mad, what happens?”

“The eggs are alive. The fire in the egg isn’t . . .” Lune trailed off, smiling at her own inarticulacy. “It’s not really fire. It’s the living essence of something much older than us. When the eggs are opened, the fire leaks. The beings inside the eggs perish. After billions of years, they just fade out and die.” She paused. “But there’s another way. If the fire’s shone into another mind, a human mind, then not everything is lost. Some of the wisdom of the eggs . . . the wisdom of the beings trapped inside . . . it crosses over.”

“Captain Pallas put this nonsense in your head?”

“The fire touched him, a long time ago. He survived, obviously. The egg blinded him, and left him . . . changed. Some would say mad, I suppose. But not so mad that he couldn’t make this happen.”

“The fire’s fading,” Madame Bezile said, relinquishing her hold on Lune’s hair. “Look, you can see it dying away. The egg’s spent its power. Wasted on glass and mirrors, when it could have done some good for us all.”

“You’re wrong.” Lune dared to pull away, dropping the blood-soiled handkerchief from her face. “The fire touched the acolytes. It’s done what Captain Pallas wanted it to do.”

The fire-web was indeed guttering out, line by line, but for a moment the memory of it was seared into Lune’s vision like a brand. Then it was just the rooftops and the icebound streets and cold dark ribbon of the Seine, and it was as if the egg had never been opened.

“How many?”

“Twenty,” Lune said firmly. “Twenty people with the same will and determination as Captain Pallas. Twenty people who understand that the world doesn’t have to be like this. That it doesn’t have to end in ice and darkness.”

“Fools.”

“Perhaps. But you feared Captain Pallas, and there was just one of him. Now there are twenty more.”

“Assuming none of them went mad.”

“That’s true. You’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you?”

After a moment Madame Bezile said: “When you helped them steal that egg from me, you must have known there’d be consequences. Or were you so stupid as to imagine otherwise?”

“No,” Lune said. “I knew what I was doing. I knew what you were, and I knew what you were capable of.”

Madame Bezile nodded gravely. “Then what’s about to happen won’t come as any great surprise. That’s good. This late in the game, I’d hate for there to be any misunderstanding between us.”

“I’m sure there won’t be,” Lune answered

With genuine regret she said: “I gave you everything. I took you as a child, took you from the piss-stinking sewer of your life, made you something. I had hopes for you, Lune. You were quick and clever and you showed uncommon courage. I dared to think that one day you might inherit my mantle. I see now that my investment was wasted. A foolish whimsy, nothing more. You’re no better than the rest.”

The floor lurched. “We’re losing control,” Derain said urgently. “We should attempt landfall now, or abandon the argosy.”

“Let it crash,” Bezile said, as if the flying machine was of no more consequence than the soiled handkerchief. “I’ll find another one, as I did before. Tell the crew they may leave, and ready my own parachute. I’ll be at the door in a few moments.” When she had finished speaking, she reached into a secret pocket and withdrew a tiny gem-encrusted discharge pistol. For a second or two she marvelled at it, as if it had been years since she last set eyes on the dainty little weapon.

Then she flicked an arming stud, and caused lights to glimmer along the involute barrel.

Lune backed away.

“It’ll be quick,” Bezile said. “I said you were my favorite, and I meant it. Only the best for my good Lune. But I can’t let this treachery go unrewarded.”

She aimed the vile thing at Lune’s face.

“It’s over,” Lune said. “Don’t you realise? It’s over.”

“Yes, it is.”

But it was Soutine who had spoken, not Bezile. And in his hand was another discharge pistol, the one he had sometimes let her handle, against the day when she might be allowed to carry one herself.

Now he pointed it at his mistress, his hand trembling, but not so badly that the shot wouldn’t be fatal, were he to squeeze the trigger. “You were right, Lune,” he said softly. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

“Charleroi,” Bezile said, astonished. “I thought better of you.”

“Go to the parachutes,” he told Lune. “There’ll still be one left for you.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll be there shortly.”

She did as she was told, as she had always done, whether it was Madame Bezile or Arquelle or Captain Pallas. When she reached the parachutes, three parachutes remained on the rack. She took one of the black, pillow-sized packages in her hands, bewildered by its dangling straps and obscure fastenings. She had never been shown how to use the parachutes. Why would she? No one had seriously expected the argosy to come to grief, and if it did, she had never imagined that she would be among the last to leave.

The floor lurched sickeningly. The exit door was wide open. No problem stepping through that, except now she didn’t have the suspensor belt. Another lurch, as the argosy lost still more power, and she had to grab a handhold to stop herself sliding along the deck plates, to the door’s hungry night-black aperture.

Even if she succeeded in wearing the parachute, she had no idea how to use it, how to control her descent, how to select a landing spot, in the confusion of streets and buildings below. But she thought even less of her chances of surviving the argosy’s fall, when at last it succumbed to gravity.

“Slip your arm through that hoop. Yes. Now the other one.”

It was Soutine, still holding the discharge pistol, steadying himself against a bolted wall strut. “Now the belt. Tight as you can. That’s good.”

“I don’t know how to work it.”

“The ripcord is that yellow tag. Pull it when you’re clear of the argosy’s engines, and not a moment sooner. That’s blackflame silk, and it won’t rip, but it still won’t thank you for being tangled in the propellers.”

“Where will I land?”

“With the wind as it is, you’ve a good chance of hitting Bestiary Park. But only if you go now.”

She hesitated. “Shouldn’t you be wearing yours?”

“I’m not going, Lune.’ His hand tightened on the pistol. “I’m afraid there’s still work to be done here.”

“Leave her. She doesn’t need you. She’s . . .”

“Nothing. I know. And I should follow you. But what you said, about things not having to be this way? You were right. It is over, for her. But not just Bezile.” As the floor tilted again he redoubled his grip. “I saw what happened down there, Lune. It was beautiful fire. Whatever happens after tonight, whether or not your Captain Pallas was mad or sane, it won’t be the same Paris, or even the same Free France. Because there’s an idea loose in the world that wasn’t there yesterday, and that changes everything. An idea that maybe it’s better to be wise than warm.” He jogged the pistol at her, not with the threat of violence, but urging her to go. “She made me what I am, Lune. I knew what she was long before you ever found out, but I didn’t have the strength to turn against her. And if I couldn’t make that change then, I can’t make this one. I don’t belong in the future you’ve just made happen. But you do. Now jump.”

“Soutine . . .”

This time, for an instant, she thought he might well fire the discharge pistol.

So she jumped. Through the door, into the cold-clawed wind, into the air above Paris, her Paris, her city.

© 2010 by Liz Williams & Alastair Reynolds.

Originally published in the OdysseyCon Souvenir Book.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Liz Williams is the author of the Detective-Inspector Chen series, which includes Snake Agent, The Demon and the City, Precious Dragon, and The Shadow Pavilion. She is also the author of the novels The Ghost Sister, Empire of Bones, Banner of Souls, Darkland, Bloodmind, The Poison Master, Nine Layers of Sky, and others. She has also written numerous short stories, which have appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, and Realms of Fantasy and have been collected in The Banquet of the Lords of Night and Other Stories. Her work has been a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and has also been nominated for the British Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Forthcoming are two new novels: Morningstar and Worldsoul.

Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry in 1966. He spent his early years in Cornwall, then returned to Wales for his primary and secondary school education. He completed a degree in astronomy at Newcastle, then a PhD in the same subject at St Andrews in Scotland. He left the UK in 1991 and spent the next sixteen years working in the Netherlands, mostly for the European Space Agency, although he also did a stint as a postdoctoral worker in Utrecht. He had been writing and selling science fiction since 1989, and published his first novel, Revelation Space, in 2000. He has recently completed his tenth novel and has continued to publish short fiction. His novel Chasm City won the British Science Fiction Award, and he has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke award three times. In 2004 he left scientific research to write full time. He married in 2005 and returned to Wales in 2008, where he lives in Rhondda Cynon Taff.

vN
Madeline Ashby

(An excerpt of the novel to be published by Angry Robot Books, July 2012.)

Chapter 1

The Ugly Parts

Amy woke on the floor of a cage that hummed. She tried moving her legs and kicked the fencing nearest her feet, igniting a spark that jolted up from her toes to her teeth and left her so rigid even her eyes couldn’t move. She hated being more conductive than organic people.

“Careful,” someone said from outside the cage. “It’s rigged.”

The man wore a blue uniform and held a scroll-style reader between the thumb and first finger of each hand. Its anonymous blue glow made his expression hard to read. He looked organic; she could see his pores and the patchiness of his hair. Other clades had advanced plugins for differentiating humans. They used thermoptics or gait recognition or pheromone detection. Amy just looked for the ugly parts.

“Where am I?”

He didn’t even bother putting down the scroll. “You’re being detained.”

Amy tried moving again. She had to do so carefully; her limbs were grown-up limbs now, and they were much longer and clumsier than the ones she remembered. Finally she sat with her knees to her chest and looked around. She sat in a kennel like at an animal shelter, a rectangle of white linoleum bordered by black chain-link. Across the room was another set of kennels stacked two rows high. In the centre aisle sat an empty cage, shaped more like a cube. Its floor was black.

In games, Amy had escaped far more challenging environments than this. In fact, she could have easily designed a more intimidating space, given the time and the tools. She checked for laser turrets or acid sprinklers, but found none. Maybe the whole room had a mutable magnetic field. It would certainly explain how they’d kept her asleep, and why they bothered with an organic guard. Without a helmet, he’d be vulnerable to the field and start seeing things. Did that mean the field generator was being reset? Were there other vulnerabilities in the system?

She decided to take stock of other resources. She wore a bright green jumpsuit. It didn’t seem particularly sturdy, much less fire- or acid-proof. Far at the end of the kennels was another person in the same jumpsuit. She couldn’t tell if it was a boy or girl just by looking, but it had a very big shape over which the fabric stretched tightly. It wasn’t moving.

“Where are my parents?” She tried to think of something more intelligent to say. “They should be here. I’m a minor.”

This time the scroll did fall, and a hand strayed toward his taser. The guard’s eyes had the dead, blank look of someone watching late-night shows. “I don’t know how it is in Oakland, but where I come from, minors know how to behave themselves.”

Amy had nothing to say to that. She looked at her new prison slippers. She had never thought of her mother’s feet as big, but now that she was wearing them, Amy wondered how her mom got around without tripping. How had she never noticed details like this before? Where was her mother now? Was she still repairing the damage to her body?

“May I please call my parents? I think I get a phone call. People who get arrested get a phone call, right?”

Now the guard stood. He lumbered over to the kennel and leaned close without really touching it. This close his humanity was more obvious: burst capillaries in his nose, silver hairs sprouting from a mole below his left ear, sweat stains blackening the blue of his shirt. “I think you’re failing to grasp the enormity of the shit you’re in. Now if you know what’s good for you, you’ll sit tight and wait. It won’t be long, now.”

“It won’t be long until what?” Amy asked.

He straightened up and pulled his shirt down where it had bunched up over his curling waistband. He wore a yellow gold wedding ring. The skin around it was puffy and red. He must have started wearing it years ago, when his fingers were slimmer.

“You didn’t have to tell me about being young,” he said. “It’s already on your record.”

“So you know I just graduated kindergarten?”

He nodded slowly. “Yup. So I figure maybe you don’t know that all you vN were designed by a bunch of Bible-thumpers.”

Amy shook her head. “I know. They wanted us for after the Second Coming, or something. To take care of everybody God didn’t like.”

“That’s right. That’s why you’ve got all the right holes and such. So people can indulge themselves without sin.”

Amy’s attention scattered over several simulated outcomes to this conversation. It cohered on the one in which he opened the cage to touch her, and she wove around him and got away, somehow.

As though he had run the same simulations in his own mind, the guard shook his head. He held up one hand. “Don’t worry, kiddo. I’m a grown man; I don’t play with dolls.” He leaned down a little. “What I’m saying is, I don’t know if they left behind some piety programming or what, but if they did you had better make peace with your god.”

Amy’s body remained very still, but her mind raced. They were going to kill her. She didn’t know why. She had been trying to help. Her granny had been hurting people and Amy had stopped it. Maybe that was the problem—maybe her granny belonged to somebody important, and Amy had eaten her. That wasn’t her fault, either: she’d only meant to bite her, but Amy’s diet left her so hungry all the time. When her jaws opened all the digestive fluid came up, a whole lifetime’s worth, hot and bitter as angry tears. It ate the flesh off her granny’s bones. By then, Amy couldn’t stop. The smoke was too sweet. The bone dust was too crunchy. And the sensation of being full, really full, of her processes finally having enough energy to clock at full speed, was spectacular. Being hungry meant being slow. It meant being stupid. It felt like watching each packet of information fly across her consciousness on the wings of a carrier pigeon. But her granny tasted like Moore’s Law made flesh.

“I didn’t know it was so bad,” Amy said. “I really didn’t. I swear. I just couldn’t stop myself.”

“I know,” the guard said. “I used to work corrections before I got this job, and that’s what kids in your situation always say, organic or synthetic.”

Amy hugged her knees. She supposed organic kids wanted to curl up in a little ball in this situation, too. “There won’t be a trial, or anything?”

“Of a kind. Tests, probably. Lots of tests.”

“Tests?” That was something. She had to be alive, if there were going to be tests. “I get to live?”

He looked her up and down. “Part of you does, I guess.”

Amy pinched the skin of her arms. If you couldn’t brag in the brig, where could you? “I’ve got fractal design memory in here. Even if I’m cut up, my body remembers how to repair itself perfectly. I’ll come back in one piece, no matter what.”

“Oh, believe me, dollface, I know. I’ve seen it happen. You put some vN shrapnel in the right culture, and it grows right back. Like cancer.” He snorted. “But whether what grows back is actually you? With all the memories, and all the adaptations? That’s like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.”

Amy imagined her skin sliced thin as ham, suspended in the shadowy clouds of vN growth medium. Maybe she wouldn’t even miss her mom and dad. Never once seeing their faces or hearing their voices or feeling their arms around her would probably hurt a lot less, if she were smashed into a million pieces.

Red lights washed the kennels in a sudden cough syrup haze. “Shit,” the guard said. He thumbed off his scroll, rolled it shut, and stuffed it in one shirt pocket. Then he pressed open a panel over his shoulder and retrieved a shotgun. Frowning, he snapped it open and sniffed the rounds. Apparently pleased, he marched down to the kennel holding the other person.

“This your doing?” he asked. “Your boys know where you are?”

“ . . . chingada, cabrón.”

“Yeah, same to you, pal. I know exactly what they’re doing with you, later. They’re gonna smoke your ass.” He stared up at the ceiling. “Serial—”

Behind him, another door slammed open, knocking him forward. He stumbled, and the gun clattered to the floor. An alarm filled Amy’s ears. She covered them. Now she watched three women walk in through the door. One aimed a can of spray paint at the guard; she misted him with it and he began to collapse. The woman caught him, and laid him down tenderly, arranging his limbs as though for sleep. It must have been some kind of drug in that can; Amy heard no screams and saw no blood. What she did see frightened her more.

Granny. Three of them.

Now Amy did skitter backward in her little kennel. She watched the three women walk forward, single file. They each wore her mother’s face, but every other detail shouted Wrong! in Amy’s head: the tightness in their shoulders, the alertness of their gaze, their mismatched clothes and the hungry way they looked at her. Up close, she saw the plastic embedded in their flesh. It poked up at odd points, black and pink and green just visible at the thinnest stretches of their skin. They peeled her door away; sparks hissed harmlessly off their thick gloves.

“You’re coming with us,” one said.

Amy whimpered. There was no way she could escape from all three of them. They were here to punish her. They had to be. She had eaten their mother. “Go away!”

One of them moved forward. “You have something we need.”

“Leave me alone!” Amy pressed herself up against the wall. Her fingers, for some reason, were still in her ears. She was crying. They were staring. “I’m sorry, OK? I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to. Just please let me go home. Please, I just want to go home.”

One smiled faintly. “You are home.” And she reached out—

—and then her hand vanished, gone in a hot puff of wind that smelled vaguely of bile. For a moment, the other von Neumann woman watched her flailing stump of a wrist. Then the wrist disappeared, blazing away into blackly glittering nothingness that smoked from her disintegrating arm. She didn’t scream. She didn’t howl with pain or fear as a human would have done—she just watched as a large figure in a green jumpsuit loped down the hall carrying the guard’s shotgun.

“I think you know what this is!”

Amy’s fellow prisoner primed the shotgun again. He was hugely fat, and wore badly scorched prison slippers on his hands. Amy smelled burning cloth. The other vN women backed away, abandoning their sister, who cradled her disintegrating arm close to her chest. Now he stood at the ruined door to Amy’s cage. He said, “There are three more puke rounds in here. The peroxidase in just one can eat carbon tubes faster than your repair mods can handle it. You’re gonna die.”

He pointed the weapon straight at Amy’s head. “And now you’re gonna let me leave.”

Amy tried moving, but he was bigger and faster and he grabbed her arm and wrenched her upward. He pressed the gun into her back and nudged her forward. “Move.”

Fight back, a voice inside said to Amy. You can take him.

But then the gun was prodding her again, and she stepped forward. The sisters followed her with their eyes. She kept walking. At the end of the hall stood a set of doors secured by a single steel bar.

“Open it,” her fellow prisoner said.

Amy’s fingers fumbled on the lock. Grimacing, she forced the bar up and over. It squealed a little as it slid down. She pushed open the doors—

—and almost fell into oncoming traffic. Her arms windmilled for a minute before a hand bunched up in her jumpsuit and yanked her back. Columns of headlights had gathered just a foot below them. Drivers honked and gestured at dashboard comms. Far away, she saw the blink and spin of police cars. The kennel room wasn’t a room at all: it was a vehicle.

“Hey, a mobile prison,” said her new captor. “The chimps are getting creative.” Then he pushed her.

Amy landed on her knees—atop a car. She winced and tried to apologize to the woman shouting in the driver’s seat. Beside her, the other prisoner jumped down and grabbed her arm. He pulled her off the car and along the highway, out of the red glare of the mobile prison and into the rows of increasingly noisy cars. Amy looked back. The sisters stood high above in the mobile prison, watching. They could still help you, a voice inside said. Do you want to be a hostage?

“Out,” said her kidnapper. He was tapping on the driver’s side window of an old and dented blue sedan with the business end of the gun. The teenaged boy inside yelled something, and Amy’s captor flipped the gun around and busted the window with it. “Out,” he repeated. “Please.”

The boy scrambled out of the car on the other side. He held his hands up. “You can take whatever you want,” he said. “I mean, seriously, just take it, just let me go—”

“Start running,” Amy’s kidnapper said. The boy ran.

Her kidnapper reached inside the door via the broken window, and opened it. He pushed her inside. She crawled over to the passenger side and squeezed back against the seat as her hostage-taker reached across her and pulled the door shut. It slammed and she flinched. He gave her an odd look before shutting his own door and edging the car past the prison and into the flow of traffic. He could barely fit his bulk inside the driver’s seat. He didn’t bother with a seat belt.

“You see that?” he asked, pointing at the mobile prison as it blurred past. Outside, it looked like an ordinary eighteen-wheeler with the words ISAAC’S ELECTRONICS inscribed across its panels. “That’s somebody’s idea of a joke. It’s fucking sick.”

Amy said nothing. The gun sat between them. She wondered if she could grab it and use it. But where would she go? They were screeching through traffic. She couldn’t drive. At least, not in real life.

“You could thank me, you know.” He began ripping out peripherals and throwing them out the window.

“For taking me hostage?”

“For saving your ass!” He tossed a fistful of wires onto someone else’s windshield. “You didn’t want to go with them, did you?”

Amy blinked. She hadn’t quite thought of it that way. “Well, no . . .”

“Who were they, anyway?”

Amy hugged her knees. “My aunts, I guess,” she said. How much had he heard back there? “I, um . . . I sort of killed my grandmother.” He said nothing, but she sensed the suspicion anyway. “She and my mom were having a fight, and I got in the middle, and—”

“Whatever. Family drama. Got it.”

Amy’s kidnapper had sort of a doughy face, olive-skinned and fringed with huge black curls on top and a scrubby beard across the non-existent jaw. He had very nice eyelashes, though, long and perfectly curled like in a commercial. He seemed to notice her staring, because he turned to her suddenly and said: “I’m Javier.”

“I’m Amy. Amy Frances P—” She paused. Maybe giving out her name wasn’t such a good idea. “Amy Frances.”

“Was that your first time in jail, Amy Frances?”

“Uh huh.”

He sped up. “Lucky you.”

Amy watched the highway scrolling by. It looked like an old cartoon where the backgrounds were the same and just recycled on a loop: strip malls, streetlights, abandoned car dealerships full of desperate signs and black windows. The same everywhere, over and over, not like the unique shops her mother frequented—full of handmade things and loud music that Amy couldn’t understand, but still danced to while waiting outside the fitting rooms. Even the trees were different: thin and bristly and spiky-looking, not like the broad, shady ones planted in sidewalks. She was very, very far from home. And she had no idea where they were headed.

“Are you hungry?”

Amy turned to Javier. “Not really.” Your granny did make a pretty big meal, after all. “But thank you for asking.”

“Seriously? I’m starving. Jail-breaking is hungry work.”

“Do you do a lot of jail-breaking?”

“Define ‘a lot’.”

For some reason, Amy had assumed that this kind of bragging was confined to organics, and ended with boyhood. Men of this size, be they flesh or mech, weren’t supposed to get dimples in their faces while hinting at their exploits. Then again, she hadn’t met that many vN models. Maybe Javier’s had add-ons for charm.

“I’m not used to eating very much.”

Javier peered at her from the corner of his eye. “You’re a dieter, huh?”

“I was. But a little while ago, I . . .”

“Fell off the wagon?”

She tucked her hands under her legs. “Something like that.”

“Sweet.” Javier licked his lips. He turned off into a tiny little strip mall full of For Lease signs. “Then I guess it’s time to go shopping.”

“What?”

He parked in front of a thrift store. LEAVE DONATIONS HERE read a sign in one wall-sized window. A giant arrow pointed downward at bulging black garbage sacks. Javier jumped out of the car and hurried over to one. He started ripping it open. He looked over his shoulder. “What’s your shoe size?”

Amy looked at her new, grown-up feet. “I . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Well, come on and find out!” He threw a pair of pink flip-flop sandals at the car.

Slowly, Amy left the car. She scoped the parking lot. Arc lights cast a dull orange glow over the whole place. Earthquakes had left dark lightning patterns in the concrete façade of each dead shop. Black mould grew there, now. She heard wind in the pines. It was the loneliest place she’d ever been.

“Isn’t this stealing?” Amy asked.

Javier was wriggling into a giant black T-shirt, faded grey now, with a picture of an old video game controller on it. BLOW ME, it read in peeling white letters. “No way,” he said. “People donated this stuff already, right? They don’t care.”

Reluctantly, Amy started picking through the garbage bag. After a few tries, she found a Sesame Street T-shirt with the Count on it. The brand made her feel instantly at home, as though the little yellow and green street sign could act like a talisman and keep her safe with its promise of cheery songs and word games. “Found one,” she said, holding it up.

Javier’s brows lifted. “That’s a kid’s T-shirt.”

“So?”

“Gonna be tight, is all I’m saying.”

Amy looked down at herself. Maybe he was right. Still, it couldn’t hurt to try. “Um, where do I try it on?”

Javier gestured at the parking lot. He was already pulling at the legs of his jumpsuit. Amy quickly covered her eyes, reached blindly, and ran around the side of the building, trailing old clothes behind her. She pressed herself up against one shadowed wall, near a door marked LOADING. She threw on the clothes as quickly as possible. She’d found track pants, the shiny kind with all the buttons up each leg, and without underwear they felt a little weird. But there was no way she was digging through somebody else’s underwear and putting it on. None. Synthetic or not, some things were just disgusting.

Amy emerged from the shadows still wearing her prison slippers. They fit, and she had no desire to wear somebody else’s socks or shoes. Her new pants made a slippery sound as she walked. Javier had retrieved an enormous pair of shorts—she couldn’t tell if they were for swimming or just wearing—with a camouflage pattern and big pockets. She wondered suddenly if he did this a lot. He seemed used to it. He stared at her new clothes as he slipped on some old foam beach mocs.

“Uh, you might wanna roll those up.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your pants. Roll them up.”

Amy bent down. The ends were dragging, a little. She started folding.

“At the waist, I mean. Start rolling at the waist. So they don’t fall off.”

“Oh! OK.” Amy started rolling. It took a couple of folds, but the pants did fit better. Javier threw a nubby old grandpa sweater at her, too, saying something about it being cold outside, as he shuffled off toward another store. Amy followed, rolling up her new woolly sleeves. Javier crowed, and ran across the parking lot to the store on the opposite side—a used electronics shop. Amy jogged behind him. He ran around the side of the building and started rubbing his hands together at the sight of a row of three dumpsters.

“Awesome.” He tossed a chunk of asphalt at the nearest one. When it fell back to ground, he began opening its massive creaking lid.

“What are you doing?”

“Grocery shopping. Didn’t I say I was hungry?” Javier leapt in. A moment later, out flew a positively ancient keyboard that clattered to the concrete and promptly lost a few dirty keys. “Plastics! In the trash! It’s like they’re just throwing money away!”

Amy tiptoed to the side of the dumpster. She stood on her toes to peer inside. It seemed mostly empty, aside from a few stray accessories. Rationally, she knew that other vN, the unlucky ones out there on their own, had to eat garbage sometimes or sell it to buy food. They didn’t have to worry about diet plans like Rory’s pinging their kitchens every time they opened the cupboards, because they were just scraping to get by. She’d just never seen or met one of them, before. Not until her granny.

“You take the other one,” Javier said. “This one’s mine.”

Amy frowned. She hadn’t asked to share his loot, but she moved on to the next dumpster anyway. Slipping her fingers under the lid, she pushed it up until it rested against a wall, and tried hopping in as Javier had done. He evidently had a lot more experience, though, because he had made it look easy, and she ended up slinging one leg over before teetering on the dumpster’s lip and falling down inside. Like the other dumpster, this one was mostly empty aside from a few loose loops of frayed cable and discarded dongles, yellow and blocky like old organic teeth. She listened for rats, but doubted they would have much use for an electronics store dumpster; after all, there was nothing inside that they would want to eat.

Emptiness aside, Amy liked the dumpster just fine. It was surprisingly clean, and its faint rusty smell gave her only a little twinge of hunger. If she were still in a child-sized body, it would have made the perfect spot to play Scorched Earth. She had designed her own tanks in games, of course, and had bounced and careened over their perfectly rendered deserts blowing the middles out of everything from Nazis to djinns, but she had never really played that kind of game outside, with things she could actually touch. She wasn’t allowed to visit playgrounds during the day when human children might be there, so when her parents took her to the nearest place with swings and slides and cargo netting and a crow’s-nest, it was always after dark and the other kids were always gone. She would sit up there alone, or maybe next to her dad on the swings (her mom’s arms were so much stronger that she always pushed them both), but inevitably they left before too long.

If they’d had a backyard, maybe she could have played those games there. But they weren’t rich, so they didn’t have one, so she didn’t. She built her tanks and forts in-game instead, and her dollhouse’s walls and chimneys had gone gluey and flexible with having been recycled and reprinted so many times. She wondered about the dollhouse, now. The week before graduation, she’d programmed some new designs—based on having looked up the word “caliphate” a while back. Maybe the panels were still there waiting for her in their tray; pale and thin like the bone cups she had seen in a museum once. When she got home, she could put all the pieces together.

“What’s taking you so long?” Javier asked.

Amy looked up. Javier stood over the dumpster, clutching the old keyboard to his chest.

Amy looked around the dumpster. “This place would make a great fort.”

Javier frowned deeply. “Were you tased as an infant? Quit daydreaming and get out of there.” He moved on to the third dumpster. Amy heaved herself out of hers, and watched him cautiously put down his bounty before propping open the lid. Looking inside, he laughed and patted his belly. “We’re eating good tonight, that’s for sure,” he said, and jumped in.

The dumpster promptly closed around him. Amy watched the massive lid slam down on Javier’s head. Locks sprang up, threading through bails that pinned the whole structure together. She heard nothing. Maybe he was too muffled in there. She took a hesitant step forward to listen, and startled as a sudden thud sounded against the walls of the dumpster. “Hey! Get me out of here!”

Amy ran the rest of the way to the dumpster. She ran her fingers over the lock; it zapped her and she flew backward. She skidded roughly over the broken asphalt. Her teeth sang. Her limbs refused to move. This was twice in one night. Locked inside her own body, she worried about permanent memory damage. Javier continued banging inside his new cage. And now there was an alarm, and it was speaking in calm authoritative tones over funhouse music: “LIE DOWN ON THE GROUND AND PUT YOUR HANDS OVER YOUR HEAD. POLICE HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED. LIE DOWN—”

“Amy!”

She tried speaking. “I . . . I can’t . . .”

“AMY!”

She forced herself to stand. Her legs were slow. She stumbled. “I’m coming . . .”

“Get me out of here!” The dumpster shook with the force of his kicking and punching. She saw dents. “The whole lid’s electrified!” she heard him say, his voice muffled with garbage. “You gotta get me out from outside!”

“I . . .” She looked at her hands. “I’ll try. Wait right here.”

“Hurry!”

Amy staggered away from the dumpster. You could just leave him, you know, a voice inside said. He’s not your business. He kidnapped you at gunpoint. Amy shook her head heavily. It would be wrong to leave him, if only because she had said that she wouldn’t. She staggered forward toward the car, crossing the parking lot on traitorous feet. She opened the door with shaking hands. Thankfully, Javier had left the keys inside. Amy buckled herself in after two tries. She turned the ignition, and promptly rammed the sacks of old clothes. Wincing, she carefully switched to reverse, twisted in her seat to look behind her, and pulled away. Then she stopped with a jerk, and tried wrestling the car to her will. It was absurdly stubborn. She blinked and tried keeping her gaze straight. When it wandered, so did the car. It felt heavy and stupid under her guidance, like a clumsy prosthetic. Javier had set the seat way back, and she had no idea how to fix it. She had to keep stretching her legs just to brake in shaky fits and starts. She made a wide turn and put the dumpster in her sights.

“Hold on!” Crossing her fingers, Amy floored the gas and aimed straight for the dumpster. The impact threw her forward so hard her teeth clicked. A giant pillow exploded in her face, slapped there as though by an especially nasty girl at a sleepover. The alarm changed. She heard sirens, now. She wanted to sleep.

Someone wrenched the passenger side door open. The car sagged under sudden and massive weight. Javier. “Good thinking,” he said. “You shorted the system.”

“I crashed the car.”

“Yeah, well, get moving, unless you want to wind up back in jail.”

Amy looked up. She squinted out the shattered window. Police cars were filling the parking lot. “Oh, no . . .”

“Oh, yeah,” Javier said. “Floor it.” He held his stomach and grimaced. “I mean it. Move! Now!”

“Stop yelling at me!”

“Start driving!”

“Shut up!” Amy tried in vain to peek over the giant balloon in her face. “I can’t see!”

“Pull back and go right,” he said. “I’ll talk you through it.” He bent double in his seat.

“Are you OK? Did I crush you?”

“No. Just drive.” He hissed air through his teeth. “Aw, damn. Not good. Not good.”

“What’s not good?”

“Just drive!”

Amy jerked the car into reverse, promptly rear-ending a police car, then peeled off across the parking lot. “Where am I going?”

“You’re entering traff— You’re there.”

She heard horns.

“Keep going straight. Nudge yourself left.”

“Nudge myself?”

“I don’t know! Think left! Just do it!”

“I hate this. I hate cars. I don’t understand why people actually like this.”

“Those people drive a lot faster than you do.”

Amy’s foot fell. She leaned out the window. An oncoming car nearly took her head off, and she ducked back inside. The car filled with red and blue police lights; the sirens sounded much closer, now. “What do I do?”

Javier turned back to look at the police cars. “Uh . . . Go left.”

“There is no left! There are cars coming!”

“Puta madre,” Javier muttered, rolling his eyes and yanking the wheel from her grasp.

They roared across two lanes of traffic. The sound of Amy’s shrieks filled her ears. Other cars swerved to avoid them. Take your foot off the pedal, something inside reminded her, but it was too late—she felt the ground give way beneath the car, heard a groaning creak as the vehicle tipped forward, then over, and began to fall.

Trees rushed to catch them.

Amy tried her door. It was jammed; she had to slip outside her seatbelt (it took a lot of awkward bending) and slide over to the empty passenger side. In the dark, she could only feel around in the dirt. Javier must have crawled away. “Javier?”

Nothing. Just distant road noise, and the occasional hush of air through the pines. Then the single chirp of a stopped police car. Turning, Amy saw two white vehicles parked at the place where the car had ripped through the guardrail. She didn’t bother looking for humans; she scuttled away from the flickering rays of busted headlights and into the deeper darkness. She ran blindly. Rocks and raw roots tripped her twice, but she barely noticed. The important thing was to stay out of the light.

Her new long legs no longer seemed so awkward; they carried her a lot farther a lot faster than her old ones would have done. Ducking under a low-hanging bough, Amy paused to listen again—this time for machines. Right now, humans worried her less than other, lesser robots. It made sense that the officers parked on the embankment hadn’t come down to look for her; two baseline humans simply could not outrun a frightened vN. But a drone could survey the entire forest with a single glance, and a botfly could zip in and out of the trees to seek her out, and both of them could give the police the information they needed to surround her. She listened again. But she heard no high-pitched cicada whine . . . just the quiet hiss of muttered swear words.

“Javier?”

“Not so loud!” he said.

He had hidden himself behind a tree a few yards away. She saw his foot, now, the only thing wiggling in the shadows. Amy scrambled over, her limbs twice as clumsy now, and leaned against the tree.

“Are you OK?”

He shook his head. He doubled over. “No.” His lips pinched together and his eyes squeezed shut. “Jesus Christ, you’d think this’d get easier with time.”

“What’s wrong?”

Javier almost laughed. It came out high and a little desperate. “Where did you grow up, a fucking convent?” He slammed his head against the tree and trembled. The vibration came from inside him, like someone had twisted his tendons taut one at a time until they shivered and sang. Under his eyelids, his eyes darted back and forth. He smelled a little sweet; his systems had started burning energy at a furious pace.

“You’re scared,” Amy said.

“Gold star, querida, gold fucking star.”

“Hey, don’t snap at me just because you’re the one who’s frightened. Don’t you think it’s a bit late for that now, anyway?” Javier continued shivering. His hands came up to cover his face. He rocked back and forth against the tree. Amy swallowed, and tried to think of something nicer to say. “I mean, you’ve already done some pretty scary things today, and you didn’t seem frightened at all.”

Hesitantly, she reached over and tried to pat Javier’s hand. It burned hot to the touch, and shook under her fingers. He grabbed them and squeezed them; Amy squeaked and he let go, a little.

He spoke through gritted teeth: “This is different.”

Javier placed her hand over the warm skin of his enormous belly where his shirt had ridden up. Beneath it, something moved. Javier’s heels ground ruts in the dirt. He whimpered and kept her hand pinned to his body. “When you feel it start to rip,” he said, “you just keep it open, OK?”

Amy looked into his damp and grimacing face. “What?”

“Better this way. Didn’t want to do this in a cell.” Javier’s eyes opened. They seemed calmer now, focused. “It’s the stress. The shocks. He’s early.”

Beneath Amy’s fingers, something warm and wet oozed up from Javier’s navel. It glistened in the dark. She pulled his shirt up the rest of the way. A seam opened, bubbled, split across his skin. Javier curled his fingers under the tear and pulled the skin back slowly.

“You gotta help me,” he said. “Baby’s coming.”

[End Excerpt]

From the book vN by Madeline Ashby.

Copyright © 2012 by Madeline Ashby.

Reprinted by permission of Angry Robot Books. All rights reserved.

Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer, foresight consultant, anime fan, and immigrant living in Toronto. Her fiction has been published at Flurb, Escape Pod, Tesseracts, the Shine anthology, and elsewhere. She participated in the Border Town Design Studio, and has exhibited at the Detroit Design Festival. Her non-fiction has appeared at BoingBoing, io9.com, The Creators Project, and Tor.com. You can follow her on Twitter @MadelineAshby, or visit her website at http://madelineashby.com.

Spin the Sky
Katy Stauber

(An excerpt of the novel to be published by Night Shade Books, July 2012.)

Prologue: Tinker Ship Captain

Excerpt from Trevor Vaquero’s “Tales of my Father” Archive

I don’t remember my dad as anything more than a giant shadow with a rough beard, a ready smile, and a warm hug. He left before I turned two. My mom doesn’t like talking about him so I collect these stories, mostly recordings from travelers and war veterans. Everyone seems to have a story about my dad even if they never met him. They all have a theory about how he died and why he did what he did. This story I got from Nomie, the colony engineer for New Siberia, over a big plate of enchiladas when she came to visit my mom.

—Trevor Vaquero

So Captain turns to us and he says, “Do we die slow or just take a walk out the airlock? My money’s on the airlock.”

Seriously.

That’s what he says and he’s totally calm about it. He fixes us with that steely look and drinks his coffee. Because Captain is just that cool and that’s how life was on the tinker ships after the Spacer War, right?

In the history archives, they optimistically call them merchant ships and say we carried trade goods between the orbital colonies above Earth. But it’s a tiny bucket of bolts held together by duct tape and prayer, so everybody calls them tinker ships. We were a bit like Tinkers, sailing around swapping this and that for this and that, but really the name was a rip-off of Tinker Toys.

You know those old wooden toys? The ones that were so popular with kids growing up in orbital colonies? I guess because they were one of the few default toys, the ones all the manuvats had plans for.

This time I’m thinking about was almost two years after the Spacer War. Our ship was cobbled together from war wrecks and crewed mostly by soldiers too broke to go home. Most didn’t have homes to go to anymore.

Damn dirt-loving Earthers. The Spacer War was just so devastating. Not that the Earthers got out of it looking so pretty. It was a long time before they recovered too. But we got our independence so now we can enjoy all the poverty and anarchy that entails.

So we’re all freaking out, of course, but trying to play it cool because the Captain just doesn’t do freak-outs and we were all desperate to not disappoint the guy. Especially me, since we’re in these dire straits because I totally jacked up the day before. Sleeping at the console when pirates attacked, if you can believe it.

Me! The best, brightest and, if I do say so myself, cutest pilot this side of the stars. Nomie the Tinker Treasure, they called me. Sometimes. When I saved them from certain death and got them into port two days early on half a working thruster. When we were sucking on carbon dioxide and praying for a miracle, they called me all sorts of names not fit to repeat.

Of course that was years ago. Nowadays I’m just slightly less cute and instead of piloting tinkers, I spend my days running the logistics of this orbital and raising my little ankle-biters. Sure never would have guessed things would turn out this way.

So anyway, pirates attack. Life was like that back then. Only two years after the Spacer War, there were plenty of not-so-funny ways to die. Don’t get any ideas, kid. There is nothing romantic about these pirate guys. They were just a little more hungry and desperate than us and more willing to be jerks about it.

They blindsided us in a ship only slightly faster and less shoddy than our own. They’d never have gotten close to us except the portside sensors only worked some of the time and not at all that day. Also, I was taking a nap.

We escaped, mostly intact, but limping and slow. The ship was losing pressure and it was a long way to the main shipping lanes. Decompression is a nasty way to go.

So the Captain gives us a second to gulp like goldfish and then he says, “Or maybe you bright boys could come up with some other options?”

I forgave him for the two or three hundred times he called me a boy. It was his way of saying that even though I was the hottest girl pilot in the system, he wasn’t gonna try gnawing on my bra strap any time soon. You appreciate that, after a while.

How to get out of this mess? It’s not like we could call anybody for help. The Spacer Army was in shambles and a police force was just a dream to argue about over dinner, if you had any. These things hadn’t been thought about in the heady days of revolution. Earth just hung in our faces like a big ball of suck, ignoring our last gasp for life.

Finally Mike pipes up, his voice cracking a little, “There’s a Russian tether close enough.”

Mike was our lone Earther but we didn’t hold it against him. He said he’d been a Spacer soldier, but no one believed the kid. He looked about twelve years old and even the Spacer Army had standards.

The Captain winces, but the rest of us openly groan. Me, I flick on my comm and start plowing through the data like a salmon heading up river, looking for any solution that didn’t involve us flinging ourselves across the sky with a Russian tether.

“The idea is to find a way to live, not a more interesting way to die,” the tall Asian woman pointed out.

No one could pronounce her name and she never talked about her past. If we had to call her anything, we called her “Asia.” Her specialty was electronics and information. Over rounds of beer, we speculated that she’d been a spy in at least one of the Worlder Wars, but we never could agree which side. I could never keep track of who was fighting who in all those wars the Earthers fought amongst themselves before they started in on killing us.

Mike flushes.

“Tethers can work,” he insists. “They just don’t like to. I’ve used ’em before. If you got a better idea, I’d love to hear it. Only no one seems interested in our distress beacon.”

“Please? What is Russian tether?” asks Alex.

Alex had a thick Spanish accent but moved like a Spacer. I wondered where he came from, but the past just wasn’t something you ask about on a tinker ship. Sure, if you were drunk and a guy started talking, that’s one thing. But to just ask? Never.

Oh man, did I have a thing for Alex. Spanish accents are like catnip for this girl’s ears. He was very easy on the eyes too. Thick dark wavy locks and full sensual lips. I loved to watch him talk just as much as I loved listening to that accent.

So Captain clears his throat and starts lecturing. “A Russian tether is like a slingshot for ships. One end is attached to a weighted motor with solar panels to charge it. The other end is attached to us. It spins us around like a dead cat before pitching us. It’s cheap energy, but if you don’t let go at the right moment, it will pitch you into Earth or out into void space so far you can’t get back. There’s a bunch of them out here. They never break, but . . .”

Nobody says a word. Finally Captain sighs and says, “We can last maybe another twenty hours without docking for repairs. The repairs are easy, but we need new air. No one’s answered our signal for three days. Tether’s not a good choice, but it’s our best one.”

Captain pauses, rubbing his thumb thoughtfully. No one offers any criticism so he slaps his palm against a table and says resolutely, “We do it.”

He doesn’t wait for agreement. He just flips on his comm while we throw ourselves into action. I start the docking procedures for this little suicide run, while praying to whatever gods might listen to a bunch of tinkers.

The comms were your basic ear-bud computers with retinal projector screens that operated using your finger movements. The whole thing looked like a pair of glasses with matching earplugs and bracelets. These days everybody’s got to have those cochlear implants jacked right their skulls, but I miss my old comm. It was nice to be able to unplug once in a while.

We only had three working comms on the tinker because even black market ships from Earth came practically never. So the others only get a turn when Captain, Asia and I aren’t busy keeping us all alive.

“I always did like roller coasters,” mutters Mike with a crazed gleam in his gray eyes. He straps in, rubbing the stubble on his shaved head.

We find the tether and lock in without incident. It takes a long time for the torque to spin up. We get a kick out of the brief feeling of gravity, even if it had us standing on the walls. We were cooped up for close to two weeks without grav on that run.

Ships all travel slow in the orbitals. Everything is a lot farther away than you would think. Especially after the War, fuel for speed was too expensive for Spacers. Even on Earth, everyone moved slower than they had in the past. We gave them as good as we got in the War.

Asia and me, we check and recheck the flight figures frantically. As if our lives depend on it. Because they do.

Tinkers tend to know a bit about almost everything. Knowing a million ways to jury-rig every system in the ship with a pair of boots and an old ration box will greatly extend your life span. And if you dock at a colony that doesn’t need the goods you have to sell, knowing your way around a water filtration system or a solar generator is always good for a meal and a beer. We’d been doing pretty good before the attack, all things considered.

“Here we go!” announces Captain.

Of course, he sounds dead calm, but I catch the slight tremor in his hands. His face always remained blank, no matter how insane his curly red hair got or what kind of crap we were knee-deep in. We break loose from the tether and go hurtling through the void, powerless to stop.

I would vomit, but I’m too scared. Alex closes his eyes and begins a prayer under his breath in Spanish. Captain starts telling a very unlikely story about a distant wild night with a dazzling senorita. It is momentarily distracting and that’s a blessing.

The minute the spinning stops and we are all able to gulp down a few relieved breaths, Mike practically crawls into my lap, trying to see my retinal screen. I push him away.

“Well? Nomie, where are we? Where?” they all start yelling.

“We are not exactly where we would like to be,” I say, trying to break it to them easy.

Mike weeps.

Alex starts praying more loudly and more rapidly. I think I can make out a few very strong curses concerning God and his orifices mixed in with the litany, but my Spanish is not great.

I keep working the comm, trying to get us safe or at least safer, while Asia calms them down. She doesn’t stop working her comm though, because Asia can multitask her way to hell and back.

“We are very high up, very far out of the spheres,” she tells them. There’s some sort of long official name for the part of space around Earth that the orbitals colonized, but who can remember that? We always just call them the spheres.

Sounding surprised, Asia says, “There is an orbital up here we can reach. Perhaps there are others, but we are on a course outwards into void space. If we do not stop now, we may not be able to get back.”

There is a collective sigh of relief. Just shows you how dismal our lives are. An unknown orbital, floating like a life buoy before certain death, and we actually think our luck is looking up. Alex crosses himself quickly and stops his prayer, if that’s what it was. Asia begins hurriedly pulling her long glossy curtain of black hair back into a tight bun and that’s how I know we are in trouble.

“This is not good. There is something wrong with this place,” Asia says flatly, her black eyes flickering as she reads what the comm flashes onto her retina.

I don’t want to hear that there is anything wrong. I want her to shut up and tell me everything was going to be peachy keen and they are serving ice cream in two hours, but it would never occur to Asia to sugarcoat the truth.

“This orbital is functional. It is small but there is air. There is power,” she says slowly in that precise way she had about her. “We may be able to dock and repair our ship here. But it is not geosynchronous.”

We give her a bunch of blank looks. Asia shuts her eyes and looks annoyed for a minute before explaining. “It does not revolve at a fixed point above Earth like normal orbitals with Earth standard days. This colony is heliosynchronous. It orbits the Earth at a fixed point in relation to the sun. They do not have light-dark cycles at all.” She flips off the comm and shakes her head.

Mike snorts, “So they sleep with the lights on. Big deal.”

“No, they do not. It is the opposite. They are parked on the night side of the world,” she snaps, taking off her comm glasses and frowning. “They never see daylight. It worries me.”

Mike shrugs and says, “Weirdos are still better than death by decompression. But how do they survive? The power cells, the manufacturing vats, their food foliage, even oxygen tanks—all of it needs sunlight, doesn’t it?”

Asia pops an infrared scan of this weird orbital up on the vidscreen so everyone can have a good look at it. It is a squat, round spinning hunk of post-industrial metal with various globes and cubes attached to it. It doesn’t have the solar sails or large solar panel wings normally seen on orbitals. I think it looks ugly without them.

The Captain sighs, rubbing his bright blue eyes, “Out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

What can we do, but prep to dock?

The outer doors unlock and hiss open. We suck in greedy gulps of air on the docking bay platform. Customarily, there are officials at the door with a wide variety of questions to answer and tests to pass before you can enter an orbital. Here, we are alone on a platform bristling with sensors and cameras.

“It’s just how I like my colony—dank, smelly, and dark,” says Alex sarcastically. At least, I hope he’s being sarcastic.

“All colonies have their own smell. The Caribbean Coffee Conglomerate smells wonderful,” Asia remarks. “I checked the air quality here before we entered. It’s fine.”

“Maybe they are all gone,” Mike chirps hopefully.

Captain looks into the unblinking red eye of a large camera and shakes his head. “More likely they are just shy,” he says firmly. “Let’s get to work.”

We move quickly, wanting to be gone as soon as possible. Captain sends the grunts we’d picked up a few weeks before, Mingo and Fishtrap, to go look for inhabitants. I never could figure out what language those two spoke so I don’t know too much about them. Captain had some idea who they were and where they came from, though. At least, I think he did.

Anyway, recompressing the ship with air goes faster if the colony allows us to use the orbital’s pumps and paying for air is smarter than just taking it. Stealing is a good way to get blown out of the sky.

“If you can’t find people, make sure you find some food and water. Our supplies are low and we’ll have a long trip back,” Captain tells the grunts. But he says it quietly, away from the cameras.

Asia and me, we already have the breach fixed and we’re looking at the damaged solar cells when the first colonist appears. He moves like a ghost, old and pale. Even his eyes seem colorless and strange, like a giant who shriveled up in the sun. The hair on my neck prickles, just looking at him.

He lisps slightly as he attempts what might be a smile, “Welcome. I am Dr. Voctoire, the lead scientist here.” Dr. Voctoire has a decidedly thick Eastern European accent and he’s well over six feet tall.

Mike is sitting next to me, pulling up schematics for the water pumps while keeping his eyes on this strange character and cussing under his breath. I lean over to Mike and whisper, “Is he being creepy on purpose or is he for real?”

“Can’t tell and don’t care,” Mike whispers back without moving his lips.

Mike was pretty decent looking, if you liked them tall and stringy and young. Personally, I prefer big and beefy men like Captain. Not that he had an extra pound of fat on him. He is just a big guy.

Captain steps over and shakes the pale man’s hand. In his booming Captain voice, he says “Sorry to barge in on you like this. We were limping along, looking to die if we hadn’t docked here. Two of my men went in search for your people to ask properly for your help. We thank you for any hospitality you care to give us.”

Dr. Voctoire smiles eerily. “Ah yes, I met your men. Please, we do not get many visitors. We would like to make a meal with you?”

We agree, because who turns down free food? Dr. Voctoire lets us use the orbital’s pumps to repressurize the ship, saying we can haggle over the price after dinner. Captain tells Mike, Asia and me to continue with the repairs. Then he leaves with Alex, slipping a remote around his wrist so I can see and hear what goes on with them inside this place.

“Dr. Voctoire, we’ve been wondering how you guys manage in the dark like this,” Captain asks with a cheerful lack of concern while his blue eyes dart around, taking it all in. The walls are covered with a slimy bioluminescent moss. If that isn’t weird enough, the old man has two separate cochlear implant comms, one for each eye and both are activated.

I am used to cochlear implants now, the shiny metal disk with its red little light screwed right into a person’s temple, but two is just beyond weird, you know? Have you ever seen that before? Because Voctoire’s colony is the only place I ever did.

Dr. Voctoire says, “The dark? We have a series of mirrors that provide us with enough sunlight for survival. We find the dark preferable for our experiments.”

Captain asks, “So you are a research station? Wonderful. Not too many of those left. What are you researching?”

I wonder if they were using fuel cells or nuclear for power, since they obviously don’t use solar. I’m really glad I stayed behind. The tinker is a hunk of junk, but it has great radiation shielding and this guy didn’t look like he cared overmuch about frying his gonads with badly shielded nukes.

The old man says dismissively, “Computers, we work with. Technology. Electronics. It is very technical, our work. I would not bore you with details.”

Captain replies, “I see you have two comms. It’s unusual. Do you run them at the same time? I didn’t think that was possible.”

“Yes, we must. There are few of us here and much work to do. All of us use dual independent processors. It is difficult, but achievable with the right, ah, modifications.”

Captain gives one of his hearty captain laughs. “If it were me, I’d be tripping all over the place. Trying to walk and talk with just one on is bad enough and here you got two.”

That’s when I realize that Dr. Voctoire’s eyes are moving independently, like a chameleon. So creepy! Through the video feed, I spy Captain shuddering so he sees it too.

Dr. Voctoire nods, taking the meaning of Captain’s stare.

“Yes, Mr. Captain. It is unusual, what we have done, but necessary for our purposes. Our modified vision requires us to keep light to a minimum, but the computers allow us to see extremely well in the dark.”

“Well, the skies are big enough for everyone and you certainly don’t have much competition for this corner of the spheres, but you did startle me there, mister.” Captain says frankly.

The old man stares at him with one eye as they walk. “Mr. Captain, you have introduced all your crew members, but not yourself. Please, what is your name?” Dr. Voctoire asks.

Captain just smiles, “Out in the dark on our tinker ship, I forget my own name more often than I care to admit.”

That’s the kind of thing Captain says if you ask about his name. We all learned pretty quick not to ask.

Back in the ship, I am freaking out again. Mingo and Fishtrap weren’t responding on their remotes, which is bad enough.

Then Asia comes over and writes on a scrap of paper, “The colonists here can see everything on their colony, but they can’t see in this ship. They can hear us. Very advanced security. Very secretive. Not much in the Ether about this place. Almost a hundred years old.”

A hundred years make it one of the oldest orbitals still in use. That would make anybody nervous, especially after getting a look at that freak-show Voctoire.

I get on the comm and start squawking to Captain to come back. Since I know the people in the orbital are listening in, I use some of the code words we worked out beforehand. Sadly, this isn’t the first bizarre situation we’ve been in.

Captain listens for a minute and then calmly says to Voctoire, “Sir, if you will excuse me, there is a minor problem with my ship that needs my attention before I join you.”

Dr. Voctoire asks that Alex continue on with him. Captain agrees because he doesn’t want to tip his hand. Alex is experienced enough to know he needs to be on alert because things are getting strange here.

We use the pencil and paper to explain things to Captain when he gets back. We make sure to speak out loud about general things like our food and air supplies.

“Gene mod?” Asia scribbles.

Genetic modification was a fairly routine thing in orbital space by that time. Colonies have very specific requirements for plants or animals and they have to balance the water, air, food, and whatnot in their biosphere or else they all die. Gene mods are usually the easiest way to do that. A good splicer can solve three life-threatening issues with one well-designed fungus. But gene mod is still never, ever used on humans.

That’s because there were some very memorable, very horrific mistakes that no one dares repeat. While the black market thrives for all things under the sun, human mod is strictly off limits.

You’ll never find a geneticist willing to risk professional suicide followed rapidly by fatal torture. That’s the standard punishment for human gene mod. But Voctoire’s orbital is obviously a very top-secret corporate research station so just about anything could be happening here.

Captain frowns and shrugs. Then he goes and rummages around in the supply room and comes back with a bottle of green liquid.

He says loudly, “Well, I see you have the repairs under control. I’ll be back in a few hours.” He takes the bottle and leaves with Mike in tow. Asia and I watch through the feed on Captain’s wrist.

On the way, they meet another colonist. She is tall, frail and ghostly like the first. She also has the two implants jacked into her skull, glowing ominously. Both of her computers are engaged and she merely motions them to follow her as she slowly makes her way. When they reach the eating area, there are about twenty people in it, including Dr. Voctoire.

All are tall, gray and withered, like all the color has just washed out of them. When they enter the room, Mike’s hand hovers over his weapon, but it drops away when he looks them over. I know what he is thinking.

How could this congregation of elderly be a threat?

Captain says in his big hearty voice, “Well now, I have here the finest old absinthe still circulating above the stratosphere that I’d like to share with you fine folk. But where are my three crewmen? Don’t tell me they are off getting into trouble?”

Dr. Voctoire smiles formally and gestures for them sit.

“Your men are assisting us with a small problem. They are so kind to do so. We will join them shortly.”

The table is heavy with bread, cheese, and some kind of thick stew. The shots I can see of it through the bracelet video make me drool. I hear Mike and Captain talking about how great everything tastes, but strangely spiced. I’m hoping they remember to bring some back.

“We had a special breed of sheep designed for us. They do not need light and live on our moss.” Dr. Voctoire says.

He seems positively chatty now.

“So, your research isn’t genetic, then?” Mike asks quickly, moping up stew with some bread.

“Oh no. We are more concerned with technical matters. Mediboxes, specifically. There are many very interesting applications of that technology. For example, there are certain surgeries that it can perform to greatly extend the human life span.”

He sounds pretty reasonable and smart, but the thing is, you have to be a special kind of crazy to modify a medibox. You guys have a medibox on this colony, right? New Siberia does too.

They are a lot better than they used to be. Even back then a medibox could do the scans and tests necessary to diagnose almost any medical problem. They could perform surgeries too. They used a series of lasers that worked pretty well, although they left interesting scars. They also prescribed medicines, but most contained only basic antibiotics and painkillers.

A rogue medibox is everyone’s secret dread. Actually, it isn’t that secret. Mediboxes are heavily featured in horror Ether flicks.

Captain expresses polite disbelief at their research success. I can see him squirming in his seat just a little before busying himself with pouring the absinthe and insisting they all try it.

Voctoire does not take a glass and will not be deterred in his enthusiasm for the insane subject.

He says proudly, “Yes, it’s true. I myself am almost one hundred sixty years old. All of us here have had the surgery. No one here is under one hundred years old. There is no telling how long we will live. What do you think of that?”

Personally, long life as a wizened gray skeleton is something I’ll pass on.

That’s when Captain notices Mike snoring into his soup. He tries to leap to his feet, but staggers and falls instead. The food was drugged, you see.

Voctoire leaned towards him and says confidentially, “Mr. Captain, we have not had a shipment of experimental subjects in far too long and we have many new ideas to test. We are so pleased to have you here.” Dr. Voctoire cackles while the Captain slides to the floor. The last thing I see through the remote is Voctoire switching it off.

Asia and me set a new speed record as we slam the ship’s doors shut and pull away from the orbital. We don’t stop for breath until we are well away from there. Then I start scanning and I see Captain’s remote flick back on. So I pull the video feed onto the main vidscreen, hoping we can figure out what is going on in there. It’s weirdly distorted but I can make out Captain sitting up in a medibox in a room that is full of them.

They look like normal mediboxes, except they have wires trailing out to large computer interfaces. There are several of the gray colonists hovering like harpies over a medibox on the far side of the room.

Captain spies Mike in the middle of them and utters a hoarse cry. Mike is yanking tubes out of his arm and throwing punches. Luckily, they both downed hypermet tablets on the ship against the odds that someone tried drugging the food. So they were only out for a few minutes instead of hours. We’d been around the block enough times to be paranoid like that. Voctoire’s colonists certainly weren’t expecting it.

Captain bursts out of the medibox with a cry of pain tearing through him before hurling himself into the colonists around Mike like a fury. I could tell by the angry red puckered lines crisscrossing his stomach and back that surgical lasers had been working on him.

I look him over later, but we never figure out exactly what they did to him in that medibox. Didn’t seem to slow him down, whatever it was. The gray colonists scatter, bleeding and shrieking. Mike is also in working order, if covered in blood and raging, cussing up a storm.

Then they find Alex, Mingo, and Fishtrap. It’s bad.

It’s worse when they realize the poor bastards are still alive. Mike retches at the sight while Captain methodically puts his three men out of their misery, one shot to the temple apiece. Captain always had that old pistol with him. He kept it loaded with flechettes, the kind that don’t pierce a ship’s hull. I swear he slept with it strapped to his privates. There are many occasions for a reliable pistol on a tinker ship.

Then they run for the ship, Captain screaming orders into his comm and Mike just screaming. On the way, they find the dining hall from before. Captain snatches up the half empty absinthe bottle without breaking stride.

“What was in there, anyway? Some kind of toxin or drug to slow them down?” Mike gasps, taking stairs three at a time.

Captain laughs, “Just some damn fine absinthe. I figured it never hurts to be neighborly.”

They almost make it.

When they reach the docking platform, Dr. Voctoire and a crew of heavily armed colonists are waiting for them. Mike and Captain have their guns at the ready.

“Your ship escaped, but you will not, clever Mr. Captain,” laughs Voctoire cruelly.

I guess he’s feeling pretty confident on account of Mike and Captain have at least four lasers apiece pointed at them. It’s like high noon in an Ether drama.

“I’d rather stay here and kill you monsters, anyway,” Captain replies grimly.

“You will not damage any more of us.” Dr. Voctoire chuckles. “But please, it will help our experiments to know who we are vivisecting. Tell us your name and we may at least send your ashes home.”

Captain stands like stone. “My name is Cesar Vaquero.”

The laughter and jeering stop suddenly. Even Mike gives him a startled glance, though his gun never wavers. I can hear Asia gasp next to me so I know she’s listening too.

Dr. Voctoire begins to laugh again. This time, it has a more hysterical edge to it.

“Cesar the Scorcher? The Butcher of Mexico? You call me a monster for conducting important experiments on a few useless nothings? How many did you kill when you dropped that nuclear starship on Mexico City?”

It didn’t occur to him that Captain gave him a false name. No one would pretend to be Cesar Vaquero.

Captain’s face remains completely expressionless.

“Millions. I killed millions,” he says flatly as he cocks his pistol. “I ended the war. Billions would have died if the fighting continued. How many of you do you think I can kill?”

That’s when all the power goes out. Because Asia and me aren’t just sitting out there, twiddling our thumbs. We have a plan. We smash an electromagnetic pulse bomb against their hull with the power cranked up as high as we can get it. If any of their fancy electronics work after that, I’d guess they don’t work too well.

I can hear the sound of clicking triggers as the colonists fire their weapons reflexively, but it’s too late. The lasers are just so much useless junk by then. Some of them scream and claw at their computers, without power for the first time in decades apparently.

Only Mike and Captain remain calm. I switch the video to night vision just in time to see the Captain smile. It’s not a nice smile.

Captain knows immediately what Asia and I are up to. He cheerfully says to Voctoire, “I trust you ogres had the sense to run your vital systems off vacuum tubes like everyone else. No? Well isn’t that terrible? Perhaps if you are quick, you won’t lose the whole colony.”

There is the sound of scrabbling in the dark.

Our captain, Cesar Vaquero, calls out, “I hope you will all notice that our guns are not electronic. And neither are the bullets we are about to fire at you.”

It only takes a few minutes for the colonists to scatter, blind and toothless without their computers and lasers. Mike and Cesar fire a few rounds of flechettes to spur the exodus. And then I will be damned if Captain and Mike don’t race off into darkness after them. I thought for sure that’s the last time I’d ever see those two, but they popped back onto the docking platform with what was left of Mingo, Fishtrap, and Alex. Those poor bastards.

We have the ship docked and the doors open in no time. Before we took off, we rigged the orbital’s door to open manually. Sparing a minute to retrieve the bomb and store it for later use, we blaze away from that hellhole as fast as we can.

Only when we are sure they are not sending anything nasty after us do we stop to think about the man sitting next to us on the deck.

Cesar Vaquero, the Scorcher of Mexico, our Captain. Can you believe it? A war hero to Spacers, a genocidal maniac to the Earthers, a legend long thought dead and we’d been listening to his crazy stories and making him coffee for months. We watch him with horror and awe, but no one says a thing except for Asia. She only has one question.

“Are you sorry?” she asks.

Captain looks at his hands for a minute, and then slowly lifts his head to meet her eyes.

“The dirt-lovers were going to hit my home next. They had a bomb that could take out our whole colony with one hit. My parents, my wife, my son.” His voice breaks over that last word. “I killed eighty million people to stop a war. Truth is, I would kill billions to keep my family safe.”

He turns away from her and sets the coordinates for our next adventure.

No offense, kid, but your dad was . . . Well, he was your dad, wasn’t he? The Scorcher of Mexico. Everybody’s parents are crazy, but yours was always in a league of his own.

As if that weren’t strange enough, when he turns away, I see a new shock of white in his vivid red hair. It’d never been there before. Over the next few weeks, his hair turns snow white and stays that way.

We wondered what had been done to him in that medibox. That is, until the next crisis drives it out of our mind. Maybe you think I made the whole story up, but I swear I’m not smart enough to think of something as weird as that insane little world. Stay away from heliosynchronous orbitals, kid. That’s my advice.

I piloted that tinker for another few months for your dad. He was the best Captain I ever had, but then I met my man here on New Siberia and decided to settle down. Last I saw of him, your dad was headed for the Hathor Mining Colony with a ship full of drills to trade. I guess he never quite got there.

You tell your mom she’s in all our prayers. I hope they find the bastards that are giving you people so much trouble lately.

[End Excerpt]

From the book Spin the Sky by Katy Stauber.

Copyright © 2012 by Katy Stauber.

Reprinted by permission of Night Shade Books. All rights reserved.

Katy Stauber has degrees in Biochemistry and Mathematics from Texas A&M University. She currently lives with her husband and two sons in Austin, TX. Her first novel, Revolution World, was published in 2011 by Night Shade Books. Spin the Sky is her second novel.

Interview: Brian Greene
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, and is recognized for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in his field of superstring theory. His books are widely read: The Elegant Universe was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and has sold more than a million copies worldwide; The Fabric of the Cosmos spent half a year on The New York Times bestseller list, and inspired The Washington Post to call him the “single best explainer of abstruse ideas in the world today.” His latest book, The Hidden Reality debuted at #4 on The New York Times bestseller list. With producer Tracy Day, he is the co-founder of the World Science Festival.

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.

You recently hosted a PBS special called The Fabric of the Cosmos. How did that program come about, and why should people go check it out?

Well, it’s based on a book that I wrote with the same title, The Fabric of the Cosmos. It’s a show that explores some of the strangest features of modern science, but ideas that are well-grounded in mathematical research and observational data. So there’s one program that asks the question: What is space? The stuff that’s all around us. Another asks: What is time? This strange feature of our lives that’s so familiar yet so hard for science to pin down. And then there’s a program on quantum mechanics that explores the micro world, and focuses on a feature known as “entanglement,” where distant objects can somehow communicate with each other even though nothing travels between them. And finally there’s a program on the most far-out of all the subjects, the possibility that our universe is not the only universe, that we might be part of a multiverse.

The challenge in creating a program like this, about space and time and quantum mechanics and the multiverse, is that there’s not that much you can point a camera at to really show what we’re talking about. So the programs rely on a good deal of high-quality computer animation, on which I worked with the animators, as did the whole team at Nova, to try to get the animations to be as close as possible to what it would be like to go to these exotic realms that the programs are about—be it the micro world of quantum physics, or the other universes in the multiverse, or to try to get a sense of what the fabric of space and time might actually look like.

Since our podcast is a show for science fiction fans, we were just curious if you’re a science fiction fan yourself, and if so, who are some of your favorite authors?

Isaac Asimov, I think, is probably my favorite. I think Ray Bradbury would be right up there too. I love it when real science finds a home in a fictional setting, where you take some real core idea of science and weave it through a fictional narrative in order to bring it to life, the way stories can. That’s my favorite thing.

I’ve had various experiences where I’ve been called by Hollywood studios to look at a script or comment on various scientific ideas that they’re trying to inject into a story. You know, I had a great meeting with Jerry Bruckheimer on a film that came out a few years ago called Deja Vu, with Denzel Washington. There was a time travel element to this film, and I went to the studios in Hollywood, and they earnestly wanted to understand special relativity, and the possibility of time travel that comes from Einstein’s insight. And it was a great thing. I had a white board, and I was writing out the equations, and explaining to them all these ideas, and they were really getting it.

But at the end of the conversation—perhaps predictably—they said to me, “But couldn’t we modify things just a little bit so that this could happen, or that could happen?” And they wanted to deviate from the science. And at the end of the day, of course, Hollywood is really dedicated to making the films that will attract the most people into the theater, get the most people into the seats, and I fully understand that.

You know, not to be self-promoting, that’s not what I mean at all, but I did a small piece with Philip Glass called Icarus at the Edge of Time, where I rewrote the myth of Icarus so that the boy doesn’t travel to the sun, but travels to a black hole. And there, the real physics of general relativity dictates how the story unfolds. And to make a long story short, the boy spends an hour near the edge of the black hole, but when he comes back and wants to show his dad what he’s done—because his dad told him not to go—he realizes that it’s 10,000 years later.

Because that’s what would happen—time slows down at the edge of a black hole. So an hour for you could be thousands of years for somebody else who’s further from the black hole. And with Philip Glass, there’s an orchestral score, and a narrator tells the story. And the hope is that people who see this piece—and we’ve now performed it many times around the world—leave with this kind of visceral sense of what general relativity is about. They don’t know the equations, they don’t know the details, but they’ve gone on a fictional ride to the edge of a black hole, and they’ve come back with an intuitive understanding of some real science.

Is that a realistic treatment, in that the ship would be able to survive getting close enough to the black hole for the relativistic effects to take effect?

It’s a great question, and one that I worried about when we were doing this, and it turns out if the black hole is sufficiently big, then yes, it is a realistic rendition of what would happen. But the bottom line is, even if it were not the case, even if the full scientific story could not be realized in this fictional setting, I don’t think it would matter, because my point is, it’s the core science—the science that really drives the narrative. In this particular case, it’s the science of how time behaves at the edge of a black hole. That’s what really matters. So I would say, give yourself license—if you’re a science fiction writer—to bend the rules at the edges in order to make the story work, but if the integrity of the core science that really matters for the story can be kept intact, I think that’s a worthwhile goal to shoot for.

One of my favorite tropes in fantasy and science fiction is the idea of parallel worlds, but in science fiction and fantasy settings, typically what happens is somebody from the real world travels to a parallel world. So assuming that the multiverse is actually real, would it ever be possible to travel to a parallel world?

It’s pretty tough to imagine how that would happen. So, you may know I have a recent book called The Hidden Reality, where I go through nine different variations on the theme of parallel universes. Because there isn’t just one flavor of parallel universe—there’s a version that comes out of quantum mechanics, there’s a version that comes out of cosmology, a version that comes out of string theory, and so forth. But one thing that they do share is it’s pretty tough, if not impossible, to go from one universe to another in any of these versions—in any conventional notion of what it would mean to travel from one universe to another.

So what I mean by that is, let me just give one example. The parallel universe theory that comes out of quantum mechanics is called “the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.” And it emerges because the core idea of quantum physics that we learned about in the 1920s and ’30s is that you can’t predict with certainty the outcome of any experiment. Instead the best you can ever do is predict the probability that you’ll get one outcome or another—say a 30 percent chance of this, 50 percent chance of that, and 20 percent chance of that. Now, the question arose, and is still with us, of when you do a measurement, when you find one and only one outcome, what happened to the other potential outcomes?

And it turns out that the most straightforward reading of the math of quantum mechanics—as realized by a guy named Hugh Everett all the way back in 1957—the most straightforward reading is that the other potential outcomes actually do happen, they just happen in their own separate universe, which would mean that the experimenter, say me, would measure the particle and find it in one location in this universe and think that’s the only outcome, but there’d be another copy of me in a parallel world finding the particle at a different location, and another version of me still in yet another parallel universe that would find the third possible outcome.

So there’d be three of me, if there are three possible outcomes in these three parallel universes, so you could say that I “traveled,” in some sense, to all of them, because there would be a version of me in each of those universes. But the traditional notion of being able to jump from one universe to another, in the way that we see in movies or sometimes read about in books, it’s hard to see how that would have any meaning in this version of parallel universes, and a similar kind of discussion would apply to most of the others as well.

I listened to a lecture where you talked about how if you were to fly deep enough into outer space, you might in effect end up in a parallel universe?

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. So another version of parallel universes comes from far more simple considerations than quantum physics. If space goes on infinitely far, then there’s another flavor of parallel universe theory that emerges. Now, we don’t know that space goes on infinitely far, but it’s certainly a viable possibility that scientists today still seriously consider. And the version of parallel universes that comes out of that is pretty straightforward to grasp. You see, when we look out into space today, even with the most powerful telescope, there’s just so far we can see, because it takes light a certain amount of time to travel through space and reach us. So we only really have access to a chunk of space, if it goes on infinitely far, the chunk that could have sent out a light signal that would reach us by the time we look up today. So it’s roughly 30 to 40 billion light years, the size of that chunk of space. It seems big, but if the universe is infinitely big, that’s just a small little patch—a little city, if you will, in a grand cosmic landscape that would go on much, much further than we have access to.

Now, the reason why that’s interesting is because in any finite region of space, matter can only arrange itself in finite many different configurations. It’s a fairly basic consequence of the laws of physics. And that means that if space goes on infinitely far out there, there have to be duplicates of us, and the argument is quite straightforward. Let me just give an analogy. Imagine I have a deck of cards, and started to shuffle the deck. Well, the cards will come out in different orders. You shuffle again, the cards will come out in a different order still, but since there are only finitely many cards in the deck, there are only finitely many distinct orders of those cards. It’s a big number, but it does mean that if you shuffle the cards enough times, sooner or later the order of the cards has to repeat.

Now, by the same reasoning, since matter could only arrange itself into finitely many different configurations in a given region of space . . . well, if you look region by region by region in an infinite cosmos, sooner or later the arrangements of the particles has to repeat. There aren’t enough different arrangements to go around, just like the shuffle of the deck of cards. Now, I’m just an arrangement of particles, as are you, as is anybody else, as is the earth, the sun, and so on. So if the particle arrangements here repeat someplace way out there, it means that you and I, the sun, the earth, they would be out there too. So that’s a sense in which there would be parallel realities way out there in the cosmos, if space goes on sufficiently far.

And now to your question. You’re right—if in principle you could travel sufficiently far, you might be able to reach those other domains, those other “parallel worlds.” But again physics comes in to pretty much thwart that possibility. First of all, we’re talking about gargantuan distances, distances that are so spectacularly large that we’ll never be able to traverse them—or at least, any conceivable technology that we know of would never be able to travel those distances. But even beyond that, we’ve learned that our universe isn’t static, it’s expanding, and in fact it’s expanding ever more quickly, and because of that there’s actually a barrier, a physical barrier, to how far we could ever traverse space, and that barrier would be too small for us to ever reach these other worlds. So again, the idea of being able to travel to a parallel world is likely one that can’t actually be realized.

Would the matter for all of those infinite worlds have come from our Big Bang, or are we talking about multiple Big Bangs—an infinite number of Big Bangs creating those worlds?

Well, it’s again a great question, and it does call into question the notion of what we mean by “the Big Bang.” You see, if our universe is truly finite in size, then ever further back in time, the size of that universe would be ever smaller, so that way back at time zero, or right near time zero, our entire universe would be a tiny little speck, and then that speck would swell rapidly, and that’s usually the picture we all have in mind when talking about the Big Bang.

But if space goes on infinitely far—this alternative possibility—then ever further back in time, objects in space were ever closer together, but space itself would still extend infinitely far. I mean, if you want to say that way back in time, the universe was half its current size, well, half of infinity, that’s still infinity. A third of infinity, that’s still infinity. So if the universe goes on infinitely far, then even way back at time zero itself, space would go on infinitely far. So the Big Bang would better be thought of, in some sense, as an infinite number of Big Bangs, all happening throughout this infinite spatial expense. And those “Big Bangs,” if you will, will be responsible for all the happenings in these different domains, these different chunks of space populating this infinite expanse—if indeed space does go on infinitely far. It’s a different image of the Big Bang than the one that we traditionally have in mind.

So going back to the Everett multiverse idea, how different could the laws of physics be in those parallel worlds? Are we talking about a different Periodic Table of Elements? Different fundamental constants? Different subatomic particles? What’s the degree of variation there?

Well, in the Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, we aren’t actually imagining that the laws of physics or the properties of particles are varying. There are other versions of parallel universe theory, multiverse theory, that do however have this feature that you’re referring to, of different laws of physics and different particle properties. And the easiest one to grasp there is the one that comes out of a field called inflationary cosmology. So inflationary cosmology is, in some sense, an enhanced version of the Big Bang theory, which seeks to fill in a missing piece in the standard Big Bang proposal.

See, the standard Big Bang tells us how the universe evolved after the bang, but doesn’t tell us what powered the bang itself, and people have tried to fill in that gap, to try to figure out what drove space to rush outward in the first place. A guy named Alan Guth, a great physicist now at MIT, in the 1980s was the first to propose that there might be a naturally occurring kind of cosmic “fuel” that would naturally force space to rush outwards, and he proposed that this would be what drove the bang in the first place. The interesting thing is, as people began to study that proposal in more detail, they found that this fuel that he had proposed—and others like Steinhart and Linde developed further—would be so efficient that it would be virtually impossible to use it all up, which would mean that in inflationary cosmology, the Big Bang giving rise to our universe would not be a unique event. There would be Big Bangs that happened before, there would be Big Bangs that would happen after, in various and far-flung locations, each giving rise to its own expanding domain, each giving rise to its own universe.

And when you study those universes in detail, you find that, indeed, particle properties can vary from one expanding realm to another. Those particle properties and various environmental influences can indeed make the laws of physics appear different from one expanding realm to another, so the variations in that version of the multiverse proposal can be quite, quite significant.

One of my favorite book series is the Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny, in which there are characters who travel between parallel worlds, and they decide to carry swords with them rather than guns, because guns stop working very rapidly when the laws of physics start changing around you. What do you think about that idea?

Indeed, I would suspect that in those other worlds, things could be so different that not only would guns stop working, everything else might stop working too. So they prepared themselves well, but I think what they may not have taken into account is, if the laws of physics vary enough that guns and gunpowder don’t work, it’s probably the case that the laws are such, and they vary to such a degree, that the biological processes that keep us ticking would probably not be happening either.

If there were a material in a parallel world that couldn’t exist in our world—that different laws of physics produced—and you could take that material and bring it to our world, would it fall apart? Would it have special properties?

You know, you can imagine the simplest example of that, where perhaps the basic fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, maybe they exist in those other universes, but maybe their masses are a little bit different, or their electric charges are a little bit different, and that idea is quite compatible with the mathematical formulations that we have of these various multiverse proposals. Now, if you study the properties of matter, and how they depend upon the masses of the basic particles, and the charges of the basic particles, you find something spectacularly interesting. If you change the basic properties of the particles by even a little bit—change masses by 20 or 30 percent, or you change electric charges by 20, 30, 40 percent, you really disrupt the atomic structure that’s responsible for all those elements on the Periodic Table, and the way those elements would exist and combine and behave.

So even modest adjustments to the fundamental physical parameters would rapidly disrupt matter as we know it. So if you tried to take things from one place to another, they would themselves suffer radical disruption. You can imagine that maybe there are other universes where the changes are so slight that matter would suffer only the most modest of changes as it went from universe to universe—if indeed you could transport it from place to place—but in most of these multiverse proposals, the vast majority of the other universes would not be very close in these features to our universe, and therefore matter really could not survive that kind of journey.

Science fiction stories are full of characters traveling through hyperspace, but in The Fabric of the Cosmos you make it sound as if that wouldn’t work, because higher dimensions only exist at very small scales. Is that right?

The most well-studied explanation for how our universe could have more than three dimensions of space, how there could be so-called “hyperspace” and yet we don’t see those dimensions, is indeed the one that you’re referring to: The extra dimensions are all around us, they’re just crumpled to such a fantastically small size that we can’t see them.

Nevertheless, there are other proposals that have come on the scene of physics in the last ten years which imagine that the extra dimensions might be big, and the reason we don’t see them is not because they’re so fantastically small, but because of the way that we see, using light and using the other forces of nature, those forces—except for gravity, it turns out—would be unable to penetrate those other dimensions. Those forces would be locked into our slice of space, our slice of bread, if you will—which is one way of thinking about it—even if there are other slices of bread in the universe, even though there are other dimensions that are off of our slice of bread that fill out the entire loaf. We wouldn’t have access to those dimensions because of the way the forces we have access to behave.

But remarkably, gravity, as I mentioned, is different, and in these theories gravity can penetrate these other, larger dimensions. So again—in a completely fanciful manner—you could imagine communicating across these other dimensions by sending gravitational waves, gravitational signals through these large extra dimensions. You and I, who are held together by the familiar forces—the electromagnetic force, the nuclear forces—we couldn’t literally travel into those extra dimensions, even though they would be big, but we might be able to send signals into them, at least in principle.

How close are we to developing a teleportation device like the transporter in Star Trek?

Well, we’re pretty far. There are experiments going on today where individual particles are being teleported from one location to another. Now, this notion of “quantum teleportation,” which is what I’m referring to, is somewhat different from at least my rudimentary understanding of what the creators of Star Trek had in mind with the transporter. There, I think, the basic idea is the material that makes you up is somehow scrambled or broken up into little pieces, and it’s kind of sent through space and then reassembled at a distant location, on the surface of some distant planet. That’s not the kind of teleportation that physics seems to allow.

Instead, what happens in quantum teleportation is the object that you want to teleport is closely examined in one location, and all the information that defines that object is sent to the remote location, and that information is then used at the remote location to build what can be thought of as an exact duplicate of the object that you started with, so you might want to call that, I don’t know, “quantum Xeroxing” or “quantum faxing” or something of that nature. What makes this a little bit closer to teleportation is that you can establish that the act of measuring the original object destroys it. There’s no way that you can get at all the necessary information to rebuild it without disrupting its basic makeup to such a degree that it really wouldn’t exist any longer at the original location, so if I asked you where the object is, I think the best answer you’d give is, well, it’s at the remote location, because that’s the only object that looks like the original that I started with, since the act of measurement destroyed the original.

So that’s a version of teleportation. Again, it’s only being done with individual particles. Perhaps that will be bumped up to some collection of particles at some point, but it is utterly, utterly beyond the pale to imagine doing this kind of process with the number of particles that make up any macroscopic body like a person, or an object like a car. So I am tempted to say that we’re infinitely far away from teleportation of big objects, but that would perhaps be a little too pessimistic, but we’re nearly infinitely far away.

One of the knocks against the Star Trek transporter from a scientific perspective has always been that it violates Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Does this quantum teleportation get around that somehow?

Yeah, exactly. So the question is: How do you actually know the information about how an object is built? Because according to Heisenberg, in some sense the act of trying to measure the object affects it or changes it. You don’t learn about the object’s makeup prior to your measurement—your measurement itself impacts that answer. So the whole trick in quantum teleportation is to try to do an end run around that problem.

And the way it’s done is, you don’t actually measure the object itself directly. Instead you bring the object into contact with some other material that’s already in the teleporter, and you measure some joint features of the combined system of the object of interest and the raw material that was already there. And it turns out that with some very clever mathematical manipulations, you can get all the information you need about the object through this more indirect measurement, and that information indeed tells you about what the object was like before you did the measurement. You’re able to avoid the contamination of the measurement itself, and in that way get a pristine result regarding the informational makeup of the object, send that to the remote location, and make use of that pristine information to rebuild the object.

There have been a lot of stories in the news recently about faster-than-light neutrinos. What’s your take on that?

There aren’t any faster-than-light neutrinos, is the quick answer. You know, even when this data was first brought to the public’s attention, six months ago or so, most physicists, me included, looked at it and said, “Yeah, that would be great if it was true,” but our suspicion was that closer examination of the experiment would reveal that there was an error, or something isn’t doing what somebody thinks it is, and at the end of the day they will not stand up to close scrutiny.

And the reason for that simply was that there’s a mountain of experimental support behind Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Anything that challenges that is going to require a similar mountain of experimental support, and one single experiment suggesting that there’s a violation of the speed of light barrier is far from convincing. The interesting thing is that in the last couple of months, the experimenters have indeed found a flaw in the experiment—a faulty fiber optic cable, which they suspect is the culprit. They’re redoing the measurements, and they’ll have the data soon. But there’s already been an independent measurement done at the same location by a different group, and they have found that the neutrinos do not go faster than the speed of light. So I think that’s an idea, however exciting it might have been, that one can pretty much throw away.

There’s a novel by Gregory Benford called Timescape in which scientists use tachyons to send a message backward in time. What do you think about that idea?

Well, the theoretical science—that if you did have a tachyon, you might be able to use it to send a signal back in time—that’s pretty solid, so the basic mathematics of Einstein’s special relativity can be used to confirm that theoretical idea. The obstacle, of course, the thing that makes it so hypothetical, is do tachyons exist? Do objects that travel faster than the speed of light exist? Now, that’s why this report about neutrinos got a lot of interest from the press and from scientists, because it would be exciting. It would be something that would shake our understanding, if indeed tachyons did exist—and neutrinos going faster than the speed of light might well be candidates for that. But the important thing to stress is there’s zero evidence that tachyons exist, and zero evidence that neutrinos go faster than the speed of light and might be candidates for tachyons.

You participated in the 2011 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, where your colleague Dr. Jim Gates explained that his recent research leads him to wonder if we’re living in the matrix [at 1:01:30 in the video]. What did you think about that?

I have no idea. You know, Jim is a great scientist, a good friend of mine. I’ve not really followed the ideas that he’s been pursuing of late, and just don’t feel qualified to comment on it.

There was something in The Fabric of the Cosmos where you said that there’s some evidence that our universe is in some sense a 3D projection of information contained in a 2D shell surrounding the universe? What was that all about?

Well, that’s a wonderfully weird collection of ideas that go under the heading of the “holographic principle.” It’s a collection of ideas developed over the last 30 or so years, initially starting with attempts to deeply understand the physics of black holes. Black holes, we all know, are these regions where if an object falls in, it can’t get out, but the puzzle that many struggled with over the decades is, what happens to the information that an object contains when it falls into a black hole. Is it simply lost? You know, if I throw an iPad chock full of all sorts of wonderful apps and books, is all that information lost when it goes into the black hole or not? Now, Stephen Hawking believes that the information is simply lost—it falls into a black hole, gets trapped inside, you’ll never see it again, and that’s that.

The problem is, there’s a pretty basic law of physics that convinces us that information can’t be destroyed. It can be scrambled, it can be transmuted, but ultimately it can’t be destroyed. And black holes seem to be flying in the face of that, and because of that tension a number of physicists—people like Leonard Susskind, Gerard ’t Hooft, others—they tried to see whether the information might not really be lost.

And over the course of many years, they developed an idea that when an object falls into a black hole, yes indeed, it falls in, but a copy of all of its information content gets in some sense “smeared out” on the surface of the black hole, on the horizon of the black hole. Smeared out in some sense like a series of 0s and 1s, the way information is stored in a typical computer. And that idea would suggest that a three-dimensional object inside the black hole could be described by information on a two-dimensional surface that surrounds the black hole.

And it was a few years ago that string theory—the field that I work on—gave really strong evidence to many of us that this idea really might be correct. Now, the reason why that’s particularly interesting is because the space inside a black hole is not really fundamentally different—it isn’t governed by different laws than space outside a black hole, or space anywhere else, for that matter. So if we learn, as we seem to have, that a 3D object inside a black hole can be described by 2D information on a surface that surrounds it, that lesson should be quite general. Which means that 3D objects, even the ones that we’re familiar with—you and me and everything around us—may indeed be describable by information on a 2D surface that surrounds us, a surface that in some sense is at the edge of the universe. Now, this starts to sound like a hologram: a thin 2D piece of plastic which, when illuminated correctly, yields a realistic three-dimensional image. The idea is, we may be that three-dimensional image of this more fundamental information on the 2D surface that surrounds us.

Now, let me just point out, this is a hard idea even for physicists who work on it every day to fully grasp. We’re still trying to really dot the i’s and cross the t’s and understand in detail what this would mean. But there are many who now take this idea very seriously, that we may be a kind of holographic projection.

The World Science Festival is coming up at the end of the month. Do you want to tell us a bit about that?

Sure. The World Science Festival is an event that we hold each year in New York at the end of May. This year it’s May 30th to June 3rd. And the idea is to have a whole collection of programs for kids to adults, from those who know a lot about science to those who don’t, on subjects from cosmology to quantum physics to neuroscience, to sustainability, to issues in psychology, to issues having to do with pandemics and vaccines. I mean, a whole range of science where people can just come and get totally immersed and absorbed and excited by what’s happening at the cutting edge of research.

And our point in this event is to take science out of the classroom, where for many people it’s kind of a boring, dull, drab subject, and to bring the public face to face with the scientists that are pushing the envelope, where they can really experience the drama and wonder of discovery. So if anybody reading this will be in the New York area in that time period, go to worldsciencefestival.com, see the wonderful spectrum of programs that are available, and come down and just immerse yourself for a few days in what I consider the greatest drama of the human species—scientific discovery.

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: Garth Nix
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Garth Nix was born in 1963 in Melbourne, Australia. A full-time writer since 2001, he has worked as a literary agent, marketing consultant, book editor, book publicist, book sales representative, bookseller, and as a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve. Garth’s books include the award-winning fantasy novels Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen, and the cult favorite young adult SF novel Shade’s Children. His fantasy novels for children include The Ragwitch, the six books of The Seventh Tower sequence, and The Keys to the Kingdom series. His most recent books are Troubletwisters, co-written with Sean Williams, and A Confusion of Princes. More than five million copies of his books have been sold around the world, his books have appeared on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, and The Australian, and his work has been translated into 38 languages. He lives in a Sydney beach suburb with his wife and two children.

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.

What kind of an impact has being from Australia had on your fiction and on your writing career?

I think I’ve actually benefited from Australia being a kind of combination of both British and American culture. We kind of got the best of both British and American television and books, science fiction and fantasy, and so on. So I’m familiar with a lot of, for example, American books and television that a British author of my generation might not be.

I got started pretty much as the internet was on the rise, and it wasn’t all that long before the internet made being published and doing business and being read more widely a lot easier. So I think it would have had a much more profound effect even if I’d started 10 years before I did. And in fact, quite possibly, I would have moved in order to make the most of my writing and publishing opportunities. I would probably have needed to move either to the UK or to the USA.

I think there is a kind of laconic Australian leg-pulling sense of humor that is certainly in some of my stories, or is an element in some of my books, and that’s probably a direct result of where I’ve grown up. But other than that I don’t draw particularly on the Australian landscape or the Australian biology and so on. So I don’t think there’s anything you could point to and say is particularly Australian.

I mean, people often presume I’m from whatever country they’re from. So Americans presume I’m American and the British presume I’m British. And they’re surprised to discover I actually am Australian. And actually some Australians are surprised too. [laughter] I’m not quite sure what that says.

Your initial career plan was actually to be a soldier. Why did you decide to become a writer instead?

I guess the short answer to that is that I became a part-time soldier and discovered I didn’t want to become a full-time one. I joined our equivalent of the National Guard when I was 17 and I was still in school, because I was thinking that when I left school I would go to a military academy and become an officer. I enjoyed the army reserve, and I learned a lot from it, but I also . . . it helped me work out that I didn’t want to live in that kind of closed environment.

I have a lot of friends who served in the regular army for a long time. Quite a few of my friends from that time went on to become full-time soldiers. But you live in a world that is entirely army. Your whole world is pretty much that military service, and it’s very hard to do other things and to break out of that environment.

Have any of your experiences as a soldier influenced your writing at all?

Absolutely. I’ve had a lifelong interest in military history as well, and certainly that’s informed all kinds of stuff all through my books. But you take Sabriel, for example, my second published novel. It’s set in a sort of 1918-ish country that’s kind of like England, which is separated by a sort of World War I trench line called the Perimeter and a wall from a country called the Old Kingdom.

And in Ancelstierre, the 1918-ish country, technology works but magic doesn’t. Except that magic does work closer to the Wall. And when you cross the Wall, modern technology fails and magic works. But the Perimeter is manned by the army of Ancelstierre, which is really like a first World War British or Australian trench line. So certainly I drew on my experiences of how that sort of thing works for some of the characters—the officers, the NCOs, and so on.

You know, I’ve never been pursued by monsters through the night that were going to kill me when they caught me and so on, but I did participate in exercises. I did one, for example, an escape and evasion exercise, where we were just dropped in the bush with nothing, and had to escape from an entire company that was searching for me and three other people, and we had to basically try to stay away from them until dawn.

So how did you first get started publishing fiction?

I sold my first short story when I was 19. It was called “Sam, Cars, and the Cuckoo.” I sent it to White Dwarf Magazine, which at that time was a general gaming magazine but also occasionally published bits of fiction. And I’d written a few gaming articles for them—a Dungeons & Dragons piece and a Traveler piece.

I wrote the story while I was in the United Kingdom, and it was a sort of futuristic, dueling-car sort of story. And I sent it to White Dwarf because they did occasionally then print stories. And I got a telegram—this is shortly before telegrams ceased to exist—and the telegram was from Penguin in the United Kingdom, saying: “Have story ‘Sam, Cars, and the Cuckoo.’ Would like to publish in magazine Warlock.”

Warlock was a magazine . . . they only published I think three or four issues. It was a magazine that Penguin did to support their Fighting Fantasy books, their choose-your-own-adventure-style books. I don’t know if you recall those. They’ve come and gone several times, I think, over the last 25 to 28 years. And they’d done one that was a sort of Car Wars-type choose-your-own-adventure thing, and they wanted the story to support that.

An editor on White Dwarf had gone to start Warlock Magazine, and he’d taken the story with him. He’d just taken various bits of unsolicited stuff with him to look at, and he’d chosen to publish that. So it was one of those examples of a lucky break, because the story got to the right person—even though I hadn’t sent it to that magazine. And I thought, “Well, this is good. I’ll write one of these stories every couple weeks, and I’ll get the money, and it’ll be plain sailing.” And I think I probably wrote maybe 20 stories over the next five years, and couldn’t sell any of them.

Speaking of role-playing games, were you playing role-playing games? Do you still play role-playing games?

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons very early on, with that very first set, the white box with the three little booklets in it, which would have been 1974, probably. I was 11. And I ran a Dungeons & Dragons campaign all through high school, which then stopped as we all went our different paths. But I kept playing various role-playing games with friends, off and on, pretty much all through my university years, and for a few years thereafter. Then I stopped for a long time.

I love role-playing games. I’m still very interested in them; I just haven’t had time to play really for the last 20 years. I probably play about once a year. I have a particular group of friends I used to play with in Canberra, which is where I grew up, and I play with them every now and again when I get to go down. It was a very formative thing for me, and I think a big part of helping me shape my skills as a storyteller was, in fact, running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for many, many years.

You mentioned that you worked in publishing, and it looks like you’ve had a wide variety of jobs in publishing: In addition to being an author, you’ve also been an agent, editor, bookseller, publicist, and sales rep. How did you end up working at so many different kinds of jobs?

I wanted to write, and I was always writing. I was pretty much constantly writing when I was 19. But I knew I needed a day job, so I went to university and I studied writing. I majored in screenwriting. And when I finished, I got a job in a bookshop where a bunch of my friends worked, and I probably would have stayed much longer, except that the owners of the bookshop were retiring, and they actually sold the whole building, which they owned—which is the secret of actually making money in bookselling, is to own the real estate.

So they sold the bookshop, and I was offered a job by a publisher as a sales rep, because I’d gotten on well with one of the sales managers who used to come and sell books to us, and she thought I could do a good job as a sales rep. So I became a sales rep, and then a publicist with a very, very small independent publisher, and then from there I went to an academic publisher on the editorial side, which is where I wanted to be. I didn’t really want to work in sales. Though I didn’t mind it, I just would have preferred to be on the editorial side. And I joined an academic publisher, where I actually had some very good training as an editor and as a production editor—I worked on the production side quite a lot, so typesetting and layout and all that sort of stuff. And I did a monthly magazine for several years, and then I moved to trade publishing as a senior editor with Harper Collins, and I was there for quite a while.

But eventually I got sort of tired of publishing. I thought, “Okay, I’m tired of being poor, I need to get a job.” I was still writing, and in fact by that time I’d had one book out, and I was well on my way with Sabriel, my second book. But the first book hadn’t been a success, so I still needed the day job. And I had a complete change of career for a while—I got a job with a public relations and marketing company that mainly worked with technology companies. It was enormously better paid than working in publishing, but ultimately less satisfying. And in the meantime Sabriel had come out, and it was a success—it was a sort of modest success at first which built, and on the back of that I had an American deal for a couple of books, which enabled me to be a full-time writer.

So actually I became a full-time writer in 1998, but I wasn’t really prepared. I went from being incredibly busy working in my PR firm—and by that stage I’d actually started one; I was a partner in a PR and marketing firm. I went from being incredibly busy with that, and also writing at night and on the weekends, to suddenly having all the time in the world. And I think in 1998 I did less work than in any year ever, even though it was my first year as a full-time writer. I wrote less in that year than at any other time, because I hadn’t psychologically prepared myself for the change.

And after that I went back to work part-time, with Curtis Brown Australia, the literary agency. And I loved being an agent; that was probably my favorite job I’ve ever had, and I was with Curtis Brown for a few years. But I really had to decide to be a writer or an agent, because the writing had taken off, and I couldn’t devote enough time to being an agent, so I had to make a choice, and writing was always the most important thing.

I sometimes talk to people who think I got published because I was an editor, or because I was an agent, and I have to disabuse them of that notion. It wasn’t because of my emplacement within the industry. Actually the writing came first, and the publishing came first as well.

When you were writing Sabriel and its sequels, how did you go about inventing all that history, geography, the different types of magic, and so on?

With Sabriel, and this actually applies to all my work . . . despite the role-playing game background—or maybe because of it, actually, I’m not sure—I don’t do all the background and the world-building before I start the story. What I do is I work out the bare minimum I need to start the story, and often that really is a bare minimum—it’s a character in a situation, and I know nothing about the character, I know nothing about the situation, and then I think about it for a long time, and make notes about where I think the story is going to go and so on, but I don’t really make notes to do with the background or the magic system or the world. It’s really all pretty much story-based, and I start writing it, and I discover the world and the magic and everything else through the story as I’m writing it.

And sometimes that means that I have to stop and pause for some time when I do find something that needs a lot more thought. So with Sabriel, for example, I started with the prologue as it is in the book, with Sabriel being born and the baby being taken into death and so on, and that’s really where I found out, okay, well, they can go into death, and death is a river. It flows through nine gates, and they’re the precincts of death, and there are people who can go into death and so on, but I really didn’t know what I was going to do with that or anything else beyond that. Then after I had written the prologue, I probably let it sit for six months, nine months—I’d have to go back and check—quite a long time while I started thinking about the story. And originally I was going to write the book about Sabriel’s father, but once I’d written the prologue, I thought, “Well actually, Sabriel herself is more interesting.”

Then I started the book. I really didn’t know about charter magic or really much about the bells. I had introduced the bells, but I hadn’t actually worked out that they were really the seven named bells that necromancers use to control the dead and to raise the dead and to walk in death, and that Sabriel and her father—the Abhorsens—used to banish the dead and set the dead to rest. So most of it I discovered as I was writing the book. And that’s pretty much how I’ve always worked ever since. I write some small part of the book, I think about it for a long time, and then I discover the world and everything else as I go along.

What culture or language inspired you when you were creating the names of characters such as Sabriel and Lirael?

With Sabriel, I wanted a name that was dark and powerful. To try to make that name I tried various things, but ultimately with Sabriel it’s actually a combination of playing with the heraldic term for black, which is “sable,” and I was trying to combine that with various word parts or endings that evoked power, and what I ended up with was I drew on the names of angels, which often end in “-ael” or “-iel,” so the Hebrew names of angels, which instinctively to us feel powerful. And of course once I’d started along that path with that family of names that use “-ael” and “-iel” endings, I ended up having to continue with that, but it started with Sabriel. But I spend a lot of time with names. I might write down 50 variations on a theme before adopting a name, and that applies to creatures and places and everything else, as well as characters.

The Wikipedia page for your novel Abhorsen says, “The origin of this title is unknown, but Nix may have chosen the name referencing the executioner in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.” Is there any truth to that?

Yeah, that’s correct. That’s where the name comes from. It’s spelled slightly differently in Measure for Measure, and I’ve said this various times when people have asked me this that that’s actually where it came from, so I’m surprised Wikipedia hasn’t got it right and said it’s perfectly known.

Well, you could go edit it yourself, right?

[laughing] I could, that’s true. I do look at my own Wikipedia page from time to time to make sure they haven’t introduced any new, strange things, but I haven’t really looked at the ones for the individual books. Perhaps I should.

Have there been incorrect things about you on Wikipedia that you’ve seen in the past?

Let’s see, there was one, I think, talking about influences or something where someone wrote something about me being influenced by a book that came out about five years after Sabriel [laughing]. So I changed that. But yes, with Abhorsen it’s a similar thing there. Because the Abhorsens in a way are executioners—they make the dead stay dead. So I went looking for a name that was not particularly well known but that would resonate as an executioner, and I looked through lots of historical sources as well as eventually turning to Shakespeare, and choosing that name from the name of the executioner in Measure for Measure.

So what was it like returning to the Old Kingdom after having worked on the Morrow Day series for so long?

I’m working on Clariel at the moment, which is the next Old Kingdom novel. And it is the first time I’m back in the Old Kingdom in terms of prose and new stuff for really a decade, because I wrote Lirael and Abhorsen, and I’ve written various other odds and ends. I’ve written a couple of quite long short stories, novelette-length stuff, but the last of those was even a few years back.

But one of the reasons I returned was because several years ago I started working on an adaptation of Sabriel as a graphic novel, which I’ve done, so I did that adaptation, which put me back in the world. Then when I’d done the graphic novel . . . it’s a very long and convoluted story, but we’ve been in discussions with various combinations of people to make a film of Sabriel for about five years. And I was going to write the screenplay with a great American screenwriter, but unfortunately he ended up being too busy working on various other things.

So after I had written the graphic novel adaptation, I thought, “Well, I’m sort of halfway there. I might as well just write a screenplay myself.” And I do write screenplays. I’ve written several original screenplays, and as I’ve said, that’s what I studied at university. So I wrote the screenplay of Sabriel about eighteen months ago, and that really got me back in the world. Doing the graphic novel adaptation, doing the screenplay, made me think, “I do want to write another Old Kingdom novel.” And I had notes for various things, and I decided the time is right to go back, and I’m writing Clariel at the moment.

Speaking of screenplays, I came across a post online where one of your fans said, “Garth Nix has famously declined offers to make films of his books, a decision I greatly respect.” What sort of offers have you received, and why have you turned them down?

It probably would be more accurate to say that I’ve never received the right kind of offer for the films. [laughing] There have been various offers for various books at various times, and there have been offers that I have actually accepted. And we have been close to actually having . . . particularly for Sabriel, we actually have been at the point twice where everything has been agreed, we’re about to sign the papers, and it’s all fallen over at the last minute due to changes in personnel or sudden doubts about tax schemes and so on, which is all part and parcel of that world. Nothing’s done until it’s done. There’s been some stuff going on with various books, mostly Sabriel, but also with Keys to the Kingdom at various times for a long time.

I’ve taken possibly a difficult road, in that I want to have a high degree of involvement, and that makes it all much more difficult. Me writing the screenplay for Sabriel, for example, makes it less attractive to studios and the bigger production companies, which typically don’t want the original author involved for all kinds of reasons.

Maybe nothing will ever happen with any of them, maybe something will. I had a meeting yesterday with some people who want to do something with Keys. Sabriel is probably in its fifth round of negotiations with a different big company than we were negotiating with last year. This stuff goes on and on.

I also, with my wife, own an animation company, which we set up primarily to produce my brother Jonathan’s films. We’ve just made a thirty-minute animated film called The Missing Key, which premiered in the middle of last year at the Sydney Film Festival. It’s set in a reimagined 1920s Venice where everyone has gramophones for heads—or radios, or tape players. There are a couple of trailers for The Missing Key, which are at TheMissingKey.com.

In the last few years you’ve written a series of short stories about a pair of adventurers named Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz. Could you tell us a bit about those?

The idea of Mister Fitz, who’s a puppet who is also a sorcerer, I’m sure comes from the fact that my mother made papier-mâché puppets when I was a child, and in particular one year she made puppets of all the Moomintroll characters, and put on a show of Moominland Midwinter for me for my birthday party. So papier-mâché puppets were part of my childhood. And I guess one of the other main influences there would be Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Michael Moorcock stories, and so on. But I also wanted to do a sort of . . . I mean, I’m very interested in 17th-century history, and I wanted to do not just a sword-and-sorcery novel, I wanted to do a kind of “gunpowder-and-sorcery” story.

I’ve actually got another couple stories I’m working on with those characters. There are three stories now, which are available as an ebook, Sir Hereward and Mr. Fitz: Three Adventures, which you can get on Amazon and iTunes and so on.

And they live in this world where different cities have patron gods, and the two heroes go around hunting down evil gods who have gotten themselves on the proscribed list. Could you identify any influences for that idea?

Part of what I like about the story is they are part of an organization that works for a political entity that doesn’t exist anymore, and hasn’t for centuries, so they’re still doing this job even though no one necessarily wants them to do it. I haven’t explored this fully, but there’s also the question of why the gods are proscribed, why they’re on the list, should they be on the list? I mean, one of the basic influences would be stuff like Robert Howard’s Conan, in which there are often evil gods or the manifestations of ancient evil and so on.

One of your other recent stories is a science fiction vampire story called “Infestation.” How did that come about?

I think the basic impetus for that story was reading about how limelight worked—the limelight that was used to illuminate theaters and so on. It was a very dangerous method of lighting, because it often resulted in explosive combustion, and I think that I was reading about limelight and thinking about, “Gee, vampires would be really scared of limelight,” and then everything sort of carried on from there. I liked the idea of all these tooled-up vampire hunters being joined by this slacker surfer dude who looks about 19, and who carries whatever vampire-killing tools he’s got in an old airline bag.

In “Infestation,” one thing I thought was really interesting is this idea of amateur vampire hunters who are given permits by the government to go hunting vampires. Was there anything about that idea that struck you or appealed to you?

I guess that just came out of the setup. I set up essentially a contemporary world, but there are vampires that have been emerging. They’ve been woken up by the massive increase in free radio frequency, and it’s woken up all these ancient warriors, which are genetically made to kill people. Now, there would be the police and so on, but there would also be the sort of people who want to kill them as well. There would be amateurs who want to kill them for reasons of revenge, or there would be bounty hunters who would be excited by it, or by the prospects of rewards for killing them and so on. So that was one layer of the story. Then, in a way, Jay—he’s the slacker surfer dude—but he is actually the most professional vampire killer of them all, because that’s why he’s there. He’s actually been put on earth to get rid of them, way back from when they were first put there as well, as part of a backstory of an interstellar war long ago.

Let’s talk about your new book, A Confusion of Princes. What’s that about?

A Confusion of Princes is a little bit of a departure for me, because it’s science fiction—not fantasy, which is pretty much where I’ve been, novel-wise, for a long time. In fact, it’s my first science fiction novel since Shade’s Children in 1997, which was a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, and as the world has rolled around, post-apocalyptic dystopian YA is flavor of the month. It’s being re-released, so my first science fiction novel, Shade’s Children, is coming out again with a new cover and a new look in a few months, and A Confusion of Princes comes out May 15 in the US and the UK. It’s just come out this month in Australia.

And A Confusion of Princes is a science fiction story. It’s the story of Khemri, who’s a prince in a galactic empire, and the galactic empire is a vast interstellar empire inhabited by trillions of people, but it’s actually ruled and managed by 10 million princes, and the princes are modified and augmented—they’re modified genetically, they’re technologically altered and enhanced. They also have boosted psionic powers—they have mechtech, psitech, and biotech powers. And Khemri has been raised that he is a prince, he’s one of the rulers of the empire, pretty much everyone has to do as he tells them. You know, he thinks he’s just going to walk out and do whatever he wants, and he discovers that it’s actually not quite like that.

He’s been raised in ignorance of the fact that, while princes do rule the empire, they have to work within certain boundaries, and they’re also always in a contest with each other to become the next emperor. And this contest includes actually killing each other, doing anything they can get away with to each other, so he’s immediately under threat as soon as he emerges as a prince, and in fact there’s an assassination attempt upon him immediately. In order to survive, he ends up having to join the navy, where he’s safe—or relatively safe—from being assassinated, and that all leads into a whole host of adventures that he has where he discovers that perhaps being a prince is not everything that you’d want it to be, that in fact there may be advantages to not being a prince, that being human could be actually a better condition. So it’s a coming-of-age story, it’s also a becoming-human story, and it’s an adventure story.

I’m a huge Roger Zelazny fan, and so any story involving superhuman feuding princes makes me think of Nine Princes in Amber. Would you say that this is kind of like that, except a million times bigger, because there are 10 million princes?

Certainly, Zelazny is a big influence. I’m a big Zelazny fan myself; I love Nine Princes in Amber and the whole series. In actual fact, I’d not thought about it. I dedicated the book to Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton. I loved Heinlein’s and Norton’s young adult books enormously growing up, and what I was trying to do was try to write something in that vein, but updated, and I hadn’t actually thought about Zelazny, but now that you point it out, actually, of course it’s a big influence—the whole feuding princes thing, the whole secret nature of the universe. Thank you for pointing that out. I shall have to mention Zelazny as well as Heinlein and Norton when I’m talking about the book.

A Confusion of Princes is actually tied to an online videogame called Imperial Galaxy. What’s the connection there?

Imperial Galaxy is an online game that I developed with a very good friend of mine, Phil Wallach, who’s a fantastic programmer. And I’d just started mapping out A Confusion of Princes, so I said, “Let’s use the background for A Confusion of Princes—this massive galactic empire ruled by millions of princes, and the players can be princes in the game and so on.” Our plan was that you played a prince and you could choose one of the different careers within the empire.

Khemri, in the book Confusion of Princes, joins the imperial navy and goes to the naval academy, but he could have equally joined one of the other imperial services, which include colonial government and the scout service, classic science-fictional empire stuff. But we realized we couldn’t develop all of these subgames, we should just focus on one game, and so we started work on primarily a navy game, which was a sort of galactic exploration and conflict game, but it’s also a career game where you try to get promoted within the navy and you get medals and so on. And we developed a very basic version of this, which still took quite a long time and quite a lot of money, all of which came from ourselves—it was all privately funded.

And then once we had that proof of concept done, we were looking at different ways of launching it. And Facebook was taking off at that time. It must have been in 2008, and we decided that we’d do it as a Facebook game. Which we did, and it actually caught on, as a beta test. It got quite a lot of attention—we had 30,000 people playing at one stage, and then we went to try to get some money to properly develop it and expand the whole thing. Unfortunately, that was also the time of the global financial crisis, so we basically went to Silicon Valley at a time when everyone was freaking out and money was hard to come by. So, unfortunately, we couldn’t get any further investment in the game, and so it essentially just sort of atrophied.

You can still play it, if you go to ImperialGalaxy.com, you can create a character, you can do some stuff, but it’s really only a proof of concept that we developed in order to try to get more funding to properly develop the game. And, of course, the other aspect of it was that we’d hoped to develop the game to launch at the same time as the book, but of course we haven’t. So we have a book, and we have a sort of proof of concept, super-cut-down beta version of the game for people to play. So in some ways, as I said to my friend Phil, it’s kind of the most expensive and least useful piece of marketing for a book ever done.

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

Well, I should mention another fun project that I’ve been doing. I’ve been working on a children’s series called Troubletwisters, which I’m co-writing with my friend Sean Williams. It’s about a pair of twins called Jack and Jade, who come into mysterious powers that they can’t control, and they blow their house up at the beginning of the first book, and are forced to move in with their grandmother, who also has these magical gifts and is supposed to train them in the use of their gifts, and they get embroiled in an ancient struggle with an entity called The Evil, which is always trying to get into our world. So they’re a lot of fun, those books, and the second one is coming out shortly.

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: Chris Cold and Tobias Roetsch

Artist Spotlight: Chris Cold and Tobias Roetsch
J. T. Glover

This month’s cover art is a collaboration by Chris Cold and Tobias Roetsch, artists who work in multiple media to create awe-inspiring scenes of worlds other than ours. Cold is based in Russia, where he does freelance work as a digital artist. Roetsch is located in Dresden, Germany, where he works in graphic design, photography, and digital art. Each has been working long enough to build a substantial body of work, and their styles mesh seamlessly.

Can you talk about your process for collaborating on “Any Direction?”

Tobias: The idea for a collaboration was quite spontaneous. The first question was the format. Chris preferred a wide one, which was okay for me in order to make it available as dual-screen wallpaper later on. Next, Chris came up with some quick sketches to outline our ideas better. Then we just sent the image back and forth from step to step. I was responsible for the background and he for the foreground. We both worked on the final touches, and the final coloring was up to each of us individually.

Do you have any common points of inspiration? Looking at your bodies of work, I immediately get the sense of scope that also comes from the paintings of artists like Syd Mead or John Berkey, though you both seem to focus on the beauty and strangeness of extraterrestrial environments first, and the role of people in them second.

Tobias: I am more into landscapes and sceneries. Depth and scope are essential there. Together with the right lighting, they make an image stand out or look boring. My inspiration basically comes from nature, as it serves as the best source of beauty. Of course music and movies are inspirational as well.

Chris: Well, anything can be inspirational—even a plain brick wall, with the right amount of imagination. I don’t actually have any favorite genres or themes, I just have ideas, and if it seems more logical to focus on a character in a painting rather than having an overwhelming landscape (or the other way around), that’s what I’ll do.

What first drew you to fantasy and science fiction art, either looking at it or making it?

Tobias: I have always been a fan of Star Trek and Star Wars. These movies impressed me a lot when I was a child. I also played space-related games like Freelancer. One day I wanted to create other worlds on my own, and that is how I started working in this genre.

Chris: Yeah, I agree with Tobias on that one. Generally, it’s the movies, games, books that get you into that stuff. I always liked fictional stories more than non-fiction, which is probably why I dislike doing still lifes or portraits of people. It all just seems ordinary. Fantasy and sci-fi were always visually impactful.

What kind of work do you want to be doing in five years?

Tobias: The same work as today, only more refined and with more painting parts.

Chris: If you mean art-related, then, yeah, pretty much the same as now, just higher quality. Maybe doing it faster, etc., but essentially the same type of work.

What kinds of ideas or sketches have led you to your most effective finished works?

Chris: It depends on how you measure “effectiveness” in art. If you mean “popular,” the public likes certain things more than others. Dragons seem to be loved by everyone. If you mean which ones I prefer myself, it’s usually the pieces I started long ago and finished only later, like after two months. It just feels like the idea has had time to mature by then, I guess.

The digital art of twenty years ago was, regardless of effectiveness, crude compared to the breathtaking art that each of you can create at home using your own computers. What could you imagine happening with the digital medium in the next twenty years? Is there anything you want to do as artists for which the technology does not currently exist, or is not yet fully developed?

Tobias: The things that are on the market nowadays are already quite powerful. The only problem is the price. I personally cannot see any major improvements that are needed; if I could, I would sell them!

Chris: It’s doubtful that a lot of things will improve much. Artists will still need the same knowledge and skill to create quality art, even if the devices and software improve. It might make the process faster, though.

What elements can help an artist create mind-blowing science fiction art?

Tobias: Try to take your own photos and create your own stock-base. Free textures (cgtextures.com) and brushes are helpful as well. Other than that, time and patience.

Chris: Totally agree. You should also look for some live streams. Just watching someone paint in real time could help out.

Tobias, how does your experience with photography overlap with or influence your digital art? Do you do a lot of post-processing of your photos?

There are basically three different ways for me: pure digital art, mixed media of digital art and my photography, and pure photography. My photography makes it easier for me to realize my ideas in the field of digital art, as it provides me a good base to start working on. That helps a lot if you are afraid of a white or empty canvas. The photos that I take for digital projects get a lot of post-processing to make them fit into the scenes. Sometimes you need abstract thinking for this kind of task, and you wind up only paying attention to small portions of the photos.

Chris, a lot of your work has a limited or monochromatic color scheme, with a very strong sense of massing of lights and darks. Is this something you came to on your own, or did particular artists influence you in this direction?

I’m not sure, honestly. I never really cared for realism, so lighting and colors were secondary to me—I was just doing whatever looked pleasant in some way. I still do a lot of abstract stuff where I’m trying to get the shapes right first and drag the colors along; usually it tends to be monotone or black and white.

What do you have planned next, singly or working together?

Currently we both are working on our own projects. As “Any Direction” was quite successful, another collaboration could be beneficial for both of us.

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.

Requiem in the Key of Prose
Jake Kerr

Metaphor

There is such a thing as an antifuse. This device is used to maintain the ongoing flow of electricity when there is local failure.

The antifuse works similarly to a fuse in that it is designed to be sacrificed for a specific goal.

But while a fuse is sacrificed to stop electricity from flowing, an antifuse is sacrificed to guarantee that the electricity does not stop.

Personification

As it gasped for breath, the world scrambled to save itself.

Domes sprung up across the globe, built in desperation from whatever was available. Glass and steel were ripped from buildings and vehicles, then repurposed. Massive oxygen-generation arrays were cobbled together from parts found in cars, hospitals, and air conditioning units. Some cities survived. Most did not.

Norfolk, Virginia, survived by scavenging a good portion of its naval shipyard—a massive turbine and propeller from an aircraft carrier, flat sheets of iron and steel from various ships, oxygen-generating material from submarines. Norfolk’s finished oxygen generator was a single massive unit that moved so much air that it was the only city remaining on Earth where you could feel a breeze.

Foreshadowing

Adam couldn’t afford to be late for class again. Offering apologies as he went, he shoved his way past the line of students and grabbed a granola bar. Turning to head to the cafeteria register, he ran straight into a girl, sending her tray of food crashing to the floor. His first thought was to apologize and then let her deal with the mess, but one glance changed everything. Her angry pout, her short disheveled hair, the tilt of her hips—everything about her stopped him in his tracks.

He dragged his attention away from her and looked at the clock on the wall over the exit. He had to go or he could pretty much give up any hope of passing the class—and if he didn’t, he wouldn’t graduate. But as he glanced back at her, thoughts of his future fell by the wayside. She just stood there and looked at him, waiting.

He smiled and then shrugged. “Accidents happen,” was all he said before he grabbed her tray, knelt down, and started to help her clean up the mess. She crossed her arms and watched him do all the work.

He did most of the talking, but she didn’t seem to mind. He lifted a piece of lettuce off her blouse, and his heart leapt as she finally smiled at him. She said her name was Violet, and he replied by saying he would be joining her for lunch. She didn’t say yes, but he didn’t care, because she didn’t say no either.

The class he couldn’t afford to miss had ended by the time their lunch was over. Adam had given up his entire future for her. As he walked to his dorm from the cafeteria, all he could think about was how glad he was that he had.

Passive Voice

Violet was overwhelmed by Adam the first time they met. She was lost in his beautiful blue eyes, his impossibly black hair, and his smile. More than anything, it was his smile that took her breath away.

When he bumped into her at the cafeteria, she was annoyed until she caught his look. It was apologetic and mischievous and utterly charming. She had asked him several times since that day if he had meant to run into her, and his reply was always ambiguous.

She accepted that.

He was a force that she was just happy to have in her life. He loved her. She never doubted that. But they lived in two different worlds, and she had no choice but to be pulled into his. He skipped classes, argued with professors, and eventually left school. He just had no interest in the specialized study demanded by academia.

He loved to tinker, to wander, to build. Meanwhile, she watched and observed and analyzed, and—more than anything else—followed in his wake. Somehow they made it work, and she was forever thankful for that.

Onomatopoeia

There was a screech, and then a whisper, and then near silence. The whoosh of the conditioned air coming out of the massive pipe at the edge of the dome was replaced by a hum. Everyone heard it.

And then, the ringing claxon of alarms that had never been heard before.

First Person

I didn’t want Adam to go, but I knew he would. We had hours of breathable air left, and the engineers had isolated the problem as mechanical and located within the fan structure. Adam said it would be easy to fix.

I don’t know why they hadn’t anticipated problems. Maybe they didn’t have a choice—the loss of oxygen and atmosphere came so fast. It’s a wonder we’re even alive and have this dome above our head.

All I know is that no one knew the physical structure and all of the complex underlying mechanical, computer, and electrical systems as well as he did. Of course they didn’t. The computer guys knew nothing of the electrical systems. The electrical guys knew nothing of the physical supporting structures. They were all masters of one thing, while Adam—foolish, dreamy, insatiable Adam—knew a little bit about everything.

He told me that they called on him. No one else—him! And the pride in his voice broke my heart.

He stood in the living room of our apartment, leaned down, and kissed my forehead. He was smiling, and for the first time in our life together it didn’t make me feel better. I held my right hand against my belly, and lightly grabbed his arm with my left.

“It sounds dangerous.” He didn’t reply but kissed me on the lips. I shook my head. “Please don’t go; someone else can do this.”

He took my hands in his and then kissed them. “No one else knows how everything works together like I do.” He then placed my hands on my belly and covered them with his own. “Lives are depending on me.”

Then he left. It wasn’t until after that I realized he never denied that it was dangerous.

Present Tense

Adam crawls along the smooth metal of the fan structure. There are no access tunnels, ladders, or entryways here. Everything was assembled with the goal of just getting the air flowing as quickly as possible. The possibility that the fan itself would fail—a simple mechanical machine with few moving parts—was so disastrous a scenario that it hadn’t even been contemplated. So Adam can do little more than use the suction cup anchors and hope they hold if he slips.

He painstakingly removes a panel and examines wires, connections, and plugs. He can tell it was assembled in a hurry: the welds are ragged, the wires are spliced in odd locations, and he has to use shears to cut through hastily closed and soldered access panels that the engineers hoped would never have to be opened.

He replaces the panel and moves on. He doesn’t stop to think. He doesn’t consider that he is approaching the blades. He focuses on finding what has stopped them from turning.

The fan looms over Adam’s head. He is next to the massive casing that holds the blades, and it is only then that he realizes that he is on the rotating structure. He puts the thought out of his head and unscrews a panel directly attached to the base of the blades. He smiles and shakes his head.

A wire as thick as his thumb has come loose. It isn’t even frayed or broken. All he has to do is re-attach it and tighten the screw.

It is then he realizes that once he attaches the wire, the fan will immediately begin turning. He looks down at the precipitous drop. He looks back the way he came, a slippery bridge of smooth metal that will rotate the moment he attaches the wire.

Interior Monologue

I can make it. I just have to be quick and careful. The fan will turn, but it will start slow, right? So I’ll have time to get across. Violet will be waiting for me at home, and she’ll be so angry but so proud, and the baby will kick like crazy, and that will make her wince and laugh all at the same time.

Of course, it is starting to turn as I tighten the screw. The flow of electricity has been restored. Okay, that makes things more difficult, but I can still make it.

Every time we pass a log, I’ll show my son how I kept my balance. He’ll try it and fall and then laugh and be impressed at how I did not.

Do I need to put the panel back on? No. I need to get the hell out of here. Damn, this fan moves fast, but I can do it. All I need to do is keep my balance.

Violet is waiting. Our son is waiting. They need me. So here I go. It’s all about focus and control. I’ve never been good at that, but I’ll focus now. I can’t let them down.

Fragment

A slight breeze. Distant cheers. A fall.

Run-on

Adam didn’t call no one called and now there is a police car escorting another car that has pulled in front of their apartment and Violet knows that something is wrong but she doesn’t want to believe it but then they come in and they are talking but she can’t hear more than that Adam is dead and he has saved them all and she should be proud but don’t they know that she is already proud without him having to kill himself and she holds her hand against her stomach and she cries and cries and cries and then they leave and it is just her and their baby and an emptiness that she knows will never go away.

Flashback

Adam was holding her hand as they both lay on their backs on the grass, looking up at the distorted moon shining through the dome. He rolled over and leaned on his elbow. “You know, you really should find another guy.”

Violet laughed. He was handsome and popular and funny and practically everything else that she dreamed about in a boyfriend. “Why do you say that?”

“Because I’ll never amount to anything. You’re in all the advanced programs. Everyone knows that you’re in line for something special when you graduate. Hell, I can’t even hold a job.” He fell back onto the grass. “I’d just ride your coattails.”

Violet peered at him. He looked thoughtful as he peered up into space. She punched him lightly on the arm. “You know you’re a genius. I don’t know anyone smarter than you.”

“It doesn’t matter if I am.” He turned to her with a serious look on his face. “I’m a realist. I’ll never be Chief Engineer or anything else important. I don’t have the discipline for it, and—” He took a deep breath. “You deserve more than that.”

She couldn’t believe that Adam Traynor, one of the most popular guys in the entire school, didn’t think he was worthy of her. It was absurd. “I don’t need you to be anything more than who you are.” She sat up, and he stared into her face. “You are the sweetest, handsomest, smartest, most amazing man I’ve ever met. That should be enough for anyone.”

“I just don’t want to let you down.”

She leaned over and kissed him. “You couldn’t.”

Simile

It’s like having a headache all the time, knowing that the pain will never go away and all you can hope to do is ignore it for short stretches of time. It’s like someone stabbed you in the heart and then thanked you for it because it helped others. It’s like someone showing you the most wonderful and amazing gift for your child, and then taking it away before your child ever receives it.

That’s what it’s like being married to a hero.

Past Tense

As he slipped the wedding ring on Violet’s finger, Adam leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “You won’t regret this.”

Present Perfect Tense

She has never regretted it.

Second Person

That’s right. Close your eyes, my darling. Now is the time for sleep.

Someday I’ll tell you about your father, and you will be proud that you share his name. You will know how kind and generous and funny and wonderful and brave he was. And while I know that will fill you with pride and love, I know it will also hurt, because he is not here for you.

But he wanted to be, my darling; he wanted to be.

So close your eyes.

Sleep.

And breathe.

© 2012 Jake Kerr

Jake Kerr began writing short fiction in 2010 after fifteen years as a music industry columnist and journalist. To date, he has sold two stories to Lightspeed: “The Old Equations,” which went on to be named a finalist for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and “Requiem in the Key of Prose.” He also has a new story forthcoming in Fireside Magazine. A graduate of Kenyon College with degrees in English and Psychology, Kerr studied under writer-in-residence Ursula K. Le Guin and Peruvian playwright Alonso Alegria. Kerr lives in Dallas, Texas, where he is working on his first novel.

Four Short Novels
Joe Haldeman

Remembrance of Things Past

Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, unless they ran out of money. When you started to feel the little aches and twinges that meant your body was running down, you just got in line at Immortality, Incorporated, and handed them your credit card. As long as you had at least a million bucks—and eventually everybody did—they would reset you to whatever age you liked.

One way people made money was by swapping knowledge around. Skills could be transferred with a technology spun off from the immortality process. You could spend a few decades becoming a great concert pianist, and then put your ability up for sale. There was no shortage of people with two million dollars who would trade one million to be their village’s Van Cliburn. In the sale of your ability, you would lose it, but you could buy it back a few decades or centuries later.

For many people this became the game of life—becoming temporarily a genius, selling your genius for youth, and then clawing your way up in some other field, to buy back the passion that had rescued you first from the grave. Enjoy it a few years, sell it again, and so on ad infinitum. Or finitum, if you just once made a wrong career move, and wound up old and poor and bereft of skill. That happened less and less often, of course, Darwinism inverted: the un-survival of the least fit.

It wasn’t just a matter of swapping around your piano-playing and brain surgery, of course. People with the existential wherewithal to enjoy century after century of life tended to grow and improve with age. A person could look like a barely pubescent teenybopper, and yet be able to out-Socrates Socrates in the wisdom department. People were getting used to seeing acne and gravitas on the same face.

Enter Jutel Dicuth, the paragon of his age, a raging polymath. He could paint and sculpt and play six instruments. He could write formal poetry with his left hand while solving differential equations with his right. He could write formal poetry about differential equations! He was an Olympic-class gymnast and also held the world record for the javelin throw. He had earned doctorates in anthropology, art history, slipstream physics, and fly-tying.

He sold it all.

Immensely wealthy but bereft of any useful ability, Jutel Dicuth set up a trust fund for himself that would produce a million dollars every year. It also provided a generous salary for an attendant. He had Immortality, Incorporated set him back to the apparent age of one year, and keep resetting him once a year.

In a world where there were no children—where would you put them?—he was the only infant. He was the only person with no useful skills and, eventually, the only one alive who did not have nearly a thousand years of memory.

In a world that had outgrown the old religions—why would you need them?—he became like unto a god. People came from everywhere to listen to his random babbling and try to find a conduit to the state of blissful innocence buried under the weight of their wisdom.

It was inevitable that someone would see a profit in this. A consortium with a name we would translate as Blank Slate offered to “dicuth” anyone who had a certain large sum of what passed for money, and maintain them for as long as they wanted. At first people were slightly outraged, because it was a kind of sacrilege, or were slightly amused, because it was such a transparent scheme to gather what passed for wealth.

Sooner or later, though, everyone tried it. Most who tried it for one year went back for ten or a hundred, or, eventually, forever. After some centuries, permanent dicuths began to outnumber humans—though those humans were not anything you would recognize as people, crushed as they were by nearly a thousand years of wisdom and experience. And jealous of those who had given up.

On 31 December, A.D. 3000, the last “normal” person surrendered his loneliness for dicuth bliss. The world was populated completely by total innocents, tended by patient machines.

It lasted a long time. Then one by one, the machines broke down.

Crime and Punishment

Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, unless they were so horrible that society had to dispose of them. Other than the occasional horrible person, the world was in an idyllic state, everyone living as long as they wanted to, doing what they wanted to do.

This is how things got back to normal.

People gained immortality by making copies of themselves, farlies, which were kept in safe places and updated periodically. So if you got run over by a truck or hit by a meteorite, your farlie would sense this and automatically pop out and take over, after prudently making a farlie of itself. Upon that temporary death, you would lose only the weeks or months that had gone by since your last update.

That made it difficult to deal with criminals. If someone was so horrible that society had to hang or shoot or electrocute or inject him to death, his farlie would crop up somewhere, still bad to the bone, make a farlie of itself, and go off on another rampage. If you put him in jail for the rest of his life, he would eventually die, but then his evil farlie would leap out, full of youthful vigor and nasty intent.

Ultimately, if society felt you were too horrible to live, it would take pre-emptive action: check out your farlie and destroy it first. If it could be found. Really bad people became adept at hiding their farlies. Inevitably, people who were really good at being really bad became master criminals. It was that, or die forever. There were only a few dozen of them, but they moved through the world like neutrinos: effortless, unstoppable, invisible.

One of them was a man named Bad Billy Beerbreath. He started the ultimate crime wave.

There were Farlie Centers where you would go to update your farlie—one hundred of them, all over the world—and that’s where almost everybody kept their farlies stored. But you could actually put a farlie anywhere, if you got together enough liquid nitrogen and terabytes of storage and kept them in a cool dry place out of direct sunlight.

Most people didn’t know this; in fact, it was forbidden knowledge. Nobody knew how to make Farlie Centers anymore, either. They were all built during the lifetime of Joan Farlie, who had wandered off with the blueprints after deciding not to make a copy of himself, himself.

Bad Billy Beerbreath decided to make it his business to trash Farlie Centers. In its way, this was worse than murder, because if a client died before he or she found out about it, and hadn’t been able to make a new farlie (which took weeks)—he or she would die for real, kaput, out of the picture. It was a crime beyond crime. Just thinking about this gave Bad Billy an acute pleasure akin to a hundred orgasms.

Because there were a hundred Bad Billy Beerbreaths.

In preparation for his crime wave, Bad Billy had spent years making a hundred farlies of himself, and he stored them in cool dry places out of direct sunlight, all around the world. On 13 May 2999, all but one of those farlies jump-started itself and went out to destroy the nearest Farlie Center.

By noon, GMT, police and militia all over the world had captured or killed or subdued every copy (but one) of Bad Billy, but by noon every single Farlie Center in the world had been leveled, save the one in Akron, Ohio.

The only people left who had farlies were people who had a reason to keep them in a secret place. Master criminals like Billy. Pals of Billy. They all were waiting at Akron, and held off the authorities for months, by making farlie after farlie of themselves, like broomsticks in a Disney cartoon, sending most of them out to die, or “die,” defending the place, until there were so many of them the walls were bulging. Then they sent out word that they wanted to negotiate, and during the lull that promise produced, they fled en masse, destroying the last Farlie Center behind them.

They were a powerful force, a hundred thousand hardened criminals united in their contempt for people like you and me, and in their loyalty to Bad Billy Beerbreath. Somewhat giddy, not to say insane, in their triumph after having destroyed every Farlie Center, they went on to destroy every jail and prison and courthouse. That did cut their numbers down considerably, since most of them only had ten or twenty farlies tucked away, but it also reduced drastically the number of police, not to mention the number of people willing to take up policing as a profession, since once somebody killed you twice, you had to stay dead.

By New Year’s Eve, A. D. 3000, the criminals were in charge of the whole world.

Again.

War and Peace

Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, unless they wanted to, or could be talked into it. That made it very hard to fight wars, and a larger and larger part of every nation’s military budget was given over to psychological operations directed toward their own people: Dulce et decorum est just wasn’t convincing enough anymore.

There were two elements to this sales job. One was to romanticize the image of the soldier as heroic defender of the blah blah blah. That was not too hard; they’d been doing that since Homer. The other was more subtle: convince people that every individual life was essentially worthless—your own and also the lives of the people you would eventually be killing.

That was a hard job, but the science of advertising, more than a millennium after Madison Avenue, was equal to it, through the person of a genius named Manny O’Malley. The pitch was subtle, and hard for a person to understand who hasn’t lived for centuries, but shorn of Manny’s incomprehensible humor and appeal to subtle pleasures that had no name until the 30th century, it boiled down to this:

A thousand years ago, they seduced people into soldiering with the slogan, “Be all that you can be.” But you have been all you can be. The only thing left worth being is not being.

Everybody else is in the same boat, O’Malley convinced them. In the process of giving yourself the precious gift of nonexistence, share it with many others.

It’s hard for us to understand. But then we would be hard for them to understand, with all this remorseless getting and spending laying waste our years.

Wars were all fought in Death Valley, with primitive hand weapons, and the United States grew wealthy renting the place out, until it inevitably found itself fighting a series of wars for Death Valley, during one of which O’Malley himself finally died, charging a phalanx of no-longer-immortal pikemen on his robotic horse, waving a broken sword. His final words were, famously, “Oh, shit.”

Death Valley eventually wound up in the hands of the Bertelsmann Corporation, which ultimately ruled the world. But by that time, Manny’s advertising had been so effective that no one cared. Everybody was in uniform, lining up to do their bit for Bertelsmann.

Even the advertising scientists. Even the high management of Bertelsmann.

There was a worldwide referendum, utilizing something indistinguishable from telepathy, where everybody agreed to change the name of the planet to Death Valley, and on the eve of the new century, A.D. 3000, have at each other.

Thus O’Malley’s ultimate ad campaign achieved the ultimate victory: a world that consumed itself.

The Way of All Flesh

Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, so long as just one person loved them. The process that provided immortality was fueled that way.

Almost everybody can find someone to love him or her, at least for a little while, and if and when that someone says goodbye, most people can clean up their act enough to find yet another.

But every now and then you find a specimen who is so unlovable that he can’t even get a hungry dog to take a biscuit from his hand. Babies take one look at him and get the colic. Women cross their legs as he passes by. Ardent homosexuals drop their collective gaze. Old people desperate for company feign sleep.

The most extreme such specimen was Custer Tralia. Custer came out of the womb with teeth, and bit the doctor. In grade school he broke up the love training sessions with highly toxic farts. He celebrated puberty by not washing for a year. All through middle school and high school, he made loving couples into enemies by spreading clever vicious lies. He formed a Masturbation Club and didn’t allow anybody else to join. In his graduation yearbook, he was unanimously voted “The One Least Likely to Survive, If We Have Anything To Do With It.”

In college, he became truly reckless. When everybody else was feeling the first whiff of mortality and frantically seducing in self-defense, Custer declared that he hated women almost as much as he hated men, and he reveled in his freedom from love; his superior detachment from the cloying crowd. Death was nothing compared to the hell of dependency. When, at the beginning of his junior year, he had to declare what his profession was going to be, he wrote down “hermit” for first, second, and third choices.

The world was getting pretty damned crowded, though, since a lot of people loved each other so much they turned out copy after copy of themselves. The only place Custer could go and be truly alone was the Australian outback. He had a helicopter drop him there with a big water tank and crates of food. They said they’d check back in a year, and Custer said don’t bother. If you’ve decided not to live forever, a few years or decades one way or the other doesn’t make much difference.

He found peace among the wallabies and dingoes. A kangaroo began to follow him around, and he accepted it as a pet, sharing his rehydrated KFC and fish and chips with it.

Life was a pleasantly sterile and objectless quest. Custer and his kangaroo quartered the outback, turning over rocks just to bother the things underneath. The kangaroo was loyal, which was a liability, but at least it couldn’t talk, and its attachment to Custer was transparently selfish, so they got along. He taught it how to beg, and, by not rewarding it, taught it how to whimper.

One day, like Robinson Crusoe, he found footprints. Unlike Robinson Crusoe, he hastened in the opposite direction.

But the footprinter had been watching him for some time, and outsmarted him. Knowing he would be gone all day, she had started miles away, walking backwards by his camp, and knew that his instinct for hermitage would lead him directly, perversely, back into her cave.

Parky Gumma had decided to become a hermit, too, after she read about Custer’s audacious gesture. But after about a year she wanted a bath, and someone to love her so she wouldn’t die, in that order. So under the wheeling Milky Way, on the eve of the 31st Century, she stalked backwards to her cave, and squandered a month’s worth of water sluicing her body, which was unremarkable except for the fact that it was clean and the only female one in two hundred thousand square miles.

Parky left herself unclothed and squeaky clean, carefully perched on a camp stool, waiting for Custer’s curiosity and misanthropy to lead him back to her keep. He crept in a couple of hours after sunrise.

She stood up and spread her arms, and his pet kangaroo boinged away in terror. Custer himself was paralyzed by a mixture of conflicting impulses. He had seen pictures of naked women, but never one actually in the flesh, and honestly didn’t know what to do.

Parky showed him.

The rest is the unmaking of history. That Parky had admired him and followed him into the desert was even more endearing than the slip and slide that she demonstrated for him after she washed him up. But that was revolutionary, too. Custer had to admit that a year or a century or a millennium of that would be better than keeling over and having dingoes tear up your corpse and spread your bones over the uncaring sands.

So this is Custer’s story, and ours. He never did get around to liking baths, so you couldn’t say that love conquers all. But it could still conquer death.

© 2000, 2003 by Joe Haldeman.

First appeared in French as “Quatre courts roman” in Destination 3001.

Originally published in English in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Joe Haldeman writes for a living and teaches as an absorbing hobby. He has been a full-time writer since 1969, except for the occasional teaching and a short tenure as senior editor of Astronomy Magazine. He has taught writing at MIT every fall semester since 1983. Main hobbies are astronomy, bicycling, watercolor, and guitar. His latest books are Marsbound, Starbound, and Earthbound. He's hard at work on a stand-alone novel, Work Done for Hire.

The Sweet Spot
A.M. Dellamonica

“I’m gonna visit Dad.” Matt is curled in the passenger seat of their antique minivan, scowling as offworlders tromp and slither past their front bumper. Shooting a glance at Ruthie through long, pretty eyelashes, he flips down the visor to check the mirror.

“Dad’s dead, Matt. He can’t see your haircut.”

“Want to come?” Falsely casual.

“Can’t.” She throws the word through the driver’s-side door; she’s outside, waving merchandise: soda, water bottles, scented strips of leather and fur. “I have to pay off Security.”

“You could trust Romano with that. You do it for him often enough.”

“I could get a job in a feeler bar too,” she snaps . . . then regrets it. So much for vowing to be more patient.

Matt gives up on finger-combing his curls. Coaxing a battery out of their aging solar charger, he checks the readout. “Did you use this?”

Ruthie winces. “An old lady paid me forty for half a charge. Her son just died.”

A flat glare.

“Forty, Matt.”

“So you get forty, I get half a visit with the old man.”

“With an answering machine.” He can dress it up all he likes, but the battery is just juice for an interactive video of their father. “Waste of credit, waste of time.”

“You suck, Ruth.” He edges out of the van, stomping off to the cemetery.

Ruthie reins in an urge to beg forgiveness. It’s done; she’ll grovel later. Instead, she climbs into the van, thumbing the air conditioning and leaning into the vent.

Since they came to Kauai, her fantasies have been about winter. Deep breath, in through the nose, out through the teeth. As cool air chills her sinuses, she imagines snow melting through her mittens.

She mimes packing a snowball, rolling it across an unbroken plain of white. She barely has the bottom ring of a snow fort built when someone raps on the window.

It’s Sam, a.k.a. Security, leering down her shirt through the tinted glass.

Ruthie shuts off the air conditioning, grabs the weekly payoff, and slides out into the balmy fist of the Hawaiian afternoon.

Sam is a spotty-faced redhead whose scarred right eye socket bulges with a cut-rate offworld prosthetic. Blue gel shot through with veins pulses at her, fronted by a lens that has the fluted edges of a poker chip.

“Morning, Ruth.” Onion breath ruffles her hair.

“Hi.” She holds out the weekly bribe.

He pockets it without counting. “We gotta talk. Inside?”

She shakes her head. “Graveyard. I’ll have Romano watch the van.”

“Please. You think I want a piece of your skinny ass?”

She shrugs. Not all the women on Vender’s Row pay their bribes in cash. Besides, she doesn’t want that onion smell in the car. “Gotta stretch my legs.”

He’s not thrilled, she can tell, but he follows her through the converted golf course to the high point of the cliff.

It’s a scenic viewpoint, postcard perfect: ocean glittering silver-blue under swirled, fragile clouds. An anti-aircraft platform, purple-black in color and shaped like a rosebud, drifts lazily among the cirrus wisps, guarding the Kauai channel and the offworlders’ undersea military base there.

A hundred feet down, the aliens are splashing around the beach at the foot of the cliff, exuberant as children. They are kids, pretty much—barely grown, they were yanked from the seas of their homeworld to help the Democratic Army in its war against the Fiends.

“I never see anyone but you up here,” Sam says. “Gawking at squid makes it hard to forget the war.”

Ruthie leans on a sand-colored boulder. Below, the offworlder soldiers wrestle, dunking each other, spitting water and tootling, churning up the Pacific as they tangle themselves into knots and then slip free. “Is that possible, forgetting the war?”

“Who the fuck knows. Hey, want an apple?”

“In exchange for what?”

“My treat.” He holds out the gleaming red fruit and Ruthie can’t help but snatch it. It’s tart enough to make her pucker, and she nearly moans at the first bite.

“So . . .” Sam glances around. “Army’s decided to put in another databank for the graveyard.”

Ruthie catches a dribble of apple juice on her chin, licking it off her thumb. “More storage . . . the Democratic Army expects more casualties?”

“Lot more. Fiends have been cleaning their clocks.”

“What’s that to do with me and Matt?”

“They’re not digging up the green for no mausoleum.”

“They’re putting it in the parking lot?” The fruit in her mouth becomes rubber; she fights to swallow. “How big?”

“Arches, plaques, statues, flowers—the whole nine.”

“The entire parking lot?”

“Half,” he says. “I’m giving twenty vendors their walking papers.”

Yet another crypt. She can already see it, a square, depressing monument to the endless grind of this war. The Fiends—Friends of Liberation, they call themselves—have been making headway in their drive to secure the whole planet.

“Kabuva’s gonna have to send even more of them,” she says, indicating the squid on the beach.

“Yeah. That’ll happen,” Sam grunts.

“We’re never gonna beat them at this rate.”

“It’s cute, Ruthie, your belief in the great Demo cause. But I ain’t here to debate strategy.”

“You’re right. Matt and I can pay more, if you give us a chance. There’ll be fewer vendors, less competition, more mourners. Can we stay?”

“Well . . .” Sam drawls, fake eye pulsing, snaggled teeth peeping out from under the skirt of his loose upper lip. “That depends.”

The graveyard greens are lined with mosaic paths made of slate tiles. Each tile is inscribed with the name and signature of a Demo soldier, along with their mourning catalog code. Twining over the immaculate fairways, the paths lead to curls of hedge and stone walled alcoves, nooks constructed to offer privacy to visitors.

Near an erstwhile sandtrap is a bench and an interactive obelisk. Ruthie pulls up its menu and lets it eat five of their hard-earned bank credits to pay for power. There’s a jack for a battery—it’s cheaper to bring your own juice—but she only needs a minute.

Fog machines belch out mist and a micro-projector starts up, projecting an image of Daddy within the fog. He’s young, the invincible father she remembers from childhood, and Matt has apparently set his defaults so he’s proportionately big. She has to look up, way up, because she only comes to his thigh.

The giant face brightens as Daddy looks down. “You’re starting to look like your mother,” it says. “How old—”

“I’m looking for Matthew,” she interrupts. “I thought this was your spot.”

Dad scratches his non-existent beard, buying time as, elsewhere, computers process her statement. “Your brother’s not on the system, Ruth.”

“Since when?”

“Twelve days, ten hours, six minutes.”

She sinks to the edge of the sand trap and buries her face in her hands. Okay, don’t be stupid, don’t be a baby. Where you been going, Matt? Little lying bastard . . .

The ghost shifts, sitting. “Shit day, kid?”

She remembers the phone call when he asked her that. She was in school . . . she’d failed an art exam. Through a teary haze she sees him flicker, resetting. He resolves on a chair near the obelisk, older now, normal sized. He’s playing his guitar.

That does it . . . she melts down completely. Dad plays rock songs under the tree, burning cash Ruthie can’t afford while she cries and cries.

When she’s stopped carrying on like a diva, he tilts his head: “Want to talk about it?”

“You’re an answering machine,” she says. “Cobbled-together phone conversations, vidblog entries . . .”

“If you prefer, I’ll direct you to my physical remains.”

Remains. A dust-proof tube containing a DNA sample, buried under the slate tile that bears his name. “I’d prefer to talk to Matt.”

“Sorry, hon. I don’t know where your brother is.”

She glares at the illusion. “We’re losing our parking spot. No spot, no money. No money, no food. You get that? Matt told you how we live?”

“Yes.”

It hurts to look at him, but the tears have carried her back to a hot, achy place where she can function.

“Sam will let us stay, but there’s strings.”

She can’t go on. Demo Intelligence has to be monitoring these conversations, combing transcripts for damaging admissions. Exploiting people’s grief. She can’t tell him Sam’s joined the Fiends. “Anyway, bribe’s going up.”

“Can you pay more?” Daddy asks.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

Matt turns up after midnight, slipping through the side door and delicately arranging his skin and bones onto their mattress. She doesn’t bother pretending to be asleep. He wouldn’t be fooled; they’ve lived this way too long.

“Where were you? I went to the sandtrap.”

“It’s a big boneyard, Ruth.”

She pinches him. “You haven’t been online all week.”

He lights up. “You talked to Dad?”

“Where were you?”

He bites his lip. “I’m seeing someone.”

“Oh.” A flare of unease, somewhere in her marrow.

“Yeah, ‘oh.’ You want to know who?”

“Someone I won’t like, I guess, or you’d have told me. But human.”

“Yeah, human. I don’t do squid, Ruth. It’s Holly Scott.”

“Oh.” Holly’s a Democratic war veteran, like Sam. She’s royalty here on the Row—lives in a real camper, sells water and battery charges. She runs a good patter on the human and offworlder marks alike; her wares sell well.

She’s old—thirty at least, twice Matt’s age.

“That’s all you have to say? No lecture on fucking the competition?”

He’s spoiling for a fight, but Ruthie doesn’t have one in her. “If I was that much of a bitch last time you had a girlfriend, I’m sorry.”

“If?” He morphs from mad to scared. “No. You’ve been drafted, haven’t you?”

“Worse.” She laughs weakly. “Sam’s with the Fiends.”

“So? We knew there had to be a few on the Row.”

“They want us to sing, Mattie.”

That gets his attention—his eyes widen, and he lets out a peep.

“He called it a project,” she tells him. “We sing, it draws the squid off Fry Beach. Fiends want to plant a bomb there.”

“We’re a diversion?”

“I guess.”

He sits, toppling a stack of soda cans. “No way.”

“Half the parking lot’s getting demolished. Sam says we can keep our spot—”

“I am not helping those bastards commit murder.”

“You think I want to?”

“You’re considering it, aren’t you?”

“Where we gonna go? We got a good thing here . . .”

“I remember what a good thing is, Ruthie, and this isn’t it.”

“You ungrateful shit. We’re eating, aren’t we?”

“You’d rather kill people than go hungry?”

“Hungrier?” But now Ruthie’s ashamed of herself. She fumbles for his hand. “We’ll offer more money.”

With that, the resistance vanishes. Matt presses his forehead against hers, and they don’t say any more.

Next morning they pull out all the stops, hustle-hustle, sell-sell-sell. Ruthie does a tune-up on the van, fills the fuel tank, changes the oil. Matt trades their heavy goods for lightweight stuff: touchables, music files, things they can hawk at any roadside. By dinner the van is ready to move. They have a few weeks of water and protein mallows laid by, just in case.

They’re discreet, but the Row talks. Sam shows, a disappointed expression on his narrow face. “You pissing on my offer, then?”

Ruthie lets him into the van. Steady voice, she thinks, don’t quaver. “We’ll pay more to keep our spot—”

“Did I ask for more money?”

“We can’t sing,” Matt says.

“Can’t?” Sam’s gelatinous eye rolls in his direction, its false iris cycling wide.

“Take the payment, Sam, okay?” Ruthie pleads.

“No.” Sam holds up both hands, making an “L” with his left finger and thumb, mirroring the gesture with his right hand so that his prosthetic leers at them through a rectangular space the size of a photoprint.

“What’s that?” Ruthie says.

“Making sure I’m in the now,” he says. “Kids, this is the moment when we become Friendly.”

Matt puts up a hand. “There’s no attitude here.”

“No scam,” Ruthie agrees. “We’ll pay more, or go.”

“It’s just singing’s impossible.”

“And I’m—we’re sorry.”

“Gee,” says Sam. “Can’t I change your mind?”

The back of her hand tingles. Itches. Pinches. A tiny silver dot pimples up from under the skin behind her thumb.

She looks up, horrified, locking on Sam’s flinty, half-alien gaze. Her flesh, around the metallic pinprick, is heating up. There are other itches now, too, a scattering of discomfort across her body.

“The apple you gave me . . .”

Sam smirks.

“What’s happening?” Matt asks.

The dot behind her thumb begins to smoke. The burn’s a candleflame at first—and that’s bad enough—but the fiery seed is getting bigger, glowing like the cherry of a lit cigarette, frying more skin by the second.

“Ruthie?”

Another of the itches, above her navel, goes hot.

Matt catches her as she doubles over. She can’t squelch a growl of pain. Wasp-heat in her temple, the stink of scorching hair, makes her gag.

Matt is screaming now.

No, she thinks, he’s hurting Mattie too. She tries to lift herself off the van floor, to fight back.

Sam is laughing.

And Matt’s not hurt, she realizes. It’s worse—he’s begging. “Stop, you win, we’ll do it, don’t hurt her.”

Tears stream down Ruthie’s face—crying again, second time in two days, she thinks—as Sam grabs her hair. “That true, Ruth? You’ll sing for us?”

“Yeah,” she manages.

The seeds cool off, forming blisters.

“Saturday, dinnertime, at the Atlanta monument.” Sam nudges her with a toe; she has his pants leg fisted in her hands. “Sing for at least an hour. Don’t try running off—we’re listening, we’ll know.”

He steps over her to the door, patting a furious Matt on the head.

“Sam . . .”

He turns, and she finds herself wanting to cringe, like a whipped dog. “We’ll need our stuff.”

“That so?”

“She’s right.” Matt says. “It was in storage in Koloa. Masks, instruments, sound system. Can you find it?”

“We can find anything.” With that, Sam steps back out onto the parking lot.

Matt slams the door, throws the locks, and flicks the a/c on full. He yanks out their first aid kit, rummaging. “What do we do?” he asks, sounding like a little boy.

Shakily, Ruthie knots her fingers together in an approximation of a Kabuva tentacle knot. “Practice,” she says, but the sign she makes is different; it’s the squid word for deception.

“Isshy taught us the Kabuva folk songs back when he and Dad were living together,” Matt says. He’s standing beyond the bedroom door of Holly’s camper. Ruthie is stretched out on the bed.

“Your dad had a sugar squiddy?” Holly pokes Ruth’s shoulder with a stubby finger; she’s using bootlegged med equipment to locate the fireseeds.

Ruthie nods. “By the time I was ten, we were a bona fide novelty act.”

“Human kids who sing squid. I can see it.” Holly’s apparent lack of judgment annoys her. She wonders if this is playacting, if Matt already told Holly their secrets.

“Dancing monkeys, they called us,” he says.

“Found another one.” Holly eases the point of her knife into Ruthie’s shoulder. “Over soon. Just breathe.”

Matt keeps talking. “Isshy got on the wrong side of his superiors and got reassigned to The Sponge.” He means the massive undersea installation the squid built in the middle of the Kauai channel. “Dad got drafted into the Demo Army. We moved here to live with a cousin, who got Dusted.”

“Okay, doll, I got all the seeds. You doing okay?”

“Thanks, Holly.” Ruthie reaches for her clothes.

“And now the Fiends want you to sing so they can crisp some calamari?”

“That’s their plan, yeah.”

“You want my opinion?”

“What, for free?” Ruthie says.

“Do as they tell you.”

“Don’t joke, Holly,” Matt says.

“So not joking.”

“But—you fought with the squid against them.”

Holly steps out into her kitchenette, where she can see them both. “Democrats are losing the war. The squid’ll give up on us.”

“Holly, come on! What the Fiends want—it’s terrorism.”

“I don’t want to cross the playground, Matt, I don’t. But in another few years, Fiends’ll invade the U.S. After that . . .”

“After that, what?”

“It’ll take years. But Earth’s gonna be all Fiend, all the time. They’re gonna crawl over the whole map and eject every offworlder they find.”

“There’s gotta be some chance.”

She shook her head. “Make some Friends, Matt. They’re psycho, but they’ll be running things.”

“Switch sides? You wouldn’t do that.” He runs a finger down her face, stunned. Ruthie wonders: does he love her?

“This whole war’s going in the squatter—”

“We aren’t murderers, Holly.”

“It’s not like they’re asking you to kill people.”

“It is like that. Isshy was a mother to us.”

“Squid momma left you here, grafting,” Holly says. “For that you defy the Fiends?”

“We’re not doing it,” Ruthie says. “We just haven’t figured out how to screw them yet.”

Her brother’s fingers come together, unconsciously expressing relief. Ruthie immediately feels better. Mattie’s on board, she’s still in charge. How hard can fooling Sam be? Being a Fiend doesn’t make him smart.

“Thanks for patching me up, Holly,” she says, then forces herself to add: “You two should get in some time together while you can. We may have to run for it.”

Matt catches her arm. “You won’t decide anything without me?”

“I figure something out, I’ll text you.”

With that, she heads for the beach path, vying with other scrabblers to sell touchables to the squid heading down to the water. She sells fake fur, fruit leather, perfumed gel, acting like everything’s okay.

Squid are blind, their senses based in taste, smell, and touch—preferably all three at once. They’ll stick a tentacle into any stinky moist thing they can find. Even the poorest scrabblers out here are wearing protective masks over their eyes and mouths.

Of course they’ll pay you to take the masks off, to let them ramble their tentacles over your mouth and eyes, better yet into your pants. Every so often, a fry goes into the bushes with one of the vendors, bringing ’em back well-paid and covered in suckermarks.

Ruthie’s not up for that, but she leaves her burned hand unbandaged, offering a taste of her blood.

It’s over an hour before she gets what she’s hoping for—a squid whose mantle veins go green with compassion when it tastes her wound. A bleeding heart.

Ruthie’s fingers form the sign for help as the stranger’s tentacle slithers over her . . . and before it can pull away, she passes it a KabuBraille note she’s been coding, surreptitiously, this whole time.

It recoils, vanishing into the crowd. Ruthie starts coding another strip, hoping for another chance.

At sundown, she goes back to the sand trap. Dad is older when she boots him up: older, uniformed, hollow-eyed. “You look more like your mother every day.”

“I need to get Matt somewhere safe,” she says. “If Isshy boots you, will you tell him?”

“Isshy rarely—”

“I’m trying to get him a message.”

More beard-scratching: it’s processing again. “I know you’re unhappy about Isshy and me . . .

She winces. “Stop. Play guitar—”

“It was love, you know—” He freezes.

Like Matt and Holly? Her face burns. “I’m over it, Dad. I’m sorry they broke you up.”

The personality simulator is so good sometimes—he looked surprised, even grateful.

Steel up. Squash that rush of emotion. Ruthie’s about to walk off when Dad starts strumming. She sinks to the grass, fixing her eyes on the anti-aircraft platform over the Sponge, the glimpse of ocean through the trees.

That evening Sam turns up with their old music trunk.

“You owe me back rent on that locker,” he says. “Fifty, due after the concert.”

“Yeah, yeah.” They shut themselves in the van and Ruthie restrings her minicello. Matt warms up, warbling soprano Kabuva laments.

As they sing, they flash squid signs back and forth, piecing together a conversation the Fiend listening devices won’t pick up. Ruthie tells him she’s trying to contact Isshy.

Matt digs in his pocket for a balled-up sheet of seapaper. Ruthie runs a hand over the Kabubraille quickly; it is an advertisement for their concert.

Where? she signs.

All over the Island. Throwing back his head, Matt lets out a string of notes, all too high and atonal to sound musical to human ears. It is one of the squids’ favorites, a howl of despair about leaving Mother Sea for faraway, violent shores. Disaffected soldiers went nuts over it.

Ruthie joins in, again fighting tears. She never liked this piece; what’s wrong with her?

When the song ends, she turns away, hiding her brimming eyes. “Let’s take a break—do some planning.”

“You’re the planner.” Sour. Talk about disaffected . . .

“I meant . . . wanna talk song order?”

“Up to you.”

She fumbles the minicello, which feels small. Her hands have grown. “Matt, you’re the one told Sam we’d do the dancing monkey on Saturday.”

“I should’ve let him burn you to a crisp?”

Ruthie’s stomach burns. She was stupid; she took candy from a stranger. “Fine, everything’s my fault.”

“Any song order is okay,” he sighs. “Shits, I’m already tired of this.”

“We ended up getting drafted after all, Matt.”

“Just not by the side we thought?”

“At least our so-called friends are winning,” she says, for the benefit of the listening Fiends.

“Now there’s a silver lining.” He smiles weakly, signing: Are we gonna be okay?

In response, Ruthie plucks through the opening notes of a Kabuva folk song. Its first line translates, roughly, to: “All we can do is hope.”

Next day she is emptying out the minivan’s squatter when two goons whisk her off to the cemetery. It’s just as she imagined in her wildest paranoid dreams: there’s a secret door within the mausoleum, then a long elevator ride down to dull, fluorescent-lit Demo offices.

The air is stale but cold—air-conditioned. Heavenly.

Matt is already there. “I told them everything,” he blurts.

“It’s okay—”

“Hurry up.” Her abductor, a lanky blond Amazon in a Democratic Army uniform, cuts them off. “We can’t have the Fiends noticing you’re gone.”

They’re marched to a squalid concrete box that smells of body fluids. An interrogation room? Ruth tenses . . .

Then Matt cries out like a baby. Isshy is here.

Her brother hurls himself across the room, burying his face in the slime of Isshy’s mantle, keening in Kabuva. Ruthie feels herself glancing askance at their captor. The woman’s disgust is obvious.

That makes it easier. When Isshy extends a tentacle, Ruthie takes it without hesitation, pressing her knuckles into the gelatinous flesh of her father’s one-time lover, then transferring a tentacle to her armpit so he can taste her.

“You’re here to get us away?” she asks, hating that she sounds like a little kid.

Isshy’s cap tightens, puckering.

Matt pulls his face out of the slimy hug. “Isshy?”

“I am getting immigration permits for you.”

“Immigrate to where? Canada?” Her legs quake with almost sexual longing. Snow, she thinks. Cold.

“You’ve betrayed the Fiends, child. There’s nowhere on Earth we can hide you.”

“The Sponge, then?” Matt asks. “With you?”

The soldier grunts. “To a refugee city on Kabuva.”

“Offworld?” Living away from Earth, on a wholly squid planet . . . Ruthie tries to imagine it.

“With you?” Matt repeats.

Isshy signs regret. “My term of service was extended. But Earthtown is a good place. It’s on Blighted Sea.”

Extended service: Isshy is buying their freedom with another tour. Ruthie shoves guilt aside; he got them into this, after all. “Can we leave right away?”

Matt startles. His face darkens.

“Or what, Mattie? Stay and die?”

“Can’t we go to the Sponge?”

The alien caresses Matt’s neck. “It’s not allowed, spawn. We’ve been infiltrated, twice—humans have been banned from the base.”

“I never heard that.”

“It’s classified,” snarls the Demo officer. “Don’t leak it. And before you go thinking there’s some choice in this for you, let me lay this out. You do the concert for the Fiends, then you go to Kabuva. That’s the deal.”

Ruthie’s jaw drops. “You want us to sing?”

“You’re bait, child.” Isshy is white now—angry. “They hope to catch the Fiends booby-trapping Fry Beach.”

“Pardon me for trying to save some of your people, Sir. Fry Beach has state-of-the-art defenses, kids. If we find out how the Fiends plan to crack its security . . .”

“We can’t go back out there.” Ruthie says. “If they realize we’ve reported them, Mattie and I are dust.”

“Life’s a gamble. You sing, we bag ’em, you go to Kabuva.”

“Or we stay and the Fiends kill us?” Ruthie says.

“Pretty much. We done here?” the woman asks.

She looks at Matt. “What do you think?”

“I think if there was any real choice, you wouldn’t ask my opinion.”

“Matthew,” Isshy says, reproachful. “Your sister is doing her best.”

Her brother turns red.

“Say your goodbyes.” The woman mimes scrubbing her hands, as if they’re dirty. “I gotta get the boy out of here.”

“Leave Matt,” says Ruthie. “I’ll go first.”

“He’s been missing longer.” She takes obvious pleasure in peeling Matt out of Isshy’s grip. “We’re taking you out near your favorite obelisk, son; far as the Fiends know, you’ve been visiting Daddy.”

Matt clings to the outstretched tentacle until she has bundled him out of reach. Then he’s gone, and Ruthie’s alone with Isshy.

“Thanks for helping us.”

“Child. There was never any question.”

“We have to run all the way to your homeworld?”

Tentacles spiral in distress. “Our attempt to help your government is falling into disgrace at home; the number of casualties is catastrophic.”

“You never lose. When you show up, the Fiends always retreat.”

“Ruth, it may be years yet before we leave. But leave we will. In defeat, I fear. You, Matthew—anyone close to us—you won’t be safe. Everyone with sense is getting their loved ones to Earthtown.”

“Your pets?”

“I hoped you weren’t angry with me anymore, spawn.”

“Isshy, we’re in the shits now because of you and Dad.”

“I can’t change the past,” he says. “But this could be a better life. Do you want to spend your days jammed in a car, starving?”

“I want my goddamn father back,” she says sulkily.

He fluffs his cap. “I wish that, too.”

She spends the evening atop her cliff, watching the fry gambol in the tide. Dozing with her back against a tree, she dreams of being on the run with Matt. Her brother is a baby again, easily transported, too young to balk or argue. They hide in a blizzard, amid curtains of freezing snow. Ruthie feels safe, invisible, in control.

When she wakes, Matt is beside her, watching the sunrise. Light spills gold over the water; peach and magenta clouds unfurl, like streamers, across the sky.

His eye falls on one of her burns.

“Don’t worry about me,” she says, irked.

“Cast iron maiden.” It is something Dad called her, before he went away.

“It wouldn’t hurt you to steel up a little.”

“Get cold,” he says.

“Life hasn’t been getting easier.”

“Cut off human contact. Dump my lover without so much as a ‘do you mind, dear?’ Yeah, that’s an answer.”

Tears spring to her eyes. Her fingers twist, of their own accord, into a Kabuva sign: hurtful, unfair.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean—” He reaches out.

She slaps his hand away. One of us has to have a hard shell, she thinks. You can’t be an open wound all the time.

“I screw up, Mattie,” she says instead. “I don’t ask your opinion enough. But this mess—I didn’t make it.”

He forms a clumsy chain of signs. We should run.

Which is ridiculous. Instead of saying so, she signs: How?

Matt opens a bottle of water and takes a long, slow gulp. “Something terrible’s going to happen,” he says, in his clear, light voice and Ruthie feels her stomach dropping into a pit.

Detonate a Dust bomb on a windless day, and it will expand in a sphere before falling downward. The nanotech weapon disassembles everything it touches. If it falls straight down, touching bare ground, the crater it makes will form a hemisphere.

The Atlanta monument, like so many from this war, reflects this reality. Its focus is a copper-lined crater, big enough to stand in and half-filled with offerings: flowers, stuffed animals, photos of the dead. Carved into its rim are images of the city in various eras, artists’ renderings of famous citizens and heroes from the Democratic Army. The Fiends reduced Atlanta to atoms.

It is a creepy place to stage a concert.

Ruthie and Matt set up their backstage in a nearby grove of magnolia trees, pitching a small tent and unpacking their gear: the electronic synthmasks that play their backup music, the minicello, and two mesh sheaths woven from strips of seaweed. It has been years since they performed, and Ruthie’s sheath is a bit short. But they still fit; neither of them has gained much weight since the so-called good days.

Squid start arriving before they are set up, flowing up from the beach, arriving in flitters, in buses from the barracks in Koloa. First there’s a half a dozen of them, then thirty, then fifty.

Sam breezes into the tent, leering. “Ready for the big day, kiddies? Where’s your donation bowl? You’re supposed to be singing for money.”

“We are singing for money,” she says. “How long do you need to do your thing? An hour?”

“That should do. I expect a cut, you know.”

She goes through the motions of haggling. Finally she says, “I need to dress.”

His plastic eye pulses. “Go ahead.”

“Get out, pervert,” Matt says, and to her relief he does. “You okay, Ruth?”

“No. I’m a big bag of emotion.”

“It’s not a bad thing.”

“Bad timing,” she says.

“It’s always a bad time,” her little brother says.

Wrestling with grief and fear, she peers outside.

In the time it has taken to play out the little farce with Sam, the audience has swelled. Hundreds of squid are out there, setting up seawater sprinklers, lying on kelp mats and each other. They smell of overripe seafood, and they are passing things around—touchables, food, scent packs, drugs. Vendors from the Row hawk goods avidly from the sidelines.

Disturbed, Ruthie wrings out the brine in her dress, slithering into the mummy-wrap of seaweed strips. She swallows a pill called Hot Flash that will send her sweat glands into overdrive, then tests the microphone and display screen within her singing mask. Her hair goes into a ponytail; then she slicks it against her neck with gel.

The waiting squid are hooting a tune, their flute-like voices tootling in the meadow. It is a song about death—that’s all the fry seem to sing anymore—and it brings up the gooseflesh on her burned arms.

“Lament to Blighted Sea,” says Matt. He is in his sheath, ready but for his mask. “You think we’ll get to Kabuva?”

“Don’t see why not,” she lies, then surprises herself by hugging him. “If anything happens, we meet on the cliff.”

“The high spot.” With a half-smile, he pulls his mask over his face. She does likewise, adjusting her mic.

Tech check. The words appear just above her eyes.

A-OK, she texts back.

“Let’s do this,” Mattie says aloud.

They emerge from the tent, hand in hand, and the cacophony of singing toots turns into a one-pitch whistle. Matt steps up to the lip of the Atlanta monument. The weeds on his legs and arms flutter in the breeze, carrying scents to their audience.

Ruthie is almost too stunned to move. There must be a thousand of them. How did the Fiends do it? She sees officers here and there, trying to disperse the crowd, only to get slapped down by a dozen hostile fry.

Bad morale, she thinks.

Mattie is letting go with a piercing high note. She activates the synthesized accompaniment coded into her mask, and the air fills with a clatter of shells and stones in surf.

Don’t let your mind wander onstage. Daddy’s voice, so deeply internalized it feels real. She boots the minicello, playing tones and chirps as her brother works his way into the song. It is a bloody-minded kid’s chant about newborn squid drifting below the skin of the sea, yanking birds down from the surface, devouring them.

The listeners are mottling, their caps turning beige and coral as they relax. Ruthie remembers opening with this same piece in dozens of clubs across America. Daddy intertwined with Isshy at the water’s edge, Scotch and soda in his hand. A sick and twisted family, sure, but a happy one. Isshy believed they’d win the war. Matt loved it all so much . . .

They finish singing the birdhunter piece and warble through a transition. Maybe we can do this in Earthtown, Ruthie muses, be dancing monkeys on Kabuva.

Concentrate, her dead father’s voice admonishes.

Another platoon of squid wriggles over Vendor’s Row as Matt begins a piece about pressure hallucinations—squid hear ghosts when they swim at too great a depth. Ruthie opens her throat, pouring out accompaniment. The words are grim, but the alien harmonies ring true.

They segue into “Mad Moon,” a more patriotic piece, and the audience pales.

Ruthie brings the song order up on her mask display, deleting several numbers. She switches the rah-rah stuff with bleaker material, and texts the revised list to her brother. Matt nods without breaking a beat. He cuts the last chorus of “Mad Moon” and starts an awful ballad about two doomed lovers who get poached out on a rock in the sun, because the tide refuses to come ashore and save them.

Yeah, they love that one. Morbid fucking aliens.

The crowd gets ever more dense. A few officers go through the motions of trying to curb their wayward troops, while clearly enjoying the show. The stick-in-the-muds have been dragged to the middle of the mosh, entrapped, their protests drowned out. The crowd is singing along, so loudly that Ruthie’s mask vibrates against her cheekbones.

A thousand squid, she thinks. Why sabotage Fry Beach when they could just drop a dust bomb right here . . .

Her skin crawls. She misses a note. Matt, lost in song, doesn’t notice.

We have time, Ruthie thinks. Sam’s only ten feet away . . . if a bomb’s going off, he’ll get clear.

We have to get them away, she texts. THIS is the trap.

Matt doesn’t answer; his eyes must be shut.

Dropping notes left and right, Ruthie calls up a menu of folk songs coded into the synthesizer. There used to be some old “Follow the Leader” things, pieces they rarely played in clubs but  . . . here. Matt knows this one.

First, they’ll need to get these soldiers up. Watching Sam fearfully, she waits for the end of their current number, then wrenches her minicello through the opening of a jig called “Jump and Fly.”

Matt jerks in surprise . . . then he starts in on the intro as smoothly as if they’d planned it.

We’re the trap? He finally responds. U think?

Yes. Lead them to the beach.

A creeping chill on her neck makes Ruthie glance back.

It’s too late. The fog generators in the graveyard are all running, pouring out an opaque, rolling cloud. Behind them, the ground is crawling with shadows.

So much for finesse. Ruthie stops playing. The crowd, which was beginning to dance, devolves into confusion.

“Run!” Ruthie screams, even as she hears the phut of the first grenade launcher.

Hundreds of the fry react, surging away from each other at shocking speed. Unarmed, out of armor, they can only flee as the first grenades pop overhead, coffee-colored Dust spreading in the air like bursts of fireworks before smearing into a deadly, downward-drifting haze. Squid who are fully enveloped by the brown wind vanish in a puff. Others lose body parts: caps, heads, tentacles.

The shrieking starts.

Grabbing Matt’s hand, Ruthie runs crossways between the approaching Fiends and the roiling, panicked offworlders. She drags her brother toward the cliff. A mumble, an undertone, follows: She is praying. In Kabuva.

Fry surge onto the beach path, fleeing for the ocean and safety. Others charge unarmed into a row of flamethrowers at the front of the Fiend line—with predictable results. One cluster hurls fry over the wall of fire, up and into the oncoming wave of human guerillas. It is an acrobatic trick Ruthie saw performed in the same clubs where she sang as a child. The flying squid vanish into the graveyard, disappearing into the cloud of smoke and artificial fog. Human screams spread where they land.

One freaked-out squid slides toward them, whistling, and Ruth’s idiot brother tries to jump in front of her. She yanks him to ground, shouting the word for “Ally” in Kabuva. A line of old-fashioned bullets chops through the alien before she finds out if it heard her.

“Stop!” Matt yells. But Ruthie scrambles up, mulishly using her greater strength to force him to the high ground. If they can get around the Fiends, they might escape before the Sponge orders a strike on the whole cemetery.

“Ruthie!”

“All we can do now is get away!” The words run in her head: getaway, get away, git way. But Mattie breaks free, leaving her with a handful of seaweed rags as he pounces on half of a dead Fiend holding a grenade launcher.

Phut! He fires at the edge of the cliff. A Dust grenade digs out the edge, excavating a crater ten feet deep. He promptly fires two more, creating a scalloped incline within the rock, a crude slide, a new escape route to the beach.

Squid start pouring through the gap, making for the ocean. They don’t wait for the Dust to settle, and so they bleed and lose tentacles as they flee.

Ruthie makes a grab for the launcher. “Someone’s gonna mistake you for a target.”

“Let ’em.” His face is wet. Stupid, over-sensitive . . .

He still needs her.

“You’ve done your good deed; now come on!” A grenade detonates nearby and they flee uphill. The high point of the cliff is in sight; they’re clearing the Fiend line . . . almost at the rear. No chance to get to the van from here, the van’s gone. She must write it off as she has written off her parents, an education, an ordinary life.

All Ruthie has left is her brother.

A Fiend comes up the path, methodically firing into the crowd of squid escaping down Matt’s improvised slide.

It’s Holly. Ruthie feels it before she truly recognizes the other woman. Holly has decided that she needs a Friend or two.

Their eyes meet, and Holly’s lips move. Shouting Matt’s name, but he can’t hear it over the battle noise.

Stay quiet. He’ll never know who was behind them. Damned cougar—Matt doesn’t need her. Run for it, force the squid to send them to Kabuva. He’ll never know.

It is an easy choice, the kind she’s been making on his behalf for years.

Instead, Ruthie tugs his arm. Points.

Matt turns. Looks. Sees that his supposed girlfriend is in on the squid slaughter.

Ducking a flying piece of monolith, Matt sprints back. He and Holly converge, crouch with their heads close. She reaches for Matt’s hand . . .

Ruthie clutches her chest. Will he take it? If Mattie leaves her, who is she supposed to be?

The ground turns to jelly underfoot.

There’s an awful, impossible light, a glow on the horizon. A torch thrusts up from the ocean, burning white-hot to the clouds. It bulges, grows fat, frying the anti-aircraft platform to ash. And now the sound is coming too, a clatter and shriek, something tearing that was never meant to be torn, louder, louder. The sound bites like a saw into her skull.

On the battlefield, everyone—human and offworlder—freezes, staring in the direction of Oahu.

It’s the Sponge, it has to be the Sponge, and how could the Fiends touch that? How could there ever be the slightest possibility of them being powerful enough to destroy an undersea squid—

Suddenly everything on the battlefield is after Ruthie.

No, she realizes, they aren’t running toward me. They’re fleeing to the high ground, like mice. That’s right, there’ll be a shockwave, won’t there?

“Matthew,” Ruthie shouts, before a scorching wind lifts her off her feet, ripping her mask off, flipping her ass over tea kettle through the air.

When she awakes, she is soaked, sore, and draped on a delicate arch of rock formed by the cliff’s edge and the lip of a dust crater. She raises herself to hands and knees, pulling her seaweed mini-skirt over her ass and staring around.

Water has battered the graveyard, making pools of its many Dust craters. Seawater, she guesses, thrown by the explosion. The rush of water doused the Fiends’ flamethrowers, giving the squid an edge in the battle—the offworlders seem to be winning now. Drowned and strangled humans litter the ground, along with Dust-proof tubes containing human DNA samples—coffin tubes—that jut up from the murk of the one-time golf course.

There is no sign of Matt or Holly.

Everything’s quiet, Ruthie realizes. The battle is continuing in total silence.

“Actually, spawn, I think you’ve gone deaf.” The words are Kabuva. Dad and Isshy are with her, flickering in the fog.

Isshy is right. She cannot hear a thing.

Her eyes find a column of black smoke rising in the east, where the Sponge was. “Isshy’s dead then,” she says and it is a surprise how much that hurts.

“Is he?” Dad says.

“I must be,” the squid says. “Child’s right. Nothing could survive that.”

“You’re hallucinations,” she says slowly. “The baby . . . I would know if Matt was dead, wouldn’t I?”

“Oh yes,” Dad says. “You would know. He’s alive—oh, wait, there’s his body.”

She screams, curling up in the crater.

“That’s not him, Ruth,” Isshy says, in that annoyingly gentle voice. “Jacob, you’re upsetting her.”

Is it or isn’t it? She crawls to the gristle lying face down in the bloody sand.

“What did I tell you, child?”

It is a stranger. He is lying atop an old machine gun. An extra cartridge of bullets is taped to his fist.

Ruthie crouches by the body, takes a breath, makes a snowball. She can see it, just as she sees Dad and Isshy loitering beside her. She tosses it into the pond, but there is no splash, no ripples.

Write it off, she thinks. The van, Isshy, escape, even my sanity. But not Matt. Never Mattie.

All around her, the skirmish continues, a disorderly cut and thrust. Down the cliff path, her intended route of escape, is a squad of Demo soldiers and armed squid, trotting up to join the fight. A trio of Fiends has set up an ambush for them. They’ve hidden behind a toppled cenotaph and are making ready to Dust the upcoming squad.

“What now?” Dad asks. “Dive into the fray looking for your brother?”

“What chance would she have?” Isshy replies. “One side or the other is bound to shoot her.”

“He’s right. Hon, you can’t start looking until the dust settles. Pardon the pun.”

“And you can’t help your brother if you’re dead.”

“Shut up!” She covers her deaf ears.

“She should go to ground. Wait this out.”

“Sure,” Dad says, “And end up a prisoner of whichever side wins?”

“You’ve been drafted after all, Ruth,” Isshy tells her. “Pick a side and go with it.”

“The Fiends killed us,” Dad reminds her. “They made you do the concert. Sam fed you fireseeds. Isn’t that him over there, directing that ambush team?”

“The Fiends are winning the war,” Isshy disagrees. “Her best chance for finding Matt might be to get Friendly. Holly thought so.”

Is it that simple? Take up the gun, join the ambush? Start killing the Demos, or start killing squid?

“Hon,” Dad says.

“Shut up,” she says. “You’re a hallucination.” She looks from one parent to the other, Dad with his guitar and reproachful eyes, Isshy pale-blue with understanding. Who would Matt pick?

Impossible to say. His mom’s a squid, his lover’s a Fiend.

But she does know who she’d most like to kill.

“Ruth,” argues Isshy. “The Fiends are winning. Your best chance to get offworld died with me. Forget the Democratic cause and join that ambush. Pick the winning team.”

“They’re not winning this battle, are they?” Dad counters. “She doesn’t get off the cliff, today, she doesn’t get to look for anyone.”

Daddy’s right. And the squid might be grateful if she pitches in; the Fiends just regard it as their due.

She pries the clip of ammo off the corpse and slithers up to the lip of the dust crater. She takes careful aim at the center of Sam’s back, the sweet spot, as he prepares to slaughter the contingent of Demos and squid coming up from below.

“Ashes to ashes,” she murmurs—and it is so weird not to be able to hear her voice, or even the pop pop pop of the gun as she signs up for the Demo cause, pulling the trigger and sending her alleged brethren to oblivion.

© 2012 A. M. Dellamonica

A.M. Dellamonica has published short fiction in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Strange Horizons, Tor.com and over thirty other magazines and anthologies. Her first novel, urban fantasy Indigo Springs, won the 2010 Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic; a sequel, Blue Magic, was released by Tor in April, 2012. A resident of Vancouver, British Columbia, Dellamonica’s home online is at www.alyxdellamonica.com. She teaches writing through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.

The Giving Plague
David Brin

1.

You think you’re going to get me, don’t you? Well, you’ve got another think coming, ‘cause I’m ready for you.

That’s why there’s a forged card in my wallet saying my blood group is AB Negative, and a MedicAlert tag warning that I’m allergic to penicillin, aspirin, and phenylalanine. Another one states that I’m a practicing, devout Christian Scientist. All these tricks ought to slow you down when the time comes, as it’s sure to, sometime soon.

Even if it makes the difference between living and dying, there’s just no way I’ll let anyone stick a transfusion needle into my arm. Never. Not with the blood supply in the state it’s in.

And anyway, I’ve got antibodies. So you just stay the hell away from me, ALAS. I won’t be your patsy. I won’t be your vector.

I know your weaknesses, you see. You’re a fragile, if subtle devil. Unlike TARP, you can’t bear exposure to air or heat or cold or acid or alkali. Blood-to-blood, that’s your only route. And what need had you of any other? You thought you’d evolved the perfect technique, didn’t you?

What was it Leslie Adgeson called you? “The perfect master? The paragon of viruses?”

I remember long ago when HIV, the AIDS virus, had everyone so impressed with its subtlety and effectiveness of design. But compared with you, HIV is just a crude butcher, isn’t it? A maniac with a chainsaw, a blunderer that kills its hosts and relies for transmission on habits humans can, with some effort, get under control. Oh, old HIV had its tricks, but compared with you? An amateur!

Rhinoviruses and Flu are clever, too. They’re profligate, and they mutate rapidly. Long ago they learnt how to make their hosts drip and wheeze and sneeze, so the victims spread the misery in all directions. Flu viruses are also a lot smarter than AIDS ’cause they don’t generally kill their hosts, just make ’em miserable while they hack and spray and inflict fresh infections on their neighbors.

Oh, Les Adgeson was always accusing me of anthropomorphizing our subjects. Whenever he came into my part of the lab, and found me cursing some damned intransigent leucophage in rich, Tex-Mex invective, he’d react predictably. I can just picture him now, raising one eyebrow, commenting dryly in his Winchester accent.

“The virus cannot hear you, Forry. It isn’t sentient, nor even alive, strictly speaking. It’s little more than a packet of genes in a protein case, after all.”

“Yeah, Les,” I’d answer. “But selfish genes! Given half a chance, they’ll take over a human cell, force it to make armies of new viruses, then burst it apart as they escape to attack other cells. They may not think. All that behavior may have evolved by blind chance. But doesn’t it all feel as if it was planned? As if the nasty little things were guided, somehow, by somebody out to make us miserable . . . ? Out to make us die?”

“Oh, come now, Forry,” he would smile at my New World ingenuousness. “You wouldn’t be in this field if you didn’t find phages beautiful, in their own way.”

Good old, smug, sanctimonious Les. He never did figure out that viruses fascinated me for quite another reason. In their rapacious insatiability I saw a simple, distilled purity of ambition that exceeded even my own. The fact that it was mindless did little to ease my mind. I’ve always imagined we humans over-rated brains, anyway.

We’d first met when Les visited Austin on sabbatical, some years before. He’d had the Boy Genius rep even then, and naturally I played up to him. He invited me to join him back in Oxford, so there I was, having regular amiable arguments over the meaning of disease while the English rain dripped desultorily on the rhododendrons outside.

Les Adgeson. Him with his artsy friends and his pretensions at philosophy—Les was all the time talking about the elegance and beauty of our nasty little subjects. But he didn’t fool me. I knew he was just as crazy Nobel-mad as the rest of us. Just as obsessed with the chase, searching for that piece of the Life Puzzle, that bit leading to more grants, more lab space, more techs, more prestige . . . leading to money, status, and, maybe eventually, Stockholm.

He claimed not to be interested in such things. But he was a smoothy, all right. How else, in the midst of the Thatcher massacre of British science, did his lab keep expanding? And yet, he kept up the pretense.

“Viruses have their good side,” Les kept saying. “Sure, they often kill, in the beginning. All new pathogens start that way. But eventually, one of two things happens. Either humanity evolves defenses to eliminate the threat or . . .”

Oh, he loved those dramatic pauses.

“Or?” I’d prompt him, as required.

“Or we come to an accommodation, a compromise . . . even an alliance.”

That’s what Les always talked about. Symbiosis. He loved to quote Margulis and Thomas, and even Lovelock, for pity’s sake! His respect even for vicious, sneaky brutes like the HIV was downright scary.

“See how it actually incorporates itself right into the DNA of its victims?” he would muse. “Then it waits, until the victim is later attacked by some other disease pathogen. Then the host’s T-Cells prepare to replicate, to drive off the invader, only now some cells’ chemical machinery is taken over by the new DNA, and instead of two new T-Cells, a plethora of new AIDS viruses results.”

“So?” I answered. “Except that it’s a retrovirus, that’s the way nearly all viruses work.”

“Yes, but think ahead, Forry. Imagine what’s going to happen when, inevitably, the AIDS virus infects someone whose genetic makeup makes him invulnerable!”

“What, you mean his antibody reactions are fast enough to stop it? Or his T-Cells repel invasion?”

Oh, Les used to sound so damn patronizing when he got excited.

“No, no, think!” he urged. “I mean invulnerable after infection. After the viral genes have incorporated into his chromosomes. Only in this individual, certain other genes prevent the new DNA from triggering viral synthesis. No new viruses are made. No cellular disruption. The person is invulnerable. But now he has all this new DNA . . .”

“In just a few cells—”

“Yes. But suppose one of these is a sex cell. Then suppose he fathers a child with that gamete. Now every one of that child’s cells may contain both the trait of invulnerability and the new viral genes! Think about it, Forry. You now have a new type of human being! One who cannot be killed by AIDS. And yet he has all the AIDS genes, can make all those strange, marvelous proteins . . . Oh, most of them will be unexpressed or useless, of course. But now this child’s genome, and his descendants’, contains more variety . . .”

I often wondered, when he got carried away this way. Did he actually believe he was explaining this to me for the first time? Much as the Brits respect American science, they do tend to assume we’re slackers when it comes to the philosophical side. But I’d seen his interest heading in this direction weeks back, and had carefully done some extra reading.

“You mean like the genes responsible for some types of inheritable cancers?” I asked, sarcastically. “There’s evidence some oncogenes were originally inserted into the human genome by viruses, just as you suggest. Those who inherit the trait for rheumatoid arthritis may also have gotten their gene that way.”

“Exactly. Those viruses themselves may be extinct, but their DNA lives on, in ours!”

“Right. And boy, have human beings benefitted!”

Oh, how I hated that smug expression he’d get. (It got wiped off his face eventually, didn’t it?)

Les picked up a piece of chalk and drew a figure on the blackboard.

HARMLESS—> KILLER!—> SURVIVABLE ILLNESS—> INCONVENIENCE—> HARMLESS

“Here’s the classic way of looking at how a host species interacts with a new pathogen, especially a virus. Each arrow, of course, represents a stage of mutation and adaptation selection.

“First, a new form of some previously harmless micro-organism leaps from its prior host, say a monkey species, over to a new one, say us. Of course, at the beginning we have no adequate defenses. It cuts through us like Syphilis did in Europe in the Sixteenth Century, killing in days rather than years . . . in an orgy of cell feeding that’s really not a very efficient modus for a pathogen. After all, only a gluttonous parasite kills off its host so quickly.

“What follows, then, is a rough period for both host and parasite as each struggles to adapt to the other. It can be likened to warfare. Or, on the other hand, it might be thought of as a sort of drawn out process of negotiation.”

I snorted in disgust. “Mystical crap, Les. I’ll concede your chart, but the War analogy is the right one. That’s why they fund labs like this one. To come up with better weapons for our side.”

“Hmm. Possibly. But sometimes the process does look different, Forry.” He turned and drew another chart.

BEGIN HARMLESS—>KILLER!—>SURVIVABLE ILLNESS—>INCONVENIENCE —>BENIGN PARASITISM—>SYMBIOSIS

“You can see that this chart is the same as the other, right up to the point where the original disease disappears.”

“Or goes into hiding.”

“Surely. As E. coli took refuge in our innards. Doubtless long ago the ancestors of E. coli killed a great many of our ancestors before eventually becoming the beneficial symbionts they are now, helping us digest our food.

“The same applies to viruses, I’d wager. Heritable cancers and rheumatoid arthritis are just temporary awkwardnesses. Eventually, those genes will be comfortably incorporated. They’ll be part of the genetic diversity that prepares us to meet challenges ahead.

“Why, I’d wager a large portion of our present genes came about in such a way, entering our cells first as invaders . . .”

Crazy sonovabitch. Fortunately, he didn’t try to lead the lab’s research effort too far to the right on his magic diagram. Our Boy Genius was plenty savvy about the funding agencies. He knew they weren’t interested in paying us to prove we’re all partly descended from viruses. They wanted, and wanted badly, progress on ways to fight viral infections themselves.

So Les concentrated his team on vectors.

Yeah, you viruses need vectors, don’t you. I mean, if you kill a guy, you’ve got to have a liferaft, so you can desert the ship you’ve sunk, so you can cross over to some new hapless victim. Same applies if the host proves tough, and fights you off—gotta move on. Always movin’ on.

Hell, even if you’ve made peace with a human body, like Les suggested, you still want to spread, don’t you? Big-time colonizers, you tiny beasties.

Oh, I know. It’s just natural selection. Those bugs that accidentally find a good vector spread. Those that don’t, don’t. But it’s so eerie. Sometimes it sure feels purposeful . . .

So the flu makes us sneeze. Salmonella gives us diarrhea. Smallpox causes pustules, which dry, flake off, and blow away to be inhaled by the patient’s loved ones. All good ways to jump ship. To colonize.

Who knows? Did some past virus cause a swelling of the lips that made us want to kiss? Heh. Maybe that’s a case of Les’s “benign incorporation” . . . we retain the trait, long after the causative pathogen went extinct! What a concept.

So our lab got this big grant to study vectors. Which is how Les found you, ALAS. He drew this big chart covering all the possible ways an infection might leap from person to person, and set us about checking all of them, one by one.

For himself he reserved straight blood-to-blood infection. There were reasons for that.

First off, Les was an altruist, see. He was concerned about all the panic and unfounded rumors spreading about Britain’s blood supply. Some people were putting off necessary surgery. There was talk of starting over here what some rich folk in the States had begun doing—stockpiling their own blood in silly, expensive efforts to avoid having to use the Blood Banks if they ever needed hospitalization.

All that bothered Les. But even worse was the fact that lots of potential donors were shying away from giving blood because of some stupid rumors that you could get infected that way.

Hell, nobody ever caught anything from giving blood . . . nothing except maybe a little dizziness and perhaps a zit or spot from all the biscuits and sweet tea they feed you afterwards. And as for contracting HIV from receiving blood, well, the new antibodies tests soon had that problem under control. Still, the stupid rumors spread.

A nation has to have confidence in its blood supply. Les wanted to eliminate all those silly fears once and for all, with one definitive study. But that wasn’t the only reason he wanted the blood-to-blood vector for himself.

“Sure, there are some nasty things like AIDS that use that vector. But that’s also where I might find the older ones,” he said, excitedly. “The viruses that have almost finished the process of becoming benign. The ones that have been so well selected that they keep a low profile, and hardly inconvenience their hosts at all. Maybe I can even find one that’s commensal! One that actually helps the human body.”

“An undiscovered human commensal,” I sniffed doubtfully.

“And why not? If there’s no visible disease, why would anyone have ever looked for it! This could open up a whole new field, Forry!”

In spite of myself, I was impressed. It was how he got to be known as a Boy Genius, after all, this flash of half-crazy insight. How he managed not to have it snuffed out of him at OxBridge, I’ll never know, but it was one reason why I’d attached myself to him and his lab, and wrangled mighty hard to get my name attached to his papers.

So I kept watch over his work. It sounded so dubious, so damn stupid. And I knew it just might bear fruit, in the end.

That’s why I was ready when Les invited me along to a conference down in Bloomsbury, one day. The colloquium itself was routine, but I could tell he was near to bursting with news. Afterwards, we walked down Charing Cross Road to a pizza place, one far enough from the University area to be sure there’d be no colleagues anywhere within earshot—just the pre-theatre crowd, waiting till opening time down at Leicester Square.

Les breathlessly swore me to secrecy. He needed a confidant, you see, and I was only too happy to comply.

“I’ve been interviewing a lot of blood donors lately,” he told me after we’d ordered. “It seems that while some people have been scared off from donating, that has been largely made up by increased contributions by a central core of regulars.”

“Sounds good,” I said. And I meant it. I had no objection to there being an adequate blood supply. Back in Austin, I was pleased to see others go to the Red Cross van, just so long as nobody asked me to contribute. I had neither the time nor the interest, so I got out of it by telling everybody I’d had malaria.

“I found one interesting fellow, Forry. Seems he started donating back when he was twenty-five, during the Blitz. Must have contributed thirty-five, forty gallons, by now.”

I did a quick mental calculation. “Wait a minute. He’s got to be past the age limit by now.”

“Exactly right! He admitted the truth, when he was assured of confidentiality. Seems he didn’t want to stop donating when he reached sixty-five. He’s a hardy old fellow . . . had a spot of surgery a few years back, but he’s in quite decent shape, overall. So, right after his local Gallon Club threw a big retirement party for him, he actually moved across the county and registered at a new blood bank, giving a false name and a younger age!”

“Kinky. But it sounds harmless enough. I’d guess he just likes to feel needed. Bet he flirts with the nurses and enjoys the free food . . . sort of a bi-monthly party he can always count on, with friendly appreciative people.”

Hey, just because I’m a selfish bastard doesn’t mean I can’t extrapolate the behavior of altruists. Like most other user-types, I’ve got a good instinct for the sort of motivations that drive suckers. People like me need to know such things.

“That’s what I thought too, at first,” Les said, nodding. “I found a few more like him, and decided to call them ‘addicts.’ At first I never connected them with the other group , the one I named ‘converts.’”

“Converts?”

“Yes, converts. People who suddenly become blood donors—get this—very soon after they’ve recovered from surgery themselves!”

“Maybe they’re paying off part of their hospital bills that way?”

“Mmm, not really. We have nationalized health, remember? And even for private patients, that might account for the first few donations only.”

“Gratitude, then?” An alien emotion to me, but I understood it, in principle.

“Perhaps. Some few people might have their consciousnesses raised after a close brush with death, and decide to become better citizens. After all, half an hour at a blood bank, a few times a year, is a small inconvenience in exchange for . . .”

Sanctimonious twit. Of course he was a donor. Les went on and on about civic duty and such until the waitress arrived with our pizza and two fresh bitters. That shut him up for a moment. But when she left, he leaned forward, eyes shining.

“But no, Forry. It wasn’t bill-paying, or even gratitude. Not for some of them, at least. More had happened to these people than having their consciousnesses raised. They were converts, Forry. They began joining Gallon Clubs, and more! It seems almost as if, in each case, a personality change had taken place.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that a significant fraction of those who have had major surgery during the last five years seem to have changed their entire set of social attitudes! Beyond becoming blood donors, they’ve increased their contributions to charity, joined the Parent-Teacher organizations and Boy Scout troops, become active in Greenpeace and Save The Children . . .”

“The point, Les. What’s your point?”

“My point?” He shook his head. “Frankly, some of these people were behaving like addicts . . . like converted addicts to altruism. That’s when it occurred to me, Forry, that what we might have here was a new vector.”

He said it as simply as that. Naturally I looked at him, blankly.

“A vector!” he whispered, urgently. “Forget about typhus, or smallpox, or flu. They’re rank amateurs! Wallies who give the show away with all their sneezing and flaking and shitting. To be sure, AIDS uses blood and sex, but it’s so damned savage, it forced us to become aware of it, to develop tests, to begin the long, slow process of isolating it. But ALAS—”

“Alas?”

“A-L-A-S.” He grinned. “It’s what I’ve named the new virus I’ve isolated, Forry. It stands for ‘Acquired Lavish Altruism Syndrome.’ How do you like it?”

“Hate it. Are you trying to tell me that there’s a virus that affects the human mind? And in such a complicated way?” I was incredulous and, at the same time, scared spitless. I’ve always had this superstitious feeling about viruses and vectors. Les really had me spooked now.

“No, of course not,” he laughed. “But consider a simpler possibility. What if some virus one day stumbled on a way to make people enjoy giving blood?”

I guess I only blinked then, unable to give him any other reaction.

“Think, Forry! Think about that old man I spoke of earlier. He told me that every two months or so, just before he’d be allowed to donate again, he tends to feel ‘all thick inside.’ The discomfort only goes away after the next donation!”

I blinked again. “And you’re saying that each time he gives blood, he’s actually serving his parasite, providing it a vector into new hosts . . .”

“The new hosts being those who survive surgery because the hospital gave them fresh blood, all because our old man was so generous, yes! They’re infected! Only this is a subtle virus, not a greedy bastard, like AIDS, or even the flu. It keeps a low profile. Who knows, maybe it’s even reached a level of commensalism with its hosts—attacking invading organisms for them, or . . .”

He saw the look on my face and waved his hands. “All right, far-fetched, I know. But think about it! Because there are no disease symptoms, nobody has ever looked for this virus, until now.”

He’s isolated it, I realized, suddenly. And, knowing instantly what this thing could mean, career-wise, I was already scheming, wondering how to get my name onto his paper, when he published this. So absorbed was I that, for a few moments, I lost track of his words.

“  . . . and so now we get to the interesting part. You see, what’s a normal, selfish Tory-voter going to think when he finds himself suddenly wanting to go down to the blood bank as often as they’ll let him?”

“Um,” I shook my head. “That he’s been bewitched? Hypnotized?”

“Nonsense!” Les snorted. “That’s not how human psychology works. No, we tend to do lots of things without knowing why. We need excuses, though, so we rationalize! If an obvious reason for our behavior isn’t readily available, we invent one, preferably one that helps us think better of ourselves. Ego is powerful stuff, my friend.”

Hey, I thought. Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs.

“Altruism,” I said aloud. “They find themselves rushing regularly to the blood bank. So they rationalize that it’s because they’re good people . . . they become proud of it. Brag about it . . .”

“You’ve got it,” Les said. “And because they’re proud, even sanctimonious about their newfound generosity, they tend to extend it, to bring it into other parts of their lives!”

I whispered in hushed awe. “An altruism virus! Jesus, Les, when we announce this  . . .”

I stopped when I saw his sudden frown, and instantly thought it was because I’d used that word, “we.” I should have known better, of course. For Les was always more than willing to share the credit. No, his reservation was far more serious than that.

“Not yet, Forry. We can’t publish this yet.”

I shook my head. “Why not! This is big, Les! It proves much of what you’ve been saying all along, about symbiosis and all that. There could even be a Nobel in it!”

I’d been gauche, and spoken aloud of The Ultimate. But he did not even seem to notice. Damn. If only Les had been like most biologists, driven more than anything else by the lure of Stockholm. But no. You see, Les was a natural. A natural altruist.

It was his fault, you see. Him and his damn virtue, they drove me to first contemplate what I next decided to do.

“Don’t you see, Forry? If we publish, they’ll develop an antibody test for the ALAS virus. Donors carrying it will be barred from the blood banks, just like those carrying AIDS and syphilis and hepatitis. And that would be incredibly cruel torture to those poor addicts and carriers.”

“Screw the carriers!” I almost shouted. Several pizza patrons glanced my way. With a desperate effort I brought my voice down. “Look, Les, the carriers will be classified as diseased, won’t they? So they’ll go under doctor’s care. And if all it takes to make them feel better is to bleed them regularly, well, then we’ll give them pet leeches!”

Les smiled. “Clever. But that’s not the only, or even my main reason, Forry. No, I’m not going to publish, yet, and that is final. I just can’t allow anybody to stop this disease. It’s got to spread, to become an epidemic. A pandemic.”

I stared, and upon seeing that look in his eyes, I knew that Les was more than an altruist. He had caught that specially insidious of all human ailments, the Messiah Complex. Les wanted to save the world.

“Don’t you see?” he said urgently, with the fervor of a proselyte. “Selfishness and greed are destroying the planet, Forry! But nature always finds a way, and this time symbiosis may be giving us our last chance, a final opportunity to become better people, to learn to cooperate before it’s too late!

“The things we’re most proud of, our prefrontal lobes, those bits of gray matter above the eyes which make us so much smarter than beasts, what good have they done us, Forry? Not a hell of a lot. We aren’t going to think our way out of the crises of the 20th Century. Or, at least, thought alone won’t do it. We need something else, as well.

“And Forry, I’m convinced that something else is ALAS. We’ve got to keep this secret, at least until it’s so well established in the population that there’s no turning back!”

I swallowed. “How long? How long do you want to wait? Until it starts affecting voting patterns? Until after the next election?”

He shrugged. “Oh, at least that long. Five years. Possibly seven. You see, the virus tends to only get into people who’ve recently had surgery, and they’re generally older. Fortunately, they also are often influential. Just the sort who now vote Tory . . .”

He went on. And on. I listened with half an ear, but already I had come to that fateful realization. A seven year wait for a goddamn co-authorship would make this discovery next to useless to my career, to my ambitions.

Of course I could blow the secret on Les, now that I knew of it. But that would only embitter him, and he’d easily take all the credit for the discovery anyway. People tend to remember innovators, not whistle-blowers.

We paid our bill and walked toward Charing Cross Station, where we could catch the tube to Paddington, and from there to Oxford. Along the way we ducked out of a sudden downpour at a streetside ice cream vendor. While we waited, I bought us both cones. I remember quite clearly that he had strawberry. I had a raspberry ice.

While Les absent-mindedly talked on about his research plans, a small pink smudge colored the corner of his mouth. I pretended to listen, but already my mind had turned to other things, nascent plans and earnest scenarios for committing murder.

2.

It would be the perfect crime, of course.

Those movie detectives are always going on about “motive, means, and opportunity.” Well, motive I had in plenty, but it was a one so far-fetched, so obscure, that it would surely never occur to anybody.

Means? Hell, I worked in a business rife with means. There were poisons and pathogens galore. We’re a very careful profession, but, well, accidents do happen . . . The same holds for opportunity.

There was a rub, of course. Such was Boy Genius’s reputation that, even if I did succeed in knobbling him, I didn’t dare come out immediately with my own announcement. Damn him, everyone would just assume it was his work anyway, or his “leadership” here at the lab, at least, that led to the discovery of ALAS. And besides, too much fame for me right after his demise might lead someone to suspect a motive.

So, I realized. Les was going to get his delay, after all. Maybe not seven years, but three or four perhaps, during which I’d move back to the States, start a separate line of work, then subtly guide my own research to cover methodically all the bases Les had so recently flown over in flashes of inspiration. I wasn’t happy about the delay, but at the end of that time, it would look entirely like my own work. No co-authorship for Forry on this one, nossir!

The beauty of it was that nobody would ever think of connecting me with the tragic death of my colleague and friend, years before. After all, did not his demise set me back in my career, temporarily? “Ah, if only poor Les had lived to see your success!” my competitors would say, suppressing jealous bile as they watched me pack for Stockholm.

Of course, none of this appeared on my face or in my words. We both had our normal work to do. But almost every day I also put in long extra hours helping Les in “our” secret project. In its own way it was an exhilarating time, and Les was lavish in his praise of the slow, dull, but methodical way I fleshed out some of his ideas.

I made my arrangements slowly, knowing Les was in no hurry. Together we gathered data. We isolated, and even crystallized the virus, got X-Ray diffractions, did epidemiological studies, all in strictest secrecy.

“Amazing!” Les would cry out, as he uncovered the way the ALAS virus forced its hosts to feel their need to “give.” He’d wax eloquent; effusive over elegant mechanisms which he ascribed to random selection, but which I could not help superstitiously attributing to some incredibly insidious form of intelligence. The more subtle and effective we found its techniques to be, the more admiring Les became, and the more I found myself loathing those little packets of RNA and protein.

The fact that the virus seemed so harmless—Les thought even commensal—only made me hate it more. It made me glad of what I had planned. Glad that I was going to stymie Les in his scheme to give ALAS free reign.

I was going to save humanity from this would-be puppet master. True, I’d delay my warning to suit my own purposes, but the warning would come, nonetheless, and sooner than my unsuspecting compatriot planned.

Little did Les know that he was doing background for work I’d take credit for. Every flash of insight, his every “Eureka!”, was stored away in my private notebook, beside my own columns of boring data. Meanwhile, I sorted through all the means at my disposal.

Finally, I selected for my agent a particularly virulent strain of Dengue Fever.

3.

There’s an old saying we have in Texas. “A chicken is just an egg’s way of makin’ more eggs.”

To a biologist, familiar with all those latinized-graecificated words, this saying has a much more “posh” version. Humans are “zygotes,” made up of diploid cells containing 46 paired chromosomes . . . except for our haploid sex cells, or “gametes.” Males’ gametes are sperm and females’ are eggs, each containing only 23 chromosomes.

So biologists say that “a zygote is only a gamete’s way of making more gametes.”

Clever, eh? But it does point out just how hard it is, in nature, to pin down a Primal Cause . . . some centre to the puzzle, against which everything else can be calibrated. I mean, which does come first, the chicken or the egg?

“Man is the measure of all things,” goes another wise old saying. Oh yeah? Tell that to a modern feminist.

A guy I once knew, who used to read science fiction, told me about this story he’d seen, in which it turned out that the whole and entire purpose of humanity, brains and all, was to be the organism that built starships so that houseflies could migrate out and colonize the galaxy.

But that idea’s nothing compared with what Les Adgeson believed. He spoke of the human animal as if he were describing a veritable United Nations. From the E. coli in our guts, to tiny commensal mites that clean our eyelashes for us, to the mitochondria that energise our cells, all the way to the contents of our very DNA . . . Les saw it all as a great big hive of compromise, negotiation, symbiosis. Most of the contents of our chromosomes came from past invaders, he contended.

Symbiosis? The picture he created in my mind was one of minuscule puppeteers, all yanking and jerking at us with their protein strings, making us marionettes dance to their own tunes, to their own nasty, selfish little agendas.

And you, you were the worst! Like most cynics, I had always maintained a secret faith in human nature. Yes, most people are pigs. I’ve always known that. And while I may be a user, at least I’m honest enough to admit it.

But deep down, we users count on the sappy, inexplicable generosity, the mysterious, puzzling altruism of those others, the kind, inexplicably decent folk . . . those we superficially sneer at in contempt, but secretly hold in awe.

Then you came along, damn you. You make people behave that way. There is no mystery left, after you get finished. No corner remaining impenetrable to cynicism. Damn, how I came to hate you!

As I came to hate Leslie Adgeson. I made my plans, schemed my brilliant campaign against both of you. In those last days of innocence I felt oh, so savagely determined. So deliciously decisive and in control of my own destiny.

In the end it was anticlimactic. I didn’t have time to finish my preparations, to arrange that little trap, that sharp bit of glass dipped in just the right mixture of deadly micro-organisms. For CAPUC arrived then, just before I could exercise my option as a murderer.

CAPUC changed everything.

Catastrophic Auto-immune PUlmonary Collapse . . . acronym for the horror that made AIDS look like a minor irritant. And in the beginning it appeared unstoppable. Its vectors were completely unknown and the causative agent defied isolation for so long.

This time it was no easily identifiable group that came down with the new plague, though it concentrated upon the industrialized world. Schoolchildren in some areas seemed particularly vulnerable. In other places it was secretaries and postal workers.

Naturally, all the major epidemiology labs got involved. Les predicted the pathogen would turn out to be something akin to the prions which cause shingles in sheep, and certain plant diseases . . . a pseudo life form even simpler than a virus and even harder to track down. It was a heretical, minority view, until the CDC in Atlanta decided out of desperation to try his theories out, and found the very dormant viroids Les predicted—mixed in with the glue used to seal paper milk cartons, envelopes, postage stamps.

Les was a hero, of course. Most of us in the labs were. After all, we’d been the first line of defense. Our own casualty rate had been ghastly.

For a while there, funerals and other public gatherings were discouraged. But an exception was made for Les. The procession behind his cortege was a mile long. I was asked to deliver the eulogy. And when they pleaded with me to take over at the lab, I agreed.

So naturally I tended to forget all about ALAS. The war against CAPUC took everything society had. And while I may be selfish, even a rat can tell when it makes more sense to join in the fight to save a sinking ship . . . especially when there’s no other port in sight.

We learned how to combat CAPUC, eventually. It involved drugs, and a vaccine based on reversed antibodies force grown in the patient’s own marrow after he’s given a dangerous overdose of a Vanadium compound I found by trial and error. It worked, most of the time, but the victims suffered great stress and often required a special regime of whole blood transfusions to get across the most dangerous phase.

Blood banks were stretched even thinner than before. Only now the public responded generously, as in time of war. I should not have been surprised when survivors, after their recovery, volunteered by their thousands. But, of course, I’d forgotten about ALAS by then, hadn’t I?

We beat back CAPUC. Its vector proved too unreliable, too easily interrupted once we’d figured it out. The poor little viroid never had a chance to get to Les’s “negotiation” stage. Oh well, those are the breaks.

I got all sorts of citations I didn’t deserve. The King gave me a KBE for personally saving the Prince of Wales. I had dinner at the White House.

Big deal.

The world had a respite, after that. CAPUC had scared people it seemed, into a new spirit of cooperation. I should have been suspicious, of course. But soon I’d moved over to WHO, and had all sorts of administrative responsibilities in the Final Campaign on Malnutrition.

By that time, I had almost entirely forgotten about ALAS.

I forgot about you, didn’t I? Oh, the years passed, my star rose, I became famous, respected, revered. I didn’t get my Nobel in Stockholm. Ironically, I picked it up in Oslo. Fancy that. Just shows you can fool anybody.

And yet, I don’t think I ever really forgot about you, ALAS, not at the back of my mind.

Peace treaties were signed. Citizens of the industrial nations voted temporary cuts in their standards of living in order to fight poverty and save the environment. Suddenly, it seemed, we’d all grown up. Other cynics, guys I’d gotten drunk with in the past—and shared dark premonitions about the inevitable fate of filthy, miserable humanity—all gradually deserted the faith, as pessimists seem wont to do when the world turns bright—too bright for even the cynical to dismiss as a mere passing phase on the road to Hell.

And yet, my own brooding remained unblemished. For subconsciously I knew it wasn’t real.

Then, the third Mars Expedition returned to worldwide adulation, and brought home with them TARP.

And that was when we all found out just how friendly all our home-grown pathogens really had been, all along.

4.

Late at night, stumbling in exhaustion from overwork, I would stop at Les’s portrait where I’d ordered it hung in the hall opposite my office door, and stand there cursing him and his damned theories of symbiosis.

Picture mankind ever reaching a symbiotic association with TARP! That really would be something. Imagine, Les, all those alien genes, added to our heritage, to our rich human diversity!

Only TARP did not seem to be much interested in “negotiation.” Its wooing was rough, deadly. And its vector was the wind.

The world looked to me, and to my peers, for salvation. In spite of all of my successes and high renown, though, I knew myself for a second-best fraud. I would always know—no matter how much they thanked and praised me—who had been better than me by light years.

Again and again, deep into the night, I would pore through the notes Leslie Adgeson had left behind, seeking inspiration, seeking hope. That’s when I stumbled across ALAS, again.

I found you again.

Oh, you made us behave better, all right. At least a quarter of the human race must contain your DNA, by now, ALAS. And in their newfound, inexplicable, rationalized altruism, they set the tone followed by all the others.

Everybody behaves so damned well in the present calamity. They help each other, they succor the sick, they all give so.

Funny thing, though. If you hadn’t made us all so bloody cooperative, we’d probably never have made it to bloody Mars, would we? Or if we had, there’d have still been enough paranoia around so we’d have maintained a decent quarantine.

But then, I remind myself, you don’t plan, do you. You’re just a bundle of RNA, packed inside a protein coat, with an incidentally, accidentally acquired trait of making humans want to donate blood. That’s all you are, right? So you had no way of knowing that by making us “better” you were also setting us up for TARP, did you? Did you?

5.

We’ve got some palliatives, now. A few new techniques seem to be doing some good. The latest news is great, in fact. Apparently, we’ll be able to save maybe fifteen percent or so of the children. At least half of them may even be fertile.

That’s for nations who’ve had a lot of racial mixing. Heterozygosity and genetic diversity seems to breed better resistance. Those peoples with “pure,” narrow bloodlines will be harder to save, but then, racism has its inevitable price.

Too bad about the great apes and horses, but then, at least all this will give the rain forests a chance to grow back.

Meanwhile, everybody perseveres. There is no panic, as one reads about happening in past plagues. We’ve grown up at last, it seems. We help each other.

But I carry a card in my wallet saying I’m a Christian Scientist, and that my blood group is AB Negative, and that I’m allergic to nearly everything. Transfusions are one of the treatments commonly used now, and I’m an important man. But I won’t take blood.

I won’t.

I donate, but I’ll never take it. Not even when I drop.

You won’t have me, ALAS. You won’t.

I am a bad man. I suppose, all told, I’ve done more good than evil in my life, but that’s incidental, a product of happenstance and the bizarre caprices of the world.

I have no control over the world, but I can make my own decisions, at least. As I make this one, now.

Down, out of my high research tower I’ve gone. Into the streets, where the teeming clinics fester and boil. That is where I work now. And it doesn’t matter to me that I’m behaving no differently than anyone else today. They are all marionettes. They think they’re acting altruistically, but I know they are your puppets, ALAS.

But I am a man, do you hear me? I make my own decisions.

Fever wracks my body now, as I drag myself from bed to bed, holding their hands when they stretch them out to me for comfort, doing what I can to ease their suffering, to save a few.

You’ll not have me, ALAS.

This is what I choose to do.

© 1988 by David Brin.

Originally published in Interzone.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

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 by Kevin Costner was based on The Postman. His novels, including New York Times Bestsellers, have been translated into more than twenty languages, and won Hugo and Nebula awards. His new novel from Tor Books is Existence.

Ghost River Red
Aidan Doyle

Akamiko arrived three days before the anniversary of the Lady of All Colors’ death. The village held a small market filled with stalls selling fish and vegetables, and a bathhouse stood by the river. It was hard to imagine the Lady of All Colors growing up here.

It was still too early to perform the ceremony, but Akamiko wanted to make sure she could find the grave. She started along the path leading to the village’s hilltop cemetery. She had only taken a few steps when a chill wrapped itself around her. The sun was strong in the sky, but the air grew cold enough that she could see her breath. She drew her red sword, but the chill did not dissipate. Specks of ice appeared at the tip of her blade and she backed away in surprise. The cold air did not relinquish its grasp until she left the path.

She had to learn what was wrong with the cemetery.

The younger villagers would still be at work in the fields. The bathhouse would give Akamiko a chance to talk to some of the village’s seniors. Secrets were harder to hide when you were naked.

Some villages had mixed bathing, but she was pleased this one had separate baths. She unstrapped the wooden frame she carried on her back. It held her seven swords and the urn with the Lady of All Colors’ ashes. She missed her full palette, but swordwriters were permitted to travel with at most seven swords. Red, green, blue, yellow, purple, orange, and white. Even swordwriters needed special permission to travel with a black blade.

A young attendant helped her store the swords and frame. She gave the girl double the fee. “Take good care of my swords,” she instructed.

The girl hesitated and then asked, “Are you a swordwriter?”

“Yes.”

“Are you here to kill the ghost?”

She hadn’t even had to get naked to discover what was wrong. “It is in the cemetery?”

The girl nodded.

Akamiko was duty bound to scatter the ashes at the lady’s ancestral grave. Death was a more attractive option than failing to honor the memory of her teacher. She had to remove the ghost.

She took off her robes and hung them on a peg next to four kimonos. Red was her strong color, but her robes looked pale and insignificant compared to the other kimonos. The richness of the golds, crimsons, and purples put the dyes of the capital to shame. “Who dyes the clothes?” she asked.

“The ghost hunter’s son.”

The village was lucky enough to have a ghost hunter. Yet they still had a ghost.

The bathing room contained a stone bath big enough to hold around a dozen people. The four women immersed in the cloudy water fell silent when Akamiko entered the room. She bowed and washed herself using water from a bucket before climbing into the bath. She had walked a long way and the warm water soothed her tired muscles.

Travel was forbidden to most citizens and the women stared at her suspiciously. The women all looked older than Akamiko. She was sixty-two, but the Lady of All Colors had been more than thirty years her senior and Akamiko had never thought of herself as old. Her body had slowed in recent years, but she still practiced with her swords every morning and night.

She bowed her head and addressed the oldest woman. “I am Akamiko Iro. I am a swordwriter.”

The senior touched her ears and shook her head. She was deaf.

“Can you read?” Akamiko asked.

One of the other women nodded.

Akamiko leaned forward and stared intently at the senior, reading her color. “Please excuse me,” she said and climbed out of the bath. She returned to the changing room and instructed the attendant to fetch her green sword.

Akamiko removed the scabbard and marched past the startled girl into the bathing room. The women stared at the sword in shock. “Get out of the bath,” she commanded.

The women hurried to obey, leaving only the senior in the water. She did not look frightened. “I have seen swordwriting tricks before,” she said in a raspy voice.

Akamiko raised the blade. She summoned her colors and brought the sword down on the senior’s arm. The sword vanished.

A tiny tattoo of a green sword appeared on the senior’s arm.

“My name is Akamiko Iro,” Akamiko said. Bright green characters spelling the words, My name is Akamiko Iro, appeared on the senior’s arm.

The senior’s eyes widened in surprise.

“It is a poor excuse for hearing, but it is the best I can do,” Akamiko said. The first set of characters disappeared, replaced by her latest sentence. The sword had been buried at a moss temple for a year to acquire its color. Its worth had been incalculable, but Akamiko always found the seeds of generosity brought a welcome harvest.

Tears rolled down the senior’s cheeks. “Thank you,” she whispered.

The other women rejoined them in the bath. They exchanged various pleasantries and Akamiko told them some of the things she had learned on her journey. Most of those allowed to travel were men—soldiers and merchants—and while they might bring tales of the shogun’s latest glorious battle and news that copper was in high demand in the capital, they seldom knew the stories the women were eager to hear. One of the women had been born in a neighboring village and listened with rapt attention as Akamiko relayed the names of the newborn children and their mothers she had met. Akamiko told them how the wife of another village’s headman had been banished for stealing rice and described the food at the headman’s second wedding. Normally she didn’t like to indulge in gossip, but the senior seemed to take such pleasure in following the conversation.

Finally the senior cleared her throat and the others fell silent. “I can guess why you are here,” she said. “We do not get much news from the outside world, but even we heard of the death of the Lady of All Colors. I was most blessed to have known her in my youth. Even then she had a special wisdom.”

“I have been traveling for almost a year,” Akamiko said. The pain of the lady’s death had not diminished and she tried to keep her voice calm. “Before her death, the Lady of All Colors granted me the honor of escorting her ashes on a final tour of the empire. On the anniversary of her death, I will scatter her ashes on her family grave.”

Even the steam could not hide the troubled looks on the others’ faces. “There is a ghost,” the senior said.

“What color?”

“Black.”

Of course. Akamiko had fought ghosts before, but never without a sword of matching color. In other circumstances, she would have returned to the capital and requested permission to use her black blade, but there was not enough time. If she missed the anniversary, the lady’s spirit would not be able to rest. “Can it be reasoned with?”

“It rejected our offerings,” the senior said.

“There is a ghost hunter?”

“Yes, but she won’t help. The ghost is the father of her child.”

Akamiko set a plate filled with sweet bean paste buns and a plate filled with burned paper money on the edge of the path to the cemetery. She held little hope it would work, but she had to at least try. She spent the night in the senior’s family home. The next morning the plates had been knocked aside, their contents scattered.

The ghost had been the village’s former ghost hunter and had haunted the cemetery for six years. Those who dealt in dark colors always ran the risk of an unsettled death.

The village had requested aide from two other ghost hunters, but even though they had wielded black swords, the ghost still slew them. There were no other ghost hunters within a week’s ride. Without a black sword, it would have been suicide to confront the ghost, even during the day.

Akamiko armed herself with her red and white swords and followed the river to beyond the village outskirts. The ghost hunter’s former apprentice, Kitamura, had assumed the position of ghost hunter after his death. She had taken ownership of his house, and more importantly, his black sword.

As Akamiko neared the house, a patch of purple water in the midst of the river caught her attention. The purple water assumed the form of a serpent and swept across the river’s surface to where a boy holding a brown kimono stood by the bank. The serpent leapt from the water and then disappeared, leaving the boy holding a purple kimono.

The boy looked to be about six years old and had wide, innocent eyes. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” Akamiko answered cautiously. “Is your mother here?” she asked.

“Your robes are the wrong color,” the boy answered.

“What do you mean?”

“Your red should be brighter.” He turned to face the river. A crimson serpent leapt from the water towards Akamiko.

She was taken by surprise and the water spattered against her robes. When she looked down, her robes were dyed a brilliant crimson. She used her white sword to inspect her robes. They appeared to be free from any ghostly enchantment and the red matched her color perfectly. “Thank you,” she said. She clutched her white sword and peered closer at the boy.

He looked normal enough on the surface, but a ghost heart beat beneath his chest. Kitamura had lain with the ghost hunter after he became a ghost. The boy would die if the ghost was destroyed.

“Toshi! Come here,” a voice shouted. Kitamura stood in the house’s doorway holding a black sword.

The boy smiled at Akamiko and ran inside.

Kitamura was a tall, slender woman in her early thirties. She glared at Akamiko. “What do you want?”

“You are a ghost hunter. There is a ghost in the cemetery,” she said.

“What is this to you?”

“I have my duty to my teacher. I must enter the cemetery.”

“It is the villagers’ fault. If they hadn’t sent the other ghost hunters, he never would have hurt anyone.”

“Ghosts always show their colors,” Akamiko said. There was little point in scolding the woman. In Akamiko’s experience, the colors of love were rarely without a shade of foolishness.

“I will not help you,” Kitamura answered.

“I am sorry about your boy, but the ghost must be destroyed. I must have your black sword.”

Kitamura retreated inside the house.

Akamiko readied her swords. A ghost hunter with a black sword was a dangerous opponent, but swordwriters spent years learning how to fight beautifully.

Kitamura returned holding the boy in front of her. “Toshi, thank our visitor for coming to see us. She is leaving now.”

“Thank you,” Toshi said.

The boy was only six years old. “Thank you for the color,” Akamiko said. She returned to the village.

If there had been more time, perhaps she could have thought of a way of dislodging the ghost without destroying it. Toshi was innocent, but she could not risk missing the anniversary of the lady’s death.

Akamiko knew the pain of losing loved ones. Many years ago, her two girls and husband had died in a fire. She had gone to the river to throw herself in. That was when she met the Lady of All Colors. The leader of the swordwriters convinced Akamiko she had a future.

Akamiko had given the ghost the chance to stand aside. She had given Kitamura a chance to help. Now she had no choice. She needed the black sword.

She waited until dark and then armed herself with her red and white swords. She used her red sword to bring fire into her eyes so she could see in the darkness. Then she made her way to Kitamura’s house.

The window was the most obvious entry point for someone wishing to enter undetected. Akamiko was sure Kitamura would be expecting her to come that way. She undid the window’s shutters and softly called, “I will wait for you outside.”

The front door opened and Kitamura stepped out. She held the black sword. She bowed . . .

. . . and then attacked.

Kitamura was stronger, but Akamiko was the quicker and more experienced fighter. The Lady of All Colors had taught Akamiko to wield her swords as though they were brushes, painting the demise of anyone foolish enough to challenge her. She disarmed Kitamura and struck her across the head with the hilt of her red sword. Kitamura dropped to the ground unconscious.

The black sword felt heavy in Akamiko’s hand and a melancholy seized her heart. Dark tools were never lightly used.

She left as quickly as she could. She heard the sound of a boy crying in the distance.

Akamiko strapped her white sword to her back and hurried to the cemetery. It would have been safer to wait for dawn, but Kitamura might complicate things once she woke. She had stored the lady’s ashes in the senior’s house and planned to fetch them after she defeated the ghost.

She thought she heard the sound of someone following her, but couldn’t see anyone. Kitamura or the boy couldn’t have caught up yet. She held the black and red swords in front of her and stepped onto the path leading up the hill. Cold air immediately wrapped itself around her. She summoned fire and wreathed her red sword in flames.

She struggled up the path till she reached the top of the hill. Hundreds of stone grave markers surrounded her. The air shimmered and a spectral figure coalesced into existence. The ghost of the former ghost hunter resembled a tall, lanky man with a thick beard. He wielded a black sword.

“If there are colors left in you, I ask that you stand aside,” Akamiko said.

The ghost lunged forward. She parried, but the ghost was quick and she was tired. Their black blades clashed again and she struck at it with her red sword. The blade passed straight through its ghostly form.

They traded blows and then it dodged to the side, letting her stumble forward. Its blade swept out, slicing into her thigh. She cried out and staggered backwards. The ghost pressed forward its advantage, forcing her to retreat. It took all of her strength just to keep standing.

She stared at the blood staining her robes. Her blood had unlocked an enchantment hidden in Toshi’s crimson dye. She couldn’t be sure what the enchantment would do, but it was her only hope.

She ran to the edge of the cemetery. The pain in her leg was unbearable, but it gave her a moment free from the ghost. She dropped her red sword and used her black blade to cut a square patch from the edge of her robes.

The ghost charged towards her and swung its sword at her head. She parried the blow and then reached out with the patch of cloth. The dyed cotton coiled like a serpent and wrapped itself around the ghost’s black blade. She flicked her wrist and the ghost’s sword spun away through the air.

The ghost looked astonished.

She thrust her black sword into its heart.

The ghost howled and disappeared. The night air grew warmer.

Her leg was still bleeding. She tried to summon fire to cauterize the wound, but she no longer had the strength. She hobbled down the path, her night vision growing dimmer.

She staggered through the darkness until she heard the sound of flowing water. In her confusion she had gone towards the river instead of the village.

Her leg gave way and she fell to the ground. Her blood trickled into the river. Even in the darkness she could tell it was a particularly beautiful shade of red.

Akamiko awoke in the senior’s bedroom. She lay on a thin mattress with a heavy blanket over her. Her thigh felt tender and was heavily bandaged. The senior sat beside her. “How did I get here?” Akamiko asked.

The senior consulted the characters on her arm. “I told my grandson to follow you. He brought you back here.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Three days.”

Tears came to Akamiko’s eyes. “I missed the anniversary.”

The senior shook her head. “I took the ashes to the cemetery and performed the ceremony. I knew the Lady of All Colors and guided her way. I am sure she will excuse your absence.”

Akamiko grasped the senior’s hand. “Thank you,” she said. She hoped the lady’s spirit was at peace. She said a prayer of thanks in Toshi’s name, but there was nothing else she could do for him. He had been ghost born.

Akamiko spent a week recovering her strength. She embedded her purple sword in her leg, using its energy to give her the strength to walk again. The senior wanted to give her a horse to ride back to the capital, but Akamiko insisted she would walk.

It rained the morning of her departure. She visited Kitamura’s house, but there was no sign of the ghost hunter. She bid the villagers farewell and set off down the road leading north. She was not surprised when Kitamura tried to ambush her.

“You killed my son,” Kitamura screamed, and attacked with a plain, gray sword.

Akamiko again disarmed her. She used her blue sword to turn the raindrops to rope and tied up Kitamura. “Spend a year mourning your son. Then come to the capital. I will train you as a swordwriter.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Kitamura screamed.

“Your thoughts should be with Toshi,” Akamiko insisted. “Then come to the capital.”

When Akamiko had thought all was lost, the Lady of All Colors had given her a new life. Akamiko would never have the lady’s gifts, but she had to at least try.

She had asked the senior’s grandson to follow behind her till she reached the edge of the village. She watched over Kitamura until he arrived. “Do not untie her until noon,” she instructed.

Kitamura struggled against the blue rope.

“Your boy was very brave,” Akamiko said. “I owe him my life. Come to the capital and I will try and repay that debt.” She thanked the senior’s grandson and set off down the road.

It had stopped raining by the time she reached the point where the road led away from the river. She had hoped to see a rainbow, but the sky was gray and overcast. So instead she pictured the brightest rainbow she had ever seen and continued on her journey.

© 2012 Aidan Doyle

Aidan Doyle is an Australian writer and computer programmer who loves traveling. He has visited more than 70 countries and his experiences include teaching English in Japan, interviewing ninjas in Bolivia, and going ten-pin bowling in North Korea. His stories have been published in Fantasy, Strange Horizons, and Weird Tales and have been shortlisted for the Aurealis Award.

Singing of Mount Abora
Theodora Goss

A hundred years ago, the blind instrument-maker known as Alem Das, or Alem the Master, made a dulcimer whose sound was sweeter, more passionate, and more filled with longing than any instrument that had ever been made. It was carved entirely from the wood of an almond tree that had grown in the garden of Al Meseret, that palace with a thousand rooms where the Empress Nasren had chosen to spend her widowhood. The doors of the palace were shaped like moons, its windows like stars. It was a palace of night, and every night the Empress walked through its thousand rooms, wearing the veil she had worn for her wedding to the Great Khan. If the cooks, who sometimes saw her wandering through the kitchen, had not known who she was, they would have mistaken her for a ghost. The dulcimer was strung with the whiskers of the Cloud Dragon, who wreaths his body around the slopes of Mount Abora. He can always be found there in the early morning, and that is when Alem Das approached him, walking up the path on the arm of his niece Kamora.

“What do you want?” asked the dragon.

“Your whiskers, luminous one,” said Alem Das.

“My whiskers! You must be that instrument maker. I’ve heard of you. You’re the reason my cousin, the River Dragon, no longer has spines along his back, and why my other cousin, the Phoenix, no longer has tail-feathers. Why should I give you my whiskers?”

“Because when I have made my dulcimer, my niece Kamora will come and play for you, and sing to you the secrets of your soul,” said Alem Das.

“We dragons have no souls,” said the Cloud Dragon, wreathing himself around and around, like a cat.

“You dragons are souls,” said Alem Das, and he asked his niece to sing one of the songs that she sang at night, to sooth the Empress Nasren. Kamora sang, and the Cloud Dragon stopped wreathing himself around and around. Instead, he lay at her feet, which disappeared into mist. When she was done, he said, “All right, instrument maker. You may have my whiskers, but on one condition. First, your niece Kamora must marry me. And when you have made your dulcimer, she must sing to me every night the secrets of my soul.”

Kamora knew how the Cloud Dragon looked at night, when he took the form of a man, so she said, “I will marry you, if my Empress allows it.” And that is my first song.

You can’t imagine how cold Boston is in winter, not for someone from a considerably warmer climate. In my apartment, I sat as close as I could to the radiator, sometimes with my back against it. The library at the university was warmer, but the chairs were wooden and hard, so it was a compromise: the comforts of my apartment, where I had to wrap my fingers around incessant cups of chamomile tea to warm them, or the warmth and discomfort of the library. I had been born in Abyssinia, which is now Ethiopia, and had been brought up in so many places that they seemed no place at all, Italy and France and Spain. Finally, I had come to cold, shining North America, where the universities, I told my mother, were the best in the world. And the best of the best universities were in Boston.

My mother was beautiful. I should say rather that she was a beauty, for to her, beauty was not a quality but a state of being. Beauty was her art, her profession. I don’t mean that she was anything as vulgar as a model, or even an actress. No, she was simply beautiful, and so life gave her what it gives the beautiful: apartments in Italy, France, and Spain, and an airplane to travel between them, and a diamond called the Robin’s Egg, because it was as big as a robin’s egg, and as blue.

“Oh, Sabra,” she would say to me, “what will we do about you? You look exactly like your father.” And it was true. In old photographs, I saw my nose, the bones of my cheeks and jaws on a man who had not needed to be handsome, because he was rich. But his riches had not saved his life. Although he could have bought his way out of the revolution, he had remained loyal to the Emperor. He had died when his airplane was shot down, with the Emperor in it, just before crossing the border. This was after the Generals had taken power and the border had been closed. My mother and I were already on our way to Italy, with the Robin’s Egg in her brassiere. “Loyalty is nothing,” my mother would say. “If your father had been more sensible, he would still be with us. Loyalty is a breath. It is not worth the ring on my finger.”

“But he had courage,” I said. “Did he not have courage?”

“Courage, of course. He was, after all, my husband. But it is better to have diamonds.”

Her beauty gave her ruthless practicality an indescribable charm.

“You are like him, Sabra. Always with your head in the clouds. When are you going to get married? When are you going to live properly?” She thought it was foolish that I insisted on living on my stipend, but she approved of my studying literature, which was a decorative discipline. “That Samuel Coleridge whose poem you read to me,” she would say, “I am convinced he must have been a handsome man.”

I insisted on providing for myself, and living in a city that was too cold for her, because it kept me from feeling the enchantment that she threw over everything around her. She was an enchantress without intention, as a spider gathers flies by instinct. One longed to be in her web. In her presence, one could not help loving her, without judgment. And I was proud of my independence, if of nothing else.

Let me sing about the marriage of Kamora and the Cloud Dragon. Among all the maidens of the Empress Nasren, there was none so clever as Kamora. She knew every song that had ever been sung, since the world was made. When she sang, she could draw the nightingales into the Empress’ garden, where they would sit on the branches of the almond trees and sing accompaniment. Each night she followed the Empress through the thousand rooms of the palace, singing her songs. Only Kamora could soothe the Empress when Nasren sank down on the courtyard stones and wept into her hands with the wild abandon of a storm.

On the night after Alem Das had visited the Cloud Dragon, Kamora said to the Empress, “Lady, whose face is as bright as the moon, there is nothing more wonderful in the world than serving you, except for marrying the one I love. And you know this is true, because you have known the delights of such a marriage.”

The Empress, who sat in a chair that Alem Das had carved for her from the horns of Leviathan, stood suddenly, so that the chair fell back, and a figure of Noah broke off from one corner. “Kamora, would you too leave me, as the Great Khan left me to wander among the stars? Some night, it may be this night, he will come back to me. But until that night, you must not leave me!” And she stared at Kamora with eyes that were apprehensive, and a little mad.

“Lady, whose eyes are as dark as the night,” said Kamora, in her most soothing voice, “you know that the Great Khan lies in his tomb on Mount Abora. You built it yourself of white marble, stone on stone, and before you placed the last stone, you kissed his lips. Do you think that your husband would leave the bed you made for him? You would not keep me from marrying the one I love.”

The Empress turned and walked, out of that room and into another, and another, and through all the thousand rooms of the palace. Kamora followed her, not singing tonight, but silent. When the Empress had reached the last room of the palace, a pantry in which the head cook kept her rose-petal jam, she said, “Very well. You may marry your Cloud Dragon. Do not look surprised that I know whom you love. I am not so insensible as all that. But first, you must complete one task for me. When you have completed it, then you may marry whom you please.”

“What is that task?” asked Kamora.

“You must find me someone who amuses me more than you do.”

It was Michael who introduced me to Coleridge. “Listen to this,” he said.

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.”

“I can’t believe you’ve never read it before. I mean, I learned that in high school.”

“Who is this Michael Cavuto you keep talking about?” asked my mother over the telephone. “Where does he come from?”

“Ohio,” I said.

She was as silent as though I had said, “The surface of the moon.”

We were teaching assistants together, for a class on the Romantics. We read sentences to each other from our students’ papers. “A nightingale is a bird that comes out at night to which Keats has written an ode.” “William and his wife Dorothy lived together for many years until she died and left him lamenting.” “Coleridge smoked a lot of opium, which explains a lot.” We laughed, and marked our papers together, and one day, when we were both sitting in the library, making up essay questions for the final exam, we started talking about our families.

“Yours is much more interesting than mine,” he told me. “I’d like to meet your mother.”

You never will, I told myself. I liked him, with his spiky hair that stood up although he was always trying to gel it down, the angular bones that made him look graceless, as though his joints were not quite knit together, and his humor. I did not want him, too, to fall hopelessly in love. For goodness’ sake, the woman was fifty-four. She was in Italy again, with a British rock star. He was twenty-seven. They had been together for two years. I could tell that she was already beginning to get bored.

“There’s no one like Coleridge,” Michael had said. “You’ll see.”

I have told you that Kamora was clever. Listen to how clever she was. She said to the Empress, “I will bring you what you ask for, but you must give me a month to find it, and a knapsack filled with bread and cheese and dried apricots, and a jar of honey.”

“Very well,” said the Empress. “You shall have all these things, although I will miss you, Kamora. But at the end of that month you will return to me, won’t you?”

“If at the end of that month I have not found someone who amuses you more than I do, then I will return to you, and remain with you as long as you wish,” said Kamora.

The Empress said, “Now I can sleep, because I know you will remain with me forever.”

The next day, Kamora put her knapsack on her back. “I wish you luck, I do,” said the head cook. “It can’t be easy, spending every night with Her Craziness upstairs. Though why you would want to marry a dragon is beyond me.”

Kamora smiled but did not answer. Then she turned and walked through the palace gates, chewing a dried apricot.

First, Kamora went to the house of her uncle Alem Das, which was built against the wall that surrounded the palace. She found him sitting on the stone floor, carving a bird for the youngest daughter of the River Dragon. When you wound it with a key, it could sing by itself. “Uncle,” she said, “They call me clever, but I know that you are more clever than I am. You talked the horns off Leviathan, and once Bilkis, the sun herself, gave you three of her shining hairs. Who can amuse the Empress more than I can?”

Alem Das sat and thought. Kamora was his favorite niece, and he did not want to disappoint her. “You might bring her the Laughing Hound, who dances on his hind legs, and rides a donkey, and tells jokes all day long, or the Tree of Tales, whose leaves whisper all the secrets that men do not wish to reveal. But she would eventually tire of these. You, my dear, can sing all the songs that were ever sung. If she tires of a song, you can sing her another. If she is sad, you can comb her hair with the comb I gave you for your fourteenth birthday, and cover her with a blanket, and sit by her until she has fallen asleep. It will be difficult to find anyone as amusing as you are.”

Kamora sighed. “I hoped that you could help me. Oh, uncle,” and for the first time she did not sound perfectly confident, “I do love him, you know.”

“I’m not clever enough to help you,” said Alem Das, “but I know who is. Kamora, I will tell you a secret. If you climb to the top of Mount Abora, even higher than the Cloud Dragon, you will find the Stone Woman. She is the oldest of all things, and I think she will be able to help you. But you must tell no one where she lives, and allow no one to follow you, because she values her privacy. If it grows dark, take out the tail-feather of the Phoenix, which I gave you for your twelfth birthday. It will light your way up the mountain.”

Kamora said, “But uncle, why should the Stone Woman help me?”

“Take this drum,” said Alem Das. “I made it from the skin that the Sea Serpent sheds once a year. The Stone Woman is old, and the old always like a present.”

“Thank you, uncle,” said Kamora, kissing him on both cheeks. “There truly is no one in the world as clever as you.”

Kamora walked through the village, chewing a dried apricot. She walked over the hills, to the foot of Mount Abora. At the foot of the mountain, where the climb begins in earnest, she picked a handful of lilies, which grow by the streams that flow down the mountain to become the Alph. She left them at the tomb of the Great Khan, who had given her sugared almonds when she was a girl. Then she began to climb the path up the mountain. Halfway up, Kamora ate her lunch, bread and cheese and dried apricots. She washed her hands in one of the streams, put her knapsack on her back, and continued to climb. Near the top, she stopped to see the Cloud Dragon and tell him the Empress’ condition.

“Well, good luck to you,” he said. “If you were anyone else, I would be certain that you would fail, but I’ve been told that you’re almost as clever as your uncle.”

“I will not fail,” said Kamora, and she gave him a look that made him break into puffs that flew every which way over the mountain. And this is the woman I’m going to marry, he thought. What have I gotten myself into?

In his house by the palace wall, Alem Das thought about his niece and smiled. He said to himself, “Sometimes she is too clever, that girl. First she asked for one of the Phoenix’s tail-feathers, then for a comb carved from the shell of the Great Turtle. And now I’ve given her my drum. Does she really think she’s tricked me? Oh, Kamora! It’s certainly time you got married.”

I’m not sure when we started dating. There was a gradual progression between friend and boyfriend. We were comfortable together, we seemed to fit together like two pieces of a puzzle. But a puzzle that showed what picture? I did not know.

It was a Friday. I remember because we had just turned back a set of graded papers. I was still taking classes, and for my own class on the Romantics, taught by the same professor for whom I was TAing, I had decided to write a final paper on Coleridge. This will be easy, I thought. Michael and I have talked about him so often.

I was in my apartment. It was cold. It felt like a cave of ice.

And suddenly, I was there.

The Kubla Khan of Coleridge’s poem is not the historical Kubla Khan, founder of the Yuan Dynasty, and Xanadu is not Shangdu. Both are dreams or hallucinations. Indeed, if we examine Coleridge’s description of the palace itself, we notice that it does not make sense. Here, the river Alph, fed by the streams that flow down Mount Abora, does something strange: It disappears into a series of fissures in the ground, flowing through them until it comes to an underground lake. Coleridge’s identification of this lake as a “sunless sea” or “lifeless ocean” is certainly poetic exaggeration, as my experience will show. The palace itself is situated where the river disappears, so that seen from one side, it seems to sit on the river itself. Seen from the other, it is surrounded by an extensive garden, where the Khan has collected specimens from all the fantastical countries, plants from lost Atlantis and Hyperborea and Thule. The palace is built of stone, and rises out of the stone beneath it, so that an outcropping will suddenly turn into a wall. Although Coleridge describes “caves of ice,” this is again a poetic exaggeration. He means that since the palace is built of stone, even in summer the rooms are cold, so cold. I was always cold in that palace, as long as I was there.

It was empty. There were silk cushions on the floor, embroidered with dragons and orange trees, but no one to sit on them. There were tables inlaid with tulips and gazelles and chessboards, but no one to play. The curtains that hung in the doorways, filtering the sunlight, rose and fell with the breath of the river. But there was no other breath, and no noise other than a ceaseless rushing as the river swept through the caves below. As I walked, my steps sounded hollow, and I knew that the floors hung over rushing water and empty space. As an architectural feat, the Khan’s palace is impossible.

There was water everywhere, in pools where ornamental fish swam, dappled white and orange and black, and basins in which the inhabitants, if there were any, would have washed their hands. The air had the clean, curiously empty smell of sunlight and water.

“I have looked. There is no one but ourselves.”

He was dressed as you might expect, in breeches and a waistcoat over a linen shirt that seemed too large for him. He had thick brown hair and a thin, inquisitive face, and his hands moved nervously. The young poet, already an addict.

I was not sure how to respond. “Have you been here long?”

“Several hours, and I confess that I’m beginning to feel hungry. Surely there is a kitchen? Shall we attempt to find it?”

The kitchen was empty as well, but the pantry was full. We ate sugared almonds, and a sweet cheese studded with raisins, and dried fish that was better than it looked. We drank a wine that tasted like honey.

“Sabra is a pretty name,” he said. “Mine is Samuel, not so pretty, you see, but then I’m not as pretty as you.” He wiped the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief. “Here we are, Samuel and Sabra, in the palace of the Khan. Where is the Khan, I wonder? Is he out hunting, or in another of his palaces? Perhaps when he returns he will execute us for being here. Have you thought of that, Sabra? We are, after all, trespassers.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t feel like a trespasser. And anyway, he isn’t here now.”

“That is true,” he said. “Would you like the last of the almonds? I’ve never much cared for almonds.” He leaned back against a cushion, his hair spread out over an apricot tree in bloom, with a phoenix in its boughs. “Will you sing to me, Sabra? I am tired, and I feel that I have been speaking inanities. There is an instrument, on that table. Can you play it, do you think?”

“Yes,” I said, and picked up the instrument: a dulcimer. While my friends in school were at soccer practice, I was learning to play the dulcimer. It was another of my mother’s charming impracticalities.

“Then sing me something, won’t you, pretty Sabra? I’m so tired, and my head aches, I don’t know why.”

So I put away the last of the sugared almonds, picked up the dulcimer, and began to sing.

Kamora could feel blisters forming where her sandals rubbed against her feet, but she climbed steadily. It was late afternoon, and the sun was already sinking into the west, when she reached the summit. The Stone Woman was waiting for her. She was wrapped in a gray shawl and hunched over with age, so that she looked like a part of the mountain itself.

“Back again, are you? And did you ever find your own true love, the one whose face you saw in my mirror?”

“I found him, lady who is wiser than the stars,” said Kamora. “But now I have to win him.”

“None of your flattery for me, girl,” said the Stone Woman. “I know exactly how wise I am. What are you going to give me for my help?”

Kamora took the drum out of her knapsack.

The Stone Woman looked at it appreciatively. “Ah, this is better than that other stuff you gave me. Although the tail-feather of the Phoenix, which you gave me for teaching you all the songs that have ever been sung, burns all night long, so I can weave my tapestries. And every morning I use the comb made from the shell of the Great Turtle, which you gave me for showing you the Cloud Dragon in my mirror, and my hair never tangles.” She ran one hand over her braid of gray hair, which was so long that it touched the ground. “But this!” She tapped the drum once with her finger, and Kamora heard a reverberation, not only from the drum itself, but from the stones around her, the scrubby cedars, bent by the wind, and even the air. It seemed to echo over the forested slopes of the mountain, and the hills below, on which she could see the tomb of the Great Khan, as white as the rising moon, and the plains stretching away into the distance.

“What is it?” asked Kamora.

“You uncle didn’t tell you? That sound is the beat of the world, which governs everything, even the beating of your heart, and on this drum I can play it slower or faster, more sadly or more joyfully. No one can make an instrument like your uncle Alem, but I think this is his masterpiece. No wonder he wanted you to bring it to me. I’m the only one in whose hands it is perfectly safe. Think, girl, what would a man do who could alter the beat of the world? And by getting you to carry it, he saved himself a trip up the mountain! He is a clever man, your uncle. Now, it’s dinnertime, and I’m hungry. Have you brought me any food?”

Kamora took out the honey, of which she knew the Stone Woman was inordinately fond.

“Good girl. Well, come inside, then, and tell me what you want this time.”

The walls of the Stone Woman’s cave were covered with tapestries. On one you could see the creation of the world by Lilit, and her marriage to the Sea Serpent, in which she wore a veil of stars. On another you could see the flood that resulted from their thrashing when they lay together, so that many of the first creatures she had created, the great dragons with horns like Leviathan’s and eyes like rubies and emeralds, and the great turtles that carried mountains and even small lakes on their backs, were drowned. The whole history of the world was there, and on a panel that Kamora had not seen before, she saw Mount Abora, and the marriage of the Empress Nasren, the oldest daughter of the River Dragon, to the Great Khan, with the apricot trees on the mountain blooming around them.

The Stone Woman sat on a cushion and opened the honey-pot. She dipped a wooden spoon into it, tasted the honey, and licked her lips. “Very good, very good. Well, what do you want this time?”

Kamora knew that it was time to be, not clever, but direct. “The Empress, whose hands move like doves, will not let me marry until I have brought her someone who amuses her more than I do.”

“So that’s how it is,” said the Stone Woman. “You can’t marry your Cloud Dragon until she lets you, and she won’t let you until she has found a substitute. You have been too clever, Kamora. When you asked me to teach you all the songs that have ever been sung, so the Empress would choose you as one of her maidens, to serve her and live in the palace, did you consider that she might want to keep you forever? Getting what you wish for isn’t always a good thing, you know.”

“If I had not learned all the songs that have ever been sung,” said Kamora, “the Cloud Dragon would not have wanted to marry me. And I love him, I can’t help loving him, since I saw how he looks at night, when he is a man. Perhaps I should not have looked in your mirror and asked to see my own true love, but when I saw how happy the Empress was with the Great Khan . . .” A tear slid down her cheek, and she wiped it away with her hand.

“Ah, clever Kamora! So you wanted to love and be loved. You have a heart after all,” said the Stone Woman. “Just remember that cleverness is not enough to keep a husband, not even the Cloud Dragon, who is less clever than you are. You must show him your heart as well. I warned him about choosing such a clever wife! But how do you expect me to help you?”

Kamora said, “I thought about that, when I walked through the thousand rooms of the palace at night with the Empress. What is more amusing than a person who knows all the songs that have ever been sung? Only a person who can create new songs. Only a poet.”

“If you know the answer yourself,” said the Stone Woman, “why do you need me?”

“Because I need you to make me a poet. Not one of those poets who sit in the marketplace, selling rhymes so that soldiers, and anyone with a silver coin, can sing them to the Empress’ maidens—out of tune! I need a true poet, who can write what has never been sung before.”

“A poet?” asked the Stone Woman. “And how to you expect me to make you a poet?”

“In the same way you made the world, Lilit.”

Kamora and the Stone Woman stared at each other. Finally the Stone Woman said, “You are as clever as your uncle. How did you know who I am?”

Kamora smiled. “Who else would know all the songs that have ever been sung? Who else would keep the Mirror of Truth in a cave on Mount Abora? And when the Great Khan was laid in his tomb, the Empress put honey on his lips so you would kiss them when he entered the land of the dead. Even songs from the making of the world mention how fond you are of honey. You have created the Sea Serpent, the Lion of the Sun who carries Bilkis on his back, and whose walk across the sky warms the earth, the Silver Stag who summons men to the land of the dead . . . Only you can make a poet.”

“Very well,” said the Stone Woman. “I will make you a poet, Kamora. But only because I like you. And this is my wedding gift, and the last thing I will do for you. You have had two gifts from me already, and three is enough for anyone.” She stood and considered. “But I haven’t made a poet for a long time. I wonder if I remember how?”

Have you seen the stone caves beneath the palace of Kubla Khan, called the Lesser Khan because for all his palaces, he could not match the conquests of his grandfather, the Great Khan? Where the stone is thin, it is translucent, so that the caves are filled with a strange, ghostly light. In the dark water, which is still and no longer rushing, since the river has mingled into the underground lake, there are luminescent fish. When they swim to the surface, they shine like moving stars.

Samuel took off his breeches and swam in the dark water, in just his shirt. I sat on the bank, striking the dulcimer, thinking of songs that he might like. He floated on his back, his hair spreading around his face like seaweed.

“There seems to be no time here,” he said. “At home, I was expecting a person from Porlock. But here, I feel that no person from Porlock will ever come. Time has stopped, and nothing will ever happen. Except that you will keep singing, Sabra. You will keep singing, won’t you? Sing to me about how the Stone Woman made a poet.” But I did not finish my song, then.

Later, we walked in the garden that surrounded the palace.

“They go on for ten miles,” I said.

“How do you know that?” he asked, but I did not answer. It was hot, even in the shade of the almond trees, and the roses, which had been transported at great expense from Nineveh, were releasing their fragrance into the evening. “I think I could stay here forever,” he said. “Forget my damned debts. Forget my . . . marriage. Never write again, never write anything else. I’m no good at it anyway. I never finish anything.”

“That’s not what Lilit said, when she made you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lilit created the poet out of clay. Kamora watched her mold the figure, the height and shape of a man. It was late now. Outside, the moon had risen, and it shone in through the opening of the cave, its pale light meeting the light of the Phoenix’s tail-feather. Kamora sat on the floor and watched, but she was so tired that her eyes kept closing, and somehow, between one blink of her eyes and another, the man was complete. He was tall, well-formed, and gray, the color of the clay at the bottom of the river Alph. His mouth was open, as though already speaking a poem.

“‘Now we must awaken him,’ said Lilit. ‘I will walk around him three times one way, and you must walk around him three times the other. Then I will spread honey on his lips, and you must put honey into his mouth, so that his words will be both nourishing and sweet.’

“Kamora rose. She was so tired that she stumbled as she walked, but three times she stumbled around the poet, and when she had done so, she took the jar from Lilit and put honey into the poet’s open mouth.

“‘There,’ said Lilit. ‘And I really think that this time I have outdone myself. He will be the greatest poet that ever lived, and every night he will write a poem that has never been heard before for the Empress Nasren. He will be like the river Alph, endlessly replenished by the streams that flow down Mount Abora.’ The poet was no longer the color of clay. Now he had brown hair hanging down to his shoulders, and his skin was as white as milk and covered, irregularly, with brown hair. Lilit took off her gray shawl and wrapped it around his hipbones. ‘Speak, poet. Give us the gift of your first poem.’

“The poet turned to her and said,

‘A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.’

“‘That’s enough for now,’ said Lilit. ‘You see, Kamora, your poet works. Now take him to your Empress, and marry your Cloud Dragon. But don’t visit me again, because the next time you come I won’t be here.’”

“And was he the greatest poet that ever lived?” asked Samuel. We were sitting on the riverbank, where the Alph begins to disappear into the fissures below, surrounded by the scent of roses. The sun was setting, and the walls of the palace had changed from white to gold, and then to indigo. I could not see his face, but his voice sounded sad.

“He was, in the palace of the Empress Nasren,” I said. “He wrote a different poem for her every night, and she gathered scribes around her to make copies so they could be taken to every village. They were set to music, as poems were in those days, and sung at every village fair. And when her ambassadors traveled to other countries, they carried the volumes of his poems, fourteen of them, the number of the constellations, on the back of a white elephant, so they could be presented to foreign sultans and caliphs and tzars.”

“But elsewhere, in the country of daffodils and mutton and rain? Because I think, Sabra, that you come from outside this dream, as I do.”

“In that country, he was a poet who could not finish his poems, and who, for many years, did not write poems at all. How could he, when every night in the palace of the Empress, he wrote a new poem entirely for her? What was left over, after that?”

“Perhaps. Yes, perhaps that is true.”

We heard it then: lightning, crashing over the palace, turning the walls again from indigo to white. Once, twice, three times.

“He has come,” said Samuel. “He has come, the person from Porlock.” And then suddenly, he was gone.

I was staring at my computer screen, on which I had written, “The Kubla Khan of Coleridge’s poem is not the historical Kubla Khan, founder of the Yuan Dynasty, and Xanadu is not Shangdu.”

Again, I heard three knocks on the apartment door. “Sabra, are you there? It’s Michael.”

I rose, and went to open the door. “You people!” I said, as Michael walked in, carrying two bags of groceries.

“What do you mean?” he asked, startled.

“You people from Porlock, always interrupting.”

He kissed me and put the bags he had been carrying on the table. “I was thinking of making a curry, but—you’ve had better curry than I can make. Are you going to laugh at my curry?”

“I would never laugh at your curry.”

He began unpacking the grocery bags. “So, what were you thinking about so hard that you didn’t hear me knock?”

“Coleridge. About how he never finished anything. And about how I’m not sure I want to finish this PhD. Michael, what would you think if I became a writer?”

“Fine by me, as long as you become famous—and rich, so you can keep me in a style to which I am not accustomed.”

Later, after dinner, which was not as disastrous as I had expected, I called my mother. “Nasren Makeda, please.”

“Just a moment. Madame Makeda, it’s your daughter.”

“Sabra! How good it is to hear your voice. I’m in Vienna with Ronnie. Darling, I’m so bored. Won’t you come visit your poor mother? You can’t imagine these rock and roll people. They have no culture whatsoever. One can’t talk to them about anything.”

“Mom, I’d like you to come to Boston and meet Michael.”

“The one from Ohio? Oh, Sabra. Well, I suppose we can’t control whom we fall in love with. It was like that with your father. He was the only man I ever loved, and yet he was shorter than I am by three inches, and that nose—such a pity you inherited it, although you have my ears, thank goodness. But I tell you the truth, I would have married him even if he had not been rich. He was that sort of man. So, I will come and meet your Michael. I can fly over in Ronnie’s plane. Is there a month when Boston is warm? I can come then.”

Perhaps he would fall in love with her. But sometimes one has to take chances.

For Kamora’s marriage to the Cloud Dragon, the Empress’ poet Samuel wrote a new poem, one that no one had heard before. It began,

Do you ask what the birds say? The sparrow, the dove,

The linnet and thrush say, “I love and I love.”

Alem Das himself sang it, playing a dulcimer strung with the whiskers of the Cloud Dragon, whose sound was sweeter, more passionate, and more filled with longing than any instrument that had ever been made. When he was finished, the Empress Nasren clapped, and Kamora, in the Empress’ wedding veil, turned to her husband and blushed.

Later that night, in the cave of the Cloud Dragon, he said to her, “It may be that you are too clever to be my wife.”

She stroked his silver hair and looked with wonder at his pale shoulders, shy for once before his human form. “And perhaps you are too beautiful to be my husband.”

“Then we are well-matched,” he said, “for together there is none in the world more clever or more beautiful than we. And now, my clever wife, are you going to kiss your husband?”

That night, the top of Mount Abora was wreathed in clouds. The Empress Nasren saw it as she walked in the garden of her palace, and she told blind Alem Das, who was walking with her. “Did you know, my friend, that it would end like this?” she asked.

Alem Das laughed in the darkness. “I suspected, from the moment Kamora insisted that my dulcimer should be strung with the whiskers of the Cloud Dragon. She always was a clever girl, although not as clever, I like to think, as her uncle.”

“So, your niece is happy,” said the Empress. “It is good that she is happy, although we who are old, Alem, know that happiness is fleeting.” And she sighed her soft, mad sigh.

“Yes, lady,” said Alem Das. “But tonight your roses are blooming, and I can hear the splashing of fountains. Somewhere inside the palace, your poet is reciting to the wedding guests, who are drunk on honey wine. And we who are old can remember what it was like to be young and foolish and happy, and be content.” And they walked on in the moonlight, the instrument-maker and the Empress.

© 2006 by Theodora Goss.

Originally published in Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories, edited by John Klima.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection “In the Forest of Forgetting” (2006); “Interfictions” (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; and “Voices from Fairyland” (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and has won the World Fantasy and Rhysling Awards.

Gordon, the Self-made Cat
Peter S. Beagle

Once upon a time, to a family of house mice there was born a son named Gordon. He looked very much like his father and mother and all his brothers and sisters, who were gray and had bright, twitchy, black eyes, but what went on inside Gordon was very different from what went on inside the rest of his family. He was forever asking why everything had to be the way it was, and never satisfied with the answer. Why did mice eat cheese? Why did they live in the dark and only go out when it was dark? Where did mice come from, anyway? What were people? Why did people smell so funny? Suppose mice were big and people were tiny? Suppose mice could fly? Most mice don’t ask many questions, but Gordon never stopped.

One evening, when Gordon was only a few weeks old, his next-to-eldest sister was sent out to see if anything interesting had been left open in the pantry. She never returned. Gordon’s father shrugged sadly and spread his front paws, and said, “The cat.”

“What’s a cat?” Gordon asked.

His mother and father looked at one another and sighed. “They have to know sometime,” his father said. “Better he learns it at home than on the streets.”

His mother sniffled a little and said, “But he’s so young,” and his father answered, “Cats don’t care.” So they told Gordon about cats right then, expecting him to start crying and saying that there weren’t any such things. It’s a hard idea to get used to. But Gordon only asked, “Why do cats eat mice?”

“I guess we taste very good,” his father said.

Gordon said, “But cats don’t have to eat mice. They get plenty of other food that probably tastes as good. Why should anybody eat anybody if he doesn’t have to?”

“Gordon,” said his father. “Listen to me. There are two kinds of creatures in the world. There are animals that hunt, and animals that are hunted. We mice just happen to be the kind of animal that gets hunted, and it doesn’t really matter if the cat is hungry or not. It’s the way life is. It’s really a great honor to be the hunted, if you just look at it the right way.”

“Phooey on that,” said Gordon. “Where do I go to learn to be a cat?”

They thought he was joking, but as soon as Gordon was old enough to go places by himself, he packed a clean shirt and some peanut butter, and started off for cat school. “I love you very much,” he said to his parents before he left, “but this business of being hunted for the rest of my life just because I happened to be born a mouse is not for me.” And off he went, all by himself.

All cats go to school, you know, whether you ever see them going or not. Dogs don’t, but cats always have and always will. There are a great many cat schools, so Gordon found one easily enough, and he walked bravely up the front steps and knocked at the door. He said that he wanted to speak to the Principal.

He almost expected to be eaten right there, but the cats—students and teachers alike—were so astonished that they let him pass through, and one of the teachers took him to the Principal’s office. Gordon could feel the cats looking at him, and hear the sounds their noses made as they smelled how good he was, but he held on tight to the suitcase with his shirt and the peanut butter, and he never looked back.

The Principal was a fat old tiger cat who chewed on his tail all the time he was talking to Gordon. “You must be out of your mind,” he said when Gordon told him he wanted to be a cat. “I’d smack you up this minute, but it’s bad luck to eat crazies. Get out of here! The day mice go to cat school . . .”

“Why not?” said Gordon. “Is it in writing? Where does it say that I can’t go to school here if I want?”

Well, of course there’s nothing in the rules of cat schools that says mice can’t enroll. Nobody ever thought of putting it in.

The Principal folded his paws and said, “Gordon, look at it this way—”

“You look at it my way,” said Gordon. “I want to be a cat, and I bet I’d make a better one than the dopey-looking animals I’ve seen in this school. Most of them look as if they wouldn’t even make good mice! So let’s make a deal. You let me come to school here and study for one term, and if at the end of that time I’m not doing better than any cat in the school—if even one cat has better grades than I have—then you can eat me and that’ll be the end of it. Is that fair?”

No cat can resist a challenge like that. But before agreeing, the Principal insisted on one small change: At the end of the term, if Gordon didn’t have the very best marks in the school, then the privilege of eating him would go to the cat that did.

“Ought to encourage some of those louts to work harder,” the Principal said to himself, as Gordon left his office. “He’s crazy, but he’s right—most of them wouldn’t even make good mice. I almost hope he does it.”

So Gordon went to cat school. Every day he sat at his special little desk, surrounded by a hundred kittens and half-grown cats who would have liked nothing better than to leap on him and play games with him for a while before they gobbled him. He learned how to wash himself, and what to do to keep his claws sharp, and how to watch everything in the room while pretending to be asleep. There was a class on Dealing With Dogs, and another on Getting Down From Trees, which is much harder than climbing up, and also a particularly scholarly seminar on the various meanings of “Bad Kitty!” Gordon’s personal favorite was the Visions class, which had to do with the enchanting things all cats can see that no one else ever does—the great, gliding ancestors, and faraway castles, and mysterious forests full of monsters to chase. The Professor of Visions told his colleagues that he had never had such a brilliant student. “It would be a crime to eat such a mouse!” he proclaimed everywhere. “An absolute, shameful, yummy crime.”

The class in Mouse-Hunting was a bit awkward at first, because usually the teacher asks one of the students to be the mouse, and in Gordon’s case the Principal felt that would be too risky. But Gordon insisted on being chased like everyone else, and not only was he never caught (well, almost never; there was one blue Persian who could turn on a dime), but when he took his own turn at chasing, he proved to be a natural expert. In fact, his instant mastery of the Flying Pounce caused his teacher and the entire class to sit up and applaud. Gordon took three bows and an encore.

There was also a class where the cats learned the necessities of getting along with people: how to lie in laps, how to keep from scratching furniture even when you feel you have to, what to do when children pick you up, and how to ask for food or affection in such a sweet manner that people call other people to look at you. These classes always made Gordon a little sad. He didn’t suppose that he would ever be a real “people” cat, for who would want to hold a mouse on his lap, or scratch it behind the ears while it purred? Still, he paid strict attention in People Class, as he did in all the others, for all the cats knew that whoever did best in school that term would be the one who ate him, and they worked harder than they ever had in their lives. The Principal said that they were becoming the best students in the school’s history, and he talked openly about making this a regular thing, one mouse to a term.

When all the marks were in, and all the grades added up, two students led the rankings: Gordon and the blue Persian. Their scores weren’t even a whisker’s thickness apart. In the really important classes, like Running And Pouncing, Climbing, Stalking, and Waiting For The Prey To Forget You’re Still There; and in matters of feline manners such as Washing, Tail Etiquette, The Elegant Yawn, Sleeping In Undignified Positions, and Making Sure You Get Enough Food Without Looking Greedy (101 and 102)—in all of these Gordon and the blue Persian were first, and the rest nowhere. Besides that, both could meow in five different dialects: Persian, Abyssinian, Siamese, Burmese (which almost no cat who isn’t Burmese ever learns), and basic tiger.

But there can only be one Top Cat to a term; no ties allowed. In order to decide the matter once and for all between them, the Principal announced that Gordon and the blue Persian would have to face one another in a competitive mouse roundup.

The Persian and Gordon got along quite well, all things considered, so they shook paws—carefully—and the Persian purred, “No hard feelings.”

“None at all,” Gordon answered. “If anyone here got to eat me, I’d much rather it was you.”

“Very sporting of you,” the Persian said. “I hope so too.”

“But it won’t happen,” Gordon said.

The blue Persian never had a chance. Once he and Gordon were set on their marks in a populous mouse neighborhood, Gordon ambushed and outsmarted and cornered all but a handful of the very quickest mice, and did it in a style so smooth, so effortlessly elegant—so catlike—that the Persian finally threw up his paws and surrendered. In front of the entire faculty and student body of the cat school, he announced, “I yield to Gordon. He’s a better cat than I am, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. If all mice were like him, we cats would be vegetarians.” (Persians are very dramatic.)

The cheering was so wild and thunderous that no one objected in the least when Gordon freed all the mice he had captured. Cats can appreciate a grand gesture, and everyone had already had lunch.

Gordon had won his bet, and, like the blue Persian, the Principal was cat enough to accept it graciously. He scheduled a celebration, which the whole school attended, and at the end of the party he announced that Gordon was now to be considered as much a cat as any student in the school, if not more so. He gave Gordon a little card to show that he was a cat in good standing, and all the students cheered, and Gordon made another speech that began, “Fellow cats . . .” As he spoke, he wished very much that his parents could be there to see what he had accomplished, and just how different things could be if you just asked questions and weren’t afraid of new ideas.

Being acknowledged the best cat in the school didn’t make Gordon let up in his studies. Instead, he worked even harder, and did so well that he graduated with the special degree of felis maximus, which is Latin for some cat! He stayed on at the school to teach a seminar in Evasive Maneuvers, which proved very popular, and a course in the Standing Jump (for a bird that comes flying over when you weren’t looking).

The story of his new life spread everywhere among all mice, and grew very quickly into a myth more terrifying than any cat could have been. They whispered of “Gordon the Terrible,” “Gordon, the Self-Made Cat,” and, simply, “The Unspeakable,” and told midnight tales of a gigantic mouse who lashed his tail and sprang at them with his razor claws out and his savage yellow eyes blazing; a mouse without pity who hunted them out in their deepest hiding places, walking without a sound. They believed unquestioningly that he ate mice like gingersnaps, and laughingly handed over to his cat friends those he was too full to devour. There was even a dreadful legend that Gordon had eaten his own family, and that he frequently took kittens from the school on field trips in order to teach them personally the secret mouse ways that no mere cat could ever have known.

These stories made Gordon deeply unhappy when he heard them, because he believed with absolute conviction that what he had achieved was for the good of all mice everywhere. Whether he trapped a lone mouse or cornered a dozen trembling in an attic or behind a refrigerator, he would say the same thing to them: “Look at me. Look at me! I am a mouse like you—nothing more, nothing less—and yet I walk with cats every day, and I am not eaten! I am respected, I am admired, I am even powerful among cats—and every one of you could be like me! Do not believe that we mice are born only to be hunted, humiliated, tormented, and finally gobbled up. It is not true! Instead of huddling in the shadows, in constant lifelong terror, pitiful little balls of fur, we too can be sleek, fierce hunters, fearing nothing and no one. Run now and spread the word! You must spread the word!”

Saying that, he would step back and let the mice scatter, hoping each time that they would finally understand what he was trying to show them. But it simply never happened. The mice always scurried away, convinced that they had escaped only by great good fortune, and myths and legends of the terrible Self-Made Cat were all that spread among them, growing ever more horrifying, ever more chilling. It didn’t matter that not one mouse had ever actually seen Gordon doing any of the frightful things he was supposed to have done. That’s the way it is with legends.

Now it happened that Gordon was walking down the street one day, on his way to a faculty meeting, padding along like a leopard, twitching his tail like a lion, and making the eager little noises in his throat that a tiger makes when he smells food. Quite suddenly an enormous shadow fell across his path, so big that he looked up to see if he were going through a tunnel. What he saw was a dog. What he actually saw was a leg, for this dog was huge, too big for even a full-grown cat to have understood his real size without looking twice. The dog rumbled, “Oh, goody! I love mice. Lots of phosphorus in mice. Yummy.”

Gordon crouched, tail lashing, and lifted the fur along his spine. “Watch it, dog,” he said warningly. “Don’t mess with me, I’m telling you.”

“Oh, how cute,” the dog said. “He’s playing he’s a cat. I’m a cat too. Meow.”

“I am a cat!” Gordon arched his back until it ached, hissing and spitting and growling in his throat, all more or less at the same time. “I am! You want to see my card? Look, right here.”

“A crazy,” the dog said wonderingly. “They say it’s bad luck to eat a crazy. Good thing I’m not superstitious.”

Having given the proper First Warning, exactly as he’d been taught, Gordon moved quickly to the Second—the lightning-swift slash of the right paw across the nose. Gordon had to leap straight up to reach the dog’s big wet nose, but even with that handicap, he executed the Second Warning in superb style.

Instead of yelping and retreating in a properly humbled state, however, the dog only sneezed.

This, Gordon thought, is the difference between theory and practice.

But there was a reason that Gordon’s seminar in Evasive Maneuvers was always so well attended. With astonishing daring, he went directly from the Second Warning right into the Fourth Avoidance, which involves a double feint—head looking this way, tail jerking that way—followed by a quick, threatening charge directly at the attacker, and then a leap to the side, which, done correctly, leaves one perfectly poised either for escape or the Flying Pounce, depending on the situation.

But the big dog had no idea that a classic Evasive Maneuver had just been performed upon him, leaving him looking like an idiot. He was used to looking like an idiot. He gave a delighted bounce, woofed, “Tag—you’re it!” and went straight for Gordon, who responded by going up a tree with the polished grace that always left his students too breathless to cheer. He found a comfortable branch and rested there, thinking ruefully that a real cat wouldn’t have been so proud of being a cat as to waste time arguing about it.

The dog sat down too, grinning. “Be a bird now,” he called to Gordon. “Let’s see you be a bird and fly away.”

Normally, Gordon could easily have stayed up in the tree longer than the dog felt like waiting below, but he was tired and rather thirsty, not to mention annoyed at the thought of being late for the faculty meeting. Something had to be done. But what?

He was bravely considering an original plan of leaping straight down at the dog, when three young mice happened along. They had been out shopping for their mother.

They were really very young, and as they had never seen Gordon the Terrible—though they had heard about him since they were blind babies—they didn’t know who it was in the tree. All they saw was a fellow mouse in danger, and, being at the age when they didn’t know any better than to do things like that, they carefully put down their packages and began luring the dog away from the tree. First one mouse would rush in at him and make the dog chase him a little way, and then another would come scampering from somewhere else, so that the dog would leave off chasing the first mouse and go after him.

The dog, who was actually quite good-natured, and not very hungry, had a fine time running after them all. He followed them farther and farther away from the tree, and had probably forgotten all about Gordon by the time the Unspeakable was able to spring down from the tree and vanish into the bushes.

Gordon would have waited to thank the three mice, but they had disappeared, along with the dog. Anxious not to miss his meeting, he dashed back to the school, slowing down before he got there to catch his breath and smooth his whiskers. “It could happen to anyone,” he told himself. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Yet there was something fundamentally troubling to Gordon about having run away. Feeling uncertain for the first time since he had marched up the front steps, he washed himself all over and stalked on into the school, outwardly calm and proud, the best cat anyone there would ever see, Gordon the Terrible, the Unspeakable—yes, the Self-Made Cat.

But another cat—the Assistant Professor of Tailchasing, in fact—had seen the whole incident, and had already interrupted the faculty meeting with the shocking tale.

The Principal tried to brush the news aside. “When it’s time to climb a tree, you climb a tree,” he said. “Any cat knows that.” (He had become quite fond of Gordon, in his way.)

It wasn’t enough. The Assistant Professor of Tailchasing (a chocolate-point Siamese who dreamed of one day heading the school himself) led the opposition. As the Assistant Professor saw it, Gordon was plainly a fraud, a pretender, a cat in card only, so friendly with his fellow mice that they had rushed to help him when he was in danger. In light of that, who could say what Gordon’s real plans might be? Why had he come to the school in the first place? What if more like him followed? What if the mice were plotting to attack the cat school, all cat schools?

This thought rattled everyone at the table. With a mouse like Gordon in their midst, a mouse who knew far more about being a cat than the cats themselves, was any feline safe?

Just that quickly, fear replaced reason. Within minutes everyone but the Principal forgot how much they had liked and admired Gordon. Admitting him to the school had been a catastrophic mistake, one that must be set right without a moment’s delay!

The Principal groaned and covered his eyes and sent for Gordon. He was almost crying as he took Gordon’s cat card away.

Gordon protested like mad, of course. He spoke of Will and Choice, and Freedom, and the transforming power of Questioning Assumptions. But the Principal said sadly, “We just can’t trust you, Gordon. Go away now, before I eat you myself. I always wondered what you’d taste like.” Then he put his head down on his desk and really did begin to cry.

So Gordon packed his clean shirt and his leftover peanut butter and left the cat school. All the cats formed a double line to let him pass, their faces turned away, and nobody said a word. The Assistant Professor of Tailchasing was poised to pounce at the very last, but the Principal stepped on his tail.

Nobody ever heard of Gordon again. There were stories that he’d gone right on being a cat, even without his card; and there were other tales that said he had been driven out of the country by the mice themselves. But only the Principal knew for sure, because only the Principal had heard the words that Gordon was muttering to himself as he walked away from the cat school with his head held high.

“Woof,” Gordon was murmuring thoughtfully. “Woof. Bow-wow. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

© 2005 by Peter S. Beagle.

Originally published in The Raven.

Reprinted by permission of the Avicenna Development Corporation.

Peter S. Beagle was born in 1939 and raised in the Bronx, where he grew up surrounded by the arts and education: Both his parents were teachers, three of his uncles were world-renowned gallery painters, and his immigrant grandfather was a respected writer, in Hebrew, of Jewish fiction and folktales. As a child, Peter used to sit by himself in the stairwell of the apartment building he lived in, staring at the mailboxes across the way and making up stories to entertain himself. Today, thanks to classics like The Last Unicorn, A Fine and Private Place, and “Two Hearts,” he is a living icon of fantasy fiction. In addition to eight novels and over one hundred pieces of short fiction, Peter has written many teleplays and screenplays (including the animated versions of The Lord of the Rings and The Last Unicorn); six nonfiction books (among them the classic travel memoir I See By My Outfit); the libretto for one opera; and more than seventy published poems and songs. He currently makes his home in Oakland, California.

Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream
Maria Dahvana Headley

In the middle of the maze, there’s always a monster.

If there were no monster, people would happily set up house where it’s warm and windowless and comfortable. The monster is required. The monster is a real estate disclosure.

So. In the middle of the maze, there is a monster made of everything forgotten, everything flung aside, everything kept secret. That’s one thing to know. The other thing to know is that it is always harder to get out than it is to get in. That should be obvious. It’s true of love as well.

In the history of labyrinths and of monsters, no set of lovers has ever turned back because the path looked too dark, or because they knew that monsters are always worse than expected. Monsters are always angry. They are always scared. They are always kept on short rations. They always want honey.

Lovers, for their part, are always immortal. They forget about the monster.

The monster doesn’t forget about them. Monsters remember everything. So, in the middle of the maze, there is a monster living on memory. Know that, if you know nothing else. Know that going in.

They meet at someone else’s celebration, wedding upstate, Japanese paper lanterns, sparklers for each guest, gin plus tonic. They see each other across the dance floor. They each consider the marzipan flowers of the wedding cake and decide not to eat them.

Notes on an eclipse: Her blue cotton dress, transparent in the sunlight at the end of the dock, as she wonders about jumping into the water and swimming away. His button-down shirt, and the way the pocket is torn by his pen. Her shining hair, curled around her fingers. His arms and the veins in them, traceable from fifty feet.

They resist as long as it is possible to resist, but it is only half dark when the sparklers are lit, from possibly dry-cleaned matches he finds in his pocket. She looks up at him and the air bursts into flame between them.

They are each with someone else, but the other two people in this four-person equation are not at this wedding. They know nothing.

Yet.

In the shadow of a chestnut tree, confetti in her cleavage, party favors in his pockets, they find themselves falling madly, falling utterly, falling without the use of words, into one another’s arms.

Run. There is always a monster—

No one runs. She puts her hand over her mouth and mumbles three words into her palm. She bites said hand, hard.

“What did you say?” he asks.

“I didn’t,” she answers.

So, this is what is meant when people say love at first sight. So this is what everyone has been talking about for seven thousand years.

He looks at her. He shakes his head, his brow furrowed.

They touch fingertips in the dark. Her fingerprints to his. Ridge against furrow. They fit together as though they are two parts of the same tree. He moves his hand from hers, and touches her breastbone. Her heart beats against his fingers.

“What are you?” he asks.

“What are you?” she replies, and her heart pounds so hard that the Japanese lanterns jostle and the moths sucking light there complain and reshuffle their wings.

They lean into each other, his hands moving first on her shoulders, and then on her waist, and then, rumpling the blue dress, shifting the hem upward, onto her thighs. Her mouth opens onto his mouth, and—

Then it’s done. It doesn’t take any work to make it magic. It doesn’t even take any magic to make it magic.

Sometime soon after, he carries her to the bed in his hotel room. In the morning, though she does not notice it now, the hooks that fasten her bra will be bent over backward. The black lace of her underwear will be torn.

This is what falling in love looks like. It is birds and wings and voodoo dolls pricking their fingers as they sing of desire. It is blood bond and flooded street and champagne and O, holy night.

It is Happily Ever.

Give it a minute. Soon it will be After.

So, say her man’s a magician. Say that when he enters a forest, trees stand up and run away from their leaves, jeering at their bonfired dead. Say that in his presence people drop over dead during the punchlines of the funniest jokes they’ve ever managed to get through without dying of laughing, except—

Like that.

So, say he knew it all along. This is one of a number of worst things itemized already from the beginning of time by magicians. This falls into the category of What To Do When Your Woman Falls In Love With Someone Who Is Something Which Is Not The Least Bit Like The Something You Are.

The magician shuffles a deck of cards, very pissed off. The cards have altered his fingerprints. Scars from papercuts, scars from paper birds and paper flowers, from candle-heated coins, and scars from the teeth of the girls from whose mouths he pulled the category Things They Were Not Expecting.

Turns out, no woman has ever wanted to find a surprise rabbit in her mouth.

He finds this to be one of many failings in his wife. Her crooked nose, her dominant left hand, her incipient crow’s feet. He hates crows. But she is his, and so he tries to forgive her flaws.

His wife has woken sometimes, blinking and horrified, her mouth packed with fur. No one ever finds the rabbits. His wife looks at him suspiciously as she brushes her teeth.

Sometimes it hasn’t been rabbits. When they first met, years and years ago, she found her mouth full of a dozen roses, just as she began to eat a tasting menu at a candlelit restaurant. She choked over her oyster, and then spat out an electric red hybrid tea known as Love’s Promise. By the end of evening, she was sitting before a pile of regurgitated roses, her tuxedoed magician bowing, the rest of the room applauding.

She excused herself to the bathroom—golden faucets in the shape of swans—to pick the thorns from her tongue. And then sometime later, what did she do?

She married him.

The magician continues to shuffle his cards. He clubs his heart, buries said heart with his wife’s many diamonds, and uses his spade to do it. Some of those diamonds are made of glass. She never knew it.

In their hotel room, the lovers sleep an hour. He’s looking at her as she opens her eyes.

“What?” she asks.

He puts his hand over his mouth and says three words into it. He bites down on his palm. She reaches out for him. It is morning, and they are meant to part.

They do not.

This is meant to be a one-night love story not involving love.

It is not.

They stay another day and night in bed. They’ve each accidentally brought half the ingredients of a spell, objects rare and rummaged, philters and distillations, words that don’t exist until spoken.

They get halfway through a piece of room service toast before they’re on the floor, tea dripping off the table from the upended pot, a smear of compote across her face, buttered crumbs in his chest hair.

They think, foolish as any true lovers have ever been, that this is so sweet that nothing awful would dare happen now.

They think, what could go wrong?

Right.

And so, say his wife is a witch. A cave full of moonlight and black goats and bats, housed in a linen closet in the city. Taxicabs that speak in tongues and have cracked blinking headlights and wings. An aquarium full of something bright as sunlight, hissing its way up and out into the apartment hallway, and a few chickens, which mate, on occasion, with the crocodiles that live in the bathtub.

Like that.

Say she knew about this too, from the moment she met her man, foretold the mess in a glass full of tea, the heart-shaped, crow-footed face of this woman who is nothing like the witch.

The night the two true-lovers meet, his wife is sitting in their shared apartment. Coffee grounds shift in the bottom of her cup. A yellow cat streaks up the fire escape, shrieking a song of love and lamentation. The witch’s hair tangles in her hands, and she breaks the knot, tears the strands, throws them from the window and down into the neighbor’s place, where he, wide-eyed, elderly, and stoned on criminal levels of pot, drops the witch’s hair into the flame of his gas stove and leaves it be while it shoots fireworks over the range and sets off the smoke detector.

The witch looks for allies. There is one. He’s a magician. Typically, she works alone, but she suspects her skills will be blurred by sorrow and fury.

She sees him in her coffee grounds, shuffling a deck of cards and crying. He pulls a coin from beneath his own eyelid. A white rabbit appears in his mouth and then climbs out, looking appalled, dragging with it a rainbow of silk scarves and a bouquet of dead roses. The magician lets the table rise beneath his fingers, propelled by the rattling ghosts of other magicians’ wives.

The witch has no patience for any of this. She spills milk so that no one needs to cry over it anymore. There. It’s done. It’s happened. After a moment, though, the waste begins to irritate her, and so she unspills the milk and pours it into her coffee cup. She sweetens it with a drop of her own blood, and drinks it.

She’s strong enough to kill him, but she doesn’t want to kill him.

She is not, unfortunately, strong enough to make him fall out of love. Making someone fall out of love, particularly when it is the kind of love that is meant to be, is much harder than murder. There are thousands of notoriously unreliable spells meant to accomplish just this. Typically, they backfire and end up transforming eyebrows into tiny, roaring bears, or turning hearts inside out and leaving them that way.

Once, when attempting something similar, the witch found her own heart ticking like a timebomb. This was expensive to fix, and in truth, the fixing did not go well. Her heart is mostly made of starfish these days. At least it could regenerate when something went wrong.

When the witch first fell in love with her husband, she showed him all of her spells, a quick revue of revelations.

She crouched on the floor of the apartment, and opened her closet full of cave, let the bats and goats and ghosts come pouring out into the room, and he laughed and told her she might need an exterminator. She crumpled herbs from ancient hillsides, and in their dust she planted seeds shaken carefully from a tiny envelope. She watched him as the flowers bloomed up out of nothingness. Each flower had his face. She wasn’t sure he’d noticed. She pointed it out, and he said, “Thank you.”

She worried he was not impressed enough. They stayed together.

At night sometimes, she took down buildings brick by brick, all over the city, but left their bedchamber untouched.

The witch is busy too. She has things to accomplish. She has no time for fate. She doesn’t wish to let her man go off into his own story, giving fate as his reason.

Fate is never fair. This is why there is such a thing as magic.

The witch picks up her phone and calls the magician. She monitors him in the coffee grounds as he answers. He’s dressed in a full tuxedo and most of a sequined gown. He’s sawed himself in half, and is carefully examining the parts. The witch could have told him that this’d yield nothing in the way of satisfaction. Years ago, just as she met this man and learned about the other woman in his future, she dismantled her own body, and shook it out like laundry, hoping to purge the urge to love. It hid, and when she replaced her skin with cocoa-colored silk, the urge to love got loose, and hid elsewhere.

She never told him about the woman he’s meant to meet. Men were often blind. He might miss her.

Love was blind too, though, and this was the witch’s mistake. Had he been blind and deaf and mute, he’d still have met the other woman, in the dark, in the silence.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be done.

“Meet me,” she says to the magician. “We have things to do together.”

Together, the lovers walk through a cemetery holding hands, laughing over the fact that they are tempting fate by walking through a cemetery holding hands.

Together, they walk through a torrential storm, heads bent to look at each other’s rain-streaming faces.

Together, they have faith in traffic.

Together, they fuck in the stairwell, on the floor, against the bookshelves, on the couch, in their sleep, while waking, while dreaming, while reading aloud, while talking, while eating takeout first with chopsticks and then with fingers and then from each other’s fingers, and then?

Lover’s arithmetic: test to see how many fingers can be fit into her mouth, how many fingers can be fit inside her body. Test to see how many times she can come. They chalk it up on an imaginary blackboard. She lays still, her hair spread across the pillow, and comes simply by looking at him.

Together they compare histories, secrets, treasures.

Together, they’re reduced to cooing and whirring like nesting birds, junketing on joy.

Together, they try to doubt it.

It’s no use. There are too many ways to break a heart. One of them is to tear that heart in half and part company. And so, they don’t.

“Fate,” he says. And it is.

“Magic,” she says. And it is.

“Meant to be together,” they say, together. And it is.

Careful. There need be no mention of star-crossing, not of Desdemona and Othello, nor of Romeo and Juliet. Not of any of those people who never existed, anyway. Someone made those people up. If any of them died for love, it’s someone else’s business.

Together, they compare fingerprints again, this time with ink. He rolls her thumb over his page, and looks at the mark, and they memorize each other’s lines.

Together, they say, “Forever.”

Look. Everyone knows that forever is, and has always been, a magic word. Forever isn’t always something one would choose, given all the information.

And so, the magician and the witch hunch over a table in the neutral zone of a Greek diner, brutalized by a grumpy waitress and bitter coffee. Outside, the sky’s pouring sleet. Inside, the ceiling’s streaming fluorescent light. The witch’s taxicabs patrol the streets, crowing miserably, wings folded. Too nasty out there to fly.

The magician is in formal dress, including top hat. The witch is wearing a fleece blanket that has sleeves and a pocket for Kleenex, and though she’s managed lipstick, it’s crooked. She’s wearing fishnet stockings, which the magician suspects are an illusion.

Neither witch nor magician are in top form. Both have head colds, and are heartbroken. Each has a sack of disaster.

The witch coughs violently, and removes a tiny, red-smudged white rabbit from between her lipsticked lips. She holds the rabbit in her hand, weighing it.

The magician stares steadily at her, one eyebrow raised, and after a moment, the witch laughs, puts the rabbit back into her mouth, chews, and swallows it.

The magician blinks rapidly. A moment later, he chokes, and tugs at the neck of his tuxedo shirt, where his bowtie was, but is no longer.

He glances sideways at the witch, and then fishes a black bat from his own mouth. The bat is wild-eyed and frothing, its wings jerking with fury. It has a single black sequin attached to its forehead.

“Are you ready to stop fucking around?” asks the witch.

“Yes,” says the magician, humbled, and the bat in his hand stops struggling and goes back to being a bowtie.

The waitress passes the table, her lip curled.

“No animals,” she says, pointing at the sign. She sloshes boiled coffee into each of their cups.

“What do you have for me?” says the witch.

“What do you have for me?” says the magician. “I love my wife.”

“We’re past that. You’re not getting her back, unless you want half a wife and I want half a husband. Look.”

She pulls an x-ray from her bag. It’s a bird’s-eye skeletal of two people entwined in a bed, her back to his front. In the image, it’s appallingly clear that their two hearts have merged, his leaning forward through his chest, her heart backbending out of her body, and into his.

“How did you get this?” the magician says, both fascinated and repulsed.

The witch shrugs.

She hands him another image, this one a dark and blurry shot of a heart. On the left ventricle, the magician reads his wife’s name, in her own cramped handwriting. “Hospital records from forty years ago,” she says. “None of this is our fault. He was born with a murmur. Now we know who was murmuring.”

She passes him another photo. He doesn’t even want to look. He does.

His wife’s bare breasts, and this photo sees through them, and into the heart of the magician’s own wife, tattooed with the name of the witch’s own husband.

“What’s the point, then? Revenge?” he asks, removing his tailcoat, unfastening his cufflinks, and rolling up his sleeves. There’s a little bit of fluffy bunny tail stuck at the corner of the witch’s mouth. He reaches out and plucks it from her lips.

“Revenge,” she repeats. “Together forever. That’s what they want.”

She pulls out a notebook. When she opens the cover, there’s a sound of wind and wings and stamping, and a low roar, growing louder. Something’s caged in there, in those pages. Something’s been feeding on forever.

The magician smiles weakly and pours out the saltshaker onto the page. He uses his pen to carve a complicated maze in salt. He feels like throwing up.

“Something like this?” he says, and the witch nods. She feels like throwing up too. No one ever wants things to turn out this way. But they do.

“Something like that. I’ll do the blood.”

“I could do it if you don’t want to,” the magician volunteers, not entirely sincerely. That kind of magic’s never been his specialty.

“No, I owe you. I ate your rabbit.”

He rummages in his sack of disaster and brings out a pair of torn black lace panties. A bra with bent hooks. A photograph of a woman in a blue dress, laughing, giddy, her eyes huge, her hair flying in the wind. He looks at the crow’s feet around her eyes. Side effect of smiling. Crows walk on those who laugh in their sleep. He tried to tell her, but she did it anyway.

He pushes his items to the witch’s side of the table. The witch rummages in her own sack and removes a razor, a t-shirt ripped and ink-stained, a used condom (the magician suppresses a shudder), a gleaming golden thread. She suppresses the urge to smash the t-shirt to her face and inhale. She suppresses the desire to run her wrist along the razor blade.

She signals to the waitress. “Steak,” she says. “Bloody. I don’t normally do meat, but I get anemic when I do this. And a martini.”

“Two,” says the magician.

“We don’t serve steak,” says the waitress. “You can get a gyro, if you want a gyro. That’s probably chicken.”

The magician flicks his fingers, and the waitress pirouettes like a ballerina.

A moment later she returns with a white damask tablecloth, and two lit candles. Two plates of prime float out of the kitchen, smoking and bleeding. The fluorescent lights flicker off. The witch and the magician raise their glasses in a toast.

They toast to “Forever.”

And even when they say it, it is, as it always has been, a magic word.

The monster, newly uncaged, runs hands over new skin. The monster opens a new mouth and learns to roar.

She fell asleep holding his right hand in her left. She wakes up alone. There’s a playing card stuck to her left breast. It is not the Queen of Hearts. It’s a two of spades.

She’s in a hospital.

Her husband is a magician. Her lover’s wife is a witch. She knew better than to do this, this forever. But here she is, and here’s a nice nurse who asks her what she thinks she’s doing when she asks for the return of her shoelaces and belt and purse strap.

“I don’t belong here,” she says, in a very calm voice.

“Then why do you think you are here?” asks the nurse, in a voice equally calm.

Her wedding ring is missing too, but she doesn’t miss it. Her mouth tastes of rabbit and overhandled playing card. Where historically she has felt sympathetic to her husband, to his oddities, to his pain, she now begins to feel angry.

She looks down at her left hand and feels her lover still there. She looks at her ring finger, and sees something new there, a bright thing in her fingerprint.

A red mark. A movement, spinning through the whorls, slowly, tentatively. Someone is there, and the moment she thinks someone, she knows who it is.

She brings her fingertips closer to her face. She looks at them, hard. She concentrates. One does not spend years married to a magician without picking up some magic.

His eyes open. He’s freezing. His blood’s turned to slush and he remembers that time, when he did his girlfriend a significant wrong via text message. She salted him, limed him, and then drank him with a straw for seven hollow-cheeked minutes.

Last night, he held his lover in his arms, and kissed the back of her neck. She curled closer to him, pressing her spine into him.

He heard the crowing of taxicabs in his dreams.

There are looping, curving walls on either side of him. Above him, far above, the sky is dazzling, fluorescently white.

A flash across the heavens of rose-colored clouds. They press down upon him, soft and heavy. They depart. A rain of saltwater begins, and splashes through the narrow passage he inhabits. He hears his love’s voice, whispering to him, but he can’t find her. Her voice is everywhere, shaking the walls, shaking the sky.

“I have you,” she says. “You’re with me. Don’t worry.”

But he can’t see her. He’s frightened.

Something has started singing, somewhere, a horrible, beautiful, sugary roar. He’s suddenly hit by a memory of fucking his wife, on the floor surrounded by flowers that had his face. They both failed to come, bewildered by lack. It was years after the beginning, back then, but still nowhere near the end.

“I have you,” his beloved whispers. “You’re safe with me. I know the way.” He wonders if he’s imagining her.

The walls shake around him. He can feel her heartbeat, moving the maze, and his own heart returns to beating a counterpoint, however tiny in comparison.

He opens his hand and finds a ball of string in it.

The witch and the magician fumble in the car on the way to her place. Her sleeved blanket is rumpled. His top hat and tuxedo have turned to ponytail and hoodie. He may or may not be wearing a nude-colored unitard beneath his clothes. Old habits.

“Unbelievable dick,” she says, not crying yet. “He deserves this.”

“Believable,” he says. “Some people are idiots. She deserves this. I think maybe she never loved me.”

He’s looking at the witch’s black curls, at the way her red lipstick is smeared out from the corner of her lip. He’s thinking about his rabbit, working its way through her digestive tract. She’s still wearing the fishnet stockings he’d thought she conjured.

“It’s hard to make fishnets look right,” she says, turning her face toward his. Her eyelashes are wet. “They’re complicated geometry.”

He pulls an ancient Roman coin from behind her ear, clacking awkwardly against her earrings. She looks at him, half-smiling, and then pulls a tiny white rabbit from out of his hoodie. He’s stunned.

“It seemed wasteful to let it stay dead,” she says.

He puts his shaking hand on her knee. She moves his hand to inside her blanket. He takes off his glasses. She takes off her bra.

There are still people in madhouses and mazes. There are still monsters. Love is still as stupid and delirious as it ever was.

The monster in the middle of the labyrinth opens its mouth. It starts to sing for someone to bring it what it wants, its claws trembling, its tail lashing, its eyes wide and mascaraed to look wider, its horns multiplying until the ceiling is scratched and its own face is bloody.

The monster screams for honey, for sugar, for love, and its world comes into existence around it. Bends and twists, dead ends, whorling curves and barricades and false walls, all leading, at last, to the tiny room at the center of the maze, where the monster lives alone.

The other thing that’s always being forgotten, the other thing that no one remembers, is that monsters have hearts, just as everyone else does.

Here, in the middle of the maze, the monster sings for sweetness. As it does, it holds its own heart in its hands and breaks it, over and over and over.

And over.

© 2012 Maria Dahvana Headley

Maria Dahvana Headley’s first novel, Queen of Kings, a dark fantasy/alt-history involving monsters, gods, witches, Cleopatra, and the Roman Army, was recently published by Dutton in the US, and Transworld in the UK, among other countries. She’s also the author of the internationally bestselling and somewhat notorious memoir The Year of Yes. Her short fiction has appeared in Subterranean, as well as in various anthologies and magazines, including, due to a constantly genre-hybridizing career, Best American Erotica. Mainly, she lives on Twitter, at @mariadahvana, but you can also find her at www.mariadahvanaheadley.com.

Author Spotlight: Liz Williams & Alastair Reynolds
Gina Guadagnino

How did you come up with the idea for this story? Was the idea a joint effort?

Williams: As I recall, a lot of the driving force behind this came from Al—I think he came up with the original concept—but it was one of those stories that just seemed to evolve once we started writing it.

Reynolds: I’d had an idea about the “eggs” knocking around in my files for a bit, but I can’t remember how we actually got started—whether that was the starting point, or whether we just hit the ground running and the eggs entered the story later. I do know that I had a clear idea of the kind of story I hoped we could come up with, which was
something very far future, almost Jack Vancean—and since I knew of Liz’s enthusiasm for Vance, and the amazing sense of decaying futurity she already brings to much of her fiction, I suspected we’d be able to find some common ground very easily.

The future in this novella is particularly bleak—perpetual winter and enclosing ice are so pervasive that the coldness almost seems like a character itself. Tell us a little bit more about the world in which this story is set.

Williams: Al came up with the backstory for this—far future Earth, winter, the alien jewels. I don’t know much about the world itself but I know how it feels.

Reynolds: I think we both like the imaginative scope offered by cold, wintery landscapes—I know I do. I’d far rather write about a city covered in ice and snow than one suffering a future heat wave. As a child, I remembered a picture book with striking, Aubrey Beardsley type illustrations of (I’m guessing) a story that may have been the Snow Queen, and that frosty, precise imagery has stuck with me ever since. Of course on a plot level the world of “Lune” needs to be freezing, in order for the eggs to offer some salvation. Speaking for myself, I’d had a stab at a similar frozen future setting in my story “The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter,” although I stress that this isn’t the same setting. I don’t think I’m done with wintery futures by any stretch.

Lune seems to be very in tune with her city. Indeed, the last lines of the piece invoke Paris as her city. Why Paris? What about the location is so important to this story?

Williams: I can’t remember why we chose Paris, actually. This was a real right brain experience for me: as I say, I know how the world feels and there were elements of it which just appeared, like the skating guards, but I tend to write quite instinctively sometimes and this was one of those times.

Reynolds: I find it very easy to imagine Paris enduring for thousands of years—it’s been around for such a long time, and seems so firmly rooted in history. I’ve written about it in my fiction before, and it’s there in Liz’s own Winterstrike. We didn’t get out a map or anything, though—just used our imaginations and (doubtless) very flawed memories. There’s Paris, and there’s the dream of Paris, and this story definitely comes from the latter.

The fire of the eggs and the blending of science and mythology worked so well in this story. What was the inspiration for this combination?

Reynolds: We definitely wanted to hit that Vancean/Gene Wolfe territory where science and myth bleed together, where the delineation between the two is vague and not particularly clear or even relevant to any of the characters. Again, I think it’s something that seemed to sit well with the type of stuff we both write individually. On one level, Liz and I might be seen to sit at very different poles of the science fiction scene—I’m a trained scientist and something of a skeptic, Liz runs a witchcraft shop—but hopefully that makes for a more interesting, sparky collaboration. You couldn’t do this unless you get on well, though—which we do.

What’s next for you two? Are you planning any additional collaborations?

Williams: I’d certainly like to. This was a very easy collaboration for me, and our only problem was really lack of time.

Reynolds: Nothing definite although I think we’d both like to do something again at some point. There’s plenty more of Lune’s world to write about, of course. I think that, both of us having worked hard on this story (at a time when we also had other, equally pressing work commitments) we’d be pleased enough for the story to be read and commented on—if it’s generally deemed to have been a good thing, then I’m sure that would be the spur to getting us to sit down and think up another one. If, on the other hand, the community is indifferent, then we’d be fine with that as well. The main thing is that we had fun doing it, and (for better or for worse) there’s a story which wouldn’t otherwise have existed and which hopefully is a little bit unlike anything we could have produced individually.

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: Jake Kerr
Andrew Liptak

Your story, “Requiem in the Key of Prose” takes on a very different style than most stories; how did you come up with the idea to split the story up as it is?

The idea originated from a number of elements that all came together into this singular idea. The first was a TED talk by Benjamin Zander where he discusses music and passion. At one point he plays two notes and says the job of the C note is to make the B note sound sad. I immediately was struck by a parallel to writing, where we use various prose elements for a specific effect. For example, present tense exists to focus the reader’s attention on the now, short sentences communicate fast-moving action, and so on. So I left the Zander presentation thinking that my new appreciation of the tools of music had no parallel with readers appreciating the tools of prose.

The next element was watching Penn & Teller. I’ve always been fascinated by their ability to explain the magic tricks that they are going to do before they do them. And then we still enjoy the tricks, even as we know what is happening. There are narrative parallels where we know how the story ends in the beginning and then we enjoy the journey to how the story got there, but I could think of no true Penn & Teller parallels, where the actual “trick” of story-telling is explained before the author uses it.

Finally, what brought everything together for me was listening to Frederic Chopin’s Sonata in B-Flat Minor. I loved how this great composer telegraphed not just what he was presenting—a sonata—but also the tool he was going to use—the key of B-flat minor. Everything flowed together, and I envisioned a story where the author would telegraph the framework in the title, and then use that framework within the piece, just like great composers did, with a touch of Penn & Teller to boot. The actual direct inspiration was a requiem, specifically Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D Minor.

Do you think there’s something to be said for sacrificing one person for the good of the many?

This is a theme with a deep history not just in SF but all of literature. I’m sure we can all recite Spock’s final words from The Wrath of Khan. For me, I am much more interested in the personal toll of such a sacrifice. Does having your loved one sacrifice him- or herself and become a hero make you feel happier as a survivor? Proud? Deeply sad despite the sacrifice? Guilty? Perhaps all these things? I wanted to address these emotions in my story.

Adam’s chosen because he knows a little of everything; is too much specialization a bad thing?

Specialization is not a bad thing, but having a complex structure where everyone is so focused on the parts that no one understands the whole is a bad thing. In the story, Adam is a fallen intellectual in the sense that he isn’t a great engineer or electrician. He’s the kind of guy that likes to slop around with the guys laying the cement to see how they create vertical cylinders. If he has a specialty, it is knowledge. When the oxygen structure fails, there are plenty of people with expertise, but only Adam seems to have the wide-ranging knowledge to save it.

In the story, the reason things break down is that the oxygen generator is built without any thought of the future. The goal is just to get it going. Society today seems very much focused on the here and now. Was that a statement you were trying to make?

Not consciously. The reason for the immediacy in the story is pure desperation. If they didn’t build something quickly, they would all die. I could see a parallel to our cultural mindset today in that there is this sense of desperation. It’s tough to focus on the future when your present is miserable, and solving that misery in any way possible as quickly as you can makes a sad sense to me.

Finally, what can you tell us about your writing process? Any tips for beginners?

Conceptually, my writing process is to take an interesting idea or situation, and then add a human element to it. This is mostly done in my head. By the time I sit down and write, I have a very good idea of the entire story, from beginning to end.

In terms of tips, one of the biggest mistakes beginning writers make is working in a vacuum. They hear that all they have to do is write one million words, and they’re on their way. The road to improvement, however, requires objective feedback. Otherwise you make the same mistakes again and again, and that one-millionth word you wrote is no more effective than the first one.

So the first thing you need to do as a beginning writer is welcome feedback from people who will tell you that you are doing lots of things wrong and then pay close attention to what they say you did wrong. Join a local or online critique group. Grow a thick skin. Seek out and embrace readers who are viciously precise in their criticism. It will help enormously.

Related to the above, you are well served by improving your own ability to recognize what actually is great fiction and what is not. This will not only help you recognize your own shortcomings, it will help you recognize when you are getting advice that is unhelpful. Read the classics and learn the things that make those stories great. And when I say learn the things that made them great, I mean not just what those stories achieve but how they achieve them. It is not enough to say that a lot of people are playing a C note and a B note, and thus you will too. You need to know that the C note’s job is to make the B note sad.

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: Joe Haldeman
Erin Stocks

Welcome back to Lightspeed! We’re delighted to reprint “Four Short Novels,” which was nominated for a Hugo back in 2004, and remains today a fascinating read. The title of each very short novel is taken from a famous novel; can you tell us what inspired this decision, and the story itself?

As far as I can recall, the idea and the title came to me at the same time, while I was pedaling up a long hill near Millhopper State Geological Park (or some such name) near my home in Florida.

Each of these sequences dwell on different perceptions (and results) of immortality, something we as humans may forever be searching for. Do you think this will be an eternal goal of man no matter the scenario?

Not necessarily . . . it’s easy to come up with science-fictional cultures that put no great value on long life, for whom immortality would be unpleasant or even obscene. Ursula Le Guin wrote a wonderful short story a couple of years ago with a new angle on that.

A large number of Americans believe they’re going to be immortal up in the sky after they die on Earth. That’s one of the solutions to the problem, and it takes care of certain aspects like expense, real estate, post-mortem effect, and so on.

I found it interesting that Custer Tralia’s story, “The Way of All Flesh,” was the only sequence out of the four that didn’t end in complete annihilation of man (or of good men, as in “Crime and Punishment.”) Perhaps love is the key to avoiding mankind’s consistent ability to self-destruct?

Of course that’s why it’s the last chapter. As Custer’s spokesperson says, “You couldn’t say that love conquers all. But it could still conquer death.”

You’re a prolific traveler. What kind of inspiration does traveling have on your writing?

Obviously, it sometimes provides interesting settings and experiences. Actual “inspiration” is usually internal, though. I don’t think my stories would be greatly different if I stayed home and wrote. (There might be more of them, admittedly.)

For our readers who may be new to your novels, where do you recommend they start?

The Marsbound trilogy—Marsbound, Starbound, and Earthbound.

What can we look forward to reading from you next?

I’m finishing up a stand-alone novel called Work Done For Hire.

Lightspeed Assistant Editor Erin Stocks’s fiction can be found in the Coeur de Lion anthology Anywhere but Earth, Flash Fiction Online, the Hadley Rille anthology Destination: Future, and The Colored Lens. Follow her on Twitter @ErinStocks.

Author Spotlight: A.M. Dellamonica
Caleb Jordan Schulz

In your story, “The Sweet Spot,” Ruthie and Matt are siblings caught in the middle of a drawn-out war, living in Kauai, Hawaii. How did you decide to set the story in this location?

I have been writing this series of squid stories, as I call them, for a few years—a couple have been in Strange Horizons and another was in an anthology called Fast Forward: Fiction From The Cutting Edge, edited by Lou Anders. A lot of these are about Ruthless Gerrickle’s life. I’m writing and publishing them out of chronological order, but “The Sweet Spot” is one of the earlier pieces—in other words, she’s still a kid in this one.

I have a decent sense of the geographical direction taken in the war between the Democratic Army and the Fiends, and many of my touch points for the history of the war are the big battles for U.S. cities. There’s a Battle of Las Vegas story I haven’t finished yet, and a big fight in Texas when the Fiends cross the Rio Grande, putting ground troops on mainland U.S. soil for the first time. “Five Good Things about Meghan Sheedy” takes place when things are a lot worse, during the Siege of Seattle.

When I was considering this particular story, I was thinking about the period before the Fiends get into Texas, and other incursions they might make onto U.S. territory. And Hawaii seemed as though it would make an excellent outpost for a big Kabuva Consultancy base, for all the reasons why Pearl Harbor makes a good naval base, but also because they’re an oceanic species. The climate and terrain of the Hawaiian beaches appeals to the squid. So, with that, I started considering a Battle of Hawaii.

Music plays an important role in the lives of Ruthie and Matt, from Kabuva folk songs to their father’s guitar to their concert performance. Why did you choose to use music so prominently in this story?

I sing in a choir called Out in Harmony here in Vancouver, so I know a fair bit about making music, and that helped—in a sense, some of the research was done for me. I also wanted to touch on the importance of music to soldiers. Songs are something that humans have always taken with us to war: you can’t go on the march with a painting from home in your pack, or bring your entire library of books with you (well, with modern tech you could carry an e-reader loaded with books and photos, but that’s a new development). But you can always sing a song. Music is a portable piece of home. War songs are as old as war, and music offers inspiration, comfort, a sense of a shared cultural background. Sometimes singing together can offer a crucial form of emotional relief to soldiers in horrifying situations.

Bringing Kabuva’s music to Earth, along with all the young squid soldiers and their weaponry is, therefore, a way to create a little bit of common ground between a fairly peculiar alien species and people—both their fictional human allies in the stories and readers too.

Squids and Democrats, Fiends and Friends. Could you give us a bit of the background for the origins of the war between the Squid and the Fiends?

Heh. I have wayyyy too much history worked out for this universe, considering that so far there are only a handful of stories to justify the time, thought, and reading I’ve put into it.

But here goes: a couple centuries before Ruthie’s birth, first contact happened. The aliens that found Earth had vastly superior technology and they found a few things here of economic value. In the process of establishing trade relations and extracting the resources they wanted, they messed up the global economy pretty badly. Over time, things degraded to the point where Earth was dependent on alien aid to function and a lot of people were extremely poor.

In time, a movement arose in Southeast Asia. It called itself the Friends of Liberation and its platform was anti-offworlder; they claimed to want to evict every last alien from the planet. There was a hypocritical component there, as they were getting their funds and weaponry from an alien sponsor. They also had a totalitarian streak: as far as they were concerned, the way to make earth alien-free was to establish a single world government, one that was in no way democratic.

As this movement spread, a number of nations formed an alliance to resist the Friends of Liberation, and they gave them the moniker Fiends because that’s what we do in wars—we dehumanize the enemy through a number of strategies, including name calling. There was no way the Democratic Army could resist the Fiends without offworld assistance, and for that they turned to the Kabuva Consultancy—the squid.

Though mostly the casual name I use for this series is “the squid stories,” I also sometimes call it “The Proxy War.” Because what this conflict really centers around is a global-scale human civil war, where both principal combatants are being propped up by opposing alien governments.

As computer technology changes the world around us at an incredible speed, much discussion has taken place about the future of death, and how technology can and will alter how we view death. In your story, the children are able to have conversations with their dead father using a computer program. Do you feel technologies such as this are close at hand?

If we chose to use it in that way, I think we could get up a fair amount of what I’m describing right now. I was visiting my 90-year-old grandma a couple years ago and she was strumming a ukulele and holding it, for some unknown reason, upside-down. It was incredibly charming, and I had my camera out. Two button-clicks later, I’d captured about thirty seconds of video that’s now tucked away on Youtube even though there are only four people in the world who’d ever want to watch it. And even then, as I was recording Grandma, I thought, “I’ll have this when she’s gone.”

Which is morbid . . . but I’ve lost a lot of loved ones this past decade. I’m one of those people whose laptop wallpaper cycles through a random sampling of the photos of my hard drive . . . and every now and then I’ll walk into my office and be confronted with some image I shot at a funeral, or a picture of someone who’s gone. It’s sometimes nice, sometimes painful, sometimes sobering. It’s also a way of stumbling over the past that didn’t used to exist.

The AI in my story cut and pastes bits and pieces of video recordings into new conversations. We could do that now, given a big video archive; it wouldn’t work all that well yet, but programmers are working on programs that do an ever-better job of faking conversation. As for raw material, many of us are busily engaged in uploading tons of stuff from our lives onto sites like Facebook. By the time I’m seventy, how much footage of me will be online? Enough to CGI a fair amount of video of faux Alyx, if anyone wanted to do such a thing.

That said, I’m with Ruthie in stating the obvious: no AI is going to make a decent substitute for the presence of a real loved one. At best, it might provide a little pain relief. Is that a good thing? Well, grief is awfully painful.

We get hints about Kabuva, but what would life be like for a human on Kabuva, living in Earthtown on the Blighted Sea? Would they be free? Pets? Something in between?

I have a story about Ruthless as a much older woman, in Earthtown, after the Democrat defeat. It’s called “The Town on Blighted Sea” and it goes into exactly that. Earthtown’s a city for refugees, and it’s a mostly-human environment, because it’s built on land and the squid live in the oceans of their homeworld. It is also more than half-empty, because the Kabuva thought they’d get a lot more of their human allies off of Earth than they actually ended up rescuing.

Finally, do you have any new projects you’d like to announce?

Sure! My second novel, Blue Magic, came out in April. Blue Magic is the sequel to my ecofantasy Indigo Springs. It has magic and monsters instead of high-tech weaponry and aliens, but there’s a big global conflict there, too, and some of the themes are similar. And right now I’m at work on a trilogy set on Stormwrack, the world I introduced in my Tor.com story “Among the Silvering Herd.”

Caleb Jordan Schulz is a writer, illustrator, and nomad, currently finding himself in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His fiction can be found in Subversion, Scape, 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: David Brin
Andrew Liptak

Hi David, thanks for talking with us! What can you tell us about your story, “The Giving Plague?”

Back in the 1980s, biological science was abuzz with a new idea—that the boundaries between species aren’t anywhere near as firm and permanent as we (and Darwin) once thought. Bacteria exchange DNA with each other. Many of our own genes entered our chromosomes, originally, from viruses. Some species even hijack each other, as when a parasitic wasp lays her egg in an ant, who then behaves almost like a living vehicle, taking the growing larva where it needs to be.

Then there’s the Gaia Hypothesis—the notion that our planet behaves much like a living organism, whose many cells consist of the countless species and organisms that seem, at the surface, to be so competitive with each other.

Some of these notions made it into my novels Earth and Heart of the Comet. But there was one really cool idea that I had left over. So cool that it made “The Giving Plague” a Hugo nominee.

“The Giving Plague” was first written in 1987, and you talk a bit about the AIDS epidemic in the beginning of the story. What are your thoughts on the progress of combating the disease?

Of course, I’m glad that finally, after so many false starts, some progress has been made in extending the lives of infected people. HIV is a tough, ferocious enemy and so far it’s been hard to apply standard techniques, teaching our immune systems how to fend it off, by ourselves.

I’m fascinated by the way you look at viruses’ motivations (for lack of a better word) and their own evolution towards survival. Do you see their existence as intention without intelligence, or something different?

No, I have a pretty standard view that life stumbles into things. There are so many viruses of so many kinds, hijacking macro cells to make and spew millions of copies, that some of those copies will stumble into methods and tricks that seem (from an outside perspective) to be very, very clever. One example of a cunning trick would be the kind of disease I describe in “The Giving Plague.”

Another kind, having to do with making whole civilizations “sneeze” across the cosmos, is a feature in my new novel Existence. You’ve never seen anything like it.

With your fictional ALAS virus in mind, do you think that there’s any significant part of our lives that we owe to any sort of biological determinism?

Certainly. But that’s never the whole story. Life consists of layers and levels. What seems deterministic at one level becomes subject to an animal’s will at another. Where creatures compete with each other—to survive, to eat or to reproduce—at a higher scale they are participating in a cooperative ecosystem. Or “circle of life.”

The same is true of human consciousness. We are products of evolution and extreme pressures, not only over millions of years, but also the mere hundred centuries of agricultural and urban existence, which have altered us tremendously. We inherit many compulsions, some of them improper for civilized life.

But out of that mélange, there arise whole suites of “emergent properties.” Perspectives that help us to achieve wonders of imagination, compassion, invention and even transcendent insight.

Lastly, what do you have coming up that we should be looking forward to?

June 2012 saw publication of my first “big Brin book” in a decade. Existence is pretty daring in its portrayal of our near future and the threats we must overcome. It’s a first contact tale with several unusual twists. [You can read an excerpt from Existence in the June issue of Lightspeed. —ed.] And it has the most incredible preview-trailer for a book, illustrated by the great Patrick Farley.

Beyond that, I owe folks that big Uplift novel, at last! And there are a dozen cool other projects. Here’s hoping we all maintain a grand civilization that keeps encouraging us to ponder fresh ideas.

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: Aidan Doyle
Robyn Lupo

Colors seem to be the connective tissue in “Ghost River Red.” Can you tell us more about the significance, and how this story came about?

Akamiko means “red maiden” in Japanese. I’m fascinated with colors and how they are interpreted in different cultures. In Japan, light green is considered a different color from green and is called ki midori (yellow green). The Chinese character (adopted by Japan) for blue is sometimes interchangeably used with green. Hence in Japan, green traffic lights are referred to as blue lights and there is some confusion over identifying the traditional four guardian animals (red phoenix, white tiger, black turtle, and green/blue dragon). I have explored the issue of colors in other stories set in alternate versions of Japan. “Blue Cherry Sky” deals with the use of ideograms in magic and “Hokkaido Green” involves a photographer in contemporary Japan.

The story came about because I love Barry Hughart’s Master Li and Number Ten Ox books (novels of an Ancient China that never was) and the Chinese Ghost Story movies and wanted to write my own ghost hunter story.

Another source of inspiration was a news story about a pair of 1250-year-old Japanese swords that were only recently identified. X-rays revealed inscriptions marking them as swords dedicated to the memory of an emperor who died in 756. The swords had been buried at the foot of the Great Buddha statue in Nara for more than a thousand years.

Why did you choose an older leading character?

Older protagonists aren’t as common in fiction. I have older female friends and relatives who have described becoming increasingly invisible in social situations as they get older. I liked the idea of an older character that was quietly spoken, but at the same time was too powerful to ignore.

In some ways Japan is a youth-obsessed culture, but it is still strongly influenced by the Confucian idea of age commanding respect. It is generally not considered rude to ask people their age in Japan, as it is important to know whether someone is older than you. If they are your senior, this dictates the verb endings and style of language you should use when speaking with them. My landlady’s mother in Japan would exercise in the park every morning, even when she was 93. Once a month people from the neighborhood would come to her house and listen to her give a talk on how to live a good life.

From the story, we can guess what a swordwriter does, but a lot is left to the imagination. What made you go this way? Also, can you tell us a little more about the nature of swordwriting?

There isn’t a lot of space in a short story for backstory and exposition, so I kept the explanations about swordwriters to a minimum. I had been reading about Japanese calligraphy and the emphasis placed on creating simple yet beautiful strokes. I wanted to apply that kind of philosophy to a dedicated warrior, mixed with the idea of having a palette of different colored swords. Although swordwriters are only permitted to travel with at most seven swords, in the capital Akamiko has more than a hundred different colored swords. I like the idea of choosing the right tool for the job and each particular color being suitable for a particular task.

What do you think the most important bit of advice is to give to new writers?

The most important thing is to consistently make time to write. My advice for writing short stories is to think of an interesting character and start the story when they are in trouble. Give them a difficult choice to make, and end the story when there is some kind of resolution.

What’s next for you?

I’ve finished a young adult novel set in a version of feudal Japan involving monks that use equations to control dragons. That is currently on submission. I’m working on a novel featuring a zombie outbreak at a computer game tournament in Japan, as well as some more color-themed short stories. I also have plans for a novel set in the world of the swordwriters.

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: Theodora Goss
Jennifer Konieczny

Your short story, “Singing of Mount Abora,” won The World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 2008. Can you tell us a bit about it?

I’ve always been fascinated by the secondary or even tertiary characters in stories, the characters who don’t get written about. Who may not even get to speak. I have a tendency to write their stories, like the story of Anne de Bourgh from Pride and Prejudice in my story “Pug.” In this case, I was fascinated by a character in a poem: the Abyssinian maid in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” What was her story, I wondered. Why was she singing of Mount Abora? When John Klima told me that he was editing an anthology of spelling-bee inspired stories called Logorrhea and gave me a list of words to choose from that included “dulcimer,” I knew it was time to write her story. In case readers don’t remember, this is what Coleridge says:

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.

The structure of “Singing of Mount Abora” is delightful. Could you tell us about the process of writing it?

Thank you! I didn’t write it all that differently from how I write any other story. I just sat down, wrote a first draft, and then revised it. By the time I sit down to write a short story, I already have the story arc in my head, so it’s just a matter of writing. Even if the structure of the story is complicated, the writing of it is fairly linear. If only novels worked that way . . .

Earlier this year, you released a unique “accordion format” novella The Thorn and the Blossom. What attracted you to the format?

Actually, my editor Stephen Segal suggested the format and I wrote the story (or two interlocking stories, really) specifically for it. Once again, I was inspired by an editor. I think that’s something readers often don’t know: how much writers can be inspired by specific projects. I have ideas in my head, but hearing about a format, or a word I can use, or an anthology idea, will bring it out. Usually, I do already have the idea—somewhere in my head, I have a sort of file room of story ideas, and it contains many, many ideas—but having a specific project to write for brings them out.

I enjoyed that Sabra’s mother “approved of [her] studying literature, which was a decorative art.” How did your family influence your decision to pursue writing and literature?

I have an ancestor who was a famous Hungarian poet, and about half of my family is artistic, so perhaps it’s in the blood. The other half of my family is scientific, but I’m definitely in the artistic half. I did think about my own mother when I was writing that line. She’s in the scientific half (both of my parents are medical doctors and research scientists), and I think she would have much preferred me to be a scientist as well. She did regard literature as a sort of decorative art, something one could do in one’s spare time, on the side. Although she did realize relatively early on that she couldn’t fight my desire to write —I think when I announced that I wanted to be a poet! But it was a complicated influence, involving both support from my family and fighting to find my own path.

Michael introduces Sabra to Coleridge and says, “I can’t believe you’ve never read it before. I mean, I learned that in high school.” When were you first introduced to Coleridge? What was your reaction?

Oh, I’m pretty sure I first read Coleridge in middle or high school, and he blew me away. Completely. I think I memorized “Kubla Khan” back then, and I can still recite most of it. One of my favorite books of all time, which I read when I was young, is The Magic Circle by Louis Untermeyer. I still have it. It’s the perfect book of poems for children, and Untermeyer is a wonderful guide to poetry. It seems to be out of print, which is a real shame.

Last time we spoke you mentioned that you were hoping to work on a young adult novel. Could you tell us about that and the other things you’re currently working on?

I am in fact working on that novel! It’s based on a story I wrote called “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter,” which was originally published in Strange Horizons and will be reprinted in The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination. It’s giving me fits because, while I know how to write short stories, poems, and essays, I don’t really know how to write a novel. I’ve never done it before. Even The Thorn and the Blossom was a novella. So I’m having a hard time adjusting. But once I get into it, I think it will go more smoothly. It’s just a matter of learning a different pace. I’m also working on some short stories, again because editors have asked me for specific projects. So there should be lots of stories coming out in the near future. It’s an exciting 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, and inflicting her medieval-studies self on her students.

Author Spotlight: Peter Beagle
Robyn Lupo

Can you tell us how “Gordon, the Self-Made Cat” started for you?

Back in the late sixties or early seventies, a small—and now long defunct—animation company asked me to submit some story ideas. The first version of “Gordon” was one of two notions that I wrote up and handed in. They weren’t impressed with either, but my kids had liked “Gordon,” so I tucked it away in my filing cabinet, thinking that someday I might do something more with it. I had no idea it would take more than 30 years. As for the first flickering spark of the idea, that came from the fact that I was living in a run-down old rural house that had a lot of cats and, for obvious reasons, no mice. Looking at the cats, I found myself thinking, “If there were any mice around here, they’d have to go undercover to survive.” Young Gordon followed.

Why don’t dogs go to school?

Dogs sort of know about being a dog, early on. And I say this with all due respect and affection, because I love dogs, but canine life consists of a fairly limited range of behavior. It’s like my father’s old joke about counting a dog’s interest on his legs, by turning the dog upside down and going counter-clockwise: food, food, sex, food, and food. Cats have a more varied spectrum of interests and some of it is indeed rather technical. It’s like watching a mother cat training her kittens how to stalk, or to freeze when necessary. So I imagined what else cats get taught.

I got the impression that the Principal of the Cat School had a fondness for Gordon. How do you see their relationship?

The Principal has a fondness for Gordon because of the sheer gall of Gordon’s request, the fact that he couches it as a gamble, and of course, what he actually accomplishes once he’s in. But mainly he’s attracted to Gordon’s chutzpah. He doesn’t think of himself as a friend, though—he just doesn’t quite think of Gordon as prey, which is very unusual for a cat.

Gordon exhibits extraordinary perseverance and creativity. Can you tell us more about that?

I’ve known people who were born, as it were, in the depths of pre-established despair, who got a good look at the world that was waiting for them and just curled up and died. And I’ve known some who didn’t give in despite horrendous odds against them. Call it stubbornness or creativity or determination, Gordon is like those folks.

Do you have any advice for someone just starting out in writing?

The thing I always say is to show up for work. To make it a discipline. Even if you don’t write much each day, make certain that you do write every day. And don’t give up on the days when nothing seems to be coming at all. Stay at your desk or your pad (or whatever) anyway. Commitment counts more than craft, when you’re starting out: It’s the way you make certain you get enough experience to develop craft.

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: Maria Dahvana Headley
Erin Stocks

Love is a maze, in your story “Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream.” Or is love the monster itself? Will you tell us a little about the inspiration behind this story?

My brain’s a used bookstore. Bits of cool hoarded shit bang up against each other in the shelves. In this case, a couple years ago, I ran across a reference to a Cretan myth involving sacrifices to a labyrinth goddess whose real name couldn’t be spoken. You had to talk about her somehow, so one of the names that was used was Despoina—Δέσποινα in the Greek, Mistress in English. Mistress of the End of the World is another way of referring to the same goddess, and that usage actually gets applied to Cleopatra in some of the 1st century BCE pseudo-Sibylline Oracles (apocrypha I used in my novel Queen of Kings). There was an accounting of what you might need if you were a human trying to get through a labyrinth, tribute-wise, and it included a lot of honey. One amount for all the deities, and then a second, enormous amount for The Mistress, who needed to be bribed with sugar.

Okay, this is a long way of saying: me thinking about despoina, The Mistress, as in this dark, unnamable, sweet-hungry goddess of the classical labyrinth, got me thinking about the concept of The Mistress in the modern world, as in Someone Engaging in a Torrid Love Affair.

And then I had a separate random idea involving fingerprints.

I mashed it the fuck up, added the monster (“In the middle of the maze, there’s always a monster,” was the first line I wrote, because hell, there aren’t too many things I know for sure. That’s one of them.) and it became this story.

I think in this case, love is everything: scenery, actors, play. Love is like that, no matter whether you’re in it or out. It takes over. But the story is literal. There’s a monster. It’s hungry.

It’s hard to know whom to root for: the jilted spouses who initially seek revenge, or the lovers who cannot resist each other. What was it like for you in writing from both sides? Did you ever have to choose one over the other?

This story is me capitalizing on something that can also be a gnarl, writing-wise. I have a convulsive desire to tell every side of the story. I used to write screenplays and plays. One of the things that always went wrong with my stories in those days was that all my characters wanted to tell their side of the story. My plays were always full of monologues. Even the taxidermy had a POV.

In life, it’s very rare for someone to be the villain of their own story. I’m interested in people doing awful things and feeling reasonable in doing them. That seems realistic to me, fantasy story or not. So, that happens here. People do terrible shit, and nobody doing the bad things feels like they’re nuts. They feel justified.

So, when I was writing “Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream,” I fell in love with both sides in turn, and because I loved them, I gave them each presents. I wrote an entirely different version of the true-lovers, and then snipped that out, because it wasn’t right. It was too sweet. It needed to be dirty and hot (and sweet, too) to be believably irresistible. The witch and the magician, on the other hand, needed awkwardness and desperation. Initially, I thought the witch and the magician were going to be really villainous. They were, after all, fighting against true love. And true love, in a nice story, is supposed to conquer all. Apparently, I’m not too interested in nice stories. Here, the two jilted spouses are justifiably upset. And the two lovers, while being deceitful, are also truly in love. You can’t say no to that. I believe in love. So, hell, I sympathize with everyone in the story. I’m on all the sides.

Interestingly enough, the jilted spouses are both proficient (to a certain degree) in their respective magics. How do you think this colored their behavior and resulting journey?

In this story, the lovers aren’t magic. The only magic they really have is that they’re in love. But oh, my, god, love is major magic. There’s a reason we talk about being bewitched.

So, I think the witch and the magician, who are the fucked-over parties in this equation, got magic from me because I wanted to make things fair. The lovers get love. Their screwed-over spouses get spells. And then I was interested in what would happen if they were pretty good at what they did, in a kind of pragmatic professional sense. Magic here works like a recipe, a couple of chefs chopping things up, and taking care of business. Magic is always about defying the natural laws, and the two magical entities in this story do that in a big way, but they do it as a kind of matter of course. I’m interested in what weird bullshit we do to try and manage our emotions. Here, vengeful magic. They’re actually able to do something about the fact that their spouses have fallen in love with each other. Kind of, anyway. The vengeance, though, is never as satisfying as the love.

This isn’t the only tale of love and betrayal you’ve written. Your historical fantasy Queen of Kings, about Cleopatra, was released in May 2011 by Dutton. What draws you to these timeless themes?

I’m massively interested in love, and in the way it can transform a person. (Or not a person—a creature, a civilization, as has happened over and over. Trojan War, fought over a love affair. Fall of Egypt to Rome in 30BCE? Love affair.) Particularly, I’m interested in the gory aspects of love, of falling in, of falling out. Of what you might do to get love. Of what you might do to get revenge if you lost love.

In genre terms, there’s also the fact that it’s fucking weird to fall in love with someone, and realize that you are actually agreeing to merge yourselves into one thing, with shared desires, a shared life. It’s this peculiar equation where 1 + 1 = 1. Two into one is a massive transformation. There’s also the way that falling in love feels: your heart races, you shake, you have the same reactions you might have when terrified. And the phrases we use: I’m giving you my heart. You belong to me. I’m always interested in taking those things and making them literal.

I’m kind of consistently amazed that love is often seen to be a less than ferocious topic, when in fact, it’s totally life-changing. It’s one of the big topics. Birth, death, love, lack thereof, monsters. Um, really, what else is there?

What’s coming up for you next?

I’m finishing up the sequel to Queen of Kings, which is set in the 16th century, and full to the brim with venomous creatures. I’m also deep into a YA novel, which grew out of a one-line piece of gorgeousness I happened on while researching that sequel. And I’m writing a short story, which involves a ghost and some badass women. I like badass women. Most of my monsters are women. So are most of my heroes. Sometimes both at once.

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 August, in Lightspeed . . .

We’ll have original fantasy by Kat Howard (“Breaking the Frame”) and Linda Nagata (“A Moment Before It Struck”), plus fantasy reprints by Wil McCarthy (“The Necromancer in Love”) and Delia Sherman (“Cotillion”).

Plus, we’ll have original science fiction by 2012 Nebula Award-winner Ken Liu (“The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species”) and a collaboration between Caroline M. Yoachim and Tina Connolly (“Flash Bang Remember”), and SF reprints by io9’s Charlie Jane Anders (“Love Might Be Too Strong a Word”) and award-winning author Michael Swanwick (“Slow Life”).

For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella will be “A Separate War” by Joe Haldeman, and of course we’ll have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with our 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!