Editorial, September 2012
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue twenty-eight of Lightspeed!

Sad tidings this month: Just as we were about to go to press with this issue, we lost two legends: science fiction author Harry Harrison and moonwalker Neil Armstrong.

Coincidentally, we had one of Harrison’s most famous stories slated for reprint in this issue: “The Streets of Ashkelon.” I consider it quite an honor to be able to publish the story in Lightspeed, as, in addition to being a bona fide classic, it is a story that was also very important to me personally. It is the story of a missionary who goes to spread his religion to an alien culture, and the irreparable harm that results. I first read the story when I was in college, and, though at that point in my life I was pretty much done with religion, reading it really helped cement in my mind the idea that being an atheist was not only morally acceptable but morally preferable. (Your mileage may vary, of course.) But what has made it stand the test of time, I think, is that it is no mere anti-religious tract; it is high-concept pure science fiction in the most classic sense. But what pleases me more than being able to publish the story is the fact that I was able to express my gratitude to Harry Harrison for writing it, and to let him know how important and influential the story was to me.

Ad Astra, gentlemen.

On a happier note, this issue is scheduled to be published on September 1, and according to the Worldcon website, this year’s Hugo Awards will be presented on September 2. So while we have no news to report right now, we’re hoping that some good news will be coming our way shortly after this issue drops. I’ve said this before, but when you’re up for an award and the voting closes, at that point they’re kind of like Schrödinger’s Awards—until the results are announced, the nominee is in a superposition: you’ve both won and lost the award until someone observes the results, thereby forcing the quantum waveform to collapse . . . and your cat to huff some poisonous gas. Or something like that.

In any case, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

We have original science fiction by Adam-Troy Castro (“My Wife Hates Time Travel”) and Brooke Bolander (“Sun Dogs”), along with SF reprints by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette (“Boojum”) and Harry Harrison (“The Streets of Ashkelon”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Nina Kiriki Hoffman (“Monsters, Finders, Shifters”) and Peter Sursi (“The Seven Samovars”), and fantasy reprints by Scott Edelman (“The Last Supper”) and Holly Black (“Heartless”).

On the nonfiction side of things this month, we’ve got something a little bit different for you. As usual, we’ve got an artist showcase on our cover artist (Frank Hong), along with a feature interview with bestselling author John Scalzi, and our usual assortment of author spotlights.

The difference this month is instead of a second feature interview, we’ve got a second artist showcase for you, to, well, showcase the talents of our house illustrator, Galen Dara. Over the last few months, Galen has been illustrating one or two stories for us every month (all of which you can find via the Illustrated by Galen Dara tag: lightspeedmagazine.com/tag/illustrated-by-galen-dara), and we just wanted to change things up a bit so we could shine the spotlight on her because we think she’s been doing amazing work.

For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella is “The Green Leopard Plague” by Walter Jon Williams. And our excerpt this month is from The Eternal Flame by acclaimed author Greg Egan.

Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for Seeds of Earth, the first in an exciting new space opera series by Michael Cobley. 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.

The Green Leopard Plague
Walter Jon Williams

Kicking her legs out over the ocean, the lonely mermaid gazed out at the horizon from her perch in the overhanging banyan tree.

The air was absolutely still and filled with the scent of night flowers. Large fruit bats flew purposefully over the sea, heading for their daytime rest. Somewhere a white cockatoo gave a penetrating squawk. A starling made a brief flutter out to sea, then came back again. The rising sun threw up red-gold sparkles from the wavetops and brought a brilliance to the tropical growth that crowned the many islands spread out on the horizon.

The mermaid decided it was time for breakfast. She slipped from her hanging canvas chair and walked out along one of the banyan’s great limbs. The branch swayed lightly under her weight, and her bare feet found sure traction on the rough bark. She looked down to see the deep blue of the channel, distinct from the turquoise of the shallows atop the reefs.

She raised her arms, poised briefly on the limb, the ruddy light of the sun glowing bronze on her bare skin, and then she pushed off and dove head-first into the Philippine Sea. She landed with a cool impact and a rush of bubbles.

Her wings unfolded, and she flew away.

After her hunt, the mermaid—her name was Michelle—cached her fishing gear in a pile of dead coral above the reef, and then ghosted easily over the sea grass with the rippled sunlight casting patterns on her wings. When she could look up to see the colossal, twisted tangle that were the roots of her banyan tree, she lifted her head from the water and gulped her first breath of air.

The Rock Islands were made of soft limestone coral, and tide and chemical action had eaten away the limestone at sea level, undercutting the stone above. Some of the smaller islands looked like mushrooms, pointed green pinnacles balanced atop thin stems. Michelle’s island was larger and irregularly shaped, but it still had steep limestone walls undercut six meters by the tide, with no obvious way for a person to clamber from the sea to the land. Her banyan perched on the saucer-edge of the island, itself undercut by the sea.

Michelle had arranged a rope elevator from her nest in the tree, just a loop on the end of a long nylon line. She tucked her wings away—they were harder to retract than to deploy, and the gills on the undersides were delicate—and then Michelle slipped her feet through the loop. At her verbal command, a hoist mechanism lifted her in silence from the sea to her resting place in the bright green-dappled forest canopy.

She had been an ape once, a siamang, and she felt perfectly at home in the treetops.

During her excursion she had speared a yellowlip emperor, and this she carried with her in a mesh bag. She filleted the emperor with a blade she kept in her nest, and tossed the rest into the sea, where it became a subject of interest to a school of bait fish. She ate a slice of one fillet raw, enjoying the brilliant flavor, sea and trembling pale flesh together, then cooked the fillets on her small stove, eating one with some rice she’d cooked the previous evening and saving the other for later.

By the time Michelle finished breakfast the island was alive. Geckoes scurried over the banyan’s bark, and coconut crabs sidled beneath the leaves like touts offering illicit downloads to tourists. Out in the deep water, a flock of circling, diving black noddies marked where a school of skipjack tuna was feeding on swarms of bait fish.

It was time for Michelle to begin her day as well. With sure, steady feet she moved along a rope walkway to the ironwood tree that held her satellite uplink in its crown, and then straddled a limb, took her deck from the mesh bag she’d roped to the tree, and downloaded her messages.

There were several journalists requesting interviews—the legend of the lonely mermaid was spreading. This pleased her more often than not, but she didn’t answer any of the queries. There was a message from Darton, which she decided to savor for a while before opening. And then she saw a note from Dr. Davout, and opened it at once.

Davout was, roughly, twelve times her age. He’d actually been carried for nine months in his mother’s womb, not created from scratch in a nanobed like almost everyone else she knew. He had a sib who was a famous astronaut, and a McEldowney Prize for his Lavoisier and His Age, and a red-haired wife who was nearly as well-known as he was. Michelle, a couple years ago, had attended a series of his lectures at the College of Mystery, and been interested despite her specialty being, strictly speaking, biology.

He had shaved off the little goatee he’d worn when she’d last seen him, which Michelle considered a good thing. “I have a research project for you, if you’re free,” the recording said. “It shouldn’t take too much effort.”

Michelle contacted him at once. He was a rich old bastard with a thousand years of tenure and no notion of what it was to be young in these times, and he’d pay her whatever outrageous fee she asked.

Her material needs at the moment were few, but she wouldn’t stay on this island forever.

Davout answered right away. Behind him, working at her own console, Michelle could see his red-haired wife, Katrin.

“Michelle!” Davout said, loudly enough for Katrin to know who called without turning around. “Good!” He hesitated, and then his fingers formed the mudra for <concern>. “I understand you’ve suffered a loss,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, her answer delayed by a second’s satellite lag.

“And the young man—?”

“Doesn’t remember.”

Which was not exactly a lie, the point being what was remembered.

Davout’s fingers were still fixed in <concern>. “Are you all right?” he asked.

Her own fingers formed an equivocal answer. “I’m getting better.” Which was probably true.

“I see you’re not an ape anymore.”

“I decided to go the mermaid route. New perspectives, all that.” And welcome isolation.

“Is there any way we can make things easier for you?”

She put on a hopeful expression. “You said something about a job?”

“Yes.” He seemed relieved not to have to probe further—he’d had a realdeath in his own family, Michelle remembered, a chance-in-a-billion thing, and perhaps he didn’t want to relive any part of that.

“I’m working on a biography of Terzian,” Davout said.

“. . . and his Age?” Michelle finished.

“And his Legacy.” Davout smiled. “There’s a three-week period in his life where he—well, he drops right off the map. I’d like to find out where he went—and who he was with, if anyone.”

Michelle was impressed. Even in comparatively unsophisticated times such as that inhabited by Jonathan Terzian, it was difficult for people to disappear.

“It’s a critical time for him,” Davout went on. “He’d lost his job at Tulane, his wife had just died—realdeath, remember—and if he decided he simply wanted to get lost, he would have all my sympathies.” He raised a hand as if to tug at the chin-whiskers that were no longer there, made a vague pawing gesture, then dropped the hand. “But my problem is that when he resurfaces, everything’s changed for him. In June he delivered an undistinguished paper at the Athenai conference in Paris, then vanishes. When he surfaced in Venice in mid-July, he didn’t deliver the paper he was scheduled to read, instead he delivered the first version of his Cornucopia Theory.”

Michelle’s fingers formed the mudra <highly impressed>. “How have you tried to locate him?”

“Credit card records—they end on June 17, when he buys a lot of euros at American Express in Paris. After that he must have paid for everything with cash.”

“He really did try to get lost, didn’t he?” Michelle pulled up one bare leg and rested her chin on it. “Did you try passport records?”

<No luck> “But if he stayed in the European Community he wouldn’t have had to present a passport when crossing a border.”

“Cash machines?”

“Not till after he arrived in Venice, just a couple days prior to the conference.”

The mermaid thought about it for a moment, then smiled. “I guess you need me, all right.”

<I concur> Davout flashed solemnly. “How much would it cost me?”

Michelle pretended to consider the question for a moment, then named an outrageous sum.

Davout frowned. “Sounds all right,” he said.

Inwardly Michelle rejoiced. Outwardly, she leaned toward the camera lens and looked businesslike. “I’ll get busy, then.”

Davout looked grateful. “You’ll be able to get on it right away?”

“Certainly. What I need you to do is send me pictures of Terzian, from as many different angles as possible, especially from around that period of time.”

“I have them ready.”

“Send away.”

An eyeblink later, the pictures were in Michelle’s deck. <Thanks> she flashed. “I’ll let you know as soon as I find anything.”

At university Michelle had discovered that she was very good at research, and it had become a profitable sideline for her. People—usually people connected with academe in one way or another—hired her to do the duller bits of their own jobs, finding documents or references, or, in this case, three missing weeks out of a person’s life. It was almost always work they could do themselves, but Michelle was simply better at research than most people, and she was considered worth the extra expense. Michelle herself usually enjoyed the work—it provided interesting sidelights on fields about which she knew little, and provided a welcome break from routine.

Plus, this particular job required not so much a researcher as an artist, and Michelle was very good at this particular art.

Michelle looked through the pictures, most scanned from old photographs. Davout had selected well: Terzian’s face or profile was clear in every picture. Most of the pictures showed him young, in his twenties, and the ones that showed him older were of high quality, or showed parts of the body that would be crucial to the biometric scan, like his hands or his ears.

The mermaid paused for a moment to look at one of the old photos: Terzian smiling with his arm around a tall, long-legged woman with a wide mouth and dark, bobbed hair, presumably the wife who had died. Behind them was a Louis Quinze table with a blaze of gladiolas in a cloisonné vase, and above the table a large portrait of a stately looking horse in a heavy gilded frame. Beneath the table were stowed—temporarily, Michelle assumed—a dozen or so trophies, which to judge from the little golden figures balanced atop them were awarded either for gymnastics or martial arts. The opulent setting seemed a little at odds with the young, informally dressed couple: she wore a flowery tropical shirt tucked into khakis, and Terzian dressed in a tank top and shorts. There was a sense that the photographer had caught them almost in motion, as if they’d paused for the picture en route from one place to another.

Nice shoulders, Michelle thought. Big hands, well-shaped muscular legs. She hadn’t ever thought of Terzian as young, or large, or strong, but he had a genuine, powerful physical presence that came across even in the old, casual photographs. He looked more like a football player than a famous thinker.

Michelle called up her character-recognition software and fed in all the pictures, then checked the software’s work, something she was reasonably certain her employer would never have done if he’d been doing this job himself. Most people using this kind of canned software didn’t realize how the program could be fooled, particularly when used with old media, scanned film prints heavy with grain and primitive digital images scanned by machines that simply weren’t very bright. In the end, Michelle and software between them managed an excellent job of mapping Terzian’s body and calibrating its precise ratios: the distance between the eyes, the length of nose and curve of lip, the distinct shape of the ears, the length of limb and trunk. Other men might share some of these biometric ratios, but none would share them all.

The mermaid downloaded the data into her specialized research spiders, and sent them forth into the electronic world.

A staggering amount of the trivial past existed there, and nowhere else. People had uploaded pictures, diaries, commentary, and video; they’d digitized old home movies, complete with the garish, deteriorating colors of the old film stock; they’d scanned in family trees, post cards, wedding lists, drawings, political screeds, and images of handwritten letters. Long, dull hours of security video. Whatever had meant something to someone, at some time, had been turned into electrons and made available to the universe at large.

A surprising amount of this stuff had survived the Lightspeed War—none of it had seemed worth targeting, or, if trashed, had been reloaded from backups.

What all this meant was that Terzian was somewhere in there. Wherever Terzian had gone in his weeks of absence—Paris, Dalmatia, or Thule—there would have been someone with a camera. In stills of children eating ice cream in front of Notre Dame, or moving through the video of buskers playing saxophone on the Pont des Artistes, there would be a figure in the background, and that figure would be Terzian. Terzian might be found lying on a beach in Corfu, reflected in a bar mirror in Gdynia, or negotiating with a prostitute in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district—Michelle had found targets in exactly those places during the course of her other searches.

Michelle sent her software forth to find Terzian, then lifted her arms above her head and stretched—stretched fiercely, thrusting out her bare feet and curling the toes, the muscles trembling with tension, her mouth yawned in a silent shriek.

Then she leaned over her deck, again, and called up the message from Darton, the message she’d saved till last.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Why won’t you talk to me? I love you!”

His brown eyes were a little wild.

“Don’t you understand?” he cried. “I’m not dead! I’m not really dead!”

Michelle hovered three or four meters below the surface of Zigzag Lake, gazing upward at the inverted bowl of the heavens, the brilliant blue of the Pacific sky surrounded by the dark, shadowy towers of mangrove. Something caught her eye, something black and falling, like a bullet, and then there was a splash and a boil of bubbles, and the daggerlike bill of a collared kingfisher speared a blue-eyed apogonid that had been hovering over a bright red coral head. The kingfisher flashed its pale underside as it stroked to the surface, its wings doing efficient double duty as fins, and then there was a flurry of wings and feet and bubbles and the kingfisher was airborne again.

Michelle floated up and over the barrel-shaped coral head, then over a pair of giant clams, each over a meter long. The clams drew shut as Michelle slid over them, withdrawing the huge siphons as thick as her wrist. The fleshy lips that overhung the scalloped edges of the shells were a riot of colors, purples, blues, greens, and reds interwoven in an eye-boggling pattern.

Carefully drawing in her gills so their surfaces wouldn’t be inflamed by coral stings, she kicked up her feet and dove beneath the mangrove roots into the narrow tunnel that connected Zigzag Lake with the sea.

Of the three hundred or so Rock Islands, seventy or thereabouts had marine lakes. The islands were made of coral limestone and porous to one degree or another: some lakes were connected to the ocean through tunnels and caves, and others through seepage. Many of the lakes contained forms of life unique in all the world, evolved distinctly from their remote ancestors; even now, after all this time, new species were being described.

During the months Michelle had spent in the islands she thought she’d discovered two undescribed species: a variation on the Entacmaea medusivora white anemone that was patterned strangely with scarlet and a cobalt-blue; and a nudibranch, deep violet with yellow polka-dots, that had undulated past her one night on the reef, flapping like a tea towel in a strong wind as a seven-knot tidal current tore it along. The nudi and samples of the anemone had been sent to the appropriate authorities, and perhaps in time Michelle would be immortalized by having a Latinate version of her name appended to the scientific description of the two marine animals.

The tunnel was about fifteen meters long, and had a few narrow twists where Michelle had to pull her wings in close to her sides and maneuver by the merest fluttering of their edges. The tunnel turned up, and brightened with the sun; the mermaid extended her wings and flew over brilliant pink soft corals toward the light.

Two hours’ work, she thought, plus a hazardous environment. Twenty-two hundred calories, easy.

The sea was brilliantly lit, unlike the gloomy marine lake surrounded by tall cliffs, mangroves, and shadow, and for a moment Michelle’s sun-dazzled eyes failed to see the boat bobbing on the tide. She stopped short, her wings cupping to brake her motion, and then she recognized the boat’s distinctive paint job, a bright red meant to imitate the natural oil of the cheritem fruit.

Michelle prudently rose to the surface a safe distance away—Torbiong might be fishing, and sometimes he did it with a spear. The old man saw her, and stood to give a wave before Michelle could unblock her trachea and draw air into her lungs to give a hail.

“I brought you supplies,” he said.

“Thanks,” Michelle said as she wiped a rain of seawater from her face.

Torbiong was over two hundred years old and Paramount Chief of Koror, the capital forty minutes away by boat. He was small and wiry and black-haired, and had a broad-nosed, strong-chinned, unlined face. He had traveled over the world and off it while young, but returned to Belau as he aged. His duties as chief were mostly ceremonial, but counted for tax purposes; he had money from hotels and restaurants that his ancestors had built and that others managed for him, and he spent most of his time visiting his neighbors, gossiping, and fishing. He had befriended Darton and Michelle when they’d first come to Belau, and helped them in securing the permissions for their researches on the Rock Islands. A few months back, after Darton died, Torbiong had agreed to bring supplies to Michelle in exchange for the occasional fish.

His boat was ten meters long and featured a waterproof canopy amidships made from interwoven pandanas leaves. Over the scarlet faux-cheritem paint were zigzags, crosses, and stripes in the brilliant yellow of the ginger plant. The ends of the thwarts were decorated with grotesque carved faces, and dozens of white cowrie shells were glued to the gunwales. Wooden statues of the kingfisher bird sat on the prow and stern.

Thrusting above the pandanas canopy were antennae, flagpoles, deep-sea fishing rods, fish spears, radar, and a satellite uplink. Below the canopy, where Torbiong could command the boat from an elaborately carved throne of breadfruit-tree wood, were the engine and rudder controls, radio, audio, and video sets, a collection of large audio speakers, a depth finder, a satellite navigation relay, and radar. Attached to the uprights that supported the canopy were whistles tuned to make an eerie, discordant wailing noise when the boat was at speed.

Torbiong was fond of discordant wailing noises. As Michelle swam closer, she heard the driving, screeching electronic music that Torbiong loved trickling from the earpieces of his headset—he normally howled it out of speakers, but when sitting still he didn’t want to scare the fish. At night she could hear Torbiong for miles, as he raced over the darkened sea blasted out of his skull on betel-nut juice with his music thundering and the whistles shrieking.

He removed the headset, releasing a brief audio onslaught before switching off his sound system.

“You’re going to make yourself deaf,” Michelle said.

Torbiong grinned. “Love that music. Gets that blood moving.”

Michelle floated to the boat and put a hand on the gunwale between a pair of cowries.

“I saw that boy of yours on the news,” Torbiong said. “He’s making you famous.”

“I don’t want to be famous.”

“He doesn’t understand why you don’t talk to him.”

“He’s dead,” Michelle said.

Torbiong made a spreading gesture with his hands. “That’s a matter of opinion.”

“Watch your head,” said Michelle.

Torbiong ducked as a gust threatened to bring him into contact with a pitcher plant that drooped over the edge of the island’s overhang. Torbiong evaded the plant and then stepped to the bow to haul in his mooring line before the boat’s canopy got caught beneath the overhang,

Michelle submerged and swam till she reached her banyan tree, then surfaced and called down her rope elevator. By the time Torbiong’s boat hissed up to her, she’d folded away her gills and wings and was sitting in the sling, kicking her legs over the water.

Torbiong handed her a bag of supplies: some rice, tea, salt, vegetables, and fruit. For the last several weeks Michelle had experienced a craving for blueberries, which didn’t grow here, and Torbiong had included a large package fresh off the shuttle, and a small bottle of cream to go with them. Michelle thanked him.

“Most tourists want corn chips or something,” Torbiong said pointedly.

“I’m not a tourist.” Michelle said. “I’m sorry I don’t have any fish to swap—I’ve been hunting smaller game.” She held out the specimen bag, still dripping seawater.

Torbiong gestured toward the cooler built into the back of his boat. “I got some chai and a chersuuch today,” he said, using the local names for barracuda and mahi mahi.

“Good fishing.”

“Trolling.” With a shrug. He looked up at her, a quizzical look on his face. “I’ve got some calls from reporters,” he said, and then his betel-stained smile broke out. “I always make sure to send them tourist literature.”

“I’m sure they enjoy reading it.”

Torbiong’s grin widened. “You get lonely, now,” he said, “you come visit the family. We’ll give you a home-cooked meal.”

She smiled. “Thanks.”

They said their farewells and Torbiong’s boat hissed away on its jets, the whistles building to an eerie, spine-shivering chord. Michelle rose into the trees and stashed her specimens and groceries. With a bowl of blueberries and cream, Michelle crossed the rope walkway to her deck, and checked the progress of her search spiders.

There were pointers to a swarm of articles about the death of Terzian’s wife, and Michelle wished she’d given her spiders clearer instructions about dates.

The spiders had come up with three pictures. One was a not-very-well focused tourist video from July 10, showing a man standing in front of the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence. A statue of Dante, also not in focus, gloomed down at him from beneath thick-bellied rain clouds. As the camera panned across him he stood with his back to the camera but turned to the right, one leg turned out as he scowled down at the ground—the profile was a little smeared, but the big, broad-shouldered body seemed right. The software reckoned there was a 78% chance the man was Terzian.

Michelle got busy refining the image, and after a few passes of the software decided the chances of the figure being Terzian were more on the order of 95%.

So maybe Terzian had gone on a Grand Tour of European cultural sites. He didn’t look happy in the video, but then the day was cloudy and rainy and Terzian didn’t have an umbrella.

And his wife had died, of course.

Now that Michelle had a date and a place, she refined the instructions from her search spiders to seek out images from Florence a week either way from July 3, and then expand the search from there, first all Tuscany, then all Italy.

If Terzian was doing tourist sites, then she surely had him nailed.

The next two hits, from her earlier research spiders, were duds. The software gave a less than 50% chance of Terzian being in Lisbon or Cape Sounion, and refinements of the image reduced the chance to something near zero.

Then the next video popped up, with a time stamp right there in the image—Paris, June 26, 13:41:44 hours, just a day before Terzian bought a bankroll of Euros and vanished.

<Bingo!> Michelle’s fingers formed.

The first thing Michelle saw was Terzian walking out of the frame—no doubt this time that it was him. He was looking over his shoulder at a small crowd of people. There was a dark-haired woman huddled on his arm, her face turned away from the camera. Michelle’s heart warmed at the thought of the lonely widower Terzian having an affair in the City of Love.

Then she followed Terzian’s gaze to see what had so drawn his attention. A dead man stretched out on the pavement, surrounded by hapless bystanders.

And then, as the scene slowly settled into her astonished mind, the video sang at her in the piping voice of Pan.

Terzian looked at his audience as anger raged in his backbrain. A wooden chair creaked, and the sound spurred Terzian to wonder how long the silence had gone on. Even the Slovenian woman who had been drowsing realized that something had changed, and blinked herself to alertness.

“I’m sorry,” he said in French. “But my wife just died, and I don’t feel like playing this game anymore.”

His silent audience of seven watched as he gathered his papers, put them in his case, and left the lecture room, his feet making sharp, murderous sounds on the wooden floor.

Yet up to that point his paper had been going all right. He’d been uncertain about commenting on Baudrillard in Baudrillard’s own country, and in Baudrillard’s own language, a cheery compare-and-contrast exercise between Baudrillard’s “the self does not exist” and Rorty’s “I don’t care,” the stereotypical French and American answers to modern life. There had been seven in his audience, perched on creaking wooden chairs, and none of them had gone to sleep, or walked out, or condemned him for his audacity.

Yet, as he looked at his audience and read on, Terzian had felt the anger growing, spawned by the sensation of his own uselessness. Here he was, in the City of Lights, its every cobblestone a monument to European civilization, and he was in a dreary lecture hall on the Left Bank, reading to his audience of seven from a paper that was nothing more than a footnote, and a footnote to a footnote at that. To come to the land of cogito ergo sum and to answer, I don’t care?

I came to Paris for this? he thought. To read this drivel? I paid for the privilege of doing this?

I do care, he thought as his feet turned toward the Seine. Desiderio, ergo sum, if he had his Latin right. I am in pain, and therefore I do exist.

He ended in a Norman restaurant on the Île de la Cité, with lunch as his excuse and the thought of getting hopelessly drunk not far from his thoughts. He had absolutely nothing to do until August, after which he would return to the States and collect his belongings from the servants’ quarters of the house on Esplanade, and then he would go about looking for a job.

He wasn’t certain whether he would be more depressed by finding a job or by not finding one.

You are alive, he told himself. You are alive and in Paris with the whole summer ahead of you, and you’re eating the cuisine of Normandy in the Place Dauphine. And if that isn’t a command to be joyful, what is?

It was then that the Peruvian band began to play. Terzian looked up from his plate in weary surprise.

When Terzian had been a child his parents—both university professors—had first taken him to Europe, and he’d seen then that every European city had its own Peruvian or Bolivian street band, Indians in black bowler hats and colorful blankets crouched in some public place, gazing with impassive brown eyes from over their guitars and reed flutes.

Now, a couple decades later, the musicians were still here, though they’d exchanged the blankets and bowler hats for European styles, and their presentation had grown more slick. Now they had amps, and cassettes and CDs for sale. Now they had congregated in the triangular Place Dauphine, overshadowed by the neo-classical mass of the Palais de Justice, and commenced a Latin-flavored medley of old Abba songs.

Maybe, after Terzian finished his veal in calvados sauce, he’d go up to the band and kick in their guitars.

The breeze flapped the canvas overhead. Terzian looked at his empty plate. The food had been excellent, but he could barely remember tasting it.

Anger still roiled beneath his thoughts. And—for God’s sake—was that band now playing Oasis? Those chords were beginning to sound suspiciously like “Wonderwall.” “Wonderwall” on Spanish guitars, reed flutes, and a mandolin.

Terzian had nearly decided to call for a bottle of cognac and stay here all afternoon, but not with that noise in the park. He put some euros on the table, anchoring the bills with a saucer against the fresh spring breeze that rattled the green canvas canopy over his head. He was stepping through the restaurant’s little wrought-iron gate to the sidewalk when the scuffle caught his attention.

The man falling into the street, his face pinched with pain. The hands of the three men on either side who were, seemingly, unable to keep their friend erect.

Idiots, Terzian thought, fury blazing in him.

There was a sudden shrill of tires, of an auto horn.

Papers streamed in the wind as they spilled from a briefcase.

And over it all came the amped sound of pan pipes from the Peruvian band. Wonderwall.

Terzian watched in exasperated surprise as the three men sprang after the papers. He took a step toward the fallen man—someone had to take charge here. The fallen man’s hair had spilled in a shock over his forehead and he’d curled on his side, his face still screwed up in pain.

The pan pipes played on, one distinct hollow shriek after another.

Terzian stopped with one foot still on the sidewalk and looked around at faces that all registered the same sense of shock. Was there a doctor here? he wondered. A French doctor? All his French seemed to have just drained from his head. Even such simple questions as Are you all right? and How are you feeling? seemed beyond him now. The first aid course he’d taken in his Kenpo school was ages ago.

Unnaturally pale, the fallen man’s face relaxed. The wind floated his shock of thinning dark hair over his face. In the park, Terzian saw a man in a baseball cap panning a video camera, and his anger suddenly blazed up again at the fatuous uselessness of the tourist, the uselessness that mirrored his own.

Suddenly there was a crowd around the casualty, people coming out of stopped cars, off the sidewalk. Down the street, Terzian saw the distinctive flat-topped kepis of a pair of policemen bobbing toward them from the direction of the Palais de Justice, and felt a surge of relief. Someone more capable than this lot would deal with this now.

He began, hesitantly, to step away. And then his arm was seized by a pair of hands and he looked in surprise at the woman who had just huddled her face into his shoulder, cinnamon-dark skin and eyes invisible beneath wraparound shades.

“Please,” she said in English a bit too musical to be American. “Take me out of here.”

The sound of the reed pipes followed them as they made their escape.

He walked her past the statue of the Vert Galant himself, good old lecherous Henri IV, and onto the Pont Neuf. To the left, across the Seine, the Louvre glowed in mellow colors beyond a screen of plane trees.

Traffic roared by, a stampede of steel unleashed by a green light. Unfocused anger blazed in his mind. He didn’t want this woman attached to him, and he suspected she was running some kind of scam. The gym bag she wore on a strap over one shoulder kept banging him on the ass. Surreptitiously he slid his hand into his right front trouser pocket to make sure his money was still there.

Wonderwall, he thought. Christ.

He supposed he should offer some kind of civilized comment, just in case the woman was genuinely distressed.

“I suppose he’ll be all right,” he said, half-barking the words in his annoyance and anger.

The woman’s face was still half-buried in his shoulder. “He’s dead,” she murmured into his jacket. “Couldn’t you tell?”

For Terzian death had never occurred under the sky, but shut away, in hospice rooms with crisp sheets and warm colors and the scent of disinfectant. In an explosion of tumors and wasting limbs and endless pain masked only in part by morphia.

He thought of the man’s pale face, the sudden relaxation.

Yes, he thought, death came with a sigh.

Reflex kept him talking. “The police were coming,” he said. “They’ll—they’ll call an ambulance or something.”

“I only hope they catch the bastards who did it,” she said.

Terzian’s heart gave a jolt as he recalled the three men who let the man fall, and then dashed through the square for his papers. For some reason all he could remember about them were their black laced boots, with thick soles.

“Who were they?” he asked blankly.

The woman’s shades slid down her nose, and Terzian saw startling green eyes narrowed to murderous slits. “I suppose they think of themselves as cops,” she said.

Terzian parked his companion in a café near Les Halles, within sight of the dome of the Bourse. She insisted on sitting indoors, not on the sidewalk, and on facing the front door so that she could scan whoever came in. She put her gym bag, with its white Nike swoosh, on the floor between the table legs and the wall, but Terzian noticed she kept its shoulder strap in her lap, as if she might have to bolt at any moment.

Terzian kept his wedding ring within her sight. He wanted her to see it; it might make things simpler.

Her hands were trembling. Terzian ordered coffee for them both. “No,” she said suddenly. “I want ice cream.”

Terzian studied her as she turned to the waiter and ordered in French. She was around his own age, twenty-nine. There was no question that she was a mixture of races, but which races? The flat nose could be African or Asian or Polynesian, and Polynesia was again confirmed by the black, thick brows. Her smooth brown complexion could be from anywhere but Europe, but her pale green eyes were nothing but European. Her broad, sensitive mouth suggested Nubia. The black ringlets yanked into a knot behind her head could be African or East Indian or, for that matter, French. The result was too striking to be beautiful—and also too striking, Terzian thought, to be a successful criminal. Those looks could be too easily identified.

The waiter left. She turned her wide eyes toward Terzian, and seemed faintly surprised that he was still there.

“My name’s Jonathan,” he said.

“I’m,” hesitating, “Stephanie.”

“Really?” Terzian let his skepticism show.

“Yes.” She nodded, reaching in a pocket for cigarettes. “Why would I lie? It doesn’t matter if you know my real name or not.”

“Then you’d better give me the whole thing.”

She held her cigarette upward, at an angle, and enunciated clearly. “Stephanie América Pais e Silva.”

“America?”

Striking a match. “It’s a perfectly ordinary Portuguese name.”

He looked at her. “But you’re not Portuguese.”

“I carry a Portuguese passport.”

Terzian bit back the comment, I’m sure you do.

Instead he said, “Did you know the man who was killed?”

Stephanie nodded. The drags she took off her cigarette did not ease the tremor in her hands.

“Did you know him well?”

“Not very.” She dragged in smoke again, then let the smoke out as she spoke.

“He was a colleague. A biochemist.”

Surprise silenced Terzian. Stephanie tipped ash into the Cinzano ashtray, but her nervousness made her miss, and the little tube of ash fell on the tablecloth.

“Shit,” she said, and swept the ash to the floor with a nervous movement of her fingers.

“Are you a biochemist, too?” Terzian asked.

“I’m a nurse.” She looked at him with her pale eyes. “I work for Santa Croce—it’s a—”

“A relief agency.” A Catholic one, he remembered. The name meant Holy Cross.

She nodded.

“Shouldn’t you go to the police?” he asked. And then his skepticism returned. “Oh, that’s right—it was the police who did the killing.”

“Not the French police.” She leaned across the table toward him. “This was a different sort of police, the kind who think that killing someone and making an arrest are the same thing. You look at the television news tonight. They’ll report the death, but there won’t be any arrests. Or any suspects.” Her face darkened, and she leaned back in her chair to consider a new thought. “Unless they somehow manage to blame it on me.”

Terzian remembered papers flying in the spring wind, men in heavy boots sprinting after. The pinched, pale face of the victim.

“Who, then?”

She gave him a bleak look through a curl of cigarette smoke. “Have you ever heard of Transnistria?”

Terzian hesitated, then decided “No” was the most sensible answer.

“The murderers are Transnistrian.” A ragged smile drew itself across Stephanie’s face. “They’re intellectual property police. They killed Adrian over a copyright.”

At that point the waiter brought Terzian’s coffee along with Stephanie’s order. Hers was colossal, a huge glass goblet filled with pastel-colored ice creams and fruit syrups in bright primary colors, topped by a mountain of cream and a toy pinwheel on a candy-striped stick. Stephanie looked at the creation in shock, her eyes wide.

“I love ice cream,” she choked, and then her eyes brimmed with tears and she began to cry.

Stephanie wept for a while, across the table, and between sobs choked down heaping spoonfuls of ice cream, eating in great gulps, and swiping at her lips and tear-stained cheeks with a paper napkin.

The waiter stood quietly in the corner, but from his glare and the set of his jaw it was clear that he blamed Terzian for making the lovely woman cry.

Terzian felt his body surge with the impulse to aid her, but he didn’t know what to do. Move around the table and put an arm around her? Take her hand? Call someone to take her off his hands?

The latter, for preference.

He settled for handing her a clean napkin when her own grew sodden.

His skepticism had not survived the mention of the Transnistrian copyright police. This was far too bizarre to be a con—a scam was based on basic human desire, greed or lust, not something as abstract as intellectual property. Unless there was a gang who made a point of targeting academics from the States, luring them with a tantalizing hook about a copyright worth murdering for . . .

Eventually the storm subsided. Stephanie pushed the half-consumed ice cream away, and reached for another cigarette.

He tapped his wedding ring on the tabletop, something he did when thinking. “Shouldn’t you contact the local police?” he asked. “You know something about this . . . death.” For some reason he was reluctant to use the word murder. It was as if using the word would make something true, not the killing itself but his relationship to the killing . . . to call it murder would grant it some kind of power over him.

She shook her head. “I’ve got to get out of France before those guys find me. Out of Europe, if I can, but that would be hard. My passport’s in my hotel room, and they’re probably watching it.”

“Because of this copyright.”

Her mouth twitched in a half-smile. “That’s right.”

“It’s not a literary copyright, I take it.”

She shook her head, the half-smile still on her face.

“Your friend was a biologist.” He felt a hum in his nerves, a certainty that he already knew the answer to the next question.

“Is it a weapon?” he asked.

She wasn’t surprised by the question. “No,” she said. “No, just the opposite.” She took a drag on her cigarette and sighed the smoke out. “It’s an antidote. An antidote to human folly.”

“Listen,” Stephanie said. “Just because the Soviet Union fell doesn’t mean that Sovietism fell with it. Sovietism is still there—the only difference is that its moral justification is gone, and what’s left is violence and extortion disguised as law enforcement and taxation. The old empire breaks up, and in the West you think it’s great, but more countries just meant more palms to be greased—all throughout the former Soviet empire you’ve got more inspectors and tax collectors, more customs agents and security directorates than there ever were under the Russians. All these people do is prey off their own populations, because no one else will do business with them unless they’ve got oil or some other resource that people want.”

“Trashcanistans,” Terzian said. It was a word he’d heard used of his own ancestral homeland, the former Soviet Republic of Armenia, whose looted economy and paranoid, murderous, despotic Russian puppet regime was supported only by millions of dollars sent to the country by Americans of Armenian descent, who thought that propping up the gang of thugs in power somehow translated into freedom for the fatherland.

Stephanie nodded. “And the worst Trashcanistan of all is Transnistria.”

She and Terzian had left the café and taken a taxi back to the Left Bank and Terzian’s hotel. He had turned the television to a local station, but muted the sound until the news came on. Until then the station showed a rerun of an American cop show, stolid, businesslike detectives underplaying their latest sordid confrontation with tragedy.

The hotel room hadn’t been built for the queen-sized bed it now held, and there was an eighteen-inch clearance around the bed and no room for chairs. Terzian, not wanting Stephanie to think he wanted to get her in the sack, perched uncertainly on a corner of the bed, while Stephanie disposed herself more comfortably, sitting cross-legged in its center.

“Moldova was a Soviet republic put together by Stalin,” she said. “It was made up of Bessarabia, which was a part of Romania that Stalin chewed off at the beginning of the Second World War, plus a strip of industrial land on the far side of the Dniester. When the Soviet Union went down, Moldova became ‘independent’—” Terzian could hear the quotes in her voice. “But independence had nothing to do with the Moldovan people, it was just Romanian-speaking Soviet elites going off on their own account once their own superiors were no longer there to retrain them. And Moldova soon split—first the Turkish Christians . . .”

“Wait a second,” Terzian said. “There are Christian Turks?”

The idea of Christian Turks was not a part of his Armenian-American worldview.

Stephanie nodded. “Orthodox Christian Turks, yes. They’re called Gagauz, and they now have their own autonomous republic of Gagauzia within Moldova.”

Stephanie reached into her pocket for a cigarette and her lighter.

“Uh,” Terzian said. “Would you mind smoking in the window?”

Stephanie made a face. “Americans,” she said, but she moved to the window and opened it, letting in a blast of cool spring air. She perched on the windowsill, sheltered her cigarette from the wind, and lit up.

“Where was I?” she asked.

“Turkish Christians.”

“Right.” Blowing smoke into the teeth of the gale. “Gagauzia was only the start—after that a Russian general allied with a bunch of crooks and KGB types created a rebellion in the bit of Moldova that was on the far side of the Dniester—another collection of Soviet elites, representing no one but themselves. Once the Russian-speaking rebels rose against their Romanian-speaking oppressors, the Soviet Fourteenth Army stepped in as peacekeepers, complete with blue helmets, and created a twenty-mile-wide state recognized by no other government. And that meant more military, more border guards, more administrators, more taxes to charge, and customs duties, and uniformed ex-Soviets whose palms needed greasing. And over a hundred thousand refugees who could be put in camps while the administration stole their supplies and rations . . .

“But—” She jabbed the cigarette like a pointer. “Transnistria had a problem. No other nation recognized their existence, and they were tiny and had no natural resources, barring the underage girls they enslaved by the thousands to export for prostitution. The rest of the population was leaving as fast as they could, restrained only slightly by the fact that they carried passports no other state recognized, and that meant there were fewer people whose productivity the elite could steal to support their predatory post-Soviet lifestyles. All they had was a lot of obsolete Soviet heavy industry geared to produce stuff no one wanted.

“But they still had the infrastructure. They had power plants—running off Russian oil they couldn’t afford to buy—and they had a transportation system. So the outlaw regime set up to attract other outlaws who needed industrial capacity—the idea was that they’d attract entrepreneurs who were excused from paying most of the local taxes in exchange for making one big payoff to the higher echelon.”

“Weapons?” Terzian asked.

“Weapons, sure,” Stephanie nodded. “Mostly they’re producing cheap knockoffs of other people’s guns, but the guns are up to the size of howitzers. They tried banking and data havens, but the authorities couldn’t restrain themselves from ripping those off—banks and data run on trust and control of information, and when the regulators are greedy, short-sighted crooks you don’t get either one. So what they settled on was, well, biotech. They’ve got companies creating cheap generic pharmaceuticals that evade Western patents . . .” Her look darkened. “Not that I’ve got a problem with that, not when I’ve seen thousands dying of diseases they couldn’t afford to cure. And they’ve also got other companies who are ripping off Western genetic research to develop their own products. And as long as they make their payoffs to the elite, these companies remain completely unregulated. Nobody, not even the government, knows what they’re doing in those factories, and the government gives them security free of charge.”

Terzian imagined gene-splicing going on in a rusting Soviet factory, rows and rows of mutant plants with untested, unregulated genetics, all set to be released on an unsuspecting world. Transgenic elements drifting down the Dniester to the Black Sea, growing quietly in its saline environment . . .

“The news,” Stephanie reminded, and pointed at the television.

Terzian reached for the control and hit the mute button, just as the throbbing, anxious music that announced the news began to fade.

The murder on the Île de la Cité was the second item on the broadcast. The victim was described as a “foreign national” who had been fatally stabbed, and no arrests had been made. The motive for the killing was unknown.

Terzian changed the channel in time to catch the same item on another channel. The story was unchanged.

“I told you,” Stephanie said. “No suspects. No motive.”

“You could tell them.”

She made a negative motion with her cigarette. “I couldn’t tell them who did it, or how to find them. All I could do is put myself under suspicion.”

Terzian turned off the TV. “So what happened exactly? Your friend stole from these people?”

Stephanie swiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. “He stole something that was of no value to them. It’s only valuable to poor people, who can’t afford to pay. And—” She turned to the window and spun her cigarette into the street below. “I’ll take it out of here as soon as I can,” she said. “I’ve got to try to contact some friends.” She closed the window, shutting out the spring breeze. “I wish I had my passport. That would change everything.”

I saw a murder this afternoon, Terzian thought. He closed his eyes and saw the man falling, the white face so completely absorbed in the reality of its own agony.

He was so fucking sick of death.

He opened his eyes. “I can get your passport back,” he said.

Anger kept him moving until he saws the killers, across the street from Stephanie’s hotel, sitting at an outdoor table in a café-bar. Terzian recognized them immediately—he didn’t need to look at the heavy shoes, or the broad faces with their disciplined military mustaches—one glance at the crowd at the café showed the only two in the place who weren’t French. That was probably how Stephanie knew to speak to him in English, he just didn’t dress or carry himself like a Frenchman, for all that he’d worn an anonymous coat and tie. He tore his gaze away before they saw him gaping at them.

Anger turned very suddenly to fear, and as he continued his stride toward the hotel he told himself that they wouldn’t recognize him from the Norman restaurant, that he’d changed into blue jeans and sneaks and a windbreaker, and carried a soft-sided suitcase. Still he felt a gunsight on the back of his neck, and he was so nervous that he nearly ran head-first into the glass lobby door.

Terzian paid for a room with his credit card, took the key from the Vietnamese clerk, and walked up the narrow stair to what the French called the second floor, but what he would have called the third. No one lurked in the stairwell, and he wondered where the third assassin had gone. Looking for Stephanie somewhere else, probably, an airport or train station.

In his room, Terzian put his suitcase on the bed—it held only a few token items, plus his shaving kit—and then he took Stephanie’s key from his pocket and held it in his hand. The key was simple, attached to a weighted doorknob-shaped ceramic plug.

The jolt of fear and surprise that had so staggered him on first sighting the two men began to shift again into rage.

They were drinking beer, there had been half-empty mugs on the table in front of them, and a pair of empties as well.

Drinking on duty. Doing surveillance while drunk

Bastards. Trashcanians. They could kill someone simply through drunkenness.

Perhaps they already had.

He was angry when he left his room and took the stairs to the floor below. No foes kept watch in the hall. He opened Stephanie’s room and then closed the door behind him.

He didn’t turn on the light. The sun was surprisingly high in the sky for the hour: he had noticed that the sun seemed to set later here than it did at home. Maybe France was very far to the west for its time zone.

Stephanie’s didn’t have a suitcase, just a kind of nylon duffel, a larger version of the athletic bag she already carried. He took it from the little closet, and enough of Terzian’s suspicion remained so that he checked the luggage tag to make certain the name was Steph. Pais, and not another.

He opened the duffel, then got her passport and travel documents from the bedside table and tossed them in. He added a jacket and a sweater from the closet, then packed her toothbrush and shaver into her plastic travel bag and put it in the duffel.

The plan was for him to return to his room on the upper floor and stay the night and avoid raising suspicion by leaving a hotel he’d just checked into. In the morning, carrying two bags, he’d check out and rejoin Stephanie in his own hotel, where she had spent the night in his room, and where the air almost would by now reek with her cigarette smoke.

Terzian opened a dresser drawer and scooped out a double handful of Stephanie’s t-shirts, underwear, and stockings, and then he remembered that the last time he’d done this was when he cleaned Claire’s belongings out of the Esplanade house.

Shit. Fuck. He gazed down at the clothing between his hands and let the fury rage like a tempest in his skull.

And then, in the angry silence, he heard a creak in the corridor, and then a stumbling thud.

Thick rubber military soles, he thought. With drunk baboons in them.

Instinct shrieked at him not to be trapped in this room, this dead-end where he could be trapped and killed. He dropped Stephanie’s clothes back into the drawer and stepped to the bed and picked up the duffel in one hand. Another step took him to the door, which he opened with one hand while using the other to fling the duffel into the surprised face of the drunken murderer on the other side.

Terzian hadn’t been at his Kenpo school in six years, not since he’d left Kansas City, but certain reflexes don’t go away after they’ve been drilled into a person thousands of times—certainly not the front kick that hooked upward under the intruder’s breastbone and drove him breathless into the corridor wall opposite.

A primitive element of his mind rejoiced in the fact that he was bigger than these guys. He could really knock them around.

The second Trashcanian tried to draw a pistol but Terzian passed outside the pistol hand and drove the point of an elbow into the man’s face. Terzian then grabbed the automatic with both hands, took a further step down the corridor, and spun around, which swung the man around Terzian’s hip a full two hundred and seventy degrees and drove him head-first into the corridor wall. When he’d finished falling and opened his eyes he was staring into the barrel of his own gun.

Red rage gave a fangs-bared roar of animal triumph inside Terzian’s skull. Perhaps his tongue echoed it. It was all he could do to stop himself from pulling the trigger.

Get Death working for him for a change. Why not?

Except the first man hadn’t realized that his side had just lost. He had drawn a knife—a glittering chromed single-edged thing that may have already killed once today—and now he took a dangerous step toward Terzian.

Terzian pointed the pistol straight at the knife man and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

The intruder stared at the gun as if he’d just realized at just this moment it wasn’t his partner who held it.

Terzian pulled the trigger again, and when nothing happened his rage melted into terror and he ran. Behind him he heard the drunken knife man trip over his partner and crash to the floor.

Terzian was at the bottom of the stair before he heard the thick-soled military boots clatter on the risers above him. He dashed through the small lobby—he sensed the Vietnamese night clerk, who was facing away, begin to turn toward him just as he pushed open the glass door and ran into the street.

He kept running. At some point he discovered the gun still in his fist, and he put it in the pocket of his windbreaker.

Some moments later he realized he wasn’t being pursued. And he remembered that Stephanie’s passport was still in her duffel, which he’d thrown at the knife man and hadn’t retrieved.

For a moment rage ran through him, and he thought about taking out the gun and fixing whatever was wrong with it and going back to Stephanie’s room and getting the documents one way or another.

But then the anger faded enough for him to see what a foolish course that would be, and he returned to his own hotel.

Terzian had given Stephanie his key, so he knocked on his own door before realizing she was very unlikely to open to a random knock. “It’s Jonathan,” he said. “It didn’t work out.”

She snatched the door open from the inside. Her face was taut with anxiety. She held pages in her hand, the text of the paper he’d delivered that morning.

“Sorry,” he said. “They were there, outside the hotel. I got into your room, but—”

She took his arm and almost yanked him into the room, then shut the door behind him. “Did they follow you?” she demanded.

“No. They didn’t chase me. Maybe they thought I’d figure out how to work the gun.” He took the pistol out of his pocket and showed it to her. “I can’t believe how stupid I was—”

“Where did you get that? Where did you get that?” Her voice was nearly a scream, and she shrank away from him, her eyes wide. Her fist crumpled papers over her heart. To his astonishment he realized that she was afraid of him, that she thought he was connected, somehow, with the killers.

He threw the pistol onto the bed and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “No really!” he shouted over her cries. “It’s not mine! I took it from one of them!”

Stephanie took a deep gasp of air. Her eyes were still wild. “Who the hell are you, then?” she said. “James Bond?”

He gave a disgusted laugh. “James Bond would have known how to shoot.”

“I was reading your—your article.” She held out the pages toward him. “I was thinking, my God, what have I got this poor guy into. Some professor I was sending to his death.” She passed a hand over her forehead. “They probably bugged my room. They would have known right away that someone was in it.”

“They were drunk,” Terzian said. “Maybe they’ve been drinking all day. Those assholes really pissed me off.”

He sat on the bed and picked up the pistol. It was small and blue steel and surprisingly heavy. In the years since he’d last shot a gun he had forgotten that purposefulness, the way a firearm was designed for a single, clear function. He found the safety where it had been all along, near his right thumb, and flicked it off and then on again.

“There,” he said. “That’s what I should have done.”

Waves of anger shivered through his limbs at the touch of the adrenaline still pouring into his system. A bitter impulse to laugh again rose in him, and he tried to suppress it.

“I guess I was lucky after all,” he said. “It wouldn’t have done you any good to have to explain a pair of corpses outside your room.” He looked up at Stephanie, who was pacing back and forth in the narrow lane between the bed and the wall, and looking as if she badly needed a cigarette. “I’m sorry about your passport. Where were you going to go, anyway?”

“It doesn’t so much matter if I go,” she said. She gave Terzian a quick, nervous glance. “You can fly it out, right?”

“It?” He stared at her. “What do you mean, it?”

“The biotech.” Stephanie stopped her pacing and stared at him with those startling green eyes. “Adrian gave it to me. Just before they killed him.” Terzian’s gaze followed hers to the black bag with the Nike swoosh, the bag that sat at the foot of Terzian’s bed.

Terzian’s impulse to laugh faded. Unregulated, illegal, stolen biotech, he thought. Right in his own hotel room. Along with a stolen gun and a woman who was probably out of her mind.

Fuck.

The dead man was identified by news files as Adrian Cristea, a citizen of Ukraine and a researcher. He had been stabbed once in the right kidney and bled to death without identifying his assailants. Witnesses reported two or maybe three men leaving the scene immediately after Cristea’s death. Michelle set more search spiders to work.

For a moment she considered calling Davout and letting him know that Terzian had probably been a witness to a murder, but decided to wait until she either had some more evidence one way or another.

For the next few hours she did her real work, analyzing the samples she’d taken from Zigzag Lake’s sulfide-tainted deeps. It wasn’t very physical, and Michelle figured it was only worth a few hundred calories.

A wind floated through the treetops, bringing the scent of night flowers and swaying Michelle’s perch beneath her as she peered into her biochemical reader, and she remembered the gentle pressure of Darton against her back, rocking with her as he looked over her shoulder at her results. Suddenly she could remember, with a near perfect clarity, the taste of his skin on her tongue.

She rose from her woven seat and paced along the bough. Damn it, she thought, I watched you die.

Michelle returned to her deck and discovered that her spiders had located the police file on Cristea’s death. A translation program handled the antique French without trouble, even producing modern equivalents of forensic jargon. Cristea was of Romanian descent, had been born in the old USSR, and had acquired Ukrainian citizenship on the breakup of the Soviet Union. The French files themselves had translations of Cristea’s Ukrainian travel documents, which included receipts showing that he had paid personal insurance, environmental insurance, and departure taxes from Transnistria, a place of which she’d never heard, as well as similar documents from Moldova, which at least was a province, or country, that sounded familiar.

What kind of places were these, where you had to buy insurance at the border? And what was environmental insurance anyway?

There were copies of emails between French and Ukrainian authorities, in which the Ukrainians politely declined any knowledge of their citizen beyond the fact that he was a citizen. They had no addresses for him.

Cristea apparently lived in Transnistria, but the authorities there echoed the Ukrainians in saying they knew nothing of him.

Cristea’s tickets and vouchers showed that he had apparently taken a train to Bucharest, and there he’d got on an airline that took him to Prague, and thence to Paris. He had been in the city less than a day before he was killed. Found in Cristea’s hotel room was a curious document certifying that Cristea was carrying medical supplies, specifically a vaccine against hepatitis A. Michelle wondered why he would be carrying a hepatitis vaccine from Transnistria to France. France presumably had all the hepatitis vaccine it needed.

No vaccine had turned up. Apparently Cristea had got into the European Community without having his bags searched, as there was no evidence that the documents relating to the alleged vaccine had ever been examined.

The missing “vaccine”—at some point in the police file the skeptical quotation marks had appeared—had convinced the Paris police that Cristea was a murdered drug courier, and at that point they’d lost interest in the case. It was rarely possible to solve a professional killing in the drug underworld.

Michelle’s brief investigation seemed to have come to a dead end. That Terzian might have witnessed a murder would rate maybe half a sentence in Professor Davout’s biography.

Then she checked what her spiders had brought her in regard to Terzian, and found something that cheered her.

There he was inside the Basilica di Santa Croce, a tourist still photograph taken before the tomb of Machiavelli. He was only slightly turned away from the camera and the face was unmistakable. Though there was no date on the photograph, only the year, but he wore the same clothes he wore in the video taken outside the church, and the photo caught him in the act of speaking to a companion. She was a tall woman with deep brown skin, but she was turned away from the camera, and a wide-brimmed sun hat made her features indistinguishable.

Humming happily, Michelle deployed her software to determine whether this was the same woman who had been on Terzian’s arm on the Place Dauphine. Without facial features or other critical measurements to compare, the software was uncertain, but the proportion of limb and thorax was right, and the software gave an estimate of 41%, which Michelle took to be encouraging.

Another still image of Terzian appeared in an undated photograph taken at a festival in southern France. He wore dark glasses, and he’d grown heavily tanned; he carried a glass of wine in either hand, but the person to whom he was bringing the second glass was out of the frame. Michelle set her software to locating the identity of the church seen in the background, a task the two distinctive bell towers would make easy. She was lucky and got a hit right away: the church was the Eglise St-Michel in Salon-de-Provence, which meant Terzian had attended the Fête des Aires de la Dine in June. Michelle set more search spiders to seeking out photo and video from the festivals. She had no doubt she’d find Terzian there, and perhaps again his companion.

Michelle retired happily to her hammock. The search was going well. Terzian had met a woman in Paris and traveled with her for weeks. The evidence wasn’t quite there yet, but Michelle would drag it out of history somehow.

Romance. The lonely mermaid was in favor of romance, the kind where you ran away to faraway places to be more intently one with the person you adored.

It was what she herself had done, before everything had gone so wrong, and Michelle had to take steps to re-establish the moral balance of her universe.

Terzian paid for a room for Stephanie for the night, not so much because he was gallant as because he needed to be alone to think. “There’s a breakfast buffet downstairs in the morning,” he said. “They have hard-boiled eggs and croissants and Nutella. It’s a very un-French thing to do. I recommend it.”

He wondered if he would ever see her again. She might just vanish, particularly if she read his thoughts, because another reason for wanting privacy was so that he could call the police and bring an end to this insane situation.

He never quite assembled the motivation to make the call. Perhaps Rorty’s I don’t care had rubbed off on him. And he never got a chance to taste the buffet, either. Stephanie banged on his door very early, and he dragged on his jeans and opened the door. She entered, furiously smoking from her new cigarette pack, the athletic bag over her shoulder.

“How did you pay for the room at my hotel?” she asked.

“Credit card,” he said, and in the stunned, accusing silence that followed he saw his James Bond fantasies sink slowly beneath the slack, oily surface of a dismal lake.

Because credit cards leave trails. The Transnistrians would have checked the hotel registry, and the credit card impression taken by the hotel, and now they knew who he was. And it wouldn’t be long before they’d trace him at his hotel.

“Shit, I should have warned you to pay cash.” Stephanie stalked to the window and peered out cautiously. “They could be out there right now.”

Terzian felt a sudden compulsion to have the gun in his hand. He took it from the bedside table and stood there, feeling stupid and cold and shirtless.

“How much money do you have?” Terzian asked.

“Couple hundred.”

“I have less.”

“You should max out your credit card and just carry Euros. Use your card now before they cancel it.”

“Cancel it? How could they cancel it?”

She gave him a tight-lipped, impatient look. “Jonathan. They may be assholes, but they’re still a government.”

They took a cab to the American Express near the Opéra and Terzian got ten thousand Euros in cash from some people who were extremely skeptical about the validity of his documents, but who had, in the end, to admit that all was technically correct. Then Stephanie got a cell phone under the name A. Silva, with a bunch of prepaid hours on it, and within a couple hours they were on the TGV, speeding south to Nice at nearly two hundred seventy kilometers per hour, all with a strange absence of sound and vibration that made the French countryside speeding past seem like a strangely unconvincing special effect.

Terzian had put them in first class and he and Stephanie were alone in a group of four seats. Stephanie was twitchy because he hadn’t bought seats in a smoking section. He sat uncertain, unhappy about all the cash he was carrying and not knowing what to do with it—he’d made two big rolls and zipped them into the pockets of his windbreaker. He carried the pistol in the front pocket of his jeans and its weight and discomfort was a perpetual reminder of this situation that he’d been dragged into, pursued by killers from Trashcanistan and escorting illegal biotechnology.

He kept mentally rehearsing drawing the pistol and shooting it. Over and over, remembering to thumb off the safety this time. Just in case Trashcanian commandos stormed the train.

“Hurled into life,” he muttered. “An object lesson right out of Heidegger.”

“Beg pardon?”

He looked at her. “Heidegger said we’re hurled into life. Just like I’ve been hurled into—” He flapped his hands uselessly. “Into whatever this is. The situation exists before you even got here, but here you are anyway, and the whole business is something you inherit and have to live with.” He felt his lips draw back in a snarl. “He also said that a fundamental feature of existence is anxiety in the face of death, which would also seem to apply to our situation. And his answer to all of this was to make existence, dasein if you want to get technical, an authentic project.” He looked at her. “So what’s your authentic project, then? And how authentic is it?”

Her brow furrowed. “What?”

Terzian couldn’t stop, not that he wanted to. It was just Stephanie’s hard luck that he couldn’t shoot anybody right now, or break something up with his fists, and was compelled to lecture instead. “Or,” he went on, “to put this in a more accessible context, just pretend we’re in a Hitchcock film, okay? This is the scene where Grace Kelly tells Cary Grant exactly who she is and what the MacGuffin is.”

Stephanie’s face was frozen into a hostile mask. Whether she understood what he was saying or not, the hostility was clear.

“I don’t get it,” she said.

“What’s in the fucking bag?” he demanded.

She glared at him for a long moment, then spoke, her own anger plain in her voice. “It’s the answer to world hunger,” she said. “Is that authentic enough for you?”

Stephanie’s father was from Angola and her mother from East Timor, both former Portuguese colonies swamped in the decades since independence by war and massacre. Both parents had with great foresight and intelligence retained Portuguese passports, and had met in Rome, where they worked for UNESCO, and where Stephanie had grown up with a blend both of their genetics and their service ethic.

Stephanie herself had gotten a degree in administration from the University of Virginia, which accounted for the American lights in her English, then got another degree in nursing and went to work for the Catholic relief agency Santa Croce, which sent her to every war-wrecked, locust-blighted, warlord-ridden, sandstorm-blasted camp in Africa. And a few that weren’t in Africa.

“Trashcanistan,” Terzian said.

“Moldova,” Stephanie said. “For three months, on what was supposed to be my vacation.” She shuddered. “I don’t mind telling you that it was a frightening thing. I was used to that kind of thing in Africa, but to see it all happening in the developed world . . . warlords, ethnic hatreds, populations being moved at the point of a gun, whole forested districts being turned to deserts because people suddenly needed firewood . . .” Her emerald eyes flashed. “It’s all politics, okay? Just like in Africa. Famine and camps are all politics now, and have been since before I was born. A whole population starves, and it’s because someone, somewhere, sees a profit in it. It’s difficult to just kill an ethnic group you don’t like, war is expensive and there are questions at the UN and you may end up at The Hague being tried for war crimes. But if you just wait for a bad harvest and then arrange for the whole population to starve, it’s different—suddenly your enemies are giving you all their money in return for food, you get aid from the UN instead of grief, and you can award yourself a piece of the relief action and collect bribes from all the relief agencies, and your enemies are rounded up into camps and you can get your armed forces into the country without resistance, make sure your enemies disappear, control everything while some deliveries disappear into government warehouses where the food can be sold to the starving or just sold abroad for a profit . . .” She shrugged. “That’s the way of the world, okay? But no more!” She grabbed a fistful of the Nike bag and brandished it at him.

What her time in Moldova had done was to leave Stephanie contacts in the area, some in relief agencies, some in industry and government. So that when news of a useful project came up in Transnistria, she was among the first to know.

“So what is it?” Terzian asked. “Some kind of genetically modified food crop?”

“No.” She smiled thinly. “What we have here is a genetically modified consumer.”

Those Transnistrian companies had mostly been interested in duplicating pharmaceuticals and transgenetic food crops created by other companies, producing them on the cheap and underselling the patent-owners. There were bits and pieces of everything in those labs, DNA human and animal and vegetable. A lot of it had other people’s trademarks and patents on it, even the human codes, which US law permitted companies to patent provided they came up with something useful to do with it. And what these semi-outlaw companies were doing was making two things they figured people couldn’t do without: drugs and food.

And not just people, since animals need drugs and food, too. Starving, tubercular sheep or pigs aren’t worth much at market, so there’s as much money in keeping livestock alive as in doing the same for people. So at some point one of the administrators—after a few too many shots of vodka flavored with bison grass—said, “Why should we worry about feeding the animals at all? Why not have them grow their own food, like plants?”

So then began the Green Swine Project, an attempt to make pigs fat and happy by just herding them out into the sun.

“Green swine,” Terzian repeated, wondering. “People are getting killed over green swine.”

“Well, no.” Stephanie waved the idea away with a twitchy swipe of her hand. “The idea never quite got beyond the vaporware stage, because at that point another question was asked—why swine? Adrian said, ‘Why stop at having animals do photosynthesis—why not people?’”

“No!” Terzian cried, appalled. “You’re going to turn people green?”

Stephanie glared at him. “Something wrong with fat, happy green people?” Her hands banged out a furious rhythm on the armrests of her seat. “I’d have skin to match my eyes. Wouldn’t that be attractive?”

“I’d have to see it first,” Terzian said, the shock still rolling through his bones.

“Adrian was pretty smart,” Stephanie said. “The Transnistrians killed themselves a real genius.” She shook her head. “He had it all worked out. He wanted to limit the effect to the skin—no green muscle tissue of skeletons—so he started with a virus that has a tropism for the epidermis—papiloma, that’s warts, okay?”

So now we’ve got green warts, Terzian thought, but he kept his mouth shut.

“So if you’re Adrian, what you do is gut the virus and re-encode it to create chlorophyll. Once a person’s infected, exposure to sunlight will cause the virus to replicate and chlorophyll to reproduce in the skin.”

Terzian gave Stephanie a skeptical look. “That’s not going to be very efficient,” he said. “Plants get sugars and oxygen from chlorophyll, okay, but they don’t need much food, they stand in place and don’t walk around. Add chlorophyll to a person’s skin, how many calories do you get each day? Tens? Dozens?”

Stephanie’s lips parted in a fierce little smile. “You don’t stop with just the chlorophyll. You have to get really efficient electron transport. In a plant that’s handled in the chloroplasts, but the human body already has mitochondria to do the same job. You don’t have to create these huge support mechanisms for the chlorophyll, you just make use of what’s already there. So if you’re Adrian, what you do is add trafficking tags to the reaction center proteins so that they’ll target the mitochondria, which already are loaded with proteins to handle electron transport. The result is that the mitochondria handle transport from the chlorophyll, which is the sort of job they do anyway, and once the virus starts replicating you can get maybe a thousand calories or more just from standing in the sun. It won’t provide full nutrition, but it can keep starvation at bay, and it’s not as if starving people have much to do besides stand in the sun anyway.”

“It’s not going to do much good for Icelanders,” Terzian said.

She turned severe. “Icelanders aren’t starving. It so happens that most of the people in the world who are starving happen to be in hot places.”

Terzian flapped his hands. “Fine. I must be a racist. Sue me.”

Stephanie’s grin broadened, and she leaned toward Terzian. “I didn’t tell you about Adrian’s most interesting bit of cleverness. When people start getting normal nutrition, there’ll have a competition within the mitochondria between normal metabolism and solar-induced electron transport. So the green virus is just a redundant backup system in case normal nutrition isn’t available.”

A triumphant smile crossed Stephanie’s face. “Starvation will no longer be a weapon,” she said. “Green skin can keep people active and on their feet long enough to get help. It will keep them healthy enough to fend off the epidemics associated with malnutrition. The point is—” She made fists and shook them at the sky. “The bad guys don’t get to use starvation as a weapon anymore! Famine ends! One of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse dies, right here, right now, as a result of what I’ve got in this bag!” She picked up the bag and threw it into Terzian’s lap, and he jerked on the seat in defensive reflex, knees rising to meet elbows. Her lips skinned back in a snarl, and her tone was mocking.

“I think even that Nazi fuck Heidegger would think my project is pretty damn authentic. Wouldn’t you agree, Herr Doktor Terzian?”

Got you, Michelle thought. Here was a still photo of Terzian at the Fête des Aires de la Dine, with the dark-skinned woman. She had the same wide-brimmed straw hat she’d worn in the Florence church, and had the same black bag over her shoulder, but now Michelle had a clear view of a three-quarter profile, and one hand, with its critical alignments, was clearly visible, holding an ice cream cone.

Night insects whirled around the computer display. Michelle batted them away and got busy mapping. The photo was digital and Michelle could enlarge it.

To her surprise she discovered that the woman had green eyes. Black women with green irises—or irises of orange or chartreuse or chrome steel—were not unusual in her own time, but she knew that in Terzian’s time they were rare. That would make the search much easier.

“Michelle . . .” The voice came just as Michelle sent her new search spiders into the ether. A shiver ran up her spine.

“Michelle . . .” The voice came again.

It was Darton.

Michelle’s heart gave a sickening lurch. She closed her console and put it back in the mesh bag, then crossed the rope bridge between the ironwood tree and the banyan. Her knees were weak, and the swaying bridge seemed to take a couple unexpected pitches. She stepped out onto the banyan’s sturdy overhanging limb and gazed out at the water.

“Michelle . . .” To the southwest, in the channel between the mermaid’s island and another, she could see a pale light bobbing, the light of a small boat.

“Michelle, where are you?”

The voice died away in the silence and surf. Michelle remembered the spike in her hand, the long, agonized trek up the slope above Jellyfish Lake. Darton pale, panting for breath, dying in her arms.

The lake was one of the wonders of the world, but the steep path over the ridge that fenced the lake from the ocean was challenging even for those who were not dying. When Michelle and Darton—at that time apes—came up from their boat that afternoon they didn’t climb the steep path, but swung hand-over-hand through the trees overhead, through the hardwood and guava trees, and avoided the poison trees with their bleeding, allergenic black sap. Even though their trip was less exhausting than if they’d gone over the land route, the two were ready for the cool water by the time they arrived at the lake.

Tens of thousands of years in the past the water level was higher, and when it receded the lake was cut off from the Pacific, and with it the Mastigias sp. jellyfish, which soon exhausted the supply of small fish that were its food. As the human race did later, the jellies gave up hunting and gathering in exchange for agriculture, and permitted themselves to be farmed by colonies of algae that provided the sugars they needed for life. At night they’d descend to the bottom of the lake, where they fertilized their algae crops in the anoxic, sulfurous waters; at dawn the jellies rose to the surface, and over the course of the day they crossed the lake, following the course of the sun, and allowed the sun’s rays to supply the energy necessary for making their daily ration of food.

When Darton and Michelle arrived, there were ten million jellyfish in the lake, from fingertip-sized to jellies the size of a dinner plate, all in one warm throbbing golden-brown mass in the center of the water. The two swam easily on the surface with their long siamang arms, laughing and calling to one another as the jellyfish in their millions caressed them with the most featherlike of touches. The lake was the temperature of their own blood, and it was like a soupy bath, the jellyfish so thick that Michelle felt she could almost walk on the surface. The warm touch wasn’t erotic, exactly, but it was sensual in the way that an erotic touch was sensual, a light brush over the skin by the pad of a teasing finger.

Trapped in a lake for thousands of years without suitable prey, the jellyfish had lost most of their ability to sting. Only a small percentage of people were sensitive enough to the toxin to receive a rash or feel a modest burning.

A very few people, though, were more sensitive than that.

Darton and Michelle left at dusk, and by that time Darton was already gasping for breath. He said he’d overexerted himself, that all he needed was to get back to their base for a snack, but as he swung through the trees on the way up the ridge, he lost his hold on a Palauan apple tree and crashed through a thicket of limbs to sprawl, amid a hail of fruit, on the sharp algae-covered limestone of the ridge.

Michelle swung down from the trees, her heart pounding. Darton was nearly colorless and struggling to breathe. They had no way of calling for help unless Michelle took their boat to Koror or to their base camp on another island. She tried to help Darton walk, taking one of his long arms over her shoulder, supporting him up the steep island trail. He collapsed, finally, at the foot of a poison tree, and Michelle bent over him to shield him from the drops of venomous sap until he died.

Her back aflame with the poison sap, she’d whispered her parting words into Darton’s ear. She never knew if he heard.

The coroner said it was a million-to-one chance that Darton had been so deathly allergic, and tried to comfort her with the thought that there was nothing she could have done. Torbiong, who had made the arrangements for Darton and Michelle to come in the first place, had been consoling, had offered to let Michelle stay with his family. Michelle had surprised him by asking permission to move her base camp to another island, and to continue her work alone.

She also had herself transformed into a mermaid, and subsequently a romantic local legend.

And now Darton was back, bobbing in a boat in the nearby channel and calling her name, shouting into a bullhorn.

“Michelle, I love you.” The words floated clear into the night air. Michelle’s mouth was dry. Her fingers formed the sign <go away>.

There was a silence, and then Michelle heard the engine start on Darton’s boat. He motored past her position, within five hundred meters or so, and continued on to the northern point of the island.

<go away> . . .

“Michelle . . .” Again his voice floated out onto the breeze. It was clear he didn’t know where she was. She was going to have to be careful about showing lights.

<go away> . . .

Michelle waited while Darton called out a half-dozen more times, and then Darton started his engine and moved on. She wondered if he would search all three hundred islands in the Rock Island group.

No, she knew he was more organized than that.

She’d have to decide what to do when he finally found her.

While a thousand questions chased each other’s tails through his mind, Terzian opened the Nike bag and withdrew the small hard plastic case inside, something like a box for fishing tackle. He popped the locks on the case and opened the lid, and he saw glass vials resting in slots cut into dark grey foam. In them was a liquid with a faint golden cast.

“The papiloma,” Stephanie said.

Terzian dropped the lid on the case as he cast a guilty look over his shoulder, not wanting anyone to see him with this stuff. If he were arrested under suspicion of being a drug dealer, the wads of cash and the pistol certainly wouldn’t help.

“What do you do with the stuff once you get to where you’re going?”

“Brush it on the skin. With exposure to solar energy it replicates as needed.”

“Has it been tested?”

“On people? No. Works fine on rhesus monkeys, though.”

He tapped his wedding ring on the arm of his seat. “Can it be . . . caught? I mean, it’s a virus, can it go from one person to another?”

“Through skin-to-skin contact.”

“I’d say that’s a yes. Can mothers pass it on to their children?”

“Adrian didn’t think it would cross the placental barrier, but he didn’t get a chance to test it. If mothers want to infect their children, they’ll probably have to do it deliberately.” She shrugged. “Whatever the case, my guess is that mothers won’t mind green babies, as long as they’re green healthy babies.” She looked down at the little vials in their secure coffins of foam. “We can infect tens of thousands of people with this amount,” she said. “And we can make more very easily.”

If mothers want to infect their children . . . Terzian closed the lid of the plastic case and snapped the locks. “You’re out of your mind,” he said.

Stephanie cocked her head and peered at him, looking as if she’d anticipated his objections and was humoring him. “How so?”

“Where do I start?” Terzian zipped up the bag, then tossed it in Stephanie’s lap, pleased to see her defensive reflexes leap in response. “You’re planning on unleashing an untested transgenetic virus on Africa—on Africa of all places, a continent that doesn’t exactly have a happy history with pandemics. And it’s a virus that’s cooked up by a bunch of illegal pharmacists in a non-country with a murderous secret police, facts that don’t give me much confidence that this is going to be anything but a disaster.”

Stephanie tapped two fingers on her chin as if she were wishing there were a cigarette between them. “I can put your mind to rest on the last issue. The animal studies worked. Adrian had a family of bright green rhesus in his lab, till the project was canceled and the rhesus were, ah, liquidated.”

“So if the project’s so terrific, why’d the company pull the plug?”

“Money.” Her lips twisted in anger. “Starving people can’t afford to pay for the treatments, so they’d have to practically give the stuff away. Plus they’d get reams of endless bad publicity, which is exactly what outlaw biotech companies in outlaw countries don’t want. There are millions of people who go ballistic at the very thought of a genetically engineered vegetable—you can imagine how people who can’t abide the idea of a transgenetic bell pepper would freak at the thought of infecting people with an engineered virus. The company decided it wasn’t worth the risk. They closed the project down.”

Stephanie looked at the bag in her hands. “But Adrian had been in the camps himself, you see. A displaced person, a refugee from the civil war in Moldova. And he couldn’t stand the thought that there was a way to end hunger sitting in his refrigerator in the lab, and that nothing was being done with it. And so . . .” Her hands outlined the case inside the Nike bag. “He called me. He took some vacation time and booked himself into the Henri IV, on the Place Dauphine. And I guess he must have been careless, because . . .”

Tears starred in her eyes, and she fell silent. Terzian, strong in the knowledge that he’d shared quite enough of her troubles by now, stared out the window, at the green landscape that was beginning to take on the brilliant colors of Provence. The Hautes-Alpes floated blue and white-capped in the distant east, and nearby were orchards of almonds and olives with shimmering leaves, and hillsides covered with rows of orderly vines. The Rhone ran silver under the westering sun.

“I’m not going to be your bagman,” he said. “I’m not going to contaminate the world with your freaky biotech.”

“Then they’ll catch you and you’ll die,” Stephanie said. “And it will be for nothing.”

“My experience of death,” said Terzian, “is that it’s always for nothing.”

She snorted then, angry. “My experience of death,” she mocked, “is that it’s too often for profit. I want to make mass murder an unprofitable venture. I want to crash the market in starvation by giving away life.” She gave another snort, amused this time. “It’s the ultimate anti-capitalist gesture.”

Terzian didn’t rise to that. Gestures, he thought, were just that. Gestures didn’t change the fundamentals. If some jefe couldn’t starve his people to death, he’d just use bullets, or deadly genetic technology he bought from outlaw Transnistrian corporations.

The landscape, all blazing green, raced past at over two hundred kilometers per hour. An attendant came by and sold them each a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

“You should use my phone to call your wife,” Stephanie said as she peeled the cellophane from her sandwich. “Let her know that your travel plans have changed.”

Apparently she’d noticed Terzian’s wedding ring.

“My wife is dead,” Terzian said.

She looked at him in surprise. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Brain cancer,” he said.

Though it was more complicated than that. Claire had first complained of back pain, and there had been an operation, and the tumor removed from her spine. There had been a couple weeks of mad joy and relief, and then it had been revealed that the cancer had spread to the brain and that it was inoperable. Chemotherapy had failed. She died six weeks after her first visit to the doctor.

“Do you have any other family?” Stephanie said.

“My parents are dead, too.” Auto accident, aneurism. He didn’t mention Claire’s uncle Geoff and his partner Luis, who had died of HIV within eight months of each other and left Claire the Victorian house on Esplanade in New Orleans. The house that, a few weeks ago, he had sold for six hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and the furnishings for a further ninety-five thousand, and Uncle Geoff’s collection of equestrian art for a further forty-one thousand.

He was disinclined to mention that he had quite a lot of money, enough to float around Europe for years.

Telling Stephanie that might only encourage her.

There was a long silence. Terzian broke it. “I’ve read spy novels,” he said. “And I know that we shouldn’t go to the place we’ve bought tickets for. We shouldn’t go anywhere near Nice.”

She considered this, then said, “We’ll get off at Avignon.”

They stayed in Provence for nearly two weeks, staying always in unrated hotels, those that didn’t even rise to a single star from the Ministry of Tourism, or in gîtes ruraux, farmhouses with rooms for rent. Stephanie spent much of her energy trying to call colleagues in Africa on her cell phone and achieved only sporadic success, a frustration that left her in a near-permanent fury. It was never clear just who she was trying to call, or how she thought they were going to get the papiloma off her hands. Terzian wondered how many people were involved in this conspiracy of hers.

They attended some local fêtes, though it was always a struggle to convince Stephanie it was safe to appear in a crowd. She made a point of disguising herself in big hats and shades and ended up looking like a cartoon spy. Terzian tramped rural lanes or fields or village streets, lost some pounds despite the splendid fresh local cuisine, and gained a sun tan. He made a stab at writing several papers on his laptop, and spent time researching them in internet cafés.

He kept thinking he would have enjoyed this trip, if only Claire had been with him.

“What is it you do, exactly?” Stephanie asked him once, as he wrote. “I know you teach at university, but . . .”

“I don’t teach anymore,” Terzian said. “I didn’t get my post-doc renewed. The department and I didn’t exactly get along.”

“Why not?”

Terzian turned away from the stale, stalled ideas on his display. “I’m too interdisciplinary. There’s a place on the academic spectrum where history and politics and philosophy come together—it’s called political theory usually—but I throw in economics and a layman’s understanding of science as well, and it confuses everybody but me. That’s why my MA is in American Studies—nobody in my philosophy or political science department had the nerve to deal with me, and nobody knows what American Studies actually are, so I was able to hide out there. And my doctorate is in philosophy, but only because I found one rogue professor emeritus who was willing to chair my committee.

“The problem is that if you’re hired by a philosophy department, you’re supposed to teach Plato or Hume or whoever, and they don’t want you confusing everybody by adding Maynard Keynes and Leo Szilard. And if you teach history, you’re supposed to confine yourself to acceptable stories about the past and not toss in ideas about perceptual mechanics and Kant’s ideas of the noumenon, and of course you court crucifixion from the laity if you mention Foucault or Nietzsche.”

Amusement touched Stephanie’s lips. “So where do you find a job?”

“France?” he ventured, and they laughed. “In France, ‘thinker’ is a job description. It’s not necessary to have a degree, it’s just something you do.” He shrugged. “And if that fails, there’s always Burger King.”

She seemed amused. “Sounds like burgers in your future.”

“Oh, it’s not as bad as all that. If I can generate enough interesting, sexy, highly original papers, I might attract attention and a job, in that order.”

“And have you done that?”

Terzian looked at his display and sighed. “So far, no.”

Stephanie narrowed her eyes and she considered him. “You’re not a conventional person. You don’t think inside the box, as they say.”

“As they say,” Terzian repeated.

“Then you should have no objections to radical solutions to world hunger. Particularly ones that don’t cost a penny to white liberals throughout the world.”

“Hah,” Terzian said. “Who says I’m a liberal? I’m an economist.”

So Stephanie told him terrible things about Africa. Another famine was brewing across the southern part of the continent. Mozambique was plagued with flood and drought, a startling combination. The Horn of Africa was worse. According to her friends, Santa Croce had a food shipment stuck in Mogadishu and before letting it pass the local warlord wanted to renegotiate his bribe. In the meantime people were starving, dying of malnutrition, infection, and dysentery in camps in the dry highlands of Bale and Sidamo. Their own government in Addis Ababa was worse than the Somali warlord, at this stage permitting no aid at all, bribes or no bribes.

And as for the southern Sudan, it didn’t bear thinking about.

“What’s your solution to this?” she demanded of Terzian. “Or do you have one?”

“Test this stuff, this papiloma,” he said, “show me that it works, and I’m with you. But there are too many plagues in Africa as it is.”

“Confine the papiloma to labs while thousands die? Hand it to governments who can suppress it because of pressure from religious loons and hysterical NGOs? You call that an answer?” And Stephanie went back to working her phone while Terzian walked off in anger for another stalk down country lanes.

Terzian walked toward an old ruined castle that shambled down the slope of a nearby hill. And if Stephanie’s plant people proved viable? he wondered. All bets were off. A world in which humans could become plants was a world at which none of the old rules applied.

Stephanie had said she wanted to crash the market in starvation. But, Terzian thought, that also meant crashing the market in food. If people with no money had all the food they needed, that meant food itself had no value in the marketplace. Food would be so cheap that there would be no profit in growing or selling it.

And this was all just one application of the technology. Terzian tried to keep up with science: he knew about nanoassemblers. Green people was just the first magic bullet in a long volley of scientific musketry that would change every fundamental rule by which humanity had operated since they’d first stood upright. What happened when every basic commodity—food, clothing, shelter, maybe even health—was so cheap that it was free? What then had value?

Even money wouldn’t have value then. Money only had value if it could be exchanged for something of equivalent worth.

He paused in his walk and looked ahead at the ruined castle, the castle that had once provided justice and security and government for the district, and he wondered if he was looking at the future of all government. Providing an orderly framework in which commodities could be exchanged was the basic function of the state, that and providing a secure currency. If people didn’t need government to furnish that kind of security and if the currency was worthless, the whole future of government itself was in question. Taxes weren’t worth the expense of collecting if the money wasn’t any good, anyway, and without taxes government couldn’t be paid for.

Terzian paused at the foot of the ruined castle and wondered if he saw the future of the civilized world. Either the castle would be rebuilt by tyrants, or it would fall.

Michelle heard Darton’s bullhorn again the next evening, and she wondered why he was keeping fruit-bat hours. Was it because his calls would travel farther at night?

If he were sleeping in the morning, she thought, that would make it easier. She’d finished analyzing some of her samples, but a principle of science was not to do these things alone: she’d have to travel to Koror to mail her samples to other people, and now she knew to do it in the morning, when Darton would be asleep.

The problem for Michelle was that she was a legend. When the lonely mermaid emerged from the sea and walked to the post office in the little foam booties she wore when walking on pavement, she was noticed. People pointed; children followed her on their boards, people in cars waved. She wondered if she could trust them not to contact Darton as soon as they saw her.

She hoped that Darton wasn’t starting to get the islanders on his side.

Michelle and Darton had met on a field trip in Borneo, their obligatory government service after graduation. The other field workers were older, paying their taxes or working on their second or third or fourth or fifth careers, and Michelle knew on sight that Darton was no older than she, that he, too, was a child among all these elders. They were pulled to each other as if drawn by some violent natural force, cataloguing snails and terrapins by day and spending their nights wrapped in each other in their own shell, their turtleback tent. The ancients with whom they shared their days treated them with amused condescension, but then that was how they treated everything. Darton and Michelle didn’t care. In their youth they stood against all creation.

When the trip came to an end they decided to continue their work together, just a hop across the equator in Belau. Paying their taxes ahead of time. They celebrated by getting new bodies, an exciting experience for Michelle, who had been built by strict parents that wouldn’t allow her to have a new body until adulthood, no matter how many of her friends had been transforming from an early age into one newly fashionable shape or another.

Michelle and Darton thought that anthropoid bodies would be suitable for the work, and so they went to the clinic in Delhi and settled themselves on nanobeds and let the little machines turn their bodies, their minds, their memories, their desires and their knowledge and their souls, into long strings of numbers. All of which were fed into their new bodies when they were ready, and reserved as backups to be downloaded as necessary.

Being a siamang was a glorious discovery. They soared through the treetops of their little island, swinging overhand from limb to limb in a frenzy of glory. Michelle took a particular delight in her body hair—she didn’t have as much as a real ape, but there was enough on her chest and back to be interesting. They built nests of foliage in trees and lay tangled together, analyzing data or making love or shaving their hair into interesting tribal patterns. Love was far from placid—it was a flame, a fury. An obsession that, against all odds, had been fulfilled, only to build the flame higher.

The fury still burned in Michelle. But now, after Darton’s death, it had a different quality, a quality that had nothing to do with life or youth.

Michelle, spooning up blueberries and cream, riffled through the names and faces her spiders had spat out. There were, now she added them up, a preposterous number of pictures of green-eyed women with dark skin whose pictures were somewhere in the net. Nearly all of them had striking good looks. Many of them were unidentified in the old scans, or identified only by a first name. The highest probability the software offered was 43%.

That 43% belonged to a Brasilian named Laura Flor, who research swiftly showed was home in Aracaju during the critical period, among other things having a baby. A video of the delivery was available, but Michelle didn’t watch it. The way women delivered babies back then was disgusting.

The next most likely female was another Brasilian seen in some tourist photographs taken in Rio. Not even a name given. A further search based on this woman’s physiognomy turned up nothing, not until Michelle broadened the search to a different gender, and discovered the Brasilian was a transvestite. That didn’t seem to be Terzian’s scene, so she left it alone.

The third was identified only as Stephanie, and posted on a site created by a woman who had done relief work in Africa. Stephanie was shown with a group of other relief workers, posing in front of a tin-roofed, cinderblock building identified as a hospital.

The quality of the photograph wasn’t very good, but Michelle mapped the physiognomy anyway, and sent it forth along with the name “Stephanie” to see what might happen.

There was a hit right away, a credit card charge to a Stephanie América Pais e Silva. She had stayed in a hotel in Paris for the three nights before Terzian disappeared.

Michelle’s blood surged as the data flashed on her screens. She sent out more spiders and the good news began rolling in.

Stephanie Pais was a dual citizen of Portugal and Angola, and had been educated partly in the States—a quick check showed that her time at university didn’t overlap Terzian’s. From her graduation she had worked for a relief agency called Santa Croce.

Then a news item turned up, a sensational one. Stephanie Pais had been spectacularly murdered in Venice on the night of July 19, six days before Terzian had delivered the first version of his Cornucopia Theory.

Two murders . . .

One in Paris, one in Venice. And one the woman who seemed to be Terzian’s lover.

Michelle’s body shivered to a sudden gasping spasm, and she realized that in her suspense she’d been holding her breath. Her head swam. When it cleared, she worked out what time it was in Maryland, where Dr. Davout lived, and then told her deck to page him at once.

Davout was unavailable at first, and by the time he returned her call she had more information about Stephanie Pais. She blurted the story out to him while her fingers jabbed at the keyboard of her deck, sending him copies of her corroborating data.

Davout’s startled eyes leaped from the data to Michelle and back. “How much of this . . .” he began, then gave up. “How did she die?” he managed.

“The news article says stabbed. I’m looking for the police report.”

“Is Terzian mentioned?”

<No> she signed. “The police report will have more details.”

“Any idea what this is about? There’s no history of Terzian ever being connected with violence.”

“By tomorrow,” Michelle said, “I should be able to tell you. But I thought I should send this to you because you might be able to tie this in with other elements of Terzian’s life that I don’t know anything about.”

Davout’s fingers formed a mudra that Michelle didn’t recognize—an old one, probably. He shook his head. “I have no idea what’s happening here. The only thing I have to suggest is that this is some kind of wild coincidence.”

“I don’t believe in that kind of coincidence,” Michelle said.

Davout smiled. “A good attitude for a researcher,” he said. “But experience—well,” he waved a hand.

But he loved her, Michelle insisted inwardly. She knew that in her heart. Stephanie was the woman he loved after Claire died, and then she was killed and Terzian went on to create the intellectual framework on which the world was now built. He had spent his modest fortune building pilot programs in Africa that demonstrated his vision was a practical one. The whole modern world was a monument to Stephanie.

Everyone was young then, Michelle thought. Even the seventy-year-olds were young compared to the people now. The world must have been ablaze with love and passion. But Davout didn’t understand that because he was old and had forgotten all about love.

“Michelle . . .” Darton’s voice came wafting over the waters.

Bastard. Michelle wasn’t about to let him spoil this.

Her fingers formed <gotta go>. “I’ll send you everything once it comes in,” she said. “I think we’ve got something amazing here.”

She picked up her deck and swung it around so that she could be sure that the light from the display couldn’t be seen from the ocean. Her bare back against the rough bark of the ironwood, she began flashing through the data as it arrived.

She couldn’t find the police report. Michelle went in search of it and discovered that all police records from that period in Venetian history had been wiped out in the Lightspeed War, leaving her only with what had been reported in the media.

“Where are you? I love you!” Darton’s voice came from farther away. He’d narrowed his search, that was clear, but he still wasn’t sure exactly where Michelle had built her nest.

Smiling, Michelle closed her deck and slipped it into its pouch. Her spiders would work for her tirelessly till dawn while she dreamed on in her hammock and let Darton’s distant calls lull her to sleep.

They shifted their lodgings every few days. Terzian always arranged for separate bedrooms. Once, as they sat in the evening shade of a farm terrace and watched the setting sun shimmer on the silver leaves of the olives, Terzian found himself looking at her as she sat in an old cane chair, at the profile cutting sharp against the old limestone of the Vaucluse. The blustering wind brought gusts of lavender from the neighboring farm, a scent that made Terzian want to inhale until his lungs creaked against his ribs.

From a quirk of Stephanie’s lips Terzian was suddenly aware that she knew he was looking at her. He glanced away.

“You haven’t tried to sleep with me,” she said.

“No,” he agreed.

“But you look,” she said. “And it’s clear you’re not a eunuch.”

“We fight all the time,” Terzian pointed out. “Sometimes we can’t stand to be in the same room.”

Stephanie smiled. “That wouldn’t stop most of the men I’ve known. Or the women, either.”

Terzian looked out over the olives, saw them shimmer in the breeze. “I’m still in love with my wife,” he said.

There was a moment of silence. “That’s well,” she said.

And I’m angry at her, too, Terzian thought. Angry at Claire for deserting him. And he was furious at the universe for killing her and for leaving him alive, and he was angry at God even though he didn’t believe in God. The Trashcanians had been good for him, because he could let his rage and his hatred settle there, on people who deserved it.

Those poor drunken bastards, he thought. Whatever they’d expected in that hotel corridor, it hadn’t been a berserk grieving American who would just as soon have ripped out their throats with his bare hands.

The question was, could he do that again? It had all occurred without his thinking about it, old reflexes taking over, but he couldn’t count on that happening a second time. He’d been trying to remember the Kenpo he’d once learned, particularly all the tricks against weapons. He found himself miming combats on his long country hikes, and he wondered if he’d retained any of his ability to take a punch.

He kept the gun with him, so the Trashcanians wouldn’t get it if they searched his room when he was away. When he was alone, walking through the almond orchards or on a hillside fragrant with wild thyme, he practiced drawing it, snicking off the safety, and putting pressure on the trigger . . . the first time the trigger pull would be hard, but the first shot would cock the pistol automatically and after that the trigger pull would be light.

He wondered if he should buy more ammunition. But he didn’t know how to buy ammunition in France and didn’t know if a foreigner could get into trouble that way.

“We’re both angry,” Stephanie said. He looked at her again, her hand raised to her head to keep the gusts from blowing her long ringlets in her face. “We’re angry at death. But love must make it more complicated for you.”

Her green eyes searched him. “It’s not death you’re in love with, is it? Because—”

Terzian blew up. She had no right to suggest that he was in a secret alliance with death just because he didn’t want to turn a bunch of Africans green. It was their worst argument, and this one ended with both of them stalking away through the fields and orchards while the scent of lavender pursued them on the wind.

When Terzian returned to his room he checked his caches of money, half-hoping that Stephanie had stolen his Euros and run. She hadn’t.

He thought of going into her room while she was away, stealing the papiloma and taking a train north, handing it over to the Pasteur Institute or someplace. But he didn’t.

In the morning, during breakfast, Stephanie’s cell phone rang, and she answered. He watched while her face turned from curiosity to apprehension to utter terror. Adrenaline sang in his blood as he watched, and he leaned forward, feeling the familiar rage rise in him, just where he wanted it. In haste she turned off the phone, then looked at him. “That was one of them. He says he knows where we are, and wants to make a deal.”

“If they know where we are,” Terzian found himself saying coolly, “why aren’t they here?”

“We’ve got to go,” she insisted.

So they went. Clean out of France and into the Tuscan hills, with Stephanie’s cell phone left behind in a trash can at the train station and a new phone purchased in Siena. The Tuscan countryside was not unlike Provence, with vine-covered hillsides, orchards a-shimmer with the silver-green of olive trees, and walled medieval towns perched on crags; but the slim, tall cypress standing like sentries gave the hills a different profile and there were different types of wine grapes, and many of the vineyards rented rooms where people could stay and sample the local hospitality. Terzian didn’t speak the language, and because Spanish was his first foreign language consistently pronounced words like “villa” and “panzanella” as if they were Spanish. But Stephanie had grown up in Italy and spoke the language not only like a native, but like a native Roman.

Florence was only a few hours away, and Terzian couldn’t resist visiting one of the great living monuments to civilization. His parents, both university professors, had taken him to Europe several times as a child, but somehow never made it here.

Terzian and Stephanie spent a day wandering the center of town, on occasion taking shelter from one of the pelting rainstorms that shattered the day. At one point, with thunder booming overhead, they found themselves in the Basilica di Santa Croce.

“Holy Cross,” Terzian said, translating. “That’s your outfit.”

“We have nothing to do with this church,” Stephanie said. “We don’t even have a collection box here.”

“A pity,” Terzian said as he looked at the soaked swarms of tourists packed in the aisles. “You’d clean up.”

Thunder accompanied the camera strobes that flashed against the huge tomb of Galileo like a vast lighting storm. “Nice of them to forget about that Inquisition thing and bury him in a church,” Terzian said.

“I expect they just wanted to keep an eye on him.”

It was the power of capital, Terzian knew, that had built this church, that had paid for the stained glass and the Giotto frescoes and the tombs and cenotaphs to the great names of Florence: Dante, Michelangelo, Bruni, Alberti, Marconi, Fermi, Rossini, and of course Machiavelli. This structure, with its vaults and chapels and sarcophagi and chanting Franciscans, had been raised by successful bankers, people to whom money was a real, tangible thing, and who had paid for the centuries of labor to build the basilica with caskets of solid, weighty coined silver.

“So what do you think he would make of this?” Terzian asked, nodding at the resting place of Machiavelli, now buried in the city from which he’d been exiled in his lifetime.

Stephanie scowled at the unusually plain sarcophagus with its Latin inscription. “No praise can be high enough,” she translated, then turned to him as tourist cameras flashed. “Sounds overrated.”

“He was a republican, you know,” Terzian said. “You don’t get that from just The Prince. He wanted Florence to be a republic, defended by citizen soldiers. But when it fell into the hands of a despot, he needed work, and he wrote the manual for despotism. But he looked at despotism a little too clearly, and he didn’t get the job.” Terzian turned to Stephanie. “He was the founder of modern political theory, and that’s what I do. And he based his ideas on the belief that all human beings, at all times, have had the same passions.” He turned his eyes deliberately to Stephanie’s shoulder bag. “That may be about to end, right? You’re going to turn people into plants. That should change the passions if anything would.”

“Not plants,” Stephanie hissed, and glanced left and right at the crowds. “And not here.” She began to move down the aisle, in the direction of Michelangelo’s ornate tomb, with its draped figures who appeared not in mourning, but as if they were trying to puzzle out a difficult engineering problem.

“What happens in your scheme,” Terzian said, following, “is that the market in food crashes. But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is what happens to the market in labor.”

Tourist cameras flashed. Stephanie turned her head away from the array of Kodaks. She passed out of the basilica and to the portico. The cloudburst had come to an end, but rainwater still drizzled off the structure. They stepped out of the droplets and down the stairs into the piazza.

The piazza was walled on all sides by old palaces, most of which now held restaurants or shops on the ground floor. To the left, one long palazzo was covered with canvas and scaffolding. The sound of pneumatic hammers banged out over the piazza. Terzian waved a hand in the direction of the clatter.

“Just imagine that food is nearly free,” he said. “Suppose you and your children can get most of your food from standing in the sunshine. My next question is, Why in hell would you take a filthy job like standing on a scaffolding and sandblasting some old building?”

He stuck his hands in his pockets and began walking at Stephanie’s side along the piazza. “Down at the bottom of the labor market, there are a lot of people whose labor goes almost entirely for the necessities. Millions of them cross borders illegally in order to send enough money back home to support their children.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“The only reason that there’s a market in illegal immigrants is that there are jobs that well-off people won’t do. Dig ditches. Lay roads. Clean sewers. Restore old buildings. Build new buildings. The well-off might serve in the military or police, because there’s a certain status involved and an attractive uniform, but we won’t guard prisons no matter how pretty the uniform is. That’s strictly a job for the laboring classes, and if the laboring classes are too well-off to labor, who guards the prisons?”

She rounded on him, her lips set in an angry line. “So I’m supposed to be afraid of people having more choice in where they work?”

“No,” Terzian said, “you should be afraid of people having no choice at all. What happens when markets collapse is intervention—and that’s state intervention, if the market’s critical enough, and you can bet the labor market’s critical. And because the state depends on ditch-diggers and prison guards and janitors and road-builders for its very being, then if these classes of people are no longer available, and the very survival of civil society depends on their existence, in the end the state will just take them.

“You think our friends in Transnistria will have any qualms about rounding up people at gunpoint and forcing them to do labor? The powerful are going to want their palaces kept nice and shiny. The liberal democracies will try volunteerism or lotteries or whatever, but you can bet that we’re going to want our sewers to work, and somebody to carry our grandparents’ bedpans, and the trucks to the supermarkets to run on time. And what I’m afraid of is that when things get desperate, we’re not going to be any nicer about getting our way than those Sovietists of yours. We’re going to make sure that the lower orders do their jobs, even if we have to kill half of them to convince the other half that we mean business. And the technical term for that is slavery. And if someone of African descent isn’t sensitive to that potential problem, then I am very surprised.”

The fury in Stephanie’s eyes was visible even through her shades, and he could see the pulse pounding in her throat. Then she said, “I’ll save the people, that’s what I’m good at. You save the rest of the world, if you can.” She began to turn away, then swung back to him. “And by the way,” she added, “fuck you!” turned, and marched away.

“Slavery or anarchy, Stephanie!” Terzian called, taking a step after. “That’s the choice you’re forcing on people!”

He really felt he had the rhetorical momentum now, and he wanted to enlarge the point by saying that he knew some people thought anarchy was a good thing, but no anarchist he’d ever met had ever even seen a real anarchy, or been in one, whereas Stephanie had—drop your anarchist out of a helicopter into the eastern Congo, say, with all his theories and with whatever he could carry on his back, and see how well he prospered . . .

But Terzian never got to say any of these things, because Stephanie was gone, receding into the vanishing point of a busy street, the shoulder bag swinging back and forth across her butt like a pendulum powered by the force of her convictions.

Terzian thought that perhaps he’d never see her again, that he’d finally provoked her into abandoning him and continuing on her quest alone, but when he stepped off the bus in Montespèrtoli that night, he saw her across the street, shouting into her cell phone.

The next day, as with frozen civility they drank their morning coffee, she said she was going to Rome the next day. “They might be looking for me there,” she said, “because my parents live there. But I won’t go near the family, I’ll meet Odile at the airport and give her the papiloma.”

Odile? Terzian thought. “I should go along,” he said.

“What are you going to do?” she said. “Carry that gun into an airport?”

“I don’t have to take the gun. I’ll leave it in the hotel room in Rome.”

She considered. “Very well.”

Again, that night, Terzian found the tumbled castle in Provence haunting his thoughts, that ruined relic of a bygone order, and once more considered stealing the papiloma and running. And again, he didn’t.

They didn’t get any farther than Florence, because Stephanie’s cell phone rang as they waited in the train station. Odile was in Venice. “Venezia?” Stephanie shrieked in anger. She clenched her fists. There had been a cache of weapons found at the Fiumicino airport in Rome, and all planes had been diverted, Odile’s to Marco Polo outside Venice. Frenzied booking agents had somehow found rooms for her despite the height of the tourist season.

Fiumicino hadn’t been reopened, and Odile didn’t know how she was going to get to Rome. “Don’t try!” Stephanie shouted. “I’ll come to you.”

This meant changing their tickets to Rome for tickets to Venice. Despite Stephanie’s excellent Italian the ticket seller clearly wished the crazy tourists would make up their mind which monuments of civilization they really wanted to see.

Strange—Terzian had actually planned to go to Venice in five days or so. He was scheduled to deliver a paper at the Conference of Classical and Modern Thought.

Maybe, if this whole thing was over by then, he’d read the paper after all. It wasn’t a prospect he coveted: he would just be developing another footnote to a footnote.

The hills of Tuscany soon began to pour across the landscape like a green flood. The train slowed at one point—there was work going on on the tracks, men with bronze arms and hard hats—and Terzian wondered how, in the Plant People Future, in the land of Cockaigne, the tracks would ever get fixed, particularly in this heat. He supposed there were people who were meant by nature to fix tracks, who would repair tracks as an avocation or out of boredom regardless of whether they got paid for their time or not, but he suspected there wouldn’t be many of them.

You could build machines, he supposed, robots or something. But they had their own problems, they’d cause pollution and absorb resources and on top of everything they’d break down and have to be repaired. And who would do that?

If you can’t employ the carrot, Terzian thought, if you can’t reward people for doing necessary labor, then you have to use the stick. You march people out of the cities at gunpoint, like Pol Pot, because there’s work that needs to be done.

He tapped his wedding ring on the arm of his chair and wondered what jobs would still have value. Education, he supposed; he’d made a good choice there. Some sorts of administration were necessary. There were people who were natural artists or bureaucrats or salesmen and who would do that job whether they were paid or not.

A woman came by with a cart and sold Terzian some coffee and a nutty snack product that he wasn’t quite able to identify. And then he thought, labor.

“Labor,” he said. In a world in which all basic commodities were provided, the thing that had most value was actual labor. Not the stuff that labor bought, but the work itself.

“Okay,” he said, “it’s labor that’s rare and valuable, because people don’t have to do it anymore. The currency has to be based on some kind of labor exchange—you purchase x hours with y dollars. Labor is the thing you use to pay taxes.”

Stephanie gave Terzian a suspicious look. “What’s the difference between that and slavery?”

“Have you been reading Nozick?” Terzian scolded. “The difference is the same as the difference between paying taxes and being a slave. All the time you don’t spend paying your taxes is your own.” He barked a laugh. “I’m resurrecting Labor Value Theory!” he said. “Adam Smith and Karl Marx are dancing a jig on their tombstones! In Plant People Land the value is the labor itself! The calories!” He laughed again, and almost spilled coffee down his chest.

“You budget the whole thing in calories! The government promises to pay you a dollar’s worth of calories in exchange for their currency! In order to keep the roads and the sewer lines going, a citizen owes the government a certain number of calories per year—he can either pay in person or hire someone else to do the job. And jobs can be budgeted in calories-per-hour, so that if you do hard physical labor, you owe fewer hours than someone with a desk job—that should keep the young, fit, impatient people doing the nasty jobs, so that they have more free time for their other pursuits.” He chortled. “Oh, the intellectuals are going to just hate this! They’re used to valuing their brain power over manual labor—I’m going to reverse their whole scale of values!”

Stephanie made a pffing sound. “The people I care about have no money to pay taxes at all.”

“They have bodies. They can still be enslaved.” Terzian got out his laptop. “Let me put my ideas together.”

Terzian’s frenetic two-fingered typing went on for the rest of the journey, all the way across the causeway that led into Venice. Stephanie gazed out the window at the lagoon soaring by, the soaring water birds and the dirt and stink of industry. She kept the Nike bag in her lap until the train pulled into the Stazione Ferrovie dello Stato Santa Lucia at the end of its long journey.

Odile’s hotel was in Cannaregio, which according to the map purchased in the station gift shop was the district of the city nearest the station and away from most of the tourist sites. A brisk wind almost tore the map from their fingers as they left the station, and their vaporetto bucked a steep chop on the greygreen Grand Canal as it took them to the Ca’ d’Oro, the fanciful white High Gothic palazzo that loomed like a frantic wedding cake above a swarm of bobbing gondolas and motorboats.

Stephanie puffed cigarettes at first with ferocity, then with satisfaction. Once they got away from the Grand Canal and into Cannaregio itself they quickly became lost. The twisted medieval streets were broken on occasion by still, silent canals, but the canals didn’t seem to lead anywhere in particular. Cooking smells demonstrated that it was dinnertime, and there were few people about, and no tourists. Terzian’s stomach rumbled. Sometimes the streets deteriorated into mere passages. Stephanie and Terzian were in such a passage, holding their map open against the wind and shouting directions at each other when someone slugged Terzian from behind.

He went down on one knee with his head ringing and the taste of blood in his mouth, and then two people rather unexpectedly picked him up again, only to slam him against the passage wall. Through some miracle he managed not to hit his head on the brickwork and knock himself out. He could smell garlic on the breath of one of the attackers. Air went out of him as he felt an elbow to his ribs.

It was the scream from Stephanie that fortified his attention. There was violent motion in front of him, and he saw the Nike swoosh and remembered that he was dealing with killers and that he had a gun.

In an instant Terzian had his rage back. He felt his lungs fill with the fury that spread through his body like a river of scalding blood. He planted his feet and twisted abruptly to his left, letting the strength come up his legs from the earth itself, and the man attached to his right arm gave a grunt of surprise and swung counterclockwise. Terzian twisted the other way, which budged the other man only a little, but which freed his right arm to claw into his right pants pocket.

And from this point on it was just the movement that he rehearsed. Draw, thumb the safety, pull the trigger hard. He shot the man on his right and hit him in the groin. For a brief second Terzian saw his pinched face, the face that reflected such pain that it folded in on itself, and he remembered Adrian falling in the Place Dauphine with just that look. Then he stuck the pistol in the ribs of the man on his left and fired twice. The arms that grappled him relaxed and fell away.

There were two more men grappling with Stephanie. That made four altogether, and Terzian reasoned dully that after the first three fucked up in Paris, the home office had sent a supervisor. One was trying to tug the Nike bag away, and Terzian lunged toward him and fired at a range of two meters, too close to miss, and the man dropped to the ground with a whuff of pain.

The last man had ahold of Stephanie and swung her around, keeping her between himself and the pistol. Terzian could see the knife in his hand and recognized it as one he’d seen before. Her dark glasses were cockeyed on her face and Terzian caught a flash of her angry green eyes. He pointed the pistol at the knife man’s face. He didn’t dare shoot.

“Police!” he shrieked into the wind. “Policia!” He used the Spanish word. Bloody spittle spattered the cobblestones as he screamed.

In the Trashcanian’s eyes he saw fear, bafflement, rage.

“Polizia!” He got the pronunciation right this time. He saw the rage in Stephanie’s eyes, the fury that mirrored his own, and he saw her struggle against the man who held her.

“No!” he called. Too late. The knife man had too many decisions to make all at once, and Terzian figured he wasn’t very bright to begin with. Kill the hostages was probably something he’d been taught on his first day at Goon School.

As Stephanie fell, Terzian fired, and kept firing as the man ran away. The killer broke out of the passageway into a little square, and then just fell down.

The slide of the automatic locked back as Terzian ran out of ammunition, and then he staggered forward to where Stephanie was bleeding to death on the cobbles.

Her throat had been cut and she couldn’t speak. She gripped his arm as if she could drive her urgent message through the skin, with her nails. In her eyes he saw frustrated rage, the rage he knew well, until at length he saw there nothing at all, a nothing he knew better than any other thing in the world.

He shouldered the Nike bag and staggered out of the passageway into the tiny Venetian square with its covered well. He took a street at random, and there was Odile’s hotel. Of course: the Trashcanians had been staking it out.

It wasn’t much of a hotel, and the scent of spice and garlic in the lobby suggested the desk clerk was eating his dinner. Terzian went up the stair to Odile’s room and knocked on the door. When she opened—she was a plump girl with big hips and a suntan—he tossed the Nike bag on the bed.

“You need to get back to Mogadishu right away,” he said. “Stephanie just died for that.”

Her eyes widened. Terzian stepped to the wash basin to clean the blood off as best he could. It was all he could do not to shriek with grief and anger.

“You take care of the starving,” he said finally, “and I’ll save the rest of the world.”

Michelle rose from the sea near Torbiong’s boat, having done thirty-six-hundred calories’ worth of research and caught a honeycomb grouper into the bargain. She traded the fish for the supplies he brought. “Any more blueberries?” she asked.

“Not this time.” He peered down at her, narrowing his eyes against the bright shimmer of sun on the water. “That young man of yours is being quite a nuisance. He’s keeping the turtles awake and scaring the fish.”

The mermaid tucked away her wings and arranged herself in her rope sling. “Why don’t you throw him off the island?”

“My authority doesn’t run that far.” He scratched his jaw. “He’s interviewing people. Adding up all the places you’ve been seen. He’ll find you pretty soon, I think.”

“Not if I don’t want to be found. He can yell all he likes, but I don’t have to answer.”

“Well, maybe.” Torbiong shook his head. “Thanks for the fish.”

Michelle did some preliminary work with her new samples and then abandoned them for anything new that her search spiders had discovered. She had a feeling she was on the verge of something colossal.

She carried her deck to her overhanging limb and let her legs dangle over the water while she looked through the new data. While paging through the new information, she ate something called a Raspberry Dynamo Bar that Torbiong had thrown in with her supplies. The old man must have included it as a joke: it was over-sweet and sticky with marshmallow and strangely flavored. She chucked it in the water and hoped it wouldn’t poison any fish.

Stephanie Pais had been killed in what the news reports called a “street fight” among a group of foreign visitors. Since the authorities couldn’t connect the foreigners to Pais, they had to assume she was an innocent bystander caught up in the violence. The papers didn’t mention Terzian at all.

Michelle looked through pages of follow-up. The gun that had shot the four men had never been found, though nearby canals were dragged. Two of the foreigners had survived the fight, though one died eight weeks later from complications of an operation. The survivor maintained his innocence and claimed that a complete stranger had opened fire on him and his friends, but the judges hadn’t believed him and sent him to prison. He lived a great many years and died in the Lightspeed War, along with most people caught in prisons during that deadly time.

One of the four men was Belorussian. Another Ukrainian. Another two Moldovan. All had served in the Soviet military in the past, in the Fourteenth Army in Transnistria. It frustrated Michelle that she couldn’t shout back in time to tell the Italians to connect these four to the murder of another ex-Soviet, seven weeks earlier, in Paris.

What the hell had Pais and Terzian been up to? Why were all these people with Transnistrian connections killing each other, and Pais?

Maybe it was Pais they’d been after all along. Her records at Santa Croce were missing, which was odd because other personnel records from the time had survived. Perhaps someone was arranging that certain things not be known.

She tried a search on Santa Croce itself, and slogged through descriptions and mentions of a whole lot of Italian churches, including the famous one in Florence where Terzian and Pais had been seen at Machiavelli’s tomb. She refined the search to the Santa Croce relief organization, and found immediately the fact that let it all fall into place.

Santa Croce had maintained a refugee camp in Moldova during the civil war following the establishment of Transnistria. Michelle was willing to bet that Stephanie Pais had served in that camp. She wondered if any of the other players had been residents there.

She looked at the list of other camps that Santa Croce had maintained in that period, which seemed to have been a busy one for them. One name struck her as familiar, and she had to think for a moment before she remembered why she didn’t know it. It was at a Santa Croce camp in the Sidamo province of Ethiopia where the Green Leopard Plague had first broken out, the first transgenetic epidemic.

It had been the first real attempt to modify the human body at the cellular level, to help marginal populations synthesize their own food, and it had been primitive compared to the more successful mods that came later. The ideal design for the efficient use of chlorophyll was a leaf, not the Homo sapiens—the designer would have been better advised to create a plague that made its victims leafy, and later designers, aiming for the same effect, did exactly that. And Green Leopard’s designer had forgotten that the epidermis already contains a solar-activated enzyme: melanin. The result on the African subjects was green skin mottled with dark splotches, like the black spots on an implausibly verdant leopard.

The Green Leopard Plague broke out in the Sidamo camp, then at other camps in the Horn of Africa. Then it leaped clean across the continent to Mozambique, where it first appeared at an Oxfam camp in the flood zone, then spread rapidly across the continent, then leaped across oceans. It had been a generation before anyone found a way to disable it, and by then other transgenetic modifiers had been released into the population, and there was no going back.

The world had entered Terzian’s future, the one he had proclaimed at the Conference of Classical and Modern Thought.

What, Michelle thought excitedly, if Terzian had known about Green Leopard ahead of time? His Cornucopia Theory had seemed prescient precisely because Green Leopard appeared just a few weeks after he’d delivered his paper. But if those Eastern Bloc thugs had been involved somehow in the plague’s transmission, or were attempting to prevent Pais and Terzian from sneaking the modified virus to the camps . . .

Yes! Michelle thought exultantly. That had to be it. No one had ever worked out where Green Leopard originated, but there had always been suspicion directed toward several semi-covert labs in the former Soviet empire. This was it. The only question was how Terzian, that American in Paris, had got involved . . .

It had to be Stephanie, she thought. Stephanie, who Terzian had loved and who had loved him, and who had involved him in the desperate attempt to aid refugee populations.

For a moment Michelle bathed in the beauty of the idea. Stephanie, dedicated and in love, had been murdered for her beliefs—realdeath!—and Terzian, broken-hearted, had carried on and brought the future—Michelle’s present—into being. A wonderful story. And no one had known it till now, no one had understood Stephanie’s sacrifice, or Terzian’s grief . . . not until the lonely mermaid, working in isolation on her rock, had puzzled it out.

“Hello, Michelle,” Darton said.

Michelle gave a cry of frustration and glared in fury down at her lover. He was in a yellow plastic kayak—kayaking was popular here, particularly in the Rock Islands—and Darton had slipped his electric-powered boat along the margin of the island, moving in near-silence. He looked grimly up at her from below the pitcher plant that dangled below the overhang.

They had rebuilt him, of course, after his death. All the data was available in backup, in Delhi where he’d been taken apart, recorded, and rebuilt as an ape. He was back in a conventional male body, with the broad shoulders and white smile and short hairy bandy legs she remembered.

Michelle knew he hadn’t made any backups during their time in Belau. He had his memories up to the point where he’d lain down on the nanobed in Delhi. That had been the moment when his love of Michelle had been burning its hottest, when he had just made the commitment to live with Michelle as an ape in the Rock Islands.

That burning love had been consuming him in the weeks since his resurrection, and Michelle was glad of it, had been rejoicing in every desperate, unanswered message that Darton sent sizzling through the ether.

“Damn it,” Michelle said, “I’m working.”

<Talk to me> Darton’s fingers formed. Michelle’s fingers made a ruder reply.

“I don’t understand,” Darton said. “We were in love. We were going to be together.”

“I’m not talking to you,” Michelle said. She tried to concentrate on her video display.

“We were still together when the accident happened,” Darton said. “I don’t understand why we can’t be together now.”

“I’m not listening, either,” said Michelle.

“I’m not leaving, Michelle!” Darton screamed. “I’m not leaving till you talk to me!”

White cockatoos shrieked in answer. Michelle quietly picked up her deck, rose to her feet, and headed inland. The voice that followed her was amplified, and she realized Darton had brought his bullhorn.

“You can’t get away, Michelle! You’ve got to tell me what happened!”

I’ll tell you about Lisa Lee, she thought, so you can send her desperate messages, too.

Michelle had been deliriously happy for her first month in Belau, living in arboreal nests with Darton and spending the warm days describing their island’s unique biology. It was their first vacation, in Prague, that had torn Michelle’s happiness apart. It was there that they’d met Lisa Lee Baxter, the American tourist who thought apes were cute, and who wondered what these shaggy kids were doing so far from an arboreal habitat.

It wasn’t long before Michelle realized that Lisa Lee was at least two hundred years old, and that behind her diamond-blue eyes was the withered, mummified soul that had drifted into Prague from some waterless desert of the spirit, a soul that required for its continued existence the blood and vitality of the young. Despite her age and presumed experience Lisa Lee’s ploys seemed to Michelle to be so obvious, so blatant. Darton fell for them all.

It was only because Lisa Lee had finally tired of him that Darton returned to Belau, chastened and solemn and desperate to be in love with Michelle again. But by then it was Michelle who was tired. And who had access to Darton’s medical records from the downloads in Delhi.

“You can’t get away, Michelle!”

Well, maybe not. Michelle paused with one hand on the banyan’s trunk. She closed her deck’s display and stashed it in a mesh bag with some of her other stuff, then walked again out on the overhanging limb.

“I’m not going to talk to you like this,” she said. “And you can’t get onto the island from that side, the overhang’s too acute.”

“Fine,” Darton said. The shouting had made him hoarse. “Come down here, then.”

She rocked forward and dived off the limb. The saltwater world exploded in her senses. She extended her wings and fluttered close to Darton’s kayak, rose, and shook seawater from her eyes.

“There’s a tunnel,” she said. “It starts at about two meters and exits into the lake. You can swim it easily if you hold your breath.”

“All right,” he said. “Where is it?”

“Give me your anchor.”

She took his anchor, floated to the bottom, and set it where it wouldn’t damage the live coral.

She remembered the needle she’d taken to Jellyfish Lake, the needle she’d loaded with the mango extract to which Darton was violently allergic. Once in the midst of the jellyfish swarm, it had been easy to jab the needle into Darton’s calf, then let it drop to the anoxic depths of the lake.

He probably thought she’d given him a playful pinch.

Michelle had exulted in Darton’s death, the pallor, the labored breathing, the desperate pleading in the eyes.

It wasn’t murder, after all, not really, just a fourth-degree felony. They’d build a new Darton in a matter of days. What was the value of a human life, when it could be infinitely duplicated, and cheaply? As far as Michelle was concerned, Darton had amusement value only.

The rebuilt Darton still loved her, and Michelle enjoyed that as well, enjoyed the fact she caused him anguish, that he would pay for ages for his betrayal of her love.

Linda Lee Baxter could take a few lessons from the mermaid, Michelle thought.

Michelle surfaced near the tunnel and raised a hand with the fingers set at <follow me>. Darton rolled off the kayak, still in his clothes, and splashed clumsily toward her.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” Michelle replied. “You go first, I’ll follow and pull you out if you get in trouble.”

He loved her, of course. That was why he panted a few times for breath, filled his lungs, and dove.

Michelle had not, of course, bothered to mention the tunnel was fifteen meters long, quite far to go on a single breath. She followed him, very interested in how this would turn out, and when Darton got into trouble in one of the narrow places and tried to back out, she grabbed his shoes and held him right where he was.

He fought hard but none of his kicks struck her. She would remember the look in his wide eyes for a long time, the thunderstruck disbelief in the instant before his breath exploded from his lungs and he died.

She wished she could speak again the parting words she’d whispered into Darton’s ear when he lay dying on the ridge above Jellyfish Lake. “I’ve just killed you. And I’m going to do it again.”

But even if she could have spoken the words underwater, they would have been untrue. Michelle supposed this was the last time she could kill him. Twice was dangerous, but a third time would be too clear a pattern. She could end up in jail for a while, though of course you only did severe prison time for realdeath.

She supposed she would have to discover his body at some point, but if she cast the kayak adrift it wouldn’t have to be for a while. And then she’d be thunderstruck and grief-stricken that he’d thrown away his life on this desperate attempt to pursue her after she’d turned her back on him and gone inland, away from the sound of his voice.

Michelle looked forward to playing that part.

She pulled up the kayak’s anchor and let it coast away on the six-knot tide, then folded away her wings and returned to her nest in the banyan tree. She let the breeze dry her skin and got her deck from its bag and contemplated the data about Terzian and Stephanie Pais and the outbreak of the Green Leopard Plague.

Stephanie had died for what she believed in, murdered by the agents of an obscure, murderous regime. It had been Terzian who had shot those four men in her defense, that was clear to her now. And Terzian, who lived a long time and then died in the Lightspeed War along with a few billion other people, had loved Stephanie and kept her secret till his death, a secret shared with the others who loved Stephanie and spread the plague among the refugee populations of the world.

It was realdeath that people suffered then, the death that couldn’t be corrected. Michelle knew that she understood that kind of death only as an intellectual abstract, not as something she would ever have to face or live with. To lose someone permanently . . . that was something she couldn’t grasp. Even the ancients, who faced realdeath every day, hadn’t been able to accept it, that’s why they’d invented the myth of Heaven.

Michelle thought about Stephanie’s death, the death that must have broken Terzian’s heart, and she contemplated the secret Terzian had kept all those years, and she decided that she was not inclined to reveal it.

Oh, she’d give Davout the facts, that was what he paid her for. She’d tell him what she could find out about Stephanie and the Transnistrians. But she wouldn’t mention the camps that Santa Croce had built across the starvation-scarred world, she wouldn’t point him at Sidamo and Green Leopard. If he drew those conclusions himself, then obviously the secret was destined to be revealed. But she suspected he wouldn’t—he was too old to connect those dots, not when obscure ex-Soviet entities and relief camps in the Horn of Africa were so far out of his reference.

Michelle would respect Terzian’s love, and Stephanie’s secret. She had some secrets of her own, after all.

The lonely mermaid finished her work for the day and sat on her overhanging limb to gaze down at the sea, and she wondered how long it would be before Darton called her again, and how she would torture him when he did.

—With thanks to Dr. Stephen C. Lee.

© 2003 by Walter Jon Williams.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Walter Jon Williams has been nominated for eleven Nebula awards, six Hugos, and the World Fantasy Award. “The Green Leopard Plague,” which won a Nebula in 2004, was inspired by a scuba vacation in the island nation of Palau. His latest work is The Fourth Wall, the third book in his series of near-future thrillers featuring game designer Dagmar Shaw. Learn more at walterjonwilliams.net.

The Eternal Flame
Greg Egan

(Orthogonal, Book Two)

Chapter 1

“Carlo! I need your help!”

Carlo opened his rear eyes to see his friend Silvano halfway down the ladder that led into the workshop. From the tone of his words this was not a casual request.

“What is it?” Carlo turned away from the microscope. A bright afterimage of the fragment of wheat petal he’d been examining hovered for a moment against the soft red light from the walls.

Silvano halted his descent. “I need you to kill two of my children,” he said. “I can’t do it myself. I’m not that strong.”

Carlo struggled to make sense of these words. He had seen his friend’s co just a few days before, and she’d been as emaciated as any woman on the Peerless.

“How could there be four?” he asked, not wanting to believe that there were any, that Silvana had given birth at all. As far as he knew she’d still been studying, and if the event had been planned they’d never mentioned it to him. Maybe this request was some kind of sick prank. He’d drag himself all the way to their apartment and there Silvana would be, whole as ever.

“I don’t know,” Silvano replied. He offered no why-would-you-doubt-me bluster, no theories about the reason for the calamity—none of the adornments it would be tempting to add to bolster a fabrication. Carlo scrutinized his face as well as he could in the moss-light, and lost hope of any kind of deception.

He extinguished the microscope’s lamp, then pulled himself away from the bench and moved quickly around the workshop, two hands on the guide ropes as he gathered the drugs and equipment he’d need. He knew exactly what doses would euthanize a vole or a shrew by body mass, and it didn’t take much calculating to extrapolate from that. He wasn’t committed to any course of action, but if he ended up doing what Silvano had asked of him any delay would only make it harder.

Carlo grabbed a small box to hold the paraphernalia and moved toward the ladder, packing as he went. Silvano ascended quickly ahead of him. It was only when they were traveling side by side down the corridor, their ropes emitting the same forlorn twang, that Carlo dared to start searching for a way out.

“Are you sure no one’s offering an entitlement?” he asked. It was a desperately slim chance, but they could detour to the relay station and check.

“I spent the last three stints looking,” Silvano replied. “No one’s selling at any price.”

A small group of people had entered the corridor behind them; their voices echoed off the gently curved walls. Carlo increased his pace, then asked quietly, “So you were planning to have children?”

“No! I just wanted to find a way for Silvana to stop starving herself.”

“Oh.” Everyone craved the same kind of ease, but to put too much hope in such a slender prospect was asking for disappointment.

“Her studies were becoming harder and harder,” Silvano continued. “She couldn’t concentrate at all. I thought it would be worth it, just to let her stop worrying and eat normally. An extra entitlement wouldn’t have committed us to anything, and I could have re-sold it if we’d ended up not needing it.”

“So why didn’t you wait?” Carlo demanded angrily. “How many people did you expect to die in three stints?”

Silvano began humming and shivering. “She couldn’t take the hunger any more. She kept saying, ‘Let’s do it now, and at least my daughter will have a few years before it’s her turn to suffer.’”

Carlo didn’t reply. It was hard enough watching someone you loved tormented by the need to convince her body that it was living in a time of famine, but to learn now that all of this self-deprivation had been to no avail was cruel beyond belief.

They reached the ladder leading inward to the apartments. Carlo forced himself to continue. A generation ago, anyone in his place would have offered to forego a twelfth of their own entitlement to help out their friend, and with enough contributors the extra mouths would have been fed. That was what his parents had done. But the crop yields hadn’t risen since, and he wasn’t prepared to diminish his family’s share any further, forcing his own descendants into an even more precarious state. As for the chance of Silvano finding a dozen such benefactors, it was nonexistent.

At the top of the ladder it was Silvano who hung back. Carlo said, “You stay here. I’ll come and get you.” He started down the corridor.

Silvano said, “Wait.”

Carlo halted, fearful without quite knowing what he dreaded. What could make this worse? Some complicated directive on how he should choose which pair should survive?

“You don’t think you and Carla might . . . ?” Silvano began haltingly.

“You left that too late,” Carlo said. He spoke gently, but he made sure not to offer his friend the slightest hope.

“Yes,” Silvano agreed wretchedly.

Carlo said, “I won’t be long.”

The corridor was empty as he approached the apartment, but the fixed gaze of the same three faces kept repeating as he dragged himself past a long row of election posters, all bearing the slogan MAKE THE ANCESTORS PROUD. The fact that he was still in Silvano’s sight made hesitation unthinkable: he pushed the curtains aside and followed the guide ropes in. There were no lamps burning, but even by moss-light Carlo could see at a glance that the front room was deserted. Silvana’s notebooks were stacked neatly in a cabinet. He felt a pang of grief and anger, but this wasn’t the time to indulge it. He made his way into the bedroom.

Silvano had left the children encased in a tarpaulin that was tethered to two of the ropes that crossed the room. Carlo couldn’t help imagining the couple themselves inside the same enclosure, steadying their bodies for the bittersweet end. He had never had the courage to ask any of his older friends—let alone his father—what they believed had passed through their co’s mind in those final moments, what comfort the women took from the knowledge that they were creating new lives. But at least Silvana would have had no way of knowing that nature in its capriciousness was about to deliver twice the consolation she’d been expecting.

Carlo dragged himself closer to the bundle. He could see movement, but mercifully there was still no sound. The tarpaulin had been rolled into a rough cylinder, with the cord that threaded through the holes along two of the sides pulled tight to close the ends. He unknotted the cord at one end and began loosening it, his hands trembling as he felt the infants respond to the disturbance. Part of his mind skidded away from the task, conjuring fantasies of a different remedy. What if he could call on, not a dozen friends, but the entire crew? When a woman scourged her body with hunger to protect the Peerless, surely they all owed her children a simple act of decency—whether they were close to her family or not. A few crumbs less in so many meals wouldn’t be missed.

But he was deluding himself. Sharing the load among strangers wouldn’t diminish it: when the pleas started coming from every corner of the mountain—once every stint, not once in a lifetime—all those lesser demands would still add up the same way. In the long run nothing mattered but the size of the harvest and the number of mouths to be fed. If the rations were spread any thinner one bad harvest could see the entitlements torn up—and a war over the crops would leave no survivors.

One end of the tarpaulin was open now. Carlo peered into the gloom of the tunnel, then reached in and took the nearest infant in his hands. She was a tiny limbless thing, her eyes still closed, her mouth gaping for food. Her tympanum fluttered, but the membranes were not yet stiff enough to make a sound.

The child squirmed in his grip. Carlo emitted a series of soothing chirps, but they had no effect. This girl knew that he was not her father, not the one who had promised to protect her. He reached down and placed her on the bed below, where a second tarpaulin covered the sand.

The next one he extracted was her sister, not her co. Both were distressingly undersized, but both appeared equally healthy. Carlo had been clinging to the hope that with so little maternal flesh to go around one of the pairs would have died of natural causes already, or failing that a stark asymmetry in their prospects might have spared him any need to make the choice himself.

He placed the second girl on the bed; her sister was already drifting, her wriggling launching her up from the tarp. “Stay there,” Carlo entreated them both, pointlessly.

Some instinct had driven their brothers to retreat into the dark depths of the birth tent; Carlo pulled the cord out completely at his end and opened up the whole thing to the moss-light. Against the spread of the gaily patterned cloth the boys looked impossibly diminutive and fragile, and they chose this moment to become audible, humming plaintively for their father. Carlo wished he’d sent Silvano further away. If these children had been his own, this was the point when he might have lost his mind and tried to kill the man he’d sent to halve their number.

This was wrong, it was insane, it was unforgivable. If he reneged now, what would happen? A few of Silvano’s friends would take pity on him, and help keep the family of five from starving. But once those friends had children of their own, the cost of their charity would grow much steeper—and once Silvano’s children had children, the situation would be impossible. Unless Carlo was willing to declare to his co: “These two belong to us now, to raise as our own. You’d better stuff yourself with holin, because in my weakness this is what I’ve done to you: your flesh that was made for the ages will perish now, just like mine.”

Carlo dragged himself along the rope and snatched the nearest of the boys. The child writhed and hummed; Carlo spread his hand wide to deaden the boy’s tympanum. “Which one is your co?” he muttered angrily. He grabbed the side of the bed and pulled himself down. Co recognized co from the earliest age, and their fathers could always see the link, but how was a stranger who hadn’t witnessed the fission itself meant to be certain?

He held the boy beside each female sibling in turn. Carlo was humming now himself, though not as loudly as the unrestrained brother. He tried to picture all four bodies still in contact, before the partitions softened into skin and split apart: first the primary one dividing the pairs, then the secondary ones dividing co from co. He’d watched the whole process often enough in animals. With a free hand he prodded the underside of the boy’s torso, the place where he would have been connected to his co more recently than he’d been joined side by side with his brother. Just beneath the skin there was a patch of unusual rigidity, flat but irregularly shaped. Carlo probed the same spot on one of the girls. Nothing. He checked her sister, and found the mirror image of the boy’s fragment of the partition.

He hesitated, crouched above the bed, still trying to imagine how this could have ended differently. What if the four friends had made a pact, long ago, to feed each other’s children and forego their own, if it ever came to that? Was that the stark, simple answer they’d all failed to see—or would the promise of security have poisoned them against each other, leaving them afraid that it would be exploited? Carla had never starved herself quite as diligently as Silvana, so what kind of life would she have had if she’d been endlessly harangued by a woman with every reason to urge her to show more restraint?

Carlo scooped up the chosen boy’s co and pulled himself along the rope into the front room, a child clutched awkwardly in each free hand. From the box, he took two clearstone vials and a syringe. He extruded an extra pair of arms, uncapped the first vial and filled the syringe with its orange powder. When he held the sharp mirrorstone tip to the base of the boy’s skull he felt his own body start shuddering in revulsion, but he stared down his urge to take the child in his arms and soothe him, to promise him as much love and protection as he would lavish on any child of his own. He pushed the needle into the skin and searched for the angle that would take it between two plates of bone—he knew the invariant anatomy here was not that different from a vole’s—but then the tip suddenly plunged deeper without the drop in resistance he’d been expecting upon finding the narrow corridor of flesh. The child’s skull wasn’t fully ossified, and his probing had forced the needle right through it.

Carlo turned the boy to face him, then squeezed the plunger on the syringe. The child’s eyes snapped open, but they were sightless, rolling erratically, with flashes of yellow light diffusing all the way through the orbs. The drug itself could only reach a small region of the brain, but those parts it touched were emitting a barrage of meaningless signals that elicited an equally frenzied response much farther afield. Soon the tissue’s capacity to make light would be depleted throughout the whole organ. In this state, Carlo believed, there could be no capacity for thought or sensation.

When the boy’s eyes were still Carlo withdrew the needle. His co’s tympanum had been fluttering for a while, and now her humming grew audible. “I’m sorry,” Carlo whispered. “I’m sorry.” He stroked the side of her body with his thumb, but it only made her more agitated. He refilled the syringe with the orange powder, quickly drove the needle through the back of her skull, and watched the light of her nascent mind blaze like a wildfire, then die away.

Carlo released the limp children and let them drift toward the floor while he resorbed the arms he’d used to hold them. His whole body felt weak and battered. He spent a few pauses steadying himself, then he pushed out two fresh arms and filled the syringe from the second vial. When a speck of the blue powder spilled onto his palm the sensation was like passing his hand above a flame. He gathered the damaged patch of skin into a small clump, then hardened the tips of two of his fingers and sliced it off.

He picked up the boy. A world away, his brother was still calling out for help. Carlo reinserted the needle, and forced himself to take his time delivering the poison lest it burst from the wound and escape into the room. The boy’s eyes had already been dull, but now the smooth white skin of the orbs began to turn purplish gray.

When the plunger could be driven no further, Carlo withdrew the needle carefully and set the dead boy down beside the cabinet. He refilled the syringe and turned to the boy’s co. When he gripped her a spasm passed through her body; he waited to see if there was any more activity, but she remained still. He slid the needle into her brain and sent the blue powder trickling through.

Carlo returned to the inner room. He set the boy he’d spared down on the bed beside his co, then unknotted the end of the tarpaulin that had remained attached to the guide rope. In the front room he brought the bodies together, positioning them as they would have been before they’d separated, and rolled them into the tarpaulin. He folded the empty parts of the cloth together and secured the shroud with cord. Then he packed the syringe and vials back into the box he’d used to bring them.

As he approached Silvano in the corridor, his friend’s whole body contorted with anguish. “Let me see them!” he begged Carlo.

“Go and tend to your children,” Carlo replied. A woman was approaching them—one of Silvano’s neighbors on her way home—but then she saw what Carlo was holding and she retreated without a word.

“What have I done?” Silvano wailed. “What have I done?” Carlo pushed past him and moved quickly down the corridor, but he waited by the ladder until Silvano finally entered the apartment. Comforting the surviving children—holding them, feeding them, letting them know that they were safe—was the only thing that could help him now.

Carlo descended past the level of his workshop, past the test fields where the seedlings he was studying grew, past the shuddering machinery of the cooling pumps, until he reached the base of the ladder. He dragged himself along the outer corridor, picturing the void beneath the rock.

A man was emerging from the airlock as Carlo approached. He removed his helmet and glanced at the tarpaulin, then averted his eyes. Carlo recognized him: he was a miller named Rino.

“There’s no greater waste of time than the fire watch,” Rino carped, climbing out of his cooling bag. “I’ve lost count of how many shifts I’ve done, and I still haven’t seen so much as a flash.”

Carlo placed the children’s bodies on the floor and Rino helped him fit into a six-limbed cooling bag. Carlo hadn’t been outside for years; agronomy was considered important enough to keep him off the roster entirely.

Rino snapped a fresh canister of air into place and checked that it was flowing smoothly over Carlo’s skin.

“Helmet?”

Carlo said, “I won’t be out that long.”

“You want a safety harness?”

“Yes.”

Rino took one from a peg on the wall and handed it to him. Carlo slipped it over his torso and cinched it tight.

“Be careful, brother,” Rino said. There was no hint of irony in his form of address, but Carlo had always found it grimly inane that the friendliest appellation some people could offer was a death sentence.

He carried the bodies into the airlock with him, slid the door closed and started laboriously pumping down the pressure. A loose edge of the shroud flapped in the surge of air across the confined space as he delivered each stroke. He unreeled a suitable length of the safety rope, engaged the brake on the reel and hooked the rope into his harness. Then he crouched down, braced himself against the outrush of residual air and pulled open the hatch in the floor.

A short stone ladder rising up beside the hatch made the descent onto the external rope ladder easier. Carlo used four hands on the rungs and held the children in the other two. As his head passed below the hatch the trails of the old stars were suddenly right in front of him—long, garish streaks of color gouged out of the sky—while behind him the orthogonal stars were almost point-like. He glanced down and saw the fire-watch platform silhouetted against the transition circle, where the old stars blazed brightest before their light cut out.

Carlo descended until he felt the safety rope grow taut. He clung to the children, unsure what he should say before releasing them. This boy should have lived for three dozen years, and died with children of his own to mourn him. This girl should have survived in those children, her flesh outliving every man’s. What was life, if that pattern was broken? What was life, when a father had to plead for an assassin to murder half his family, just to save the rest from starvation?

So who had failed them? Not their mother, that was sure. The idiot ancestors who squatted on the home world, waiting to be rescued from their own problems? The three generations of agronomists who had barely increased the yield from the crops? But then, what good would it do if the fourth generation triumphed? If he and his colleagues found a way to raise the yield, that would bring a brief respite. But it would also bring more four-child families, and in time the population would rise again until all the same problems returned.

What miracle could put an end to hunger and infanticide? However many solos and widows chose to go the way of men, most women would rather starve themselves in the hope of having only one daughter than contemplate a regime where for every two sisters, one would be compelled to die childless.

And if he was honest, it was not just down to the women. Even if Carla, given her say, had proved willing, he would not have been prepared to throw away his chance of fatherhood to raise these children as his own.

“Forgive us,” Carlo pleaded. He stared down at the lifeless bundle. “Forgive us all. We’ve lost our way.”

He let the children slip from his arms, and watched the shroud descend into the void.

Chapter 2

Straining against the harness that held her to the observation bench, Tamara cranked the azimuth wheel of the telescope mount. Each laborious turn of the handle beside her nudged the huge contraption by just one arc-chime, and though she still had strength to spare there was nothing to be gained from it: a governor limited the speed of rotation to prevent excessive torques that might damage the gears. The soft, steady clicking of the wheel, usually a reassuring, meditative sound, drove home the machine’s serene indifference to her impatience.

When the telescope was finally pointed in the direction of her last sighting of the Object, she lay flat on the bench and wriggled into place beneath the eyepiece. As she brought the image into focus she was granted as glorious a vision as she could have hoped for: there was nothing to be seen here but the usual mundane star trails.

The trails were exactly as Tamara remembered them, so she knew that she hadn’t mis-set the coordinates. Twice now, the Object had escaped the field of view that had framed it just one day earlier. Such elusiveness proved that it was crossing the sky faster than anything she’d seen before.

Tamara turned the secondary azimuth wheel until she was rewarded with a small gray smudge of light at the top of the field, then she adjusted the altitude to center it. To the limits of the telescope’s resolving power, the Object was simply a point. Nothing in the cosmos was close enough to the Peerless to reveal its width, but even those orthogonal stars that had remained fixed in the sky for three generations showed color trails at this magnification. To possess a point-like image the Object had to be moving slowly—but the only way a slow-moving body could cross the sky as rapidly as this was by virtue of its proximity.

She ran her fingertips over the embossed coordinate wheels, recorded the numbers on her chest, then computed the angle between the Object’s last two bearings. Symbols blossomed on her forearm as she worked through the calculation. In both of the intervals between sightings the gray smudge had moved about two arc-pauses—but the second shift was slightly greater than the first. The true speed of the Object was unlikely to have changed, so its quickening progress against the background of stars could only mean that it had already moved measurably closer.

The change was far too small to yield accurate predictions, but Tamara couldn’t resist working through some crude estimates. Within a period perhaps as short as four stints—or perhaps as long as five dozen—the Object would make its closest approach to the Peerless. Just how close that would be was impossible to say, without knowing how fast the thing was moving through the void, but the lack of a discernible color trail put a ceiling on its speed. The upshot was, the Object would pass by at a distance of, at most, nine gross severances. In astronomical terms that was positively propinquitous: about a twelfth the distance of the home world from its star. No living traveler among them had ever been so close to another solid body.

Tamara resisted the urge to bolt from the observatory and start spreading the news; the protocols dictated that she should complete her shift in the face of anything less than an imminent collision. But it would not be wasted time; the Object could easily be accompanied by fellow travelers, fragments from the same parent body with similar trajectories. So she duly worked her way across her allotted segment of the sky, hunting for another speck of light or a dark silhouette against a star’s band of colors. Field after field was unblemished, as usual, but whenever the tedium of the search reached the point where her thoughts began to stray to the emptiness in her gut, she turned her mind back to the Object itself and savored again the thrill of discovery.

When she’d done her duty—with no further revelations—Tamara slipped out of the harness and pushed herself through the hatch at the base of the observatory. She drifted across the gap that separated the telescope’s stabilized mount from the imperceptibly spinning rock below, and her momentum carried her into the entrance tunnel, returning her to the Peerless proper. She grabbed a guide rope and dragged herself along to the office. Roberto was there, ready to start his own shift, while Ada was studying for an assessment, poring over a tattered set of notes on the art of navigational astrometry.

“I do believe we should expect company!” Tamara announced. She gave her fellow observers the three data points and waited while they made their own calculations.

“It does look close,” Roberto confirmed.

“How bright is it?” Ada asked.

“Five,” Tamara said.

“And you’ve only just seen it?”

“You know what it’s like, trying to spot things close to the horizon.”

To Tamara, they both sounded a shade resentful. She knew there’d been no special skill in what she’d done, and her luck would attract no great esteem. But what lay ahead now was open to everyone: the chance to observe a body of orthogonal matter in unprecedented detail.

“I wish we had some way to pin down the distance,” Roberto lamented.

“Do I detect a hint of parallax envy?” Tamara joked. On the home world, astronomers had had it easy: wait half a day and your viewpoint moved by the planet’s width; wait half a year and that became the width of the orbit. Once those baselines had been measured, the shifting angles they created had been revelatory. But whether you imagined it was the Peerless itself that was moving day by day, or the Object, without knowing the relative velocity to fix the baseline between successive views the most you could glean from the angles alone was the timing of the encounter, not the distance.

Roberto hummed with frustration. “This thing might come close enough for us to resolve its shape—and maybe even structural features, impact craters . . . who knows? Think how much more valuable all that would be if we knew their scale!”

Ada said, “It sounds like the perfect job for an infrared color trail.”

“What kind of gratitude is this?” Tamara demanded. “I bring my two friends the find of a lifetime, and all I get are fantasies about how things could be better!”

Ada was indignant. “What fantasy? I’m serious! The chemists have never made infrared a priority before, because they’ve never had a good enough reason.”

Chemicals sensitive to ultraviolet light had been known since before the launch, but no one had managed to achieve the same feat at the infrared end of the spectrum. Imaging a slow-moving object’s color trail in ultraviolet wasn’t all that helpful; even infinitely fast UV would lie closer to violet in the trail than violet was to red. But an infrared trail could stretch out to many times the length of the visible portion.

“And this will count as a good reason?” Roberto was amused. “The last time I asked for a favor from the chemists, I was told to wait until they’d solved the fuel problem.”

Ada said, “Maybe we can find a chemist who’s itching for a break. If you’ve spent half your life bashing your head against the same old problem, why not try something easier?”

“No, they all want the glory too badly for that,” Roberto declared. “Who’s going to waste their time inventing infrared-sensitive paper when they might be on the verge of inventing a way home?”

Tamara tried to put herself inside a chemist’s skin. The Peerless’s reserves of sunstone, burned in the usual manner, would barely be enough to bring the mountain to a halt, let alone carry their descendants back to the home world. She’d understood that unsettling fact since childhood, but to someone who’d made the fuel problem their vocation what interest could there be in the astronomers’ petty concerns? The orthogonal cluster and the debris that surrounded it were just obstacles to be avoided, and while gathering statistics on the distribution of this hazard was a worthwhile activity, it wouldn’t take an infrared color trail to recognize a head-on collision.

Then again, surely every chemist was at least a little curious as to how the sprinkling of orthogonal dust that had adhered to the surface of the Peerless had threatened to set the rock on fire, in the days before spin. Tamara wondered if she could sell them on the notion that establishing the size of any craters on the Object might shed light on that mysterious reaction. The trouble was, any ordinary rock that had struck the Object would have done so at such a great speed that the most likely result would have been, not a crater, but an all-obliterating fireball. The Peerless itself was almost certainly the only ordinary object in the region that had ended up more or less matching velocities with the orthogonal material—and if a leisurely encounter between the two kinds of matter was ever to be repeated, the Peerless would have to be involved again.

Tamara looked up at her friends and realized just how blind she’d been. Roberto had been right to refuse to accept the same old regime of half-useless observations; Ada had been right to insist that there could easily be better methods within their reach. But all three of them had been too timid by far.

Tamara said, “Why don’t we go there?”

Roberto blinked. “What?”

Ada emitted an excited chirp. “You mean start the engines and . . . ?”

“No, no!” Tamara cut her off. “The Peerless is too big and unwieldy, and it would be insane to waste that much fuel. We should build a smaller rocket, just for this journey—something we can take as close to the Object as we dare. Then we can measure what we like, observe what we like . . . carry out experiments, maybe even bring back samples.”

Ada held up her navigator’s manual, regarding it with an almost fearful new respect. When Tamara had studied the same notes, she’d assumed that the only use she’d ever make of them would be to teach the theory to the next generation, keeping the knowledge from withering away while they waited for the infinitely remote prospect of commencing the journey home.

Roberto’s stunned expression gave way to one of pure delight. “If the tiniest speck of orthogonal rock is a liberator for calmstone,” he said, “who knows what the same material in bulk could do to our fuel?”

Tamara said, “I think we might be able to interest the chemists in helping us find the answer to that.”

[End Excerpt]

From the book Eternal Flame by Greg Egan.

Copyright © 2012 Greg Egan.

Reprinted by permission of Night Shade Books.

All rights reserved.

Greg Egan is a computer programmer, and the author of the acclaimed SF novels Diaspora, Quarantine, Permutation City, and Teranesia. He has won the Hugo Award as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His short fiction has been published in a variety of places, including Interzone, Asimov’s, and Nature. Egan holds a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Western Australia, and currently lives in Perth.

Interview: John Scalzi
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

John Scalzi is the New York Times bestselling author of the Old Man’s War series, which consists of Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, The Last Colony, Zoe’s Tale, and the recently announced The Human Division (forthcoming). Other novels include Agent to the Stars, The Android’s Dream, Fuzzy Nation, and, his latest, Redshirts: A Novel With Three Codas. Scalzi has also written a number of nonfiction books, such as Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded and 24 Frames into the Future, and he posts essays regularly on his popular blog, Whatever.

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

Your new novel is called Redshirts. What’s it about?

“Redshirts” is a concept that goes back to the original Star Trek series. The idea is that Kirk and Spock and Chekov go down to a planet on an away team, and they take Ensign Jones, the security ensign, with them. And somebody’s got to be killed, and who’s it going to be? Is it going to be Kirk? No. Is it going to be Spock? No. Is it Chekov? He’s going to get hurt, but they’re not going to kill him. So it falls to Ensign Jones to die horribly for dramatic effect.

When the original series first came out, people started knowing statistically it was a really bad idea to be going on these away teams with the captain, and they started calling these people redshirts, and it’s become a common enough phrase in science fiction culture and in geek culture that when I did a story about these sorts of characters on a spaceship, it was just a natural title choice.

The whole idea behind the book is that these undercard ensigns and crew members start trying to avoid going on these away teams, and trying to figure out how they can stop this thing from happening in a larger sense. And then the story goes from basically what I think people are expecting to a kind of weirder territory. Which it would have to, if you want this to be more than a single-joke novel.

Since the book is sort of a parody of Star Trek, we’re just wondering how big of a Star Trek fan are you, and what do you think are some of the strengths and weaknesses of the franchise?

I would say I’m a medium-sized Star Trek fan. I love the universe that it’s created. I’ve seen the original series, obviously. Next Generation is probably my home Star Trek fandom, if you want to call it that. And then I really actually like the brand new movie, except for five minutes where Spock—who is supposed to be a science officer—just unleashes a whole spiel of completely non-scientific stuff.

It’s a pretty good universe. There’s lots going on, people care about the characters. The science in it is frequently horrible, and that’s one of the things that I pick up on in Redshirts. But if you can live with the horrible, horrible, bad, awful science that doesn’t make sense, then it’s not a bad place to live.

Redshirts is dedicated in part to Wil Wheaton, who of course starred on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and whom you’re friends with. How did you two get to know each other, and do you know what Wil thought of the book?

Wil and I have a mutual friend in common named Mykal Burns. I’ve known Mykal since he was in junior high, and Wil knew him originally through his wife Anne.

Wil had started reading my books for Audible. He’d done Fuzzy Nation, The Android’s Dream, and Agent to the Stars. So I wrote Redshirts, and clearly it seemed like this would be a book that would be up his alley, so I sent it to him, just going, “Hey, would you like to read this?” and he comes back going, “Oh my god, I love this so much!” So that made it easier to sort of co-dedicate it to him. It’s co-dedicated to him, to our mutual friend Myke Burns, and then to the two producers of Stargate Universe who I worked with primarily while I was that show’s creative consultant.

Speaking of celebrities, Redshirts also has a theme song written by Jonathan Coulton. How’d that come about?

Back in 2005, while I was writing The Android’s Dream, it was right around the time that Jonathan Coulton was just getting started, so I thought, “Hey, this might be a thing where I can get him to write songs for this. That would be amusing.” And so out of the blue—and he had no idea who I was; I think Old Man’s War had just come out or something like that—I said, “Hey, you should do this. Write three or four songs about this science fiction book that I’m doing, and here’s the book,” and I sent it as an attached file.

So basically I was the creepy dude who said, “Hey, you should work with me, and here’s my book, so why don’t you read it? And I love your stuff.” I think his entirely rational response at that time was just, “Oh, attached file, crazy dude, hit delete,” and that was the last that you ever heard of that. Years later we met, and got along very well, and I mentioned that to him, and he was like, “Oh, I didn’t know. If I had known, maybe things would have been different.” And I was like, “There’s no possible way you could have known. I did everything wrong in approaching you with that.”

Last year, when Fuzzy Nation came out, I had Paul and Storm do a song for it, and that actually worked out very well, which convinced me that this was sort of a fun thing to do with each of the books. So this time around I sent him an email and said, “Hey, remember when I was that creepy stalker dude? Now I’m going to do it again, but this time you know who I am.”

Years ago I heard you joke that you were part of a movement in science fiction called the “New Comprehensible.” Do you think that overall science fiction is too inaccessible to new readers?

We have some of the best writers in science fiction and fantasy today that we’ve ever had in the genre. That said, one of the things is that when you have people who are really engaged on the literary side of writing, as many of our current really excellent writers are, there is a question of how approachable it is to someone who is just coming fresh into the field.

I think that what I do, in terms of how I craft my words rhetorically, is fairly simple stuff. I don’t mean that to denigrate myself. I mean that in the sense of, when I write, the person that I keep in mind is my mother-in-law. And my mother-in-law reads Nora Roberts and she reads Julie Garwood, and she’s going to read my stuff because I’m her son-in-law and she loves me, and I don’t want her to get lost. So what I do when I’m writing this stuff is I think, “How am I going to communicate all the ideas that I want to communicate, and at the same time make it something that Dora—my mother-in-law—will be able to follow?” If I can make something that she’s going to be able to follow and be interested in, and have a good time reading, it seems likely to me that I should be able to get just about anybody to follow it.

For me at least that’s the way it’s worked. There’s not a week that goes by that I don’t get an email from someone who says, “I don’t read science fiction, but I read yours and it was amazing, and I was totally able to follow it. This is great.” And my response to that is always, “That’s wonderful. Here are some more writers that you should look at.”

Are there any other specific books that you tend to recommend to people who are new to the genre?

A lot of the intake for science fiction used to be younger readers, so the classic example would be the Heinlein juveniles. Right now we have an entire segment called YA, which is basically doing the job that science fiction or fantasy used to do. There’s a lot of uptake in science fiction that way. Scott Westerfeld and Suzanne Collins are both very good examples of science fiction books that have been written recently that have become—obviously—extraordinarily popular. For older readers, it’s easy to send them to Pat Rothfuss, as an example. I actually like Steven Brust’s work quite a lot. I think it’s very easy to get into if you’ve never read any fantasy before, especially because it almost has a noir-ish quality to it, so any of the books that he has in the Jhereg series, I think, are a great way to get involved with that.

Richard K. Morgan is a great way to start, because his work is filled with action and cool ideas. There’s the new book series that is coming out by Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham under the James S. A. Corey name. Leviathan Wakes is the first title in that.

I recently heard you describe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as an “extinction-level event for humor in science fiction.” What do you mean by that?

Star Wars was an extinction-level event for a certain kind of science fiction movie that just preceded Star Wars. Just before Star Wars, between 1968 and about 1976, most of the big science fiction films were dystopic in one way or another. You started with Planet of the Apes, you went through Omega Man, Silent Running, and Logan’s Run. And they were socially conscious, and they were sort of going, “Look, we’ll do terrible things if we don’t change our ways,” and so on and so forth. Then Star Wars came in and was like, “I don’t care about any of that. Look, I got lasers! I got guys with lighty swords and they’re swinging them at each other! I got this mystical force, and all this stuff that’s cool, and there’s explosions!” And it really just wiped off the map all that dystopic fiction.

That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I think that from the point of view of a viewer, eight years of dystopic science fiction is about as far as you want to go. But immediately afterwards, everything else in science fiction was, “Let’s do that thing that Star Wars did so well.” Which made perfect sense, because adjusted for inflation it made like a billion dollars at the box office. In the same way, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was tremendously successful. It was tremendously funny. I remember reading it when I was 12 and just being certain I was going to pee myself. But at the same time, it was so successful that it basically defined what humor in science fiction was going to be for the next couple of decades. And the problem with that, in this particular case—and this was a problem that they ran into with the movies that were trying to capitalize on Star Wars as well—is that you can put all the elements there, but unless you’ve got a spark that really makes it fly, it’s just not going to work.

In this particular case, Douglas Adams had something that most of the folks who were trying to replicate his humor didn’t. He was British, he was a farcisist, and he knew what he was doing in terms of having that particular type of humor. Other people can ape that sort of humor, but if it doesn’t work then it just fails miserably. And I certainly know that with, for example, Agent to the Stars or The Android’s Dream, those are pretty funny books, and I consider them basically comedies, but we didn’t market them like that, and part of the reason that we didn’t market them like that is because there was the concern that if they were marketed as humor, that they just wouldn’t sell. I mean, my publisher in the UK at the time, Tor UK, passed on Fuzzy Nation because they’re like, “Oh, it’s a humor book, and humor doesn’t sell.” One of the things I say about Redshirts is that it took me eight books to finally be at a point in my career where I could come out with a book and say, “This is meant to be a funny book,” and we didn’t have to make any bones about it.

Given that, do you have any advice that you would give to new writers who want to write funny science fiction?

Well, one, I would encourage people to attempt to write amusing science fiction. I think it’s much easier to sell amusing science fiction in a short story market than it would be for the novel market. The dynamics of those markets are separate things. I think that the way that it worked for me was that I spent, like I said, eight novels—not just getting to a point where I could write a humorous novel, but each of the novels that I write have moments of humor and levity and sarcasm and everything else, and that people got used to the idea that this was something that I did.

I think things are changing. I mean, I do think that we are in flux. And this is going to sound obnoxious, but I think that one of the nice things about Redshirts getting onto the actual best-seller list and doing as well as it has been doing, is that it is kind of a wake-up call that the science fiction audience—regardless of the long-held superstitions or beliefs of those who publish the stuff—is more than happy to entertain the idea of humorous science fiction.

You described Douglas Adams as a “British farcisist.” Do you see Redshirts or any of your other books as falling into a particular style or tradition of humor?

I’m an American sarcasticist. [laughs] No, I think my sense of humor comes from a long trail of American humorists that stretches all the way back into the ’20s. I mean, some of my touchstones for humor are James Thurber, Robert Benchley, and Dorothy Parker, and a lot of the humor that I have comes through dialog that comes through screenwriters like Ben Hecht or William Goldman or Elaine May or Larry Gelbart, who wrote Tootsie and MASH. A lot of my humor comes from newspaper columnists like P.J. O’Rourke, or Molly Ivins, or Mike Royko. To a lesser extent, Dave Barry. Also outside the science fiction genre. For example, Carl Hiaasen, or Gregory McDonald, who wrote the Fletch books, and Elmore Leonard.

Your blog, Whatever, has been described as having one of the few readable comment sections online. Why do you think that is?

It’s because I will mallet into oblivion anybody who gets out of line and is too obnoxious. I have a long-standing comment policy where I say, “Here are the rules, stick to them, and you won’t have any problem.” So that’s part of it, too: If you have rules, and everybody knows them and everybody can see them, and they’re easily referable to, then most people are going to follow them.

The second thing is that I do actively moderate. If people don’t follow the rules, then I will either tell them to straighten up, or if they don’t straighten up I will remove their posts. And if they become too much of a problem, I will moderate them, or eventually ban them. And because I don’t tolerate people trolling or being horrible to each other, or making just absolutely cookie-cutter arguments that they got off of talk radio, or wherever else they got them from, it means that the people who do that sort of crap don’t stick around on my site too long.

I mean, when I write something that is controversial, and goes outside my usual sphere of people who read and comment and link in—for example, the thing about the lowest difficulty setting, which happened very recently—occasionally, we will get people in who are not the usual gang, in terms of commenters, and when that happens a lot of them don’t pay attention to the comment rules, and the comment threads can get kind of funky. And like I said, that’s when I have to go in swinging the Mallet of Loving Correction, as I call it, and clearing it out.

Your career as a novelist seems to have benefited enormously from your online presence. How important do you think it is for writers these days to post photos of bacon taped to their cats?

The bacon on the cat thing has been done. [laughs] I would suggest that they try something else instead. If you are someone like me, who really enjoys writing in an extracurricular sort of way about a whole bunch of other stuff, and having your own website makes it easy to do it, and you have time and the interest to build the site over many, many years, and maintain it so it doesn’t just become an outlet for marketing, marketing, marketing, then it’s great. If you are doing it because a publicist or marketing person said to you, “Oh, you should have a blog,” and you go, “OK, well, I guess I should do that,” and sort of dutifully put things on your blog, or dutifully put things on Twitter or Facebook or whatever, then it’s not going to work for you at all.

The simple fact of the matter is that there’s no right way to market yourself—or no one right way. There’s not something that’s just going to work for everybody. There are very successful writers who have almost absolutely no web presence at all. Neal Stephenson is a perfect example of that. His website, as far as I recall the last time I was there, was basically, “This is why I’m not on the web, this is why I don’t answer mail, this is why I don’t do any of this crap.” And it doesn’t seem to have had a negative impact on his career at all, because ultimately his books are fantastic and people are interested in the books. On the other hand, you have people like me and Cory Doctorow, who are these sort of public internet individuals, and there’s definitely a benefit for us to having our online presence in terms of what we do in our fiction.

But at the same time, there are also people who have huge web presences, or huge Twitter presences or whatever, who don’t particularly see the benefit of it for anything else they do, because the books are not necessarily of interest to anybody else, or just for whatever reason the fame doesn’t transfer. And the fact of the matter is that even with what I do, there’s a large circle of people who read my website, and there’s a large circle of people who read the science fiction, and there’s overlap between those two circles, but the overlap is not as big as a lot of people think. There are some people who have read my blog for 10 years or more who haven’t read any of my books, because they’re like, “Eh, I’m just not interested in that,” or “I would have to pay money for that.” And then there are other people who I know read my science fiction, and they’re like, “I know you have a blog, but I never read the blog because I don’t want to know too much about you, because inevitably you will disappoint me.”

Which is a totally valid thing. I think there are science fiction and fantasy writers out there who, you know, people have read their prose and loved their prose, and then have gone to seek them out online and discovered that their political opinions are completely anathema to what they believe, and now they can’t enjoy the prose as much. That sometimes happens to me. I mean, Old Man’s War came out and was championed by Instapundit and a bunch of other conservative folks, and it’s military science fiction, so the assumption was that I was this at least vaguely conservative writer. And then they come over to my website and—surprise!—I’m basically a generic United States screaming liberal.

I’ve literally had people leave messages—emails or posts—that go, “I’m disappointed that you feel this way. Now I can no longer read your books.” And my response to that is always, “One, kiss my ass. I’m not going to stop saying what I want to say just because you won’t read my books anymore. And second of all, what do you expect? I’m a human being. I have opinions. It doesn’t matter where you are on the political spectrum, I’m inevitably going to have an opinion or I’m going to say something or I’m going to do something that’s just going to annoy you.” If the only people that you ever read are people who completely line up with you on every single social/political/technological thing—I mean, I had somebody stop reading me because I snarked on Apple products one time. But if that’s your criteria, the number of people that you’re going to eventually allow yourself to read is very, very small.

I’ve heard that your editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, first got interested in your fiction after reading an essay you wrote about Robert Heinlein. Can you tell us what that essay was about?

The essay was talking about lessons from Heinlein in terms of storytelling. His dialogue was believable as things that people would say to each other, as opposed to exposition being hidden as speech, for example. He was also concerned about entertaining people and making them have a good time with the reading.

The reason that I brought that to his attention at the time was that he had mentioned something on his website prior to me writing this piece on Heinlein regarding Heinlein and his ability to write good transparent prose and characters and so on and so forth, and so I sent him the email apropos to that.

I warned him at the time, I was like, “I’m sending this to you because this is relating to this Heinlein thing that you did. It appended when I serialized Old Man’s War on my website, but don’t read that, because if I’m going to submit it to you, I’m going to do it the way that you’ve already asked me to do. But this can be read on its own.” Patrick didn’t listen to me. He read the essay, and he was like, “OK, now I have to see if this book that he’s appended this to is actually anything like that,” and then he read it, and that’s when he made me the offer.

And so in retrospect people are asking me, “Isn’t that sort of daring him not to read your book? So you were trying to do some sort of three-dimensional chess with him?” And my answer to that is, no, actually, I assumed that someone in Patrick’s position actually has no interest in randomly reading everything that gets put up on the web because, you know, who has time? I just didn’t realize that Patrick had that particular sort of curious behavior of going, “Well, now I have to see if what he’s written here matches up with what he wrote in his book. Oh my god, it does. I think I should buy this.”

You mentioned earlier that you served as a consultant for the TV show Stargate Universe. How did that come about, and what was your role in the show?

Basically, one of the producers had sent me an email going, “I read Old Man’s War and I loved it. It’s perfect. Write for us for Stargate Atlantis.” And my response to that was, “Thank you very much, you’re very cool. I can’t write for Stargate Atlantis because I don’t watch it.” And if you don’t watch something, and you come in and you write an episode for it, then it’s basically going to be terrible, and I didn’t want to be the guy who wrote a script that was terrible and just got put out anyway because the producer thought I was a cool dude.

Then he said to me, “OK, that’s fair enough. If we do another Stargate television show, would you like to be involved with that?” And I was like, “Yeah, absolutely.” Because to start on the ground floor of an established universe and build it up from that foundation? That’s totally something that I would want to be behind. And he says, “Great.” And then I didn’t hear from him for about another year, and I completely forgot about it, because really that’s one of those future things that’s along the lines of, “Hey, let’s do lunch sometime,” right?

And then a year later, he’s like, “OK, remember when I said that we were thinking about doing another Stargate TV show? Well, we’re going to do it, and it’s called Stargate Universe, and here’s the first script. Is this something you want to be involved with?” And basically what we decided that I was going to do was—for the first season, at least, and it eventually went through the couple of seasons—that I was going to act as their creative consultant. And that meant looking at all the scripts and offering them opinions about stuff relating to a) the science of what they were doing, because I have a little bit of a background in science stuff—I had written a book on astronomy and had done science-related articles for a while—and then b) give them character and script notes so that they could make sure that what they were doing dramatically was working as well. So basically what would happen is that they would send me a script, and I would go through it and go, “OK, here in this scene, this scientific thing that you’re trying to do here is wrong. Here’s what actually happens in the real world, and here’s a way that you can fudge it so that you can do what you’re trying to achieve without having to completely overhaul the script.”

In Stargate Universe, the idea is that there’s this spaceship that gets flung billions of light years away from anything, and there’s no way for them to return home. One of the things that I told them that they needed to do was actually not do the thing that everybody else does, which is kill off their crew members and just shoot things indiscriminately, or use resources indiscriminately. I was like, “Every bullet you use is a bullet you don’t have anymore, and for this ship that actually matters.”

Or as another example—and this is a great story because it relates to Redshirts—I’m reading a script from the first season, and it has a crewman walking down the hall, and it literally says in the script, “Redshirt walks down the hall.” And you’re like, “Okay, that dude’s not making it to the end of that hall.” And true enough, a couple sentences later the hall explodes and the guy dies. And I pointed out to them, “You can’t kill off all your crew members in a very casual way, because the way that this television show is designed, you can’t replace them. And so eventually, if you kill them off at the rate that you’re killing them off, by the end of the season there’s just going to be the five main stars and that’s it.” So my innovation for redshirts in Stargate Universe—and if you watch the two seasons you’ll see that this actually bears out—is that relatively few people die, but a lot of them are really horribly maimed. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a better thing for a redshirt, you know, that instead of being dead it’s like, “Oh, he merely lost all his blood,” or whatever it was that happened to them, but we didn’t kill them off indiscriminately.

You know, one of the things that I haven’t done, because I had no experience with it, is script writing. And basically I was paid for two straight years to look at scripts and see how they function, and see how they work. And as a result of that, now when I get to the point where I feel it’s time to write a script—which I hope to do in the reasonably near future—I have real world, practical experience.

Is there anything that you can say about the upcoming scripts that you might want to write?

Well, no. I mean, if I’m going to write a script, I’ll basically write a script like I wrote my very first novel, and the very first novel I wrote, which was back in the mid-’90s, I was like, “I’m going to write this novel. I’m not going to worry about whether it’s good. I’m not going to worry about whether it’s something I can sell. I’m just going to write it to see if I can write it, and when it’s done, I’m going to take a look at it and say, ‘Okay, these are the things I did well. These are the things I need to improve on,’ and then use that to write the second novel.” And in fact that’s what I did. The first novel was really a lot of fun to write because I didn’t put any pressure on it to be good. It didn’t have to be good, it just had to be novel-length. I did learn quite a lot, so that the next novel I wrote was Old Man’s War, which I was able to sell.

So in that case, the first script that I write will literally be something that will be fun, something that I’m not planning to sell, and something where I’m just going to write it to see what I do easily and what things are difficult for me, so that the second one will be easier. At this moment I sort of have it in my brain to adapt The God Engines into a script, because out of all the things I’ve written, that’s the one that’s the most appropriate length for a feature film. But as I said, if I’m going to do it, the one thing I would caution everybody would be not to expect me to then sell that. It would be more of, “I’ve written this script for The God Engines, and oh my god is it horrible, but now I’ve learned something, and I will try something else.”

Last year you published a novel called Fuzzy Nation, which you described as an “experiment.” In what way was it an experiment, and what did you learn from doing that experiment?

It was an experiment in the sense that reboots happen all the time in movies and television and comics, but they don’t happen that often in literary stuff, and so it was an experiment to see if that was just because practical considerations make it difficult, or if it was really just a horrible idea, and the reason that it doesn’t happen very often is because it’s a horrible, horrible idea.

What I did was I picked a Golden Age science fiction story that I really enjoyed, which was Little Fuzzy. It’s a great story, H. Beam Piper did a fine job with it, and it was nominated for a Hugo in 1962. But it’s also very much a piece of its time. You can tell it was written in the early ‘60s by the way that the men acted, and the way that the women acted, and some of the cultural assumptions of the story at the time. So I thought it would be fun to take the basic story idea of Little Fuzzy and bring it into current time and current sensibility, not just in terms of socially, but also in how we craft our protagonists these days, how we frame the fundamental issues of story, and so on and so forth. So that was part of the experiment, to see if the story itself—the idea of, here are these cute and fuzzy creatures, they could be sapient, and if they are sapient there are going to be huge implications—to see if that story itself was durable, or if it was a creature of its own time.

Now, one of the nice things about doing this with Little Fuzzy is that Little Fuzzy, the novel itself, was in the public domain, so that there was no question about copyright, and that’s one of the reasons why these things are so infrequently done. For example, rebooting Star Trek wasn’t a problem because Paramount owned Star Trek, and it was in their interest to keep that property out there and moving and going forward. However, most books are not owned by corporations, they’re owned by individuals, and to be fair, if somebody came up to me and said, “Old Man’s War was great, but I want to reboot it and start from scratch,” my response would be, “Mmm, probably not.”

In this particular case, it helped that since it was in the public domain, that wasn’t a concern. And again, this was something that I wrote just for my own amusement. I honestly didn’t have plans to sell it to a publisher at all. What happened is that as I wrote it, I thought, “This is good,” and then my agent called me and said, “What are you doing?” because I was uncharacteristically quiet and he hadn’t heard from me, and if I don’t send him books he doesn’t make money from me. And I said, “Well, I just wrote a novel, but I don’t think that you’re going to be able to sell it.” And his response to that really was, “Challenge accepted. Send it.”

Even though the book was in public domain, which meant that there were no copyright issues, the H. Beam Piper estate still exists. We let them read it, and they liked it, so we worked out a deal where the H. Beam Piper estate gets a cut of the profits, and they also gave us an endorsement. So that made things a lot easier to sell. So it was an experiment. It was an experiment in updating a story, it was an experiment in the feasibility of rebooting a science fiction classic, and it was also sort of an experiment in how people would respond to a classic of the genre being rebooted in this way. And the good news is that on all fronts it worked out very well.

And now of course people are like, “Well, now you should reboot . . .” and they give me the idea of some other thing that they want to reboot. I’m like, “Yeah, but I’ve done it once, it’s time to move on to something else.” This is the proof of concept that this doesn’t necessarily have to be a horrible idea. That doesn’t mean that I want to keep doing it again and again and again. I might write a sequel eventually to Fuzzy Nation, the book I wrote, but if I do that, that’s going to be something else again entirely, separate from taking another classic of science fiction and rebuilding it from the bottom up.

When we solicited questions for this interview, about 20 people wanted us to ask you if you intend to chain your laptop to your wrist. What’s the deal with that?

I lost my Mac Air at an airport for the second time in a month, last Tuesday. The first time I was furious, I was stomping around, I just couldn’t believe it. But the second time it was more of just, “I cannot believe I have just done this again.” Because really, it just makes you feel stupid. And I can see the computer, right? I know exactly what happened, which was I’m working on it at the LaGuardia Gate 5 US Airways Terminal, and they’re calling our flight, so I go and I unplug the cord from the outlet, and I wrap up the cord and I put it away, and I zip up my bag and I’m ready to go, and I forgot that I left my computer there. I didn’t close it up and put it in first, so I’m just—ugh.

So I’ve called LaGuardia, and I’ve called US Airways, and they’re both looking for it. The nice thing about the Macs is that they have the “Find My iPhone” on the iCloud, so I can see it, right? It hasn’t been opened. It’s just sort of there somewhere. As soon as it opens up and someone tries to access the internet with it, it’s going to lock up and it’ll put up a message that says, “Hi, I’m a locked computer, please return me to . . .” and gives all my contact information. But the problem is that until that happens, it’s lost. Now, when I lost my computer the first time, three weeks ago, at the Nebulas, I went and bought a spare laptop, a little Acer netbook. It was like 250 bucks. So that’s what I’m using now, and I think that was also the case of, you know, “Oh, well, I’ve got a backup.”

But it doesn’t change the fact that I managed to lose the same computer twice in a month. And people are like, “Now you’re going to have to Crazy Glue it to yourself! Handcuff it to yourself! Graft it into your brain like a BrainPal!” But I think that the real key may just simply be to not be as frazzled as I have been. I mean, my tour started June 3rd, and it is now the very end of the month. My tour officially stops on July 1st, so I will have been—you know, with the occasional day at home to do laundry and make sure my pets and family recognize who I am—I will have been on tour for a month, and I think that the whole thing of being a little frazzled meant that my Mac Air was lost at LaGuardia. Hopefully I will get it back, and if I don’t . . . that’s the worst part, because part of my brain is like, “Argh, I can’t believe you’ve lost your computer again,” but then there’s a little part of my brain that goes, “But now you can get one of the new MacBooks with the retina screen! Woohoo!” I really want to get my old computer back and not have to spend more money.

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

I’m working on a video game right now with a company called Industrial Toys, which is headed by Alex Seropian, who’s one of the cofounders of Bungie and who helped make Halo. So that’ll be cool. We haven’t made the full announcement of the name of the game and everything else like that, but that’s been a lot of fun. And when we can finally announce it, that’s going to be awesome.

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. 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
Frank Hong

Artist Spotlight: Frank Hong
J. T. Glover

Frank Hong is a Toronto-based artist who specializes in concept art, environments, and design. He came to fantasy and science fiction via video games, and it shows in environments so immersive it makes the viewer want to walk into the painting. His work has been featured various places, including Imagine FX, and he has worked on a number of major movies, including Godzilla and the forthcoming Pacific Rim.

“Dawn of the Round Table” has a very clear sense of motion, nicely complemented by the overall pattern of lights and darks. The title brings Arthurian stories to mind, not so much the distant future. Can you tell us about your inspiration for the painting?

The original motivation came from an art contest called “Up Lift the Universe,” which is a science fiction-based story where human and aliens made contact years ago. I borrowed ideas from that as a basis to imagine a transportation system in space, much like our train networks. This piece displays a docking station at “Dawn,” where the ship makes its stop on the train track.

What are your favorite kinds of scenes to paint?

I really enjoy painting vast and epic landscape scenes filled with atmosphere, sometimes filled with science fiction elements too. Creating a believable landscape true to the fictional background is a very exciting process. It involves a lot of in-depth research and brainstorming to reach a point where the environment created could be “real,” but is still being pushed as far out of reality as possible.

What changes have you seen in your work in the time since you graduated?

My work has certainly become more mature. It has changed in a way that’s more efficient. I am able to respond to revisions a lot more quickly because I’m more professional in organization, using a lot of layers, and keeping multiple backups and copies. The design process has become more fluent, with fewer hiccups, and I learned to communicate better with my director to achieve a desirable result. All of these are tied to working professionally, and not so much with personal pieces. When I find time, very infrequently, I still enjoy messing about with no rules in mind, and bringing a bit of fun back into art making.

Which artists influenced you most heavily when you were learning your craft? Did any particular picture or artist in particular lead you to change your practice?

There were too many to list; I remember how I marveled at all sorts of concept artists from all over the world, and I’m lucky to have become a part of the industry. I also learned a lot from tutorial DVDs, namely from masters like Dylan Cole, Raphael Lacoste, and many more.

Your personal site includes various galleries, as well as a link to sample animation you’ve done. Do you want to keep doing 2D down the road, or would you like to move entirely toward 3D?

I don’t think I’ll ever go entirely 3D. I use 3D as a tool to complement my 2D designs. Whether it’s for perspective or camera mapping, I would still use Photoshop as my main weapon. I find it much faster and more fluent to just paint out what needs to be done, and then perhaps hand it off to the 3D artists who rightfully do 3D much better than I could. I find them to be two completely different roles. I won’t try to take their position, because that’s what 3D artists are really good at, nor would I abandon my area of expertise. There is still tons of room to explore in 2D designs.

What tools do you use most often for creating concept or matte art?

I use Photoshop, a lot of references, and a good tablet. So far I haven’t used too much 3D aid in my works, although that’s an area where I’m slowly learning to be more proficient.

Your bio mentions being inspired by the games you grew up with. Can you name a few, and tell us if they still influence your art today?

I had a long background in games—ever since I was tall enough to reach a mouse. It’s probably why I decided to become an artist; I was always fascinated by the art and design for games and movies. It became clear when I chose to make art professionally that gaming was going to be my first direction. Having played almost every game that’s relevant, I tried to distinguish good art design from the bad ones. Some of the great games still influence my design decisions to this day. My favourites include the Metal Gear Solid series, Command & Conquer, and Halo.

What are you playing these days? Do you still get new ideas and inspiration from games?

For sure I still do, and I draw a lot of new ideas from modern games. These new titles are getting really elaborate and sometimes hard to improve on. I’m currently playing Mass Effect 3, Max Payne 3, and being a bit of a motorhead, I’ll always go back to GT5.

Many of your paintings have a great sense of depth and scope. While there’s obviously a long tradition of painting on a large scale, from murals to gigantic canvases, I don’t see that as commonly with F/SF art, given how artists tend to focus in on people or creatures. What leads you to paint at the depth and scope you do?

You are right, artists do tend to focus more on people and creatures, and environment art becomes almost secondary to these designs. Problem is, someone would have to take up this task! Almost 70% of concept art generated is environment concepts because of the vast number of levels and dungeons that have to be made for an entire game; for movies, every set and scene has to be illustrated, and people almost become scale references in those illustrations. When I go to an art show or convention, I’m usually one of the only artists selling environment art. That doesn’t upset me at all, because I’m supplying a growing demand, while it is harder for creature/character artists due to the heavy competition. Having said that, environments with depth and scope were my own obsession before I figured out it wasn’t a bad idea financially. I find myself more attached to cool scenery than the generic “bald space marine” of a main character.

What are you working on these days?

Most recently I was working in the art department of the upcoming movies Pacific Rim and Robocop.

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 fur-bearing friends. By day he is an academic reference librarian specializing in the humanities.

Artist Spotlight
Galen Dara

Artist Spotlight: Galen Dara
Robyn Lupo

How would you describe your aesthetic? What’s beautiful to you?

I like the dark. And have an affinity for the symbolic, the poetic. Things hinted at, the play between hidden and obscured, abstract and real. I like trees and bones and internal organs and birds. Also, I like things reduced to their most basic idea and shape, with all the excess stripped away. Some of my favorite artists are Kent Williams, Jillian Tamaki, Amano Yoshitaka, Ashley Wood, John Jude Palencar, Eric Fortune, Zdzislaw Beksinski, etc.

What are your favorite tools to work with? How long does it take for you to learn a new technique?

I currently use Photoshop and Painter. I am kind of a hack and slash sort of artist: putting down large areas of paint, then carving away with an eraser, painting more, erasing more. Hacking, slashing, carving away till I have the forms I want. Towards the end of a painting, I start concentrating mostly on the negative spaces. I use a lot of textures and only a very few brushes. That is probably my weakest area; there are so many features available in my art software that I just don’t utilize. One of my goals this year is to push myself to pick up a few new tricks and techniques. (I’m a quick learner; it just takes me a while to break out of my comfort zone.)

Do you explore other mediums—I know you’re an avid photographer, but is that a different focus to your art, or more like a hobby? Or is there no difference?

I love photography and it was with a camera that I first got back into digital art making after my son was born. It’s currently on the back burner as I build up my illustration career but I am very intrigued to start incorporating photography and other mediums into my illustrations. We are moving into a place where I will have my own dedicated studio area and I am looking forward to having the space to get back into traditional mediums: My background is in painting, installation art, and mixed media assemblages. I would love to find ways of incorporating these into my digital illustrations. The way that Dave McKean creates art is something I aspire to, the way he has of mixing a broad range of mediums.

How did you get started?

I have always been artistically inclined, but it took me a while to find my focus in it. Eventually (after a lot of poking around) I got a degree in painting (that detoured into installation art during the very last semester). But after I had a baby it all got put on the back burner for a while.

I got serious about making art again a few years back and it was during the time that Jaym Gates and Erika Holt were putting together their first anthology, Rigor Amortis. John Remy had a story in it and mentioned to Jaym and Erika that if they were interested in illustrations for their book he knew an artist friend (me). Hence, I was re-introduced to the art world doing little ink zombie erotica drawings. That was the start of something awesome, a fun opportunity that grew from there. (Including further creative projects with Jaym, Erika, and John over the past few years.)

Do you have any rituals or routines that you get into before you start producing art? What’s an average creative day for you like? Is there a different process for doing something for Lightspeed?

When I illustrate short stories, the first thing I do is read the story with a highlighter, marking all the phrases and lines that catch my imagination. I’m looking for key details that might be pivotal to the illustrations (i.e., a description of the character or location), but more often than not, I’m looking for the feel or the symbol of the story. The little poetic elements that put a hook in me. [Note: You can view all of Galen’s Lightspeed illustrations here: lightspeedmagazine.com/tag/illustrated-by-galen-dara —ed.]

That’s ambiguous, I know, but the bottom line I’m aiming for is a marked up story and a jumping off point. Then I start finding my reference imagery. Looking for a color scheme, looking at how other artists have handled similar ideas, looking for just plain old photo reference so I can draw things more accurately (I take a lot of my own reference too, if I’m trying to nail a particular pose, etc.). And then I just have to jump in and start drawing (digitally, with a Wacom tablet). I have an idea of what I’m aiming for, but once I start drawing it takes on a life of its own and usually begins to boss me around a bit. I’ve learned to just trust this process; if I fight back too much I just end up with a mess. Sometimes I end up with a mess anyways, and have to start from scratch. It happens. My average creative day? Hehehe, well, it usually involves desperately trying to cram as much drawing time as I can in and around my family’s schedule. I aim for 6 hrs a day. I long for more, sometimes get it, but take whatever scraps I can.

What’s your favorite work you produced? What’s your favorite by someone else?

I’m always aiming to make my new favorite piece, but I really like the one I did recently for Aidan Doyle’s Lightspeed story, “Ghost River Red.” And, hmmm, my favorite by someone else? That’s hard, that’s always changing too. I haven’t mentioned James Jean yet, he is incredibly diverse, and I love all of his work.

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.

My Wife Hates Time Travel
Adam-Troy Castro

From the very beginning—which I guess is also the middle and the end if you follow the bent logic involved and arrange events by some scheme other than strict chronological order—there was never any way of knowing which one of us, my wife or myself, was going to invent time travel. Neither one of us was a physicist, theoretical or applied; we weren’t even qualified for rewiring the wall sockets or fixing the dead laptop. As far as life skills were concerned, I had a little more imagination and she had a little more practicality. She did more of the household repairs and I did more of the heavy lifting. That was it. Neither one of us seemed equipped to completely rewrite the laws of space and time, and before we found out that it’s what we were fated to do, neither of us had ever particularly included it among our ambitions.

Before we found out that one of us was fated to invent time travel, my wife always had a little more antipathy toward the premise than I did. Whenever we sat on the couch watching some show where somebody traveled into his personal past and intersected with his past self in some way that either rewrote his personal history or somehow cemented his pre-existing destiny in place, I was always the one who thought it cool and my wife was always the one who complained that it made her head hurt. She had no head for paradoxes. Whenever she encountered one of those narrative Möebius Strips, she always winced and declared that time travel made no sense.

Since finding out that one of us was going to invent time travel, we’ve argued almost nonstop over the likely suspect. I foolishly concluded in her hearing that it was going to be me. She read this as me calling myself smarter than her. Maybe she was right. I had to apologize for condescending. Then I said it was probably her and she got mad again, because it blamed her for everything that’s happened since. Sometimes I think that if I had a working time machine now I’d go back and warn my prior self that it’s not an argument worth having, that I’m fated to be wrong whatever position I take. Then I realize that believing it desirable to tinker with the small mistakes and larger heartbreaks of one’s past is precisely the kind of messed-up thinking that has made our current lives, the lives before we create time travel, such a parade of hellish interruptions.

This much we’ve agreed on. Since we’re both fairly bright but not world-class geniuses, the secret to time travel has to be fairly simple, the kind of thing so obvious in retrospect that it just gets overlooked until somebody woolgathering about something else entirely makes a connection nobody has ever made before, slaps his forehead, and cries, “Eureka!” That could turn out to be either one of us. We’re not brilliant, but we’re both Eureka prone. Maybe in some versions of the future it was her and in other versions it was me and in still other versions it was both of us collaborating, maybe on one of those long drives where there’s nothing but us and the highway, heading toward my in-laws, or hers.

It all seemed to depend upon where we were or what we were doing when we invented time travel, but some of the future versions of ourselves who came back to us gave the impression that they were hiding the invention from the other. They certainly each did whatever they could to keep the other one in line. There was one version of my wife hailing from about twenty years in the future who popped in all shimmering the way they do, while the current version of my wife was home alone and on her hands and knees looking for an earring that had come loose and bounced somewhere she couldn’t find it. The future version of my wife told my current one that in her timeline it had been considered lost for seven months and only found by accident much later. The trick, the future version of my wife said, was that it hadn’t skittered underneath anything, as my current wife believed, but had unpredictably bounced in another direction entirely, and neatly hooked itself on the wire framework of a statuette in the corner. It was the kind of hiding place a small inanimate object like an earring could not have found for itself unless it had been deliberately trying. The only way the current version of my wife ever would have found it—had the future version of her not interfered—would have been to dust the statue for the fortieth time since the incident and for the very first time ever, register the telltale clink.

None of this would have been even worth mentioning had I not walked in the door at that moment, seen the two versions of my wife together, and said hello to both of them . . . at which point, the one from the future cried out in sudden fear and disappeared. We had no idea why that future version of my wife would be afraid of me, and her little cry was a sore subject between the current version of my wife and myself until a version of me from some future where men wear an entire ring of differently-patterned cloth ties, hanging from both the front and back of their collars, showed up after dinner to say we shouldn’t worry about the reasons, because a further future version of me had intervened and talked the offending future me out of doing whatever horrible thing he had done.

Unfortunately, the time-traveling version of me telling us this blinked out and another future version of my wife blinked in, holding a glittery crystal gun on me and telling the current version of herself that she shouldn’t listen to him because he was “in on it” and “as dangerous as the rest of them.”

Then multiple future versions of myself and multiple future versions of my wife all shimmered into existence and charged each other with an array of weaponry that included energy weapons, electrified whips, and scimitars.

This is just the kind of thing that happens multiple times a day, since my wife and I found out that one of us would someday invent time travel.

We learned that there was only one way to get a few moments of peace whenever the chaos of being the future inventors of time travel got too apocalyptic or complicated, and that was to concentrate real hard and promise ourselves that if we ever did invent time travel, we would pledge our first journey into the past to going back to that moment and talking ourselves out of it. Just the threat of that was always enough to erase all the future timelines these versions of ourselves came from and make them shimmer away to nonexistence. It wasn’t a permanent solution, ever, because even if that moment of sublime invention was erased it just meant that one or the other of us would still experience the same brainstorm an hour or a day or a week later, starting the age of time travel all over again. Sometimes the two of us cleared the room with the “I’m going to erase any timeline where I create time travel” bomb, only to have another unwanted drop-in show up a few seconds later and say, “Don’t worry, I’m not staying; I just wanted to let you know that you did the right thing, because those guys were out of control.”

Being the future inventors of time travel wasn’t all bad, of course. It was great to know that we’d never lose anything, never go to a movie that turned out to be a stinker, never buy a book we wouldn’t want to finish, never go out to a restaurant where the service was lousy, and never get stuck in a traffic jam, because we’d always be warned away, beforehand. It was terrific to have some future version of myself pop in just as I was about to irritate my wife with some inconsiderate comment and tell me, “It would be a really bad idea to say that.” It was convenient to have some shimmery future-me pop in and say, “Move that coffee cup away from the edge of the table, if you don’t want it to spill.” It was helpful, though annoying, to have some future version of myself pop in and grab the TV remote from my hands with a contemptuous, “I’ve seen that already, and it sucks.”

No, where it really got annoying, and what drove both of us to shouted declarations that we wouldn’t invent time travel ever, were the is-now-the-right-time-to-have-sex debates. We’d lie in bed at night, drawing close in what might or might not have developed into lovemaking, only to hear the telltale pop of displaced air and see the dazzling glow of arriving time travelers, and have some future version of my wife say, “No, not tonight, trust us, tonight’s a bad idea,” while some future version of myself contributed, “Don’t listen to her, she’s lying.” Then some future version of my wife would pop in, with wild eyes and fried just-stuck-her-finger-in-a-light bulb-socket hair, and shout, “No, you have to! I come from a ruined world! You have to fuck right now!” Then a version of myself with half his face replaced with a gleaming silver mask and one eye turned into some kind of targeting laser would pop in behind her and start chanting “Annihilate, Annihilate.” And they would all start shouting to be heard over one another, and my wife and I would both shout at them to get the hell out of our bedroom, and they would all say that the stakes here were critical and we would say that as far as we were both concerned there would never be any such thing as time travel and that was final, and they would all vanish into nothingness, and there’d be a moment or two of abashed silence before the shimmering resumed and a version of my wife dressed in diaphanous silk and sporting a head as bald as a melon would pop into existence to inform us that the futures we’d just been warned about had all been narrowly averted by our swift action, but that we should both, now, not eat any radishes. And then she’d disappear and an aged version of me, wearing coke-bottle eyeglasses, would appear in her place to assure us that it was now perfectly safe for my wife and I to touch one another, at least for the next twenty minutes, though there’d be some problems with the economy of Peru if we allowed ourselves to become at all frisky afterward. By which point, seriously, who could still be in the mood?

Sometimes we try to avoid them. We once had a lot of cash on hand thanks to a six-week run of grand prizes on Powerball, so every couple of weeks we packed up enough for a week’s trip and hit the road. But our future selves always remembered every trip we’d ever taken, and were always certain we’d still need their help bringing about the destinies they preferred. We’d find ourselves in traffic jams that were entirely made up of cars from possible futures, ranging from gleaming hovercraft to heavily-weaponed monstrosities cobbled together out of post-nuclear wreckage. The road was overpopulated with versions of ourselves, shouting at us through portholes. And it wasn’t just cars: We encountered caveman selves in leopard skins, riding bareback on tamed Apatosauri, zombie selves lurching toward the horizon in search of human flesh, and impossibly-mutated selves who were nothing but giant heads riding about on floating disks. Every five miles we’d have to yell, “That’s it! We’re not going to invent time travel!” just to clear the road so we could make a few miles before they started to multiply again. Eventually, we turned around and went home, because the possibility of us actually ever getting anywhere on this trip had descended to just about nil.

Once, and only once, we got as far as a bed and breakfast nestled against a mirrored lake, far from any city noise or temporal paradoxes: there was no phone, no internet, and no other guests, the atmosphere as close to perfection as any we’d ever known. We strolled along the shoreline, holding hands and saying nothing, pausing as the sun dipped below the trees and the smooth unrippled surface of the water cast a sheen of golden light over the world. No time traveler interceded. Daring to hope, we returned to the room, built a fire, and nestled together with flutes of champagne, talking about how wonderful it was to have finally found a spot where we could be alone. We kissed, and nuzzled, and nature took its course, and as we made love for the first time in weeks I was not deterred, but rather pleasantly slowed, by the lingering fear that every moment’s uninterrupted perfection would be the last. It was impossible to completely avoid the suspicion that just as we approached the big moment the telltale pops of air displacement would erupt on all sides of us and we would find ourselves inundated by shouted advice from future selves intent on informing us that we should do this and not that. But the time travelers left us alone even as we shuddered together and giggled in mutual appreciation. And then my wife went off to the bathroom, and slipped on the bath mat, and came down hard on the rim of the tub, breaking her femur.

We couldn’t get rid of the time travelers after that. The emergency room filled with them. They took all the chairs, lined up ten-deep in the hallways, and hung from the walls using suction cups. Tinier ones, from some future capable of human miniaturization, jostled for space on our armrests, or clustered together on our scalps, imitating the sensation of lice. According to them, permitting my wife’s accident had been the chronometer’s equivalent of tough love. “See?” they told us. “See what kind of trouble you can get into if we don’t interfere? See how you can get hurt? See how our superior knowledge is missed the moment it’s not available to you?” I cursed them and vowed again and again to never invent time travel, a threat that has always kept them down to manageable numbers but never solved the problem. My wife looked at me and said words she had uttered a thousand times before, and would a thousand times again: “I hate time travel. I hate it. Hate hate hate hate hate it.”

That night I walked out of the hospital and stood under the stars and addressed the infinite number of future selves who were no doubt listening, from their bunkers or their pods or habitats. I said, “You know, for once, I don’t care what the rewards are. I don’t care what disasters await. I don’t care what information I need to impart to my past self. I don’t care if telling you people to go away has never worked before. This time I mean it more than I ever meant anything before, even more than I meant telling my wife I loved her or asking her to marry me or anything like that. This is still the life that I chose and the very point of life is living it, day by day, encountering every new chapter as it’s written. If that means some terrible catastrophe takes me by surprise, tomorrow, so be it; if that means we miss yet another lottery win or fail to move away from the East Coast just before the big tsunami then so be it; then so be that. You’re making life not worth living. If you have any respect for us, which is another way of saying any respect for yourselves, then for God’s sake please, please, please, either don’t invent time travel or go visit Shakespeare or play golf with trilobites or watch the Earth fall into the Sun and leave us the fuck alone.”

Even as I spoke the words I really didn’t expect that to be the end of it, but a cold empty wind blew across the parking lot and I found myself looking up, in awe and terror, at a universe folding in on itself. I had read a story once—not a time travel story—that ended with the stars blinking out even as the narrator watched, and this was like that, except worse; it wasn’t just the stars going out but the very idea of the stars going out, not just the actual physical entities being reduced to nothing but the physics that rendered them possible as well. I looked down at my hand and it had become like a two-dimensional drawing of a hand from some anatomy textbook, the cross-hatching that gave it the illusion of depth disappearing even as I watched. Distant buildings became block drawings and the horizon became a straight line, its ends contracting as they raced toward a single point in the middle. I further felt the flattening process taking place inside me and knew that either my wife or I inventing time travel was in some way centrally important to the existence of the universe as a whole, perhaps because one of our future travels would be to the moment of creation itself, perhaps enabling it to happen. I knew that if I did not rescind my words I would be damning all of existence to oblivion. And I must confess that, for a few seconds, as the universe packed itself away like an unwanted toy, I considered all the problems this would solve and was sorely tempted to let it happen. But then sanity prevailed and I sighed and said, “Oh, all right. Invent time travel for all I care. And until we do invent it, feel free to visit us anytime you want. I welcome your input.”

The result was as dramatic as it might have been if I’d said, “Let there be light.” The universe unfolded itself again, with an audible boing and several additional colors. You only think “orange” has been around all your life. It hasn’t been. Why would there be a color that doesn’t rhyme with anything? There wasn’t. There just is, now. Australia’s new, too; I don’t know what my wife and I might have done at some point in prehistory to make Australia happen, but it has, and now we all have to live with it.

Right now my wife has gone out on an errand, the same errand she has been stopped from carrying out for five days, by various dire warnings from future epochs. I stand on the roof and follow the progress of her journey across town from the various mutations I detect in the skyline: the two-story buildings that suddenly expand by fifty stories, the skyscrapers that suddenly become smoking craters, the mushroom clouds that threaten to blow the entire city away but that disappear only to be replaced by gleaming metallic spires. My wife is out there, somewhere, in all of that, her appearance changing constantly as time traveling versions of herself alter her past decisions to make her blonde, brunette, purple-haired, tattooed, tanned to lizard texture, anorexic, obese, hooded, naked, paraplegic, gymnastic, sumo, thin-lipped, botoxed, dressed in rags, dressed in furs, happy, sad, angry, fed-up, borderline insane, followed by a thousand cats, or attended by her own robot butler; everything about her changing at every moment and everything about her staying the same as she cries the words that have become her mantra: “I hate time travel!” I know she wants to be the one to invent it because she also wants to be the one who’s clever, but I also know that part of her has always secretly blamed me, because it’s such an annoying invention and anything that inconveniences her to such a degree cannot possibly be only hers. I also know it may have been a terrible mistake to let her go alone, because without me being there to track every single change she undergoes between now and then, or her being at my side to witness every single matching change I undergo at the same time, there’s no guarantee that we’ll recognize each other when she returns.

I only know this, and perhaps, at long last, this is the point. In all her incarnations, my wife hates time travel; in most of her incarnations, she loves me; in all of my incarnations, I love her. I didn’t need the threat of nonexistence for all of space-time to know that she was at the center of it all, because I knew it from the day we met. Even if we were only blessed with one timeline and no ability to change it and no guarantee of a far stranger future, she would still be capable of surprising me, still capable of dazzling me with her infinite variety. She is the one who carries me from one day to the next, and provides both with a point.

I would never have the nerve to speak these words to her out loud, because she hates time travel so much and would not appreciate the comparison, but: She is my time machine, the vehicle which has carried me from bland and empty past to rich and delightful future. I cannot take credit for inventing her. But I bless the mysterious forces that have.

© 2012 Adam-Troy Castro

Adam-Troy Castro’s books include Emissaries from the Dead (winner of the Philip K. Dick award), and The Third Claw of God, both of which feature his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator, Andrea Cort. His latest books are a series of middle-school novels about the adventures of a strange young boy called Gustav Gloom, the first of which is Gustav Gloom and the People Taker, which came out from Grossett and Dunlap in August 2012. His short fiction has been nominated for six Nebulas, two Hugos, and three Stokers. Adam-Troy, who describes the odd hyphen between his first and middle names as a typo from his college newspaper that was just annoying enough to embrace with gusto, lives in Miami with his wife Judi (who really does hate time travel) and a population of insane cats that includes Harley Quinn, Uma Furman, and Meow Farrow.

The Streets of Ashkelon
Harry Harrison

Somewhere above, hidden by the eternal clouds of Wesker’s World, a thunder rumbled and grew. Trader Garth stopped suddenly when he heard it, his boots sinking slowly into the muck, and cupped his good ear to catch the sound. It swelled and waned in the thick atmosphere, growing louder.

“That noise is the same as the noise of your sky-ship,” Itin said, with stolid Wesker logicality, slowly pulverizing the idea in his mind and turning over the bits one by one for closer examination. “But your ship is still sitting where you landed it. It must be, even though we cannot see it, because you are the only one who can operate it. And even if anyone else could operate it we would have heard it rising into the sky. Since we did not, and if this sound is a sky-ship sound, then it must mean—”

“Yes, another ship,” Garth said, too absorbed in his own thoughts to wait for the laborious Weskerian chains of logic to clank their way through to the end. Of course it was another spacer, it had been only a matter of time before one appeared, and undoubtedly this one was homing on the S.S radar reflector as he had done. His own ship would show up clearly on the newcomer’s screen and they would probably set down as close to it as they could.

“You better go ahead, Itin,” he said. “Use the water so you can get to the village quickly. Tell everyone to get back into the swamps, well clear of the hard ground. That ship is landing on instruments and anyone underneath at touchdown is going to be cooked.”

This immediate threat was clear enough to the little Wesker amphibian. Before Garth had finished speaking Itin’s ribbed ears had folded like a bat’s wings and he slipped silently into the nearby canal. Garth squelched on through the mud, making as good time as he could over the clinging surface. He had just reached the fringes of the village clearing when the rumbling grew to a head-splitting roar and the spacer broke through the low-hanging layer of clouds above. Garth shielded his eyes from the down-reaching tongue of flame and examined the growing form of the gray-black ship with mixed feelings.

After almost a standard year on Wesker’s World he had to fight down a longing for human companionship of any kind. While this buried fragment of herd-spirit chattered for the rest of the monkey tribe, his trader’s mind was busily drawing a line under a column of figures and adding up the total. This could very well be another trader’s ship, and if it was his monopoly of the Wesker’s trade was at an end. Then again, this might not be a trader at all, which was the reason he stayed in the shelter of the giant fern and loosened his gun in its holster. The ship baked dry a hundred square meters of mud, the roaring blast died, and the landing feet crunched down through the crackling crust. Metal creaked and settled into place while the cloud of smoke and steam slowly drifted lower in the humid air.

“Garth—you native-cheating extortionist—where are you?” the ship’s speaker boomed. The lines of the spacer had looked only slightly familiar, but there was no mistaking the rasping tones of that voice. Garth had a twisted smile when he stepped out into the open and whistled shrilly through two fingers. A directional microphone ground out of its casing on the ship’s fin and turned in his direction.

“What are you doing here, Singh?” he shouted towards the mike. “Too crooked to find a planet of your own and have to come here to steal an honest trader’s profits?”

“Honest!” the amplified voice roared. “This from the man who has been in more jails than cathouses—and that a goodly number in itself, I do declare. Sorry, friend of my youth, but I cannot join you in exploiting this aboriginal pesthole. I am on course to a more fairly atmosphered world where a fortune is waiting to be made. I only stopped here since an opportunity presented, to turn an honest credit by running a taxi service. I bring you friendship, the perfect companionship, a man in a different line of business who might help you in yours. I’d come out and say hello myself, except I would have to decon for biologicals. I’m cycling the passenger through the lock so I hope you won’t mind helping with his luggage.”

At least there would be no other trader on the planet now, that worry was gone. But Garth still wondered what sort of passenger would be taking one-way passage to an undeveloped world. And what was behind that concealed hint of merriment in Singh’s voice? He walked around to the far side of the spacer where the ramp had dropped, and looked up at the man in the cargo lock who was wrestling ineffectually with a large crate. The man turned towards him and Garth saw the clerical dog-collar and knew just what it was Singh had been chuckling about.

“What are you doing here?” Garth asked, and in spite of his attempt at self-control he snapped the words. If the man noticed this he ignored it, because he was still smiling and putting out his hand as he came down the ramp.

“Father Mark,” he said, “of the Missionary Society of Brothers. I’m very pleased to meet—”

“I said what are you doing here.” Garth’s voice was under control now, quiet and cold. He knew what had to be done, and it must be done quickly or not at all.

“That should be obvious,” Father Mark said, his good nature still unruffled. “Our missionary society has raised funds to send spiritual emissaries to alien worlds for the first time. I was lucky enough—”

“Take your luggage and get back into the ship. You’re not wanted here—and have no permission to land. You’ll be a liability and there is no one on Wesker’s World to take care of you. Get back into the ship.”

“I don’t know who you are sir, or why you are lying to me,” the priest said. He was still calm but the smile was gone. “But I have studied galactic law and the history of this planet very well. There are no diseases or beasts here that I should have any particular fear of. It is also an open planet, and until the Space Survey changes that status I have as much right to be here as you do.”

The man was of course right, but Garth couldn’t let him know that. He had been bluffing, hoping the priest didn’t know his rights. But he did. There was only one distasteful course left for him, and he had better do it while there was still time.

“Get back in that ship,” he shouted, not hiding his anger now. With a smooth motion his gun was out of the holster and the pitted black muzzle only inches from the priest’s stomach. The man’s face turned white, but he did not move.

“What the hell are you doing, Garth?!” Singh’s shocked voice grated from the speaker. “The guy paid his fare and you have no rights at all to throw him off the planet.”

“I have this right,” Garth said, raising his gun and sighting between the priest’s eyes. “I give him thirty seconds to get back aboard the ship or I pull the trigger.”

“Well, I think you are either off your head or playing a joke,” Singh’s exasperated voice rasped down at them. “If it is a joke, it is in bad taste. But either way you’re not getting away with it. Two can play at that game—only I can play it better.”

There was the rumble of heavy bearings and the remote-controlled four-gun turret on the ship’s side rotated and pointed at Garth. “Now—down gun and give Father Mark a hand with the luggage,” the speaker commanded, a trace of humor back in the voice now. “As much as I would like to help, Old Friend, I cannot. I feel it is time you had a chance to talk to the father; after all, I have had the opportunity of speaking with him all the way from Earth.”

Garth jammed the gun back into the holster with an acute feeling of loss. Father Mark stepped forward, the winning smile back now and a Bible, taken from a pocket of his robe, in his raised hand. “My son—” he said.

“I’m not your son,” was all Garth could choke out as the bitterness and defeat welled up within him. His fist drew back as the anger rose, and the best he could do was open the fist so he struck only with the flat of his hand. Still the blow sent the priest crashing to the ground and hurled the white pages of the book splattering into the thick mud.

Itin and the other Weskers had watched everything with seemingly emotionless interest. Garth made no attempt to answer their unspoken questions. He started towards his house, but turned back when he saw they were still unmoving.

“A new man has come,” he told them. “He will need help with the things he has brought. If he doesn’t have any place for them, you can put them in the big warehouse until he has a place of his own.”

He watched them waddle across the clearing towards the ship, then went inside and gained a certain satisfaction from slamming the door hard enough to crack one of the panes. There was an equal amount of painful pleasure in breaking out one of the remaining bottles of Irish whiskey that he had been saving for a special occasion. Well this was special enough, though not really what he had had in mind. The whiskey was good and burned away some of the bad taste in his mouth, but not all of it. If his tactics had worked, success would have justified everything. But he had failed and in addition to the pain of failure there was the acute feeling that he had made a horse’s ass out of himself. Singh had blasted off without any goodbyes. There was no telling what sense he had made of the whole matter, though he would surely carry some strange stories back to the trader’s lodge. Well, that could be worried about the next time Garth signed in. Right now he had to go about setting things right with the missionary. Squinting out through the rain he saw the man struggling to erect a collapsible tent while the entire population of the village stood in ordered ranks and watched. Naturally none of them offered to help.

By the time the tent was up and the crates and boxes stowed inside it the rain had stopped. The level of fluid in the bottle was a good bit lower and Garth felt more like facing up to the unavoidable meeting. In truth, he was looking forward to talking to the man. This whole nasty business aside, after an entire solitary year any human companionship looked good. Will you join me now for dinner? John Garth, he wrote on the back of an old invoice. But maybe the guy was too frightened to come? Which was no way to start any kind of relationship. Rummaging under the bunk, he found a box that was big enough and put his pistol inside. Itin was of course waiting outside the door when he opened it, since this was his tour as Knowledge Collector. He handed him the note and box.

“Would you take these to the new man,” he said.

“Is the new man’s name New Man?” Itin asked.

“No, it’s not!” Garth snapped. “His name is Mark. But I’m only asking you to deliver this, not get involved in conversation.”

As always when he lost his temper, the literal-minded Weskers won the round. “You are not asking for conversation,” Itin said slowly, “but Mark may ask for conversation. And others will ask me his name; if I do not know his na—”

The voice cut off as Garth slammed the door. This didn’t work in the long run either because next time he saw Itin—a day, a week, or even a month later—the monologue would be picked up on the very word it had ended and the thought rambled out to its last frayed end. Garth cursed under his breath and poured water over a pair of the tastier concentrates that he had left.

“Come in,” he said when there was a quiet knock on the door. The priest entered and held out the box with the gun.

“Thank you for the loan, Mr. Garth, I appreciate the spirit that made you send it. I have no idea of what caused the unhappy affair when I landed, but I think it would be best forgotten if we are going to be on this planet together for any length of time.”

“Drink?” Garth asked, taking the box and pointing to the bottle on the table. He poured two glasses full and handed one to the priest. “That’s about what I had in mind, but I still owe you an explanation of what happened out there.” He scowled into his glass for a second, then raised it to the other man. “It’s a big universe and I guess we have to make out as best we can. Here’s to Sanity.”

“God be with you,” Father Mark said, and raised his glass as well. “Not with me or with this planet,” Garth said firmly. “And that’s the crux of the matter.” He half-drained the glass and sighed.

“Do you say that to shock me?” the priest asked with a smile. “I assure you that it doesn’t.”

“Not intended to shock. I meant it quite literally. I suppose I’m what you would call an atheist, so revealed religion is no concern of mine. While these natives, simple and unlettered Stone Age types that they are, have managed to come this far with no superstitions or traces of deism whatsoever. I had hoped that they might continue that way.”

“What are you saying?” The priest frowned. “Do you mean they have no gods, no belief in the hereafter? They must die . . . ?”

“Die they do, and to dust returneth. Like the rest of the animals. They have thunder, trees, and water without having thunder-gods, tree sprites, or water nymphs. They have no ugly little gods, taboos, or spells to hag-ride and limit their lives. They are the only primitive people I have ever encountered that are completely free of superstition and appear to be much happier and sane because of it. I just wanted to keep them that way.”

“You wanted to keep them from God—from salvation?” The priest’s eyes widened and he recoiled slightly.

“No,” Garth said. “I wanted to keep them from superstition until they knew more and could think about it realistically without being absorbed and perhaps destroyed by it.”

“You’re being insulting to the Church, sir, to equate it with superstition . . .”

“Please,” Garth said, raising his hand. “No theological arguments. I don’t think your society footed the bill for this trip just to attempt to convert me. Just accept the fact that my beliefs have been arrived at through careful thought over a period of years, and no amount of undergraduate metaphysics will change them. I’ll promise not to try and convert you—if you will do the same for me.”

“Agreed, Mr. Garth. As you have reminded me, my mission here is to save these souls, and that is what I must do. But why should my work disturb you so much that you try and keep me from landing? Even threaten me with your gun, and—” The priest broke off and looked into his glass.

“And even slug you?” Garth asked, suddenly frowning. “There was no excuse for that, and I would like to say that I’m sorry. Plain bad manners and an even worse temper. Live alone long enough and you find yourself doing that kind of thing.” He brooded down at his big hands where they lay on the table, reading memories into the scars and calluses patterned there. “Let’s just call it frustration, for lack of a better word. In your business you must have had a lot of chances to peep into the darker places in men’s minds and you should know a bit about motives and happiness. I have had too busy a life to ever consider settling down and raising a family, and right up until recently I never missed it. Maybe leakage radiation is softening up my brain, but I had begun to think of these furry and fishy Weskers as being a little like my own children, that I was somehow responsible to them.”

“We are all His children,” Father Mark said quietly.

“Well, here are some of His children that can’t even imagine His existence,” Garth said, suddenly angry at himself for allowing gentler emotions to show through. Yet he forgot himself at once, leaning forward with the intensity of his feelings. “Can’t you realize the importance of this? Live with these Weskers a while and you will discover a simple and happy life that matches the state of grace you people are always talking about. They get pleasure from their lives—and cause no one pain. By circumstances they have evolved on an almost barren world, so have never had a chance to grow out of a physical Stone Age culture. But mentally they are our match—or perhaps better. They have all learned my language so I can easily explain the many things they want to know. Knowledge and the gaining of knowledge gives them real satisfaction. They tend to be exasperating at times because every new fact must be related to the structure of all other things, but the more they learn the faster this process becomes. Someday they are going to be man’s equal in every way, perhaps surpass us. If—would you do me a favor?”

“Whatever I can.”

“Leave them alone. Or teach them if you must—history and science, philosophy, law, anything that will help them face the realities of the greater universe they never even knew existed before. But don’t confuse them with your hatreds and pain, guilt, sin, and punishment. Who knows the harm—”

“You are being insulting, sir!” the priest said, jumping to his feet. The top of his grey head barely came to the massive spaceman’s chin, yet he showed no fear in defending what he believed. Garth, standing now himself, was no longer the penitent. They faced each other in anger, as men have always stood, unbending in the defense of that which they think right.

“Yours is the insult,” Garth shouted. “The incredible egotism to feel that your derivative little mythology, differing only slightly from the thousands of others that still burden men, can do anything but confuse their still fresh minds. Don’t you realize that they believe in truth—and have never heard of such a thing as a lie? They have not been trained yet to understand that other kinds of minds can think differently from theirs. Will you spare them this . . . ?”

“I will do my duty which is His will, Mr. Garth. These are God’s creatures here, and they have souls. I cannot shirk my duty, which is to bring them His word so that they may be saved and enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

When the priest opened the door the wind caught it and blew it wide. He vanished into the storm-swept darkness and the door swung back and forth and a splatter of raindrops blew in. Garth’s boots left muddy footprints when he closed the door, shutting out the sight of Itin sitting patiently and uncomplaining in the storm, hoping only that Garth might stop for a moment and leave with him some of the wonderful knowledge of which he had so much.

By unspoken consent that first night was never mentioned again. After a few days of loneliness, made worse because each knew of the other’s proximity, they found themselves talking on carefully neutral grounds. Garth slowly packed and stowed away his stock and never admitted that his work was finished and he could leave at any time. He had a fair amount of interesting drugs and botanicals that would fetch a good price. And the Wesker artifacts were sure to create a sensation in the sophisticated galactic market. Crafts on the planet here had been limited before his arrival, mostly pieces of carving painfully chipped into the hard wood with fragments of stone. He had supplied tools and a stock of raw metal from his own supplies, nothing more than that. In a few months the Weskers had not only learned to work with the new materials, but had translated their own designs and forms into the most alien—but most beautiful—artifacts that he had ever seen. All he had to do was release these on the market to create a primary demand, then return for a new supply. The Weskers wanted only books and tools and knowledge in return, and through their own efforts he knew they would pull themselves into the galactic union.

This is what Garth had hoped. But a wind of change was blowing through the settlement that had grown up around his ship. No longer was he the center of attention and focal point of the village life. He had to grin when he thought of his fall from power; yet there was very little humor in the smile. Serious and attentive Weskers still took turns of duty as Knowledge Collectors, but their recording of dry facts was in sharp contrast to the intellectual hurricane that surrounded the priest.

Where Garth had made them work for each book and machine, the priest gave freely. Garth had tried to be progressive in his supply of knowledge, treating them as bright but unlettered children. He had wanted them to walk before they could run, to master one step before going on to the next.

Father Mark simply brought them the benefits of Christianity. The only physical work he required was the construction of a church, a place of worship and learning. More Weskers had appeared out of the limitless planetary swamps and within days the roof was up, supported on a framework of poles. Each morning the congregation worked a little while on the walls, then hurried inside to learn the all-promising, all-encompassing, all-important facts about the universe.

Garth never told the Weskers what he thought about their new interest, and this was mainly because they had never asked him. Pride or honor stood in the way of his grabbing a willing listener and pouring out his grievances. Perhaps it would have been different if Itin was on Collecting duty, he was the brightest of the lot, but Itin had been rotated the day after the priest had arrived and Garth had not talked to him since.

It was a surprise then when after seventeen of the trebly-long Wesker days, he found a delegation at his doorstep when he emerged after breakfast. Itin was their spokesman, and his mouth was open slightly. Many of the other Weskers had their mouths open as well, one even appearing to be yawning, clearly revealing the double row of sharp teeth and the purple-black throat. The mouths impressed Garth as to the seriousness of the meeting: this was the one Wesker expression he had learned to recognize. An open mouth indicated some strong emotion: happiness, sadness, anger, he could never be really sure which. The Weskers were normally placid and he had never seen enough open mouths to tell what was causing them. But he was surrounded by them now.

“Will you help us, Garth?” Itin said. “We have a question.”

“I’ll answer any questions you ask,” Garth said, with more than a hint of misgiving. “What is it?”

“Is there a God?”

“What do you mean by ‘God’?” Garth asked in turn. What should he tell them? What had been going on in their minds that they should come to him with this question?

“God is our Father in Heaven, who made us all and protects us. Whom we pray to for aid, and if we are Saved will find a place—”

“That’s enough,” Garth said. “There is no God.”

All of them had their mouths open now, even Itin, as they looked at Garth and thought about his answer. The rows of pink teeth would have been frightening if he hadn’t known these creatures so well. For one instant he wondered if perhaps they had been already indoctrinated and looked upon him as a heretic, but he brushed the thought away.

“Thank you,” Itin said, and they turned and left.

Though the morning was still cool, Garth noticed that he was sweating and wondered why.

The reaction was not long in coming. Itin returned that same afternoon. “Will you come to the church?” he asked. “Many of the things that we study are difficult to learn, but none as difficult as this. We need your help because we must hear you and Father Mark talk together. This is because he says one thing is true and you say another is true and both cannot be true at the same time. We must find out what is true.”

“I’ll come, of course,” Garth said, trying to hide the sudden feeling of elation. He had done nothing, but the Weskers had come to him anyway. There could still be grounds for hope that they might yet be free.

It was hot inside the church, and Garth was surprised at the number of Weskers who were there, more than he had seen gathered at any one time before. There were many open mouths. Father Mark sat at a table covered with books. He looked unhappy but didn’t say anything when Garth came in. Garth spoke first.

“I hope you realize this is their idea—that they came to me of their own free will and asked me to come here?”

“I know that,” the priest said resignedly. “At times they can be very difficult. But they are learning and want to believe, and that is what is important.”

“Father Mark, Trader Garth, we need your help,” Itin said. “You both know many things that we do not know. You must help us come to religion, which is not an easy thing to do.” Garth started to say something, then changed his mind. Itin went on. “We have read the bibles and all the books that Father Mark gave us, and one thing is clear. We have discussed this and we are all agreed. These books are very different from the ones that Trader Garth gave us. In Trader Garth’s books there is the universe which we have not seen, and it goes on without God, for He is mentioned nowhere, we have searched very carefully. In Father Mark’s books He is everywhere and nothing can go without Him. One of these must be right and the other must be wrong. We do not know how this can be, but after we find out which is right then perhaps we will know. If God does not exist . . .”

“Of course He exists, my children,” Father Mark said in a voice of heartfelt intensity. “He is our Father in Heaven who has created us all . . .”

“Who created God?” Itin asked and the murmur ceased and every one of the Weskers watched Father Mark intensely. He recoiled a bit under the impact of their eyes, then smiled.

“Nothing created God, since He is the Creator. He always was—”

“If He always was in existence—why cannot the universe have always been in existence? Without having had a creator?” Itin broke in with a rush of words. The importance of the question was obvious. The priest answered slowly, with infinite patience.

“Would that the answers were that simple, my children. But even the scientists do not agree about the creation of the universe. While they doubt—we who have seen the light know. We can see the miracle of creation all about us. And how can there be a creation without a Creator? That is He, our Father, our God in Heaven. I know you have doubts and that is because you have souls and free will. Still the answer is simple. Have faith, that is all you need. Just believe.”

“How can we believe without proof?”

“If you cannot see that this world itself is proof of His existence, then I say to you that belief needs no proof—if you have faith!”

A babble of voices arose in the room and more of the Wesker mouths were open now as they tried to force their thoughts through the tangled skein of words and separate the thread of truth.

“Can you tell us, Garth?” Itin asked, and the sound of his voice quieted the hubbub.

“I can tell you to use the scientific method which can examine all things—including itself—and give you answers that can prove the truth or falsity of any statement.”

“That is what we must do,” Itin said. “We had reached the same conclusion.” He held a thick book before him and a ripple of nods ran across the watchers. “We have been studying the Bible as Father Mark told us to do, and we have found the answer. God will make a miracle for us, thereby proving that He is watching us. And by this sign we will know Him and go to Him.”

“This is a sign of false pride,” Father Mark said. “God needs no miracles to prove His existence.”

“But we need a miracle!” Itin shouted, and though he wasn’t human there was still the cry of need in his voice. “We have read here of many smaller miracles, loaves, fishes, wine, snakes—many of them, for much smaller reasons. Now all He need do is make a miracle and He will bring us all to Him—the wonder of an entire new world worshiping at His throne, as you have told us, Father Mark. And you have told us how important this is. We have discussed this and find that there is only one miracle that is best for this kind of thing.”

His boredom and amused interest in the incessant theological wrangling drained from Garth in an instant. He had not been really thinking or he would have realized where all this was leading. By turning slightly he could see the illustration in the Bible where Itin held it open, and knew in advance what picture it was. He rose slowly from his chair, as if stretching, and turned to the priest behind him.

“Get ready!” he whispered. “Get out the back and get to the ship, I’ll keep them busy here. I don’t think they’ll harm—”

“What do you mean . . . ?” Father Mark asked, blinking in surprise.

“Get out, you fool!” Garth hissed. “What miracle do you think they mean? What miracle is supposed to have converted the world to Christianity?”

“No!” Father Mark said. “It cannot be. It just cannot—”

“GET MOVING!” Garth shouted, dragging the priest from the chair and hurling him towards the rear wall. Father Mark stumbled to a halt, turned back. Garth leaped for him, but it was already too late. The amphibians were small, but there were so many of them. Garth lashed out and his fist struck Itin, hurling him back into the crowd. The others came on as he fought his way towards the priest. He beat at them but it was like struggling against the waves. The furry, musky bodies washed over and engulfed him. He struggled until they tied him, and he still struggled until they beat on his head until he stopped. Then they pulled him outside, where he could only lie in the rain and curse and watch.

Of course the Weskers were marvelous craftsmen, and everything had been constructed down to the last detail, following the illustration in the Bible. There was the cross, planted firmly on the top of a small hill, the gleaming metal spikes, the hammer. Father Mark was stripped and draped in a carefully pleated loincloth. They led him out of the church and at the sight of the cross he almost fainted. After that he held his head high and determined to die as he had lived, with faith.

Yet this was hard. It was unbearable even for Garth, who only watched. It is one thing to talk of crucifixion and look at the gentle carved bodies in the dim light of prayer. It is another to see a man naked, ropes cutting into his skin where he hangs from a bar of wood. And to see the needle-tipped spike raised and placed against the soft flesh of his palm, to see the hammer come back with the calm deliberation of an artisan’s measured stroke. To hear the thick sound of metal penetrating flesh.

Then to hear the screams.

Few are born to be martyrs and Father Mark was not one of them. With the first blows, the blood ran from his lips where his clenched teeth met. Then his mouth was wide and his head strained back and the awful guttural horror of his screams sliced through the susurration of the falling rain. It resounded as a silent echo from the masses of watching Weskers, for whatever emotion opened their mouths was now tearing at their bodies with all its force, and row after row of gaping jaws reflected the crucified priest’s agony.

Mercifully he fainted as the last nail was driven home. Blood ran from the raw wounds, mixing with the rain to drip faintly pink from his feet as the life ran out of him. At this time, somewhere at this time, sobbing and tearing at his own bonds, numbed from the blows on the head, Garth lost consciousness.

He awoke in his own warehouse and it was dark. Someone was cutting away the woven ropes they had bound him with. The rain still dripped and splashed outside.

“Itin,” he said. It could be no one else.

“Yes,” the alien voice whispered back. “The others are all talking in the church. Lin died after you struck his head, and Inon is very sick. There are some that say you should be crucified too, and I think that is what will happen. Or perhaps killed by stoning on the head. They have found in the Bible where it says—”

“I know.” With infinite weariness. “An eye for an eye. You’ll find lots of things like that once you start looking.”

“You must go, you can get to your ship without anyone seeing you. There has been enough killing.” Itin as well spoke with a newfound weariness.

Garth experimented, pulling himself to his feet. He pressed his head to the rough wall until the nausea stopped.

“He’s dead.” He said it as a statement, not a question.

“Yes, some time ago. Or I could not have come away to see you.”

“And buried of course, or they wouldn’t be thinking about starting on me next.”

“And buried!” There was almost a ring of emotion in the alien’s voice, an echo of the dead priest’s. “He is buried and he will rise on High. It is written and that is the way it will happen. Father Mark will be so happy that it has happened like this.” The voice ended in a sound like a human sob, but of course it couldn’t have been that since Itin was alien, and not human at all. Garth painfully worked his way towards the door, leaning against the wall so he wouldn’t fall.

“We did the right thing, didn’t we?” Itin asked. There was no answer. “He will rise up, Garth, won’t he rise?”

Garth was at the door and enough light came from the brightly lit church to show his torn and bloody hands clutching at the frame. Itin’s face swam into sight close to his, and Garth felt the delicate, many-fingered hands with the sharp nails catch at his clothes.

“He will rise, won’t he, Garth?”

“No,” Garth said, “he is going to stay buried right where you put him. Nothing is going to happen, because he is dead and he is going to stay dead.”

The rain runneled through Itin’s fur and his mouth was opened so wide that he seemed to be screaming into the night. Only with effort could he talk, squeezing out the alien thoughts in an alien language.

“Then we will not be saved? We will not become pure?”

“You were pure,” Garth said, in a voice somewhere between a sob and a laugh. “That’s the horrible ugly dirty part of it. You were pure. Now you are—”

“Murderers,” Itin said, and the water ran down from his lowered head and streamed away into the darkness.

© 1962 Harry Harrison.

Originally published in New Worlds.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Harry Harrison began writing science fiction in the 1950s and is currently one of the top-selling SF authors around the world. Best known as the creator of the cosmic thief the Stainless Steel Rat, and for his Deathworld and West of Eden series, he is also the author of Make Room! Make Room!, which was turned into the movie Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson. His novels have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list and in 2009 he was awarded the Damon Knight SF Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Boojum
Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette

The ship had no name of her own, so her human crew called her the Lavinia Whateley. As far as anyone could tell, she didn’t mind. At least, her long grasping vanes curled—affectionately?—when the chief engineers patted her bulkheads and called her “Vinnie,” and she ceremoniously tracked the footsteps of each crew member with her internal bioluminescence, giving them light to walk and work and live by.

The Lavinia Whateley was a Boojum, a deep-space swimmer, but her kind had evolved in the high tempestuous envelopes of gas giants, and their offspring still spent their infancies there, in cloud-nurseries over eternal storms. And so she was streamlined, something like a vast spiny lionfish to the earth-adapted eye. Her sides were lined with gasbags filled with hydrogen; her vanes and wings furled tight. Her color was a blue-green so dark it seemed a glossy black unless the light struck it; her hide was impregnated with symbiotic algae.

Where there was light, she could make oxygen. Where there was oxygen, she could make water.

She was an ecosystem unto herself, as the captain was a law unto herself. And down in the bowels of the engineering section, Black Alice Bradley, who was only human and no kind of law at all, loved her.

Black Alice had taken the oath back in ’32, after the Venusian Riots. She hadn’t hidden her reasons, and the captain had looked at her with cold, dark, amused eyes and said, “So long as you carry your weight, cherie, I don’t care. Betray me, though, and you will be going back to Venus the cold way.” But it was probably that—and the fact that Black Alice couldn’t hit the broad side of a space freighter with a ray gun—that had gotten her assigned to Engineering, where ethics were less of a problem. It wasn’t, after all, as if she was going anywhere.

Black Alice was on duty when the Lavinia Whateley spotted prey; she felt the shiver of anticipation that ran through the decks of the ship. It was an odd sensation, a tic Vinnie only exhibited in pursuit. And then they were underway, zooming down the slope of the gravity well toward Sol, and the screens all around Engineering—which Captain Song kept dark, most of the time, on the theory that swabs and deckhands and coal-shovelers didn’t need to know where they were, or what they were doing—flickered bright and live.

Everybody looked up, and Demijack shouted, “There! There!” He was right: The blot that might only have been a smudge of oil on the screen moved as Vinnie banked, revealing itself to be a freighter, big and ungainly and hopelessly outclassed. Easy prey. Easy pickings.

We could use some of them, thought Black Alice. Contrary to the e-ballads and comm stories, a pirate’s life was not all imported delicacies and fawning slaves. Especially not when three-quarters of any and all profits went directly back to the Lavinia Whateley, to keep her healthy and happy. Nobody ever argued. There were stories about the Marie Curie, too.

The captain’s voice over fiber optic cable—strung beside the Lavinia Whateley’s nerve bundles—was as clear and free of static as if she stood at Black Alice’s elbow. “Battle stations,” Captain Song said, and the crew leapt to obey. It had been two Solar since Captain Song keelhauled James Brady, but nobody who’d been with the ship then was ever likely to forget his ruptured eyes and frozen scream.

Black Alice manned her station, and stared at the screen. She saw the freighter’s name—the Josephine Baker—gold on black across the stern, the Venusian flag for its port of registry wired stiff from a mast on its hull. It was a steelship, not a Boojum, and they had every advantage. For a moment she thought the freighter would run.

And then it turned, and brought its guns to bear.

No sense of movement, of acceleration, of disorientation. No pop, no whump of displaced air. The view on the screens just flickered to a different one, as Vinnie skipped—apported—to a new position just aft and above the Josephine Baker, crushing the flag mast with her hull.

Black Alice felt that, a grinding shiver. And had just time to grab her console before the Lavinia Whateley grappled the freighter, long vanes not curling in affection now.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dogcollar, the closest thing the Lavinia Whateley had to a chaplain, cross himself, and she heard him mutter, like he always did, Ave, Grandaevissimi, morituri vos salutant. It was the best he’d be able to do until it was all over, and even then he wouldn’t have the chance to do much. Captain Song didn’t mind other people worrying about souls, so long as they didn’t do it on her time.

The captain’s voice was calling orders, assigning people to boarding parties port and starboard. Down in Engineering, all they had to do was monitor the Lavinia Whateley’s hull and prepare to repel boarders, assuming the freighter’s crew had the gumption to send any. Vinnie would take care of the rest—until the time came to persuade her not to eat her prey before they’d gotten all the valuables off it. That was a ticklish job, only entrusted to the chief engineers, but Black Alice watched and listened, and although she didn’t expect she’d ever get the chance, she thought she could do it herself.

It was a small ambition, and one she never talked about. But it would be a hell of a thing, wouldn’t it? To be somebody a Boojum would listen to?

She gave her attention to the dull screens in her sectors, and tried not to crane her neck to catch a glimpse of the ones with the actual fighting on them. Dogcollar was making the rounds with sidearms from the weapons locker, just in case. Once the Josephine Baker was subdued, it was the junior engineers and others who would board her to take inventory.

Sometimes there were crew members left in hiding on captured ships. Sometimes, unwary pirates got shot.

There was no way to judge the progress of the battle from Engineering. Wasabi put a stopwatch up on one of the secondary screens, as usual, and everybody glanced at it periodically. Fifteen minutes ongoing meant the boarding parties hadn’t hit any nasty surprises. Black Alice had met a man once who’d been on the Margaret Mead when she grappled a freighter that turned out to be carrying a division’s-worth of Marines out to the Jovian moons. Thirty minutes ongoing was normal. Forty-five minutes. Upward of an hour ongoing, and people started double-checking their weapons. The longest battle Black Alice had ever personally been part of was six hours, forty-three minutes, and fifty-two seconds. That had been the last time the Lavinia Whateley worked with a partner, and the double-cross by the Henry Ford was the only reason any of Vinnie’s crew needed. Captain Song still had Captain Edwards’ head in a jar on the bridge, and Vinnie had an ugly ring of scars where the Henry Ford had bitten her.

This time, the clock stopped at fifty minutes, thirteen seconds. The Josephine Baker surrendered.

Dogcollar slapped Black Alice’s arm. “With me,” he said, and she didn’t argue. He had only six weeks seniority over her, but he was as tough as he was devout, and not stupid either. She checked the Velcro on her holster and followed him up the ladder, reaching through the rungs once to scratch Vinnie’s bulkhead as she passed. The ship paid her no notice. She wasn’t the captain, and she wasn’t one of the four chief engineers.

Quartermaster mostly respected crew’s own partner choices, and as Black Alice and Dogcollar suited up—it wouldn’t be the first time, if the Josephine Baker’s crew decided to blow her open to space rather than be taken captive—he came by and issued them both tag guns and x-ray pads, taking a retina scan in return. All sorts of valuable things got hidden inside of bulkheads, and once Vinnie was done with the steelship there wouldn’t be much chance of coming back to look for what they’d missed.

Wet pirates used to scuttle their captures. The Boojums were more efficient.

Black Alice clipped everything to her belt and checked Dogcollar’s seals.

And then they were swinging down lines from the Lavinia Whateley’s belly to the chewed-open airlock. A lot of crew didn’t like to look at the ship’s face, but Black Alice loved it. All those teeth, the diamond edges worn to a glitter, and a few of the ship’s dozens of bright sapphire eyes blinking back at her.

She waved, unselfconsciously, and flattered herself that the ripple of closing eyes was Vinnie winking in return.

She followed Dogcollar inside the prize.

They unsealed when they had checked atmosphere—no sense in wasting your own air when you might need it later—and the first thing she noticed was the smell.

The Lavinia Whateley had her own smell, ozone and nutmeg, and other ships never smelled as good, but this was . . . this was . . .

“What did they kill and why didn’t they space it?” Dogcollar wheezed, and Black Alice swallowed hard against her gag reflex and said, “One will get you twenty we’re the lucky bastards that find it.”

“No takers,” Dogcollar said.

They worked together to crank open the hatches they came to. Twice they found crew members, messily dead. Once they found crew members alive.

“Gillies,” said Black Alice.

“Still don’t explain the smell,” said Dogcollar and, to the gillies: “Look, you can join our crew, or our ship can eat you. Makes no never mind to us.”

The gillies blinked their big wet eyes and made fingersigns at each other, and then nodded. Hard.

Dogcollar slapped a tag on the bulkhead. “Someone will come get you. You go wandering, we’ll assume you changed your mind.”

The gillies shook their heads, hard, and folded down onto the deck to wait.

Dogcollar tagged searched holds—green for clean, purple for goods, red for anything Vinnie might like to eat that couldn’t be fenced for a profit—and Black Alice mapped. The corridors in the steelship were winding, twisty, hard to track. She was glad she chalked the walls, because she didn’t think her map was quite right, somehow, but she couldn’t figure out where she’d gone wrong. Still, they had a beacon, and Vinnie could always chew them out if she had to.

Black Alice loved her ship.

She was thinking about that, how, okay, it wasn’t so bad, the pirate game, and it sure beat working in the sunstone mines on Venus, when she found a locked cargo hold. “Hey, Dogcollar,” she said to her comm, and while he was turning to cover her, she pulled her sidearm and blasted the lock.

The door peeled back, and Black Alice found herself staring at rank upon rank of silver cylinders, each less than a meter tall and perhaps half a meter wide, smooth and featureless except for what looked like an assortment of sockets and plugs on the surface of each. The smell was strongest here.

“Shit,” she said.

Dogcollar, more practical, slapped the first safety orange tag of the expedition beside the door and said only, “Captain’ll want to see this.”

“Yeah,” said Black Alice, cold chills chasing themselves up and down her spine. “C’mon, let’s move.”

But of course it turned out that she and Dogcollar were on the retrieval detail, too, and the captain wasn’t leaving the canisters for Vinnie.

Which, okay, fair. Black Alice didn’t want the Lavinia Whateley eating those things, either, but why did they have to bring them back?

She said as much to Dogcollar, under her breath, and had a horrifying thought: “She knows what they are, right?”

“She’s the captain,” said Dogcollar.

“Yeah, but—I ain’t arguing, man, but if she doesn’t know . . .” She lowered her voice even farther, so she could barely hear herself: “What if somebody opens one?”

Dogcollar gave her a pained look. “Nobody’s going to go opening anything. But if you’re really worried, go talk to the captain about it.”

He was calling her bluff. Black Alice called his right back. “Come with me?”

He was stuck. He stared at her, and then he grunted and pulled his gloves off, the left and then the right. “Fuck,” he said. “I guess we oughta.”

For the crew members who had been in the boarding action, the party had already started. Dogcollar and Black Alice finally tracked the captain down in the rec room, where her marines were slurping stolen wine from broken-necked bottles. As much of it splashed on the gravity plates epoxied to the Lavinia Whateley’s flattest interior surface as went into the marines, but Black Alice imagined there was plenty more where that came from. And the faster the crew went through it, the less long they’d be drunk.

The captain herself was naked in a great extruded tub, up to her collarbones in steaming water dyed pink and heavily scented by the bath bombs sizzling here and there. Black Alice stared; she hadn’t seen a tub bath in seven years. She still dreamed of them sometimes.

“Captain,” she said, because Dogcollar wasn’t going to say anything. “We think you should know we found some dangerous cargo on the prize.”

Captain Song raised one eyebrow. “And you imagine I don’t know already, cherie?”

Oh shit. But Black Alice stood her ground. “We thought we should be sure.”

The captain raised one long leg out of the water to shove a pair of necking pirates off the rim of her tub. They rolled onto the floor, grappling and clawing, both fighting to be on top. But they didn’t break the kiss. “You wish to be sure,” said the captain. Her dark eyes had never left Black Alice’s sweating face. “Very well. Tell me. And then you will know that I know, and you can be sure.”

Dogcollar made a grumbling noise deep in his throat, easily interpreted: I told you so.

Just as she had when she took Captain Song’s oath and slit her thumb with a razorblade and dripped her blood on the Lavinia Whateley’s decking so the ship might know her, Black Alice—metaphorically speaking—took a breath and jumped. “They’re brains,” she said. “Human brains. Stolen. Black-market. The Fungi—”

“Mi-Go,” Dogcollar hissed, and the captain grinned at him, showing extraordinarily white strong teeth. He ducked, submissively, but didn’t step back, for which Black Alice felt a completely ridiculous gratitude.

“Mi-Go,” Black Alice said. Mi-Go, Fungi, what did it matter? They came from the outer rim of the Solar System, the black cold hurtling rocks of the Öpik-Oort Cloud. Like the Boojums, they could swim between the stars. “They collect them. There’s a black market. Nobody knows what they use them for. It’s illegal, of course. But they’re . . . alive in there. They go mad, supposedly.”

And that was it. That was all Black Alice could manage. She stopped, and had to remind herself to shut her mouth.

“So I’ve heard,” the captain said, dabbling at the steaming water. She stretched luxuriously in her tub. Someone thrust a glass of white wine at her, condensation dewing the outside. The captain did not drink from shattered plastic bottles. “The Mi-Go will pay for this cargo, won’t they? They mine rare minerals all over the system. They’re said to be very wealthy.”

“Yes, Captain,” Dogcollar said, when it became obvious that Black Alice couldn’t.

“Good,” the captain said. Under Black Alice’s feet, the decking shuddered, a grinding sound as Vinnie began to dine. Her rows of teeth would make short work of the Josephine Baker’s steel hide. Black Alice could see two of the gillies—the same two? She never could tell them apart unless they had scars—flinch and tug at their chains. “Then they might as well pay us as someone else, wouldn’t you say?”

Black Alice knew she should stop thinking about the canisters. Captain’s word was law. But she couldn’t help it, like scratching at a scab. They were down there, in the third subhold, the one even sniffers couldn’t find, cold and sweating and with that stench that was like a living thing.

And she kept wondering. Were they empty? Or were there brains in there, people’s brains, going mad?

The idea was driving her crazy, and finally, her fourth off-shift after the capture of the Josephine Baker, she had to go look.

“This is stupid, Black Alice,” she muttered to herself as she climbed down the companionway, the beads in her hair clicking against her earrings. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.” Vinnie bioluminesced, a traveling spotlight, placidly unconcerned whether Black Alice was being an idiot or not.

Half-Hand Sally had pulled duty in the main hold. She nodded at Black Alice and Black Alice nodded back. Black Alice ran errands a lot, for Engineering and sometimes for other departments, because she didn’t smoke hash and she didn’t cheat at cards. She was reliable.

Down through the subholds, and she really didn’t want to be doing this, but she was here and the smell of the third subhold was already making her sick, and maybe if she just knew one way or the other, she’d be able to quit thinking about it.

She opened the third subhold, and the stench rushed out.

The canisters were just metal, sealed, seemingly airtight. There shouldn’t be any way for the aroma of the contents to escape. But it permeated the air nonetheless, bad enough that Black Alice wished she had brought a rebreather.

No, that would have been suspicious. So it was really best for everyone concerned that she hadn’t, but oh, gods and little fishes, the stench. Even breathing through her mouth was no help; she could taste it, like oil from a fryer, saturating the air, oozing up her sinuses, coating the interior spaces of her body.

As silently as possible, she stepped across the threshold and into the space beyond. The Lavinia Whateley obligingly lit the space as she entered, dazzling her at first as the overhead lights—not just bioluminescent, here, but LEDs chosen to approximate natural daylight, for when they shipped plants and animals—reflected off rank upon rank of canisters. When Black Alice went among them, they did not reach her waist.

She was just going to walk through, she told herself. Hesitantly, she touched the closest cylinder. The air in this hold was so dry there was no condensation—the whole ship ran to lip-cracking, nosebleed dryness in the long weeks between prizes—but the cylinder was cold. It felt somehow grimy to the touch, gritty and oily like machine grease. She pulled her hand back.

It wouldn’t do to open the closest one to the door—and she realized with that thought that she was planning on opening one. There must be a way to do it, a concealed catch or a code pad. She was an engineer, after all.

She stopped three ranks in, lightheaded with the smell, to examine the problem.

It was remarkably simple, once you looked for it. There were three depressions on either side of the rim, a little smaller than human fingertips but spaced appropriately. She laid the pads of her fingers over them and pressed hard, making the flesh deform into the catches.

The lid sprang up with a pressurized hiss. Black Alice was grateful that even open, it couldn’t smell much worse. She leaned forward to peer within. There was a clear membrane over the surface, and gelatin or thick fluid underneath. Vinnie’s lights illuminated it well.

It was not empty. And as the light struck the grayish surface of the lump of tissue floating within, Black Alice would have sworn she saw the pathetic unbodied thing flinch.

She scrambled to close the canister again, nearly pinching her fingertips when it clanked shut. “Sorry,” she whispered, although dear sweet Jesus, surely the thing couldn’t hear her. “Sorry, sorry.” And then she turned and ran, catching her hip a bruising blow against the doorway, slapping the controls to make it fucking close already. And then she staggered sideways, lurching to her knees, and vomited until blackness was spinning in front of her eyes and she couldn’t smell or taste anything but bile.

Vinnie would absorb the former contents of Black Alice’s stomach, just as she absorbed, filtered, recycled, and excreted all her crew’s wastes. Shaking, Black Alice braced herself back upright and began the long climb out of the holds.

In the first subhold, she had to stop, her shoulder against the smooth, velvet slickness of Vinnie’s skin, her mouth hanging open while her lungs worked. And she knew Vinnie wasn’t going to hear her, because she wasn’t the captain or a chief engineer or anyone important, but she had to try anyway, croaking, “Vinnie, water, please.”

And no one could have been more surprised than Black Alice Bradley when Vinnie extruded a basin and a thin cool trickle of water began to flow into it.

Well, now she knew. And there was still nothing she could do about it. She wasn’t the captain, and if she said anything more than she already had, people were going to start looking at her funny. Mutiny kind of funny. And what Black Alice did not need was any more of Captain Song’s attention and especially not for rumors like that. She kept her head down and did her job and didn’t discuss her nightmares with anyone.

And she had nightmares, all right. Hot and cold running, enough, she fancied, that she could have filled up the captain’s huge tub with them.

She could live with that. But over the next double dozen of shifts, she became aware of something else wrong, and this was worse, because it was something wrong with the Lavinia Whateley.

The first sign was the chief engineers frowning and going into huddles at odd moments. And then Black Alice began to feel it herself, the way Vinnie was . . . she didn’t have a word for it because she’d never felt anything like it before. She would have said balky, but that couldn’t be right. It couldn’t. But she was more and more sure that Vinnie was less responsive somehow, that when she obeyed the captain’s orders, it was with a delay. If she were human, Vinnie would have been dragging her feet.

You couldn’t keelhaul a ship for not obeying fast enough.

And then, because she was paying attention so hard she was making her own head hurt, Black Alice noticed something else. Captain Song had them cruising the gas giants’ orbits—Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune—not going in as far as the asteroid belt, not going out as far as Uranus. Nobody Black Alice talked to knew why, exactly, but she and Dogcollar figured it was because the captain wanted to talk to the Mi-Go without actually getting near the nasty cold rock of their planet. And what Black Alice noticed was that Vinnie was less balky, less unhappy, when she was headed out, and more and more resistant the closer they got to the asteroid belt.

Vinnie, she remembered, had been born over Uranus.

“Do you want to go home, Vinnie?” Black Alice asked her one late-night shift when there was nobody around to care that she was talking to the ship. “Is that what’s wrong?”

She put her hand flat on the wall, and although she was probably imagining it, she thought she felt a shiver ripple across Vinnie’s vast side.

Black Alice knew how little she knew, and didn’t even contemplate sharing her theory with the chief engineers. They probably knew exactly what was wrong and exactly what to do to keep the Lavinia Whateley from going core meltdown like the Marie Curie had. That was a whispered story, not the sort of thing anybody talked about except in their hammocks after lights out.

The Marie Curie had eaten her own crew.

So when Wasabi said, four shifts later, “Black Alice, I’ve got a job for you,” Black Alice said, “Yessir,” and hoped it would be something that would help the Lavinia Whateley be happy again.

It was a suit job, he said, replace and repair. Black Alice was going because she was reliable and smart and stayed quiet, and it was time she took on more responsibilities. The way he said it made her first fret because that meant the captain might be reminded of her existence, and then fret because she realized the captain already had been.

But she took the equipment he issued, and she listened to the instructions and read schematics and committed them both to memory and her implants. It was a ticklish job, a neural override repair. She’d done some fiber optic bundle splicing, but this was going to be a doozy. And she was going to have to do it in stiff, pressurized gloves.

Her heart hammered as she sealed her helmet, and not because she was worried about the EVA. This was a chance. An opportunity. A step closer to chief engineer.

Maybe she had impressed the captain with her discretion, after all.

She cycled the airlock, snapped her safety harness, and stepped out onto the Lavinia Whateley’s hide.

That deep blue-green, like azurite, like the teeming seas of Venus under their swampy eternal clouds, was invisible. They were too far from Sol—it was a yellow stylus-dot, and you had to know where to look for it. Vinnie’s hide was just black under Black Alice’s suit floods. As the airlock cycled shut, though, the Boojum’s own bioluminescence shimmered up her vanes and along the ridges of her sides—crimson and electric green and acid blue. Vinnie must have noticed Black Alice picking her way carefully up her spine with barbed boots. They wouldn’t hurt Vinnie—nothing short of a space rock could manage that—but they certainly stuck in there good.

The thing Black Alice was supposed to repair was at the principal nexus of Vinnie’s central nervous system. The ship didn’t have anything like what a human or a gilly would consider a brain; there were nodules spread all through her vast body. Too slow, otherwise. And Black Alice had heard Boojums weren’t supposed to be all that smart—trainable, sure, maybe like an Earth monkey.

Which is what made it creepy as hell that, as she picked her way up Vinnie’s flank—though up was a courtesy, under these circumstances—talking to her all the way, she would have sworn Vinnie was talking back. Not just tracking her with the lights, as she would always do, but bending some of her barbels and vanes around as if craning her neck to get a look at Black Alice.

Black Alice carefully circumnavigated an eye—she didn’t think her boots would hurt it, but it seemed discourteous to stomp across somebody’s field of vision—and wondered, only half-idly, if she had been sent out on this task not because she was being considered for promotion, but because she was expendable.

She was just rolling her eyes and dismissing that as borrowing trouble when she came over a bump on Vinnie’s back, spotted her goal—and all the ship’s lights went out.

She tongued on the comm. “Wasabi?”

“I got you, Blackie. You just keep doing what you’re doing.”

“Yessir.”

But it seemed like her feet stayed stuck in Vinnie’s hide a little longer than was good. At least fifteen seconds before she managed a couple of deep breaths—too deep for her limited oxygen supply, so she went briefly dizzy—and continued up Vinnie’s side.

Black Alice had no idea what inflammation looked like in a Boojum, but she would guess this was it. All around the interface she was meant to repair, Vinnie’s flesh looked scraped and puffy. Black Alice walked tenderly, wincing, muttering apologies under her breath. And with every step, the tendrils coiled a little closer.

Black Alice crouched beside the box, and began examining connections. The console was about three meters by four, half a meter tall, and fixed firmly to Vinnie’s hide. It looked like the thing was still functional, but something—a bit of space debris, maybe—had dented it pretty good.

Cautiously, Black Alice dropped a hand on it. She found the access panel, and flipped it open: more red lights than green. A tongue-click, and she began withdrawing her tethered tools from their holding pouches and arranging them so that they would float conveniently around.

She didn’t hear a thing, of course, but the hide under her boots vibrated suddenly, sharply. She jerked her head around, just in time to see one of Vinnie’s feelers slap her own side, five or ten meters away. And then the whole Boojum shuddered, contracting, curved into a hard crescent of pain the same way she had when the Henry Ford had taken that chunk out of her hide. And the lights in the access panel lit up all at once—red, red, yellow, red.

Black Alice tongued off the send function on her headset microphone, so Wasabi wouldn’t hear her. She touched the bruised hull, and she touched the dented edge of the console. “Vinnie,” she said, “does this hurt?”

Not that Vinnie could answer her. But it was obvious. She was in pain. And maybe that dent didn’t have anything to do with space debris. Maybe—Black Alice straightened, looked around, and couldn’t convince herself that it was an accident that this box was planted right where Vinnie couldn’t . . . quite . . . reach it.

“So what does it do?” she muttered. “Why am I out here repairing something that fucking hurts?” She crouched down again and took another long look at the interface.

As an engineer, Black Alice was mostly self-taught; her implants were second-hand, black market, scavenged, the wet work done by a gilly on Providence Station. She’d learned the technical vocabulary from Gogglehead Kim before he bought it in a stupid little fight with a ship named the V. I. Ulyanov, but what she relied on were her instincts, the things she knew without being able to say. So she looked at that box wired into Vinnie’s spine and all its red and yellow lights, and then she tongued the comm back on and said, “Wasabi, this thing don’t look so good.”

“Whaddya mean, don’t look so good?” Wasabi sounded distracted, and that was just fine.

Black Alice made a noise, the auditory equivalent of a shrug. “I think the node’s inflamed. Can we pull it and lock it in somewhere else?”

“No!” said Wasabi.

“It’s looking pretty ugly out here.”

“Look, Blackie, unless you want us to all go sailing out into the Big Empty, we are not pulling that governor. Just fix the fucking thing, would you?”

“Yessir,” said Black Alice, thinking hard. The first thing was that Wasabi knew what was going on—knew what the box did and knew that the Lavinia Whateley didn’t like it. That wasn’t comforting. The second thing was that whatever was going on, it involved the Big Empty, the cold vastness between the stars. So it wasn’t that Vinnie wanted to go home. She wanted to go out.

It made sense, from what Black Alice knew about Boojums. Their infants lived in the tumult of the gas giants’ atmosphere, but as they aged, they pushed higher and higher, until they reached the edge of the envelope. And then—following instinct or maybe the calls of their fellows, nobody knew for sure—they learned to skip, throwing themselves out into the vacuum like Earth birds leaving the nest. And what if, for a Boojum, the solar system was just another nest?

Black Alice knew the Lavinia Whateley was old, for a Boojum. Captain Song was not her first captain, although you never mentioned Captain Smith if you knew what was good for you. So if there was another stage to her life cycle, she might be ready for it. And her crew wasn’t letting her go.

Jesus and the cold fishy gods, Black Alice thought. Is this why the Marie Curie ate her crew? Because they wouldn’t let her go?

She fumbled for her tools, tugging the cords to float them closer, and wound up walloping herself in the bicep with a splicer. And as she was wrestling with it, her headset spoke again. “Blackie, can you hurry it up out there? Captain says we’re going to have company.”

Company? She never got to say it. Because when she looked up, she saw the shapes, faintly limned in starlight, and a chill as cold as a suit leak crept up her neck.

There were dozens of them. Hundreds. They made her skin crawl and her nerves judder the way gillies and Boojums never had. They were man-sized, roughly, but they looked like the pseudoroaches of Venus, the ones Black Alice still had nightmares about, with too many legs, and horrible stiff wings. They had ovate, corrugated heads, but no faces, and where their mouths ought to be sprouted writhing tentacles

And some of them carried silver shining cylinders, like the canisters in Vinnie’s subhold.

Black Alice wasn’t certain if they saw her, crouched on the Boojum’s hide with only a thin laminate between her and the breathsucker, but she was certain of something else. If they did, they did not care.

They disappeared below the curve of the ship, toward the airlock Black Alice had exited before clawing her way along the ship’s side. They could be a trade delegation, come to bargain for the salvaged cargo.

Black Alice didn’t think even the Mi-Go came in the battalions to talk trade.

She meant to wait until the last of them had passed, but they just kept coming. Wasabi wasn’t answering her hails; she was on her own and unarmed. She fumbled with her tools, stowing things in any handy pocket whether it was where the tool went or not. She couldn’t see much; everything was misty. It took her several seconds to realize that her visor was fogged because she was crying.

Patch cables. Where were the fucking patch cables? She found a two-meter length of fiber optic with the right plugs on the end. One end went into the monitor panel. The other snapped into her suit comm.

“Vinnie?” she whispered, when she thought she had a connection. “Vinnie, can you hear me?”

The bioluminescence under Black Alice’s boots pulsed once.

Gods and little fishes, she thought. And then she drew out her laser cutting torch, and started slicing open the case on the console that Wasabi had called the governor. Wasabi was probably dead by now, or dying. Wasabi, and Dogcollar, and . . . well, not dead. If they were lucky, they were dead.

Because the opposite of lucky was those canisters the Mi-Go were carrying.

She hoped Dogcollar was lucky.

“You wanna go out, right?” she whispered to the Lavinia Whateley. “Out into the Big Empty.”

She’d never been sure how much Vinnie understood of what people said, but the light pulsed again.

“And this thing won’t let you.” It wasn’t a question. She had it open now, and she could see that was what it did. Ugly fucking thing. Vinnie shivered underneath her, and there was a sudden pulse of noise in her helmet speakers: screaming. People screaming.

“I know,” Black Alice said. “They’ll come get me in a minute, I guess.” She swallowed hard against the sudden lurch of her stomach. “I’m gonna get this thing off you, though. And when they go, you can go, okay? And I’m sorry. I didn’t know we were keeping you from . . .” She had to quit talking, or she really was going to puke. Grimly, she fumbled for the tools she needed to disentangle the abomination from Vinnie’s nervous system.

Another pulse of sound, a voice, not a person: flat and buzzing and horrible. “We do not bargain with thieves.” And the scream that time—she’d never heard Captain Song scream before. Black Alice flinched and started counting to slow her breathing. Puking in a suit was the number one badness, but hyperventilating in a suit was a really close second.

Her heads-up display was low-res, and slightly miscalibrated, so that everything had a faint shadow-double. But the thing that flashed up against her own view of her hands was unmistakable: a question mark.

<?>

“Vinnie?”

Another pulse of screaming, and the question mark again.

<?>

“Holy shit, Vinnie! . . . Never mind, never mind. They, um, they collect people’s brains. In canisters. Like the canisters in the third subhold.”

The bioluminescence pulsed once. Black Alice kept working.

Her heads-up pinged again: <ALICE> A pause. <?>

“Um, yeah. I figure that’s what they’ll do with me, too. It looked like they had plenty of canisters to go around.”

Vinnie pulsed, and there was a longer pause while Black Alice doggedly severed connections and loosened bolts.

<WANT> said the Lavinia Whateley. <?>

“Want? Do I want . . . ?” Her laughter sounded bad. “Um, no. No, I don’t want to be a brain in a jar. But I’m not seeing a lot of choices here. Even if I went cometary, they could catch me. And it kind of sounds like they’re mad enough to do it, too.”

She’d cleared out all the moorings around the edge of the governor; the case lifted off with a shove and went sailing into the dark. Black Alice winced. But then the processor under the cover drifted away from Vinnie’s hide, and there was just the monofilament tethers and the fat cluster of fiber optic and superconductors to go.

<HELP>

“I’m doing my best here, Vinnie,” Black Alice said through her teeth.

That got her a fast double-pulse, and the Lavinia Whateley said, <HELP>

And then, <ALICE>

“You want to help me?” Black Alice squeaked.

A strong pulse, and the heads-up said, <HELP ALICE>

“That’s really sweet of you, but I’m honestly not sure there’s anything you can do. I mean, it doesn’t look like the Mi-Go are mad at you, and I really want to keep it that way.”

<EAT ALICE> said the Lavinia Whateley.

Black Alice came within a millimeter of taking her own fingers off with the cutting laser. “Um, Vinnie, that’s um . . . well, I guess it’s better than being a brain in a jar.” Or suffocating to death in her suit if she went cometary and the Mi-Go didn’t come after her.

The double-pulse again, but Black Alice didn’t see what she could have missed. As communications went, EAT ALICE was pretty fucking unambiguous.

<HELP ALICE> the Lavinia Whateley insisted. Black Alice leaned in close, unsplicing the last of the governor’s circuits from the Boojum’s nervous system. <SAVE ALICE>

“By eating me? Look, I know what happens to things you eat, and it’s not . . .” She bit her tongue. Because she did know what happened to things the Lavinia Whateley ate. Absorbed. Filtered. Recycled. “Vinnie . . . are you saying you can save me from the Mi-Go?”

A pulse of agreement.

“By eating me?” Black Alice pursued, needing to be sure she understood.

Another pulse of agreement.

Black Alice thought about the Lavinia Whateley’s teeth. “How much me are we talking about here?”

<ALICE> said the Lavinia Whateley, and then the last fiber optic cable parted, and Black Alice, her hands shaking, detached her patch cable and flung the whole mess of it as hard as she could straight up. Maybe it would find a planet with atmosphere and be some little alien kid’s shooting star.

And now she had to decide what to do.

She figured she had two choices, really. One, walk back down the Lavinia Whateley and find out if the Mi-Go believed in surrender. Two, walk around the Lavinia Whateley and into her toothy mouth.

Black Alice didn’t think the Mi-Go believed in surrender.

She tilted her head back for one last clear look at the shining black infinity of space. Really, there wasn’t any choice at all. Because even if she’d misunderstood what Vinnie seemed to be trying to tell her, the worst she’d end up was dead, and that was light-years better than what the Mi-Go had on offer.

Black Alice Bradley loved her ship.

She turned to her left and started walking, and the Lavinia Whateley’s bioluminescence followed her courteously all the way, vanes swaying out of her path. Black Alice skirted each of Vinnie’s eyes as she came to them, and each of them blinked at her. And then she reached Vinnie’s mouth and that magnificent panoply of teeth.

“Make it quick, Vinnie, okay?” said Black Alice, and walked into her leviathan’s maw.

Picking her way delicately between razor-sharp teeth, Black Alice had plenty of time to consider the ridiculousness of worrying about a hole in her suit. Vinnie’s mouth was more like a crystal cave, once you were inside it; there was no tongue, no palate. Just polished, macerating stones. Which did not close on Black Alice, to her surprise. If anything, she got the feeling Vinnie was holding her . . . breath. Or what passed for it.

The Boojum was lit inside, as well—or was making herself lit, for Black Alice’s benefit. And as Black Alice clambered inward, the teeth got smaller, and fewer, and the tunnel narrowed. Her throat, Alice thought. I’m inside her.

And the walls closed down, and she was swallowed.

Like a pill, enclosed in the tight sarcophagus of her space suit, she felt rippling pressure as peristalsis pushed her along. And then greater pressure, suffocating, savage. One sharp pain. The pop of her ribs as her lungs crushed.

Screaming inside a space suit was contraindicated, too. And with collapsed lungs, she couldn’t even do it properly.

alice.

She floated. In warm darkness. A womb, a bath. She was comfortable. An itchy soreness between her shoulder blades felt like a very mild radiation burn.

alice.

A voice she thought she should know. She tried to speak; her mouth gnashed, her teeth ground.

alice. talk here.

She tried again. Not with her mouth, this time.

Talk . . . here?

The buoyant warmth flickered past her. She was . . . drifting. No, swimming. She could feel currents on her skin. Her vision was confused. She blinked and blinked, and things were shattered.

There was nothing to see anyway, but stars.

alice talk here.

Where am I?

eat alice.

Vinnie. Vinnie’s voice, but not in the flatness of the heads-up display anymore. Vinnie’s voice alive with emotion and nuance and the vastness of her self.

You ate me, she said, and understood abruptly that the numbness she felt was not shock. It was the boundaries of her body erased and redrawn.

!

Agreement. Relief.

I’m . . . in you, Vinnie?

=/=

Not a “no.” More like, this thing is not the same, does not compare, to this other thing. Black Alice felt the warmth of space so near a generous star slipping by her. She felt the swift currents of its gravity, and the gravity of its satellites, and bent them, and tasted them, and surfed them faster and faster away.

I am you.

!

Ecstatic comprehension, which Black Alice echoed with passionate relief. Not dead. Not dead after all. Just, transformed. Accepted. Embraced by her ship, whom she embraced in return.

Vinnie. Where are we going?

out, Vinnie answered. And in her, Black Alice read the whole great naked wonder of space, approaching faster and faster as Vinnie accelerated, reaching for the first great skip that would hurl them into the interstellar darkness of the Big Empty. They were going somewhere.

Out, Black Alice agreed and told herself not to grieve. Not to go mad. This sure beat swampy Hell out of being a brain in a jar.

And it occurred to her, as Vinnie jumped, the brainless bodies of her crew already digesting inside her, that it wouldn’t be long before the loss of the Lavinia Whateley was a tale told to frighten spacers, too.

© 2008 Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette.

Originally published in Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer.

Reprinted by permission of the authors.

Sarah Monette grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret cities of the Manhattan Project, and now lives in a 105-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, two cats, one grand piano, and one husband. Her Ph.D. diploma (English Literature, 2004) hangs in the kitchen. She has published more than forty short stories and has two short story collections out: The Bone Key (Prime Books, 2007—with a shiny second edition in 2011) and Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (Prime Books, 2011). She has written two novels (A Companion to Wolves, Tor Books, 2007; The Tempering of Men, Tor Books, 2011) and three short stories with Elizabeth Bear, and hopes to write more. Her first four novels (Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis) were published by Ace. Her next novel, The Goblin Emperor, will come out from Tor under the name Katherine Addison. Visit her online at www.sarahmonette.com.

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the author of over twenty novels and a hundred short stories, the most recent of which is Range of Ghosts, an epic fantasy of a central Asia that never was. She is a Sturgeon, Campbell, and multiple Hugo Award winner, a rock climber, and a very bad guitarist. She divides her time between central Massachusetts, where her Giant Ridiculous Dog lives, and western Wisconsin, where her partner, fantasist Scott Lynch, lives.

Sun Dogs
Brooke Bolander

Floating through endless night in a tiny silver ball, surrounded by noise and confusion and the overpowering scents of metal and her own push-stink, the dog Laika dreams.

Snow crunches under the pads of her feet, biting at them with tiny unseen fangs. She is running with a pack of others through the cold and the city-smell, claws skittering on slippery hard water. They are all shaggy and long-toothed and their breath makes little clouds in the air. Frost grows a fur coat over Brother’s whiskers and nose, like a pup’s first layer of down. The cat they are pursuing is just strides ahead, a leap and a shake away from being warm meat between Laika’s jaws, when people appear at the mouth of the alleyway holding nooses and sticks.

In the real world, the catch-men had taken everything. In dreams, they are fooled as easily as rabbits. Laika is a smart dog. She grows brown-and-white wings, like a pigeon or a seagull. The other members of her pack follow—Brother’s feathers are as black and tangled as the rest of him—and together they fly away, leaving the catch-men empty-handed far below. The cool air lifts Laika up and up. She can smell garbage and fish-gutting places and the sting of salty water, all the wonderful reeks of home. Cat water-stink. The less pleasant odors of tar-coated poles and burning dead things, harsh enough to dull the best nose. They all go to a park with grass and trees and lots of cat push-stink to roll in. The puddles here aren’t hard. Laika drinks until her stomach sloshes and water dribbles from the corners of her mouth.

She wakes from the dream needing to make water-stink herself and whines softly when she realizes where she is. The padded ball is her den now, and everything inside her whispers that making stink in one’s den is not a thing smart dogs do. But eventually she has to. Nothing else remains. The world through the window is black and empty, marked with tiny faraway gleams that might be the eyes of unknown animals. All the trees and grasses and even the whitecoats have long since vanished in a blur of heat and tumbling, fearful movement.

There’s a rubber bag strapped to her hind end, a net of harnesses holding her tightly in place, and a feeling of floating that never disappears no matter how many times she scrabbles at the floor for purchase. It makes her dizzy and sick. Beneath the straps her skin itches, so warm and close it feels like it might split open. She cannot turn around or even circle to make a proper bed.

Laika re-adjusts herself as best she can, closes her eyes, and wishes for brown-and-white wings.

There is no trusting the ball and no understanding it, no more than one can understand the intentions of a whitecoat. Like them, it is neither good nor bad. It emits a constant howl, dispenses food slime, and shakes so terrifyingly that Laika trembles and makes water-stink without thinking. She would curl into a tiny invisible ball if she could, but the chains and the harness hold her in place. All she can do is bark to let the panic out, over and over until her throat hurts and the metal walls echo like she is many.

Her coat reeks of the whiteplace-smells they rubbed her down with before fastening her in the metal ball, painful and numbing to sensitive nostrils. Little bits of plastic are taped here and there, attached to long tails of rubber that hum quietly with strange energy. They make her nervous. Everything makes her nervous; she’s been scared and panic-bitten almost since the day the catch-men put the noose around her neck. There’s always some new terror crouched just beyond her reckoning, waiting to spring in an unseen way.

It had begun with shining crates, slippery and cold-smelling. The whitecoats spoke kindly to her, far gentler than the rough-handed catch-men, and Laika wagged her tail politely, resisting the urge to snap and bite at their hands even when they shaved her fur and poked the bare spots with stinging needles. The loss of Brother gnawed all the fight from Laika. She let them drag her from cage to progressively smaller cage without resistance, and they patted her head and gave her a name and called her good dog. She ignored the other crate-dwellers, even when they screamed and wailed and flew at the bars as she was tugged past, and the whitecoats said she was steady, ignoring the way her limbs shivered and twitched.

Cages and spinning, noise and noise and noise. The whirl-crate had been the worst, like being picked up by the scruff and twirled around by a giant unseen hand. Old food and stinks flew from both of her ends. The whitecoats would pull her out, wash her off, scrabble scratches onto their ever-present papers, and push her back inside the thing to go again. It happened forever, for what seemed like many forevers. The streets and breezes and Brother vanished into the foggy places inside Laika’s head, shadowlands where she couldn’t smell them to follow.

She does not miss the whitecoats, the whirl-crate, or the noises. She misses the blue blanket from her first cage. She misses chasing pigeons with Brother, the feeling of meat and bone crunching gristle-thick between her teeth.

She dreams about the week one of the whitecoats took her home to stay with his family, grass and blue sky and not a cage in sight. The children scratched her ears and threw sticks for her to bring back—it took her a while to understand what they wanted—and at night she slept on a towel in the kitchen-place beside the stove, breathing in the smells of vegetables and stew. Laika knew it wouldn’t last—she had snuffled the treachery before it even rounded the corner—but a part of her yearned for it to go on for as many forevers as it could. Like a puppy she pretended it actually might, right up until they loaded her back into the truck and drove to the waiting metal ball.

In her dreaming, the week never ends. On and on it goes, and Brother is there too, to share the sticks and the stew and the warm fingers scratching just so behind a cocked ear.

The sun is bright against her face. The light chews the tether of her sleep apart and then she’s suddenly awake again. Realization creeps in like a mouse stealing kibble, a slow prickling that moves in a wave from the tip of her snout to her rising hackles. Confused as her senses are in this place, Laika understands the feeling. It’s a familiar one, an old packmate from her days at the whiteplace.

She is being watched.

The inside of the ball is filled with Laika and the things that hold her down. If so much as a flea was hiding within the tangle of wires and chains she would smell it, sense the movement and the hunger and the tiny pulsing life. When she left the world, nothing rode with her. Now there is a definite something. A faint scent of burning that does not come from the ball. Invisible eyes resting on her head, taking in every sneeze and pant. Laika cannot see whatever it is, but she has no need to. It’s there, waiting in the shadows, content for now to merely observe.

Laika and Brother had occasionally come across human-shapes with no smell, usually in abandoned buildings or other forgotten corners of the city. Dogs, too. Like echoes they were nothing but memories of memory, old thoughts drifting smoke-thin through the damp hallways and streets until a gust of wind blew them away. Taking one’s scent seemed a cruel thing, for how could one truly be without it? This is much the same, but not. It has a smell. She can feel its thoughts bouncing through the walls, plink-plink-plink, like the chirps of fluttering bats.

The sensation grows. It gets bigger, and bigger, until Laika’s head is pulsing with confusing ideas that are not her own. Pictures of flame and white-hot light flash behind her blinking eyelids. They drive everything else out: Brother, the fear, all her memories of streets and cages and needles and whitecoat-men shoving her roughly into a tiny silver ball. Nothing remains but fire, licking tongues of fire lapping at the darkness like thirsty dogs. It consumes all that Laika is. She throws back her head and lets out a howl, but to her ears it sounds like the crackle and roar of a great blaze. The world is heat and orange glow. Long-legged, four-legged shadows dance and gallop through it, snapping and growling.

All at once, it pulls away. Laika is Laika again, alone in the nothing. Her howl drops to a whimper. The feeling withdraws, leaving her bewildered and mournful and somehow even lonelier than before. She raises her muzzle for a final cry, calling out to a pack that does not exist. It comes from the very bottom of her, the she that resides in her stomach and scent glands.

And from somewhere outside, there is an answer, and a blossoming of white fire in the dark.

Light streams through the bubble-window. Laika finally sees the watcher.

It’s a ball of dog-sized, dog-shaped flame and headlamp-glare. Heat ripple crawls along its coat. Rays of light jut ear-and-snout fashion from the place where a head might be. Shadow-rimmed legs stretch down and down into the nothing sky, paddling at the emptiness. It flicks its fiery tail and swims closer to the box, so bright Laika has to squint against the shine. The hairs on her shoulders and neck bristle again, and a challenge-bark tickles the back of her throat. Is it a predator? Some new whitecoat-trick?

Who are you? Her bark asks. What pack do you run with? Friend or foe? Come closer and I will bite you! Even the stupidest puppy knows that snapping at fire is foolish, but it’s the only defense Laika has. Speak! Speak speak! Why are you here?

There’s a flash that leaves little dots of darkness skimming across her eyes. When they clear, the dog-thing has fled. The air smells like a fire, crackling somewhere out of sight.

It’s almost too hot to breathe. The air burns Laika’s insides and dries out her nose. She pants constantly, even in her sleep. No summer she has ever known has been this warm.

Her dreams mix with the awake-time. Noiseless, scentless shapes appear and vanish, looking like great leaping rats or fluttering birds or drifting blue lights. Sometimes the walls of the ball fall away and she’s back in the whitecoat’s kitchen with a dish of water that fades to fog just as she bends her head to lap. Brother comes to see her once—she knows it’s not really Brother, this hollow-eyed, smell-less shadow, but she wants so much to believe—and after that a whitecoat with the head of a dead dog, flies buzzing around its dried gums. She crouches and curls her lip and rattles a warning deep in her throat until it goes again. Knowing the thing is a not-creature makes it no less terrifying. If anything, that simply makes it more wrong.

When green fire blossoms across the ceiling and walls, panic finally overwhelms sense, and Laika screams. The harness pinches clumps of hair from her shoulders. Tubes rip free and float around her like weeds in a river. The flames roll into balls that skitter and spark across her coat, bouncing without scorching, crawling all over her in that same horrible way. She thrashes, froths at the mouth, shrieks and howls and claws at her restraints, a cloud of spittle and loose fur forming around her head. Laika’s energy is blazing now, the urge to live tugging at her muscles. Death is a lean and tireless wolf. If she stops for a second it will catch her and tear the meat from her flanks and belly.

Laika fights. She is braver than the whitecoats could have ever guessed.

Two of the sun dogs now, peering through the window at her with whitecoat curiosity. Laika can no longer focus. Her brain is full of heat and humming insects, chewing and scraping and buzz buzz buzzing. Thoughts drift by like soap bubbles, impossible to hold onto. Each breath flutters stale and shallow beneath her ribs. Lifting her lip for a snarl would use more strength than she has left.

They are so bright, full of flickering life that ebbs and flows and throbs. The warmth burning beneath her skin is nothing compared to their glow. An idea cuts through her fever: If she can touch them, reach them, communicate with them somehow, maybe they will pull the heat away, like a big fire pulling a little one within. Slowly, painfully, against the crying out of her energy-sapped body, Laika raises her head. She stretches her muzzle and touches the glass with her nose.

And the brightness sucks her up, sight and hearing and smell, and Laika knows nothing at all.

Everything she has grown accustomed to has vanished. The wires and bags, the harnesses, even the silver ball itself. All have gone in the nervous flick of a tongue. Laika floats in a world of liquid fire, the heart of a great orange sun. Her thoughts are clear now. The fear that buried itself in her skin and fur like a fat burrowing tick is dried up and dead, fallen off somewhere with the rest of the whitecoat things.

She can smell heat, and burning, but it’s like paddling through warm water, not uncomfortable at all. A low-pitched sound like many throats singing to the moon hums just within reach of her hearing, endless variations on a harmonious theme. It vibrates deep inside her bones and makes her want to sing along. She wonders what sort of pack lives here to create such songs.

The sun dogs appear in flashes of white and yellow to either side of her. Laika barely has time to yelp before images flood over her, playing through her head like awake-dreams. Suns with pointed muzzles howling a joyful welcome, spewing great flames into the dark. Fields of glowing lights, singing songs of the beginning of the world. The sound she hears is the sun itself baying, accompanied by its many brothers and sisters.

The two are speaking to her, not in the muttered groans of humans, but in the language of her own kind, pictures and thoughts and bits of sense-memory. They send polite images of sniffing and tail-wagging, simple things she can understand. Laika hesitantly returns the gesture and the sun dogs act pleased, jumping about and play-bowing like sunbeams on a wall.

A mystery: How, one asks, did Laika arrive where they found her, drifting alone in a silver ball no bigger than a rock? Was there some purpose to it, some motive she had in mind when first starting out into the nothing? Can they help her reach the place she was going? The worlds the sun dog shows her are confusing jumbles that make no sense to her. The colors and sounds are all wrong, the creatures that live on them fearful and strange beyond smell or any other sensation Laika knows. She shrinks away and the pictures stop. The sun dogs pause courteously, waiting for her to gather the strewn bits of her own memory into something she can exchange.

Laika answers as best she can. City streets: wet, gray, bursting with smells and the noises of gulls and pigeons and people. Brother: shaggy black warmth and the gleam of long white fangs, big and solid and curled around her like a mother protecting a pup. The whiteplace: clean reek, fear reek, cold reek, as close to a nothing-smell as the whitecoats could manage. The whitecoats themselves, difficult to understand as any other world the sun dog showed her.

Tiny, cramped spaces. Shaking and roaring, pressure building in her ears until she cried out in pain and panic. No more grass, no more sun, no more blue sky. If there is a why to any of this, Laika cannot understand it. She gives the sun dogs everything she knows and waits to see if they have answers.

Long moments pad by. Reading the body language of the strangers is difficult, but their sudden silence and stillness make Laika afraid she has offended them somehow. Is something wrong? Will they open their bright teeth and toss her like she’s shaken so many rats? She tries to send apologetic pictures of bared bellies and tucked tails. They quickly reassure her that it is not her own actions that bother them, but the ones who sent her there in the first place. Their thoughts now are black and red bursts of confusion and anger, smoldering like coals. Something like a conversation passes between the two, and a decision is made.

The sun dogs present Laika with something she has not had in many forevers. They offer her choice.

If revenge is what she wishes, they will punish the whitecoats for their misdeeds. They will take everything from the humans—sight, hearing, even their smell—and leave them stumbling alone in darkness, scentless nothings not even a sharp-nosed hound could track. The marrow they gnaw from bones will taste like fog. The chirping of birds and mice and the trickle of clear water will go unheard. If they roll in carrion, the smell will drift right off their hairless skins. All Laika has to do is ask.

They can give her freedom, too. She will sing the forever-songs alongside them, endless and happy, bright as the sun that once hung in the sky. Her old body will burst into cinders like a log exploding in a blaze, all flame-crackle and burn smell, and the new one that emerges will be fiery, with great flaming wings to carry her wherever she pleases. Laika will have a pack. Brother is lost to her, but she need never be lonely again. There are new trails to follow, new sights to see and sniff and chase, new worlds she needn’t be afraid of. All she has to do is wish it so and it will be, as sudden as weeds burning.

Or they could simply send her home. Alone, of course, but back in her world, some place the whitecoats will never find her. Dirt between her toes, frost on her whiskers, and all of this nothing more than a terrible nightmare. All Laika has to do is think the thought.

She considers each in its turn, rolling them over inside her head like a crow with a nut. She gnaws at the marrow of them. But what Laika finally chooses is none of these things. Instead, she sends back an old dream: green grass, a warm kitchen smelling of stew and root vegetables, and Brother stretched out beside her, happy and safe on a battered blue blanket.

© 2012 Brooke Bolander

Brooke Bolander is a chaos-sowing trickster girl of indeterminate employment, half-tornado, half-writer. Originally from the deepest, darkest regions of the southern US, she attended the University of Leicester from 2004 to 2007, studying History and Archaeology, and is a graduate of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. She enjoys loud music, peaty scotch, drawings that move, and anything pumpkin-flavored you might happen to have on hand. Her short fiction has previously appeared in Reflection’s Edge, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed.

The Last Supper
By Scott Edelman

Walter’s mind was at one time rich with emotions other than hunger, but those feelings had long since fallen away. They’d dropped from his being like the flesh, now absent, which had once kept the wind from whistling through his cheeks. He remembered those inner tides but vaguely, for he lived in the eternal present, with barely a shred of memory left in which to contain them.

Gone was happiness. Gone greed. Gone anger and love and joy.

Elusive traces of those emotions flickered across the playground of his mind, flitting like small children ripe to be plucked and eaten. Whenever he reached for one of them, tried to grasp it firmly, the sensation escaped, wriggling to nothingness like a dream forgotten upon waking. They all escaped, each fleeing in turn, until only one emotion remained.

Not fear. Not passion. Not jealousy.

Now there was but hunger, and hunger only.

As Walter, his joints as stiff as his brain, staggered through the deserted streets of what had just recently been one of the most heavily populated cities in the world, hunger burned through him until it became his entire reason for being.

At first, hunger had not been an issue for him, or for any of the others. During the early weeks of his rebirth, there had been enough food for all. The streets had teemed with meat. The survivors hadn’t all evacuated at once, and so there were always plenty of the foolish lingering, which meant that he had little competition for the hunt. Those first weeks of his renewed time on Earth had been about as easy as that of a bear smacking salmon skyward from a boiling river during spawning season.

Those days were gone. Now there was not even a faint whiff of food left to tease him from a distance. The streets were filled with an army of the hungry and no others, devourers who no longer had objects of desire upon which to fulfill their single purpose.

His undead brothers and sisters were for the most part invisible to him as he stumbled along streets devoid of life. His senses tingled as he moved, his bloodlust hopeful, waiting to be tickled by even the most subtle clue of life. But none came. For weeks, or maybe months, or perhaps even years—for his sense of time had been burned away along with most of his sense of self—walking the streets was akin to wandering through a maze of mirrors and seeing reflected back nothing more than duplicates of who he was, of what he had become—a bag of soiled clothing and shredded flesh, animated by a dead, dead soul. His empty vessel was multiplied there almost beyond counting.

Staggering through a deserted square that lay in the former heart of the city, stumbling by shattered storefronts and overturned buses, he sought out flesh with a hunger grown so strong that it was less a conscious thought than a tropism born out of whatever affliction had brought him and the rest of the human race to this state. His senses, torn and ragged though they were, radiated out in search of fresh meat, as they had every day since he had been reborn.

Nothing.

No scent filled his sunken nose, no sound his remaining ear. If he’d still had a consciousness capable of depression, he would have long ago sunk into despair, but he had already sunk as far as any former human should be allowed to go. So instead, he kept surging forward, sweeping the city, borne out of a hunger beyond thought. Until this day, when what was left of his tongue began to salivate.

Blood. Somewhere out there was blood. Something with a pulse still radiated life nearby.

Whatever called to him was barely alive itself, and hidden, and quiet, but from its refuge its essence called out to him like a shout. Drawn by the vibrations of its life force, he turned from the square onto a broad avenue and then onto a narrow side street, knocking aside any barriers blocking the path to his blood—his blood now. He righted an overturned trashcan (but his promised meal was not hidden there), kicked up soot as he walked through the remnants of an ancient bonfire (but no, nothing there, either), and kept moving forward like that until he arrived at a large black car flipped over on one side against a light pole, its roof split open.

He pushed his way through the carpet of broken glass and peered down into what remained of the driver’s side door. He touched the steering wheel and a charge of energizing bloodlust coursed through him. Though the wheel’s leather skin had long ago been peeled away, he could feel the blood that had blossomed there right after impact, still feel the throbbing of its vanished presence. But he knew, if he could be said to know anything, that ghostly blood could not alone have been the call that he had heard, for after all the carnal scavenging that had occurred, any remnants of the accident could not possibly exist by now, even on a subatomic level. It had to be more than that. Something was here, waiting for him. Or hiding from him.

In the back of the tilted car, something rustled under shredded remnants of seat stuffing. From beneath the mound of makeshift bedding, confused eyes peered out at him. Walter filled with a surge of lust, and dropped atop the creature. A dog yelped—only a dog, and not a man, a man whose scream would strengthen him—and exploded into frantic wriggling, but there was no way the animal could get away from the steel cage of Walter’s hands. Seeing the nature of his victim’s species, the lust was gone. There was no longer anything appealing about this prey.

But his hunger remained.

The dog whimpered as Walter shifted his fingers to surround its neck and cradle its head in his hands. Its bright eyes pleaded and teased, but Walter had learned that the promise of satiation there was pointless. He slowly tightened his grip anyway, and the animal split in two, its head popping off to drop at his feet. He held the oozing neck up to his lips, and drank.

The blood was warm. The blood was salty.

The blood was useless.

His hunger still raged, his needs unsatisfied. What he required could only be provided by the blood of human, and not animal, intelligence. He let the dog fall, where it was immediately forgotten. There had to be something more still left on the face of the Earth. He moved on, clumsy but determined, his hunger once more an all-consuming creature. It wasn’t that he needed that flesh to live. Its presence in his leaky stomach was never what powered him. The strength of his desire was unrelated to any practical end.

He hungered, and so he needed to hunt. That was what he did. That was what he was.

He returned to endless days and nights spent walking the length and breadth of his island, but his prowling proved useless. Though he sniffed out the useless life of other dogs, and rats, and the last few surviving animals that had somehow not yet starved to death unfed at the zoo, nothing human called to him. The city was empty. There were no humans left.

One day, much later, he paused in the harbor, and looked west towards the rest of his country, a nation that he had never seen in life. He listened for the call of something faint and distant, waited as the evidence of his senses washed over him. In an earlier time, he would have closed his eyes to focus, but his eyes no longer had lids to close.

The static of the city’s life, quivering nearby, no longer rose up to distract him. There was no longer a close cacophony muffling him from the rest of the continent, just a few remaining notes vibrating out from points west. He began to walk towards them, pulled by the memory of flesh.

He dragged his creaking body along the shoreline until he came to a bridge, and then he crossed it, picking his way past snapped cables, overturned cars, and rifts through which could be seen the raging river below. He had no map, and needed none, any more than a baby needed a map to her mother’s breast, or a flower needed a map to the sun.

Concrete canyons gave way to ones born of rock, and time passed, light and dark dancing to change places as they had since the beginning of time, though he did not number the days they marked. The count did not matter. What mattered was that the sounds he heard, the stray pulsings in the distance, increased in volume.

His trek was not an easy one. He was used to concrete jungles, not the forest primeval, and yet that is where he was forced to travel, for life, if it wanted to stay alive, stayed far from highways as well. As he slipped on wet leaves and tumbled over fallen logs, he could feel an occasional beacon of information snuffed out, as another life was silenced, another slab of meat digested. Walter was not the only one on the prowl, and somehow he knew that if he did not hurry, the hunt would soon be over for him forever. As weeks passed, he could hear what had once been a constant chorus diminish into a plaintive solo. As Walter could pick out no other competing chorus, perhaps it was the final solo.

Its pull grew stronger and stronger, and the flames of its sensations flickered higher, rubbing his desire raw, he moved even more quickly, stumbling lamely through a hilly forest.

Until one stumble became more than just a stumble. His ankle caught on an exposed root, and he then felt himself falling. He fell against what appeared to be a carpet of leaves, which exploded and scattered when he hit them, allowing him to fall some more.

From the bottom of a well twice his height, he looked up to a small patch of sky, and saw the first face in an eternity that was, amazingly, not like looking in a mirror. The flesh of the man’s face was pink and red, and puffs of steam came from his lips as he breathed.

Then those lips, surrounded by a beard, moved, and a rough voice, grown unused to forming the sounds of human speech, said wearily, “Hello.”

Walter had not heard another’s voice in a long while, and that last time it had been molded in a scream.

Seeing the man up there, looking smug and seeming to feel himself safe, filled Walter with rage—the first time in ages anything but pure hunger filled him. He slammed his fists wildly against the muddy walls of his hole, unconsciously seeking a handhold that could bring him to the waiting feast above, but there was nothing he could grasp. As he struggled to beat out grips with which to climb, his flesh grew flayed against sharp stones and splintered roots, yet he did not tire. He would have gone on forever like that, a furious engine of need, had not the man above begun dropping further words to him down below. They were not frightened words or angry words or begging words, the only sort that Walter was lately used to hearing, so their tone confused him. He wasn’t sure what kind of words they were, and so he paused in his fury to listen.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” said the man, his head and shoulders taunting Walter in the slice of sky above. “We have a lot to talk about, you and I. Well . . . actually . . . I have a lot to talk about. All you have to do is listen. Which is good, because I have learned from others of your kind that all you are capable of doing is listening, and barely that.”

The man extended his arm over the hole. He rolled up his left sleeve, and then used his right hand to remove a large knife from a scabbard strapped to one thigh.

“This should help you to listen,” he said.

Walter could understand none of the words. But even he understood what happened next. The blade sliced the flesh of the man’s inner forearm, and bright blood flowed across his skin, spilled into the crook of his elbow, and then dripped in free fall. At the bottom of the pit, Walter tilted his head back like a man celebrating a spring rain, the stiff muscles in his neck creaking from the effort. He caught the short stream of drops on the back of his shredded throat.

“That’s all I can spare you for now,” the man said, pressing gauze against his voluntary wound and rolling back down his sleeve. “But then, you don’t like to hear that, do you?”

Walter had no idea what he liked or didn’t like to hear. All he knew was the hunger. That brief taste had caused it to surge, multiplying the pain and power of his desire. He roared, flailing wildly at the walls of his prison.

“If you can only shut up,” said the man, “you’ll get more. We need to come to an agreement, and then, only then, there’ll be more. Can you understand that?”

Walter responded by throwing himself against the earthen walls of his narrow prison, but his response gained him nothing. As he battered his fists against the side of the pit, three of his fingers snapped off and dropped to the uneven floor. As he struggled more franticly, his body parts were ground beneath his feet like fat worms.

“This isn’t going to work,” muttered the man above, who began to weep. “I must have gone mad.”

He crumpled back out of Walter’s field of vision. Though he could still sense the brimming bag of meat above, its disappearance from his line of sight lowered Walter’s rage, and he subsided slightly. His hunger still overwhelmed him, but he was no longer overwhelmed by the mindless urge to flail. He howled without ceasing at the changing clouds above, at the sun, and at the moon, until his captor reappeared, suddenly to him, and sat on the lip of the hole. The man let his feet dangle over the edge. Walter leapt as high as his dusty muscles would let him, and tried to snatch the man’s heels, but he could not reach them. He tried once again, still falling short. The man snorted. Or laughed. Or cried. Walter couldn’t quite tell which.

“You can’t kill me,” the man said, peering down through his knees. “Well, you can, but you shouldn’t. Because once you kill me, it might be all over. Can you understand that? It’s been years since I saw another human being. Do you realize that? I may be it.”

Walter growled in response, and continued to batter himself against the sides of his prison.

“Damn,” cried the man. “What do I have to do to get your attention?”

Walter saw him bring out the knife again. The man looked at the line on his arm that had now become a long, thin scab, and then to down below, where Walter’s shed fingers were getting crushed. The man shook his head, and then pulled his upper body back so that all Walter could see were dangling feet.

“This time,” the man said, “I’ve got to do whatever it takes.”

Then Walter heard a dull thud, one accompanied by a sharp intake of breath and a visible jerking of the man’s legs. When the man leaned forward again, a handkerchief was wrapped around one hand. He used his good hand to dangle a bloody finger out over the pit.

“Listen to me now,” the man said. Walter stared at the digit, frozen. “I may be your last meal for the rest of your eternal life. I may be the last human left on earth. Try to get that through your undead head.”

Then the man let the finger drop.

Walter leapt and caught it in midair. He had it in his mouth before his feet hit the ground. He chewed so fiercely that he ate his lips away, and many of his teeth popped from their sockets. If the man were continuing to speak, Walter would never have known it, as the sounds of his feasting as he attacked his small snack echoed deafeningly. Silence did not return until after the digit was devoured, and only then did Walter look skyward again.

“I want to live,” said the man. “I don’t want this to be the end of the human race. We have to make some sort of peace, you and I. We have to reach some sort of an agreement. That’s why I moved out here and filled these hills with pits like this one. I knew that your kind would eventually sweep out from the cities and find me even here in the middle of nowhere, and I wanted to be ready for you.

“You have to tell the others. You have to let them know. Know that I’m the last. That if you just pluck me off the face of the earth, there will be nothing left, only eternal hunger. Is that something you can understand? Is that something you can communicate to the others? If so, that way they’ll let me live. They’ll let the human race live.”

What the man said was meaningless, for Walter was for the most part beyond words. He knew the word hunger, though, plucking it from the forest of words that were being dropped on him. But that was about it. He could not perceive the man’s message, could not possibly pass it on to others, for as far as his consciousness allowed, even if it were capable of containing such a message, there were no others. There was only Walter, Walter below and his food above—and the food was not getting any closer.

The man pulled his legs up from the hole, and for a moment it looked to Walter as if he was leaving, but instead, there was another sudden thud. Then the man poked his head over the lip, even closer this time, for instead of sitting on the lip, the man was laying on his stomach peering down. Then the man brought his hands around to show another dangling finger to Walter. Walter leapt, fruitlessly, as he waited for the flesh to be dropped.

“I can see that this is the only thing you will understand. Do you see now? If you eat me, then it will all be over. Eternal hunger, with nothing more ever waiting at the other end to quench it. But if we can make a deal, I can help you feed for a long, long time. I can give you blood for a long, long while, and even some flesh from time to time.”

The man dropped his finger, and this time, Walter caught it directly in his mouth. His teeth began crunching on it immediately, but unlike before, he did not take his eyes off his captor. Walter looked up at the blood soaking through the handkerchief in the man’s other hand. The man noticed Walter’s gaze, and loosened the cloth. He dangled his damaged hand down into the pit, and shook it. The handkerchief unwrapped slowly and dropped softly down. Walter caught it and tossed it into his mouth. He sucked on the blooming stain, the corners of the handkerchief hanging out of his mouth and down his chin.

“Do we have a deal?” asked the man. His eyes were wide, and he was so caught up in his hope that he did not immediately pull back his extended hand. Filled with lust at the sight of the wet wounds inflicted there, Walter ran to the wall and leapt up towards them, wedging his feet in the wet mud of the pit wall before the man could yank himself back. Walter’s remaining fingers locked around the man’s remaining finger, and with his dead weight, Walter started pulling the man, sliding him forward so that more of his body hung over the edge.

“No!” shouted the man. “I’m the last man on Earth! You can’t do this! Without me, you’ll have nothing! Don’t you understand?”

But Walter did not understand, not really, and his screaming and scrambling did little to slow his descent into the hole. Walter pulled him down mercilessly—for he had no mercy, only hunger—and at last, after far too long, the hunger was allowed to run free. Walter began with the man’s lips, silencing the urgent pleas, and then he gnawed his way deep into the man’s chest, cracking his ribs and burrowing into his heart. Walter’s face grew slick with blood as he gorged himself. It had been far too long since he had fed this well, and even though he remained trapped at the bottom of a pit, he had no space for tomorrow, no thought of saving anything aside for a future day. He savored the flesh and sucked the bones, and then . . . then it was all gone much too soon.

Momentarily sated, Walter looked up at clouds, sniffing out the universe. He listened for the pulse of the planet, and discovered in that instant that his jailor had been correct, though as he had not understood the meaning of what the man had been babbling to him, he did not in fact realize that was what he was doing. But indeed, there was no other movement of blood in the world. No others were left.

All that existed for Walter now was a few square feet of ground, his dirt wall, and the sky above. Time passed. Walter could not say whether it passed quickly or slowly, as he had no true conception of time, just the fact that the opening above regularly darkened and lightened again. During the days, his view was occasionally altered by a bird flitting by, and at night there was the occasional flash of a falling star. Hunger returned and was his constant companion, but there was no longer any point in raging.

Mud and leaves and the detritus of time slowly filled the spot where he stood. As he paced from side to side, he rose a little each day, so gradual as to be almost imperceptible. He did not realize what was happening until enough time had passed that he was finally high enough to peer over the lip. He pulled himself up to the surface and stood seeing the whole world again for the first time in ages, rather than just a tunnel-vision picture of the sky . . . and the difference didn’t really matter to him. For whether he was trapped in a hole or free on land again, nothing had changed. His only companion for now and forever more was his hunger, and since he could no longer smell anything out there with which to quench it, since the world was now a dead beast inhabited only by others of his kind, it mattered little where he spent the rest of eternity.

Strangely, the sky seemed filled with falling stars. And yet, they did not behave the way such things were meant to behave. Instead of vanishing out quickly as had the living human race, the bright spots criss-crossed the sky like embers that refused to die. During the day, the stars still shone, another anomaly he no longer had the brain power to consider. Walter moved on without a destination.

He wandered the world aimlessly, but only until he noticed that the stars themselves were no longer moving aimlessly. The stars were on the move in a purposeful manner, and as he gazed into the sky, he knew where they were heading. With the memory of the last man on Earth forever branded on his lips, he followed the path they made, moving back east across a country that was continuing to crumble, that was transforming from civilization into debris.

The bridge into the city, when he saw it again after what had been hundreds of years, had collapsed into the river. He had to pick his way over floating rubble, still bound together by cables, to move from shore to shore. He walked the city streets once more, continuing to watch the sky. When so many stars filled the sky that it seemed impossible to fit any more, their trajectories shifted. When night fell this time, Walter could make out more clearly that they were carving concentric circles in the sky. He walked beneath the heart of them, his hunger positioning him there. Others of his kind joined him.

As he watched, a single star began to drop, pulling itself away from the carefully choreographed dance in the sky, becoming more than just a speck, gaining dimension as it fell. By the time it reached the buckled pavement on which Walter stood, it had grown into a globe several stories high. The fact that it floated there, sprouting legs on which it came to rest, had no effect on Walter. He sensed only dead machinery, and felt nothing, not even curiosity. When the outlines of a door appeared and then opened, that all changed. As a walkway eased its way out from the opening to touch the ground, Walter could feel again that old familiar tingling which had been missing for so long.

A tall, attenuated creature walked down the ramp, its two arms and two legs garbed in a soft silver, and stepped into what for it was a new world.

“Hello,” it said, in a voice unused to forming the sounds of human speech. “We have traveled a long way in search of our ancient cousins.”

It removed a helmet from its head, revealing a face which, though off in its proportions, contained all the right elements—eyes, nose, mouth and so on—that signified humanity. It held a slender hand out toward the crowd in a gesture of peace. Walter, enticed by those thin, outstretched fingers, rushed forward. He would have laughed had he still been capable of laughter.

The human race that we know may have ended.

Centuries may have passed.

But flesh—the yearning for flesh, the flavor of flesh, the incomparable power of flesh—that was eternal.

© 2003 by Scott Edelman.

Originally published in The Book of Final Flesh, edited by James Lowder.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Scott Edelman has published more than 75 short stories in magazines such as The Twilight Zone, Absolute Magnitude, Science Fiction Review and Fantasy Book, and in anthologies such as The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Crossroads, MetaHorror, Once Upon a Galaxy, Moon Shots, Mars Probes, Forbidden Planets. His many zombie stories have been collected in What Will Come After, while his science fiction can be found in What We Still Talk About. He has been a Stoker Award finalist five times, in the categories of both Short Story and Long Fiction. Additionally, Edelman currently works for the Syfy Channel as the Editor of Blastr. He was the founding editor of Science Fiction Age, which he edited during its entire eight-year run. He has been a four-time Hugo Award finalist for Best Editor. His next short story after this one will be published in the anthology The Monkey's Other Paw: Revived Classic Stories of Dread and the Dead from NonStop Press.

The Seven Samovars
Peter Sursi

“The first samovar, the silver one at the end with the little bird perched atop the key, is filled to the top with Life,” she says, “freshly brewed each morning at sunrise exactly. A few drops will perk up most customers on a Monday morning, to be sure. And most of them need it, don’t you think?”

This is what she tells me—the owner of The Seven Samovars—when I arrive at work the first morning. I gape at her. Something like that is way more than a girl can take this early in the morning.

“Just a few drops, mind. A full cup  . . . well, a full cup can convince the weary soul ready to close the door and lie down that final time that perhaps there’s a little something left to discover. You will not need so much very often. The last time I served a full cup was nearly . . . two years ago, now, it must be. David: small coffee, black, every morning with his wife, Judith: large chamomile tea with a spoon of raspberry jam. That’s the Russian way to take tea: a spoonful of jam in the tea instead of sugar.

“Every morning for three years they come in. Every morning but the Sabbath, of course. Very proper. We say hello and they sit and read the paper. Together, always together. They came here to live with their son, Paul: large latte, extra cream with a shot of hazelnut syrup. They survived the war, you know. He was a watchmaker, and they got out of Europe in time, but most of their family was long gone. Anyway, three years, nearly every morning, always together. And then one day, two days, three days, nothing. The fourth day, David’s here by himself. What happened, I ask? It’s a stroke, he says. Doctor’s not sure if she’ll wake or if she does, how much of her will be left.

“He stands there, then. The line is out the door, but he’s so lost. Small coffee, black. Every day for three years, but he can’t remember. She always ordered first, you see. So I give him a cup. Full. And you’d have done the same, I’m sure. You can just tell who needs it. I made him drink it right there, never mind the rest of the line.

“And he finished his cup and handed it back to me. He stood a little taller, and got his regular. Small coffee, black. And he asked for one more of those “fancy drinks” I’d just given him. He was going to take it to the hospital for his wife, and see if the smell might not just bring her around.

“A solid recovery. That’s what the doctor said, David told me, ‘a solid recovery,’ which made us both laugh. ‘What do doctors know anyway,’ he said. Within a week, they were back to the same old routine, and two years more she lived. They died on the same day, then, in Paul’s house.

“So, you see, you will not need a full cup of life very often, but you will know when it is time.”

It must be the early morning hour because I say nothing. What on Earth can I say? I met Erzebet—“Call me Betty, dear”—yesterday when I came in for a coffee and saw the Help Wanted sign sitting next to the shortbread. I look askance at her as she’s tying her apron on, as if the words coming out of her mouth were normal everyday things and not the words of a crazy person. And there’s no way I’m calling her “Betty.”

Now we’re standing in front of the eponymous samovars, which sit on the long counter behind the register alongside the modern espresso machine. I’d only even seen the antique water boilers in museums before. Each has an elaborate urn that sits atop a small stand with just enough room to place a cup beneath the spigot. Two are silver, three are brass, one is white and blue porcelain, and the one in the center is enameled, painted black with red and pink flowers. I’m pleasantly surprised the samovars are in use, though they don’t look electric. When I walked in yesterday I’d thought they were only decorative.

And now I find out she thinks . . . I don’t know what to think about what she just said. I look back at the front door. No. Leaving now would be a record even for me—gone before the store even opened. And the morning started out so well. I was familiar with the burr grinder and the espresso machine from my previous place of employment, so I’d been on auto-pilot for the first few minutes, her gentle patter nearly lulling me back to sleep with its coffee shop familiarity.

“Cream, milk, and soy here. There’s a rush at 2:45 every day as the high school across the street lets out and another at 4:30 as the lawyers get ready for their late nights. Let me show you how to ring up a sale. The baker, my brother, Sandor . . .” She gestures to the tall man with the brush mustache, setting kolaches and blueberry scones on the wooden boards inside the display case, and lowers her voice to continue. “He comes in at three every morning to begin baking the pastries. He also lays them out in the counter.” She rolls her eyes. “Let him do it. He’s an artist and very particular.”

I look over at her brother. He obviously heard her, but says nothing. He’s putting pain au chocolat on a tiered stand, and looks at the display for a few seconds before deliberately placing each subsequent pastry.

All normal. And then, wham. The waters of life or whatever she thinks is inside the samovar. For sale with your morning muffin.

Erzebet moves further down the counter. I gather my wits and try to pay attention. Watching her dive headfirst into crazy will at least make for a few good stories later at the bar.

“The second one, right here, contains the waters of Lethe.” This samovar is brass and shaped like a fat little barrel on its side, standing on a small base worked to look like a chicken’s foot. The spigot and key are a golden beak and cock’s comb. She turns to me with a concerned and questioning look on her face. “You know that one, yes?”

I realize with some surprise that I do. “Um . . . the River of Forgetfulness, right?” Thanks Edith Hamilton, wherever you are.

She beams and pats me on the arm. “It’s nice to meet a girl who has her classics down. A lot of use you’ll get from that later.” She turns back to the samovar. “I get a gallon delivered every two weeks—I’m too old now to be traipsing down there and back again that often—but I do doctor it up a little. Very dangerous in excess, as you might imagine, but just the thing for the wounded soul who needs a little distance.”

She gestures to the set of mismatched teacups and saucers that cluster around the samovar’s foot. “To be served in bone china for utmost potency, but . . .” and here she points at me with a sharp look. “They must be triple rinsed after or there’s hell to pay.

“The previous girl, Antigone—five shots of vanilla syrup in a small coffee with extra whipped cream—I should have known right then that it would never work out. She forgot and only ran them through the sterilizer twice, even though I had been very specific. And that afternoon, we had the ladies of the Scarlet Hat Society for their monthly tea.

“They want the whole proper set up. Scones with sour cherry jam and clotted cream. I get Sandor to do them some sandwiches—which he complains about, doesn’t he, every month, but they keep getting fancier, as if I can’t see. Last month, it was salmon mousse piped onto pumpernickel squares with a dill crème fraîche.” She pauses for a second to peek over at her brother, still fussing with the display. “Dill crème fraîche, I tell you.” She shakes her head. “And then in the middle of the tea, Dorcas Littlefield, normally a tall, nonfat latte with soymilk—but Lapsang Souchong with lemon that day—drops her cup with a clatter, jumps up and whirls around, staring at the group.

“‘What am I doing here? Where’s Charlie?’ she asks. That was her husband—coffee with a little milk only, if I recall, which I’m sure I do, though nearly twenty years now he’s been dead. And then she pulls the hat off her head and looks down at herself in that—I’ll say it—rather unflattering purple dress that was cut too low for her and she should have known it; she looks at herself and shouts out—and please excuse my language dear, but the story requires it—she shouts out ‘And what the fuck am I wearing?’ and throws that scarlet tragedy of a hat onto the floor.

“Well . . . you can imagine, I’m sure, what happened then. Tears and shouting, gasps of horror. You’ve seen the sort. The sandwiches ended up on the floor and I lost three teacups and a saucer. The other ladies calmed her down and called her daughter, but done was done. The last twenty years, nearly all gone. Her children, her husband’s death, the birth of her first grandson. A terrible tragedy, really, and all because that fool girl couldn’t be bothered to hit ‘Sani-Rinse’ one more time.”

I stop moving after her and stand frozen at the corner of the counter and Loony Bin Lane. Holy shit, this woman is nuts. Her brother is back in the kitchen, but he must hear the sound of my jaw hitting the floor because he sticks his head through the door. “Erzebet, enough.” She looks at him and frowns, annoyed.

“Yes, yes, Sandor. I know.” She reaches out and takes a clear glass mug from the open shelf nearby, and fills it from the third samovar, the porcelain one, white with large blue flowers painted on. The liquid is thick like kefir as it flows from the small golden faucet. When she hands it to me, I hesitate. I briefly consider that she might be poisoning me, but, then again, The Seven Samovars had been packed yesterday when I came in and poisoning customers (and staff) was surely bad for business.

Erzebet waits, patiently, until, at last, I bring it to my mouth and take a tentative sip. It’s pale gold, cool and delicious, redolent of apples and something else.

“What is it?” I ask.

“It makes people tell the truth,” she says, suddenly serious. “It is the most terrible of my offerings.” She takes the cup out of my hands before I can take another sip. “That’s enough, then. How do you feel?”

I think about it. “Weirdly calm,” I say, and realize it is, in fact, the truth. She hands me a poppy seed kolache and I eat it in two bites.

“And what are you thinking of me right now?”

My mouth opens before I can think. “That you must be crazy, with all this talk of Life and Lethe and whatever’s in those other ones, but your brother makes great pastries, and I really need this job because I got fired from my temp job yesterday. It smells really good in here, and I think I’m starting to believe that whatever that is I drank really does make people tell the truth, since I never talk like this and it makes me wonder what’s in the other ones and if this whole thing is for real.”

I take a deep breath and feel like I’ve finished a short sprint. Huh. Maybe not so crazy after all.

Erzebet nods and puts the cup under the counter in a dishpan bound for the kitchen. “That’s about what I expected.” She smiles. “I told Sandor you’d do fine. I knew as soon as you ordered yesterday. Large coffee, one sugar, with a small splash of milk. A sensible drink for a sensible mind. A little rich, a little sweet, but not trying to hide that solid bitterness underneath. Perfect for what I had in mind.”

What did she have in mind? But again, she’s talking before I can ask my question.

“Well, let’s continue. We have a bit more to cover before the shop opens.”

We’re now at the center of the counter and the black samovar sits low and squat, like it’s somehow guarding the others and being guarded by them at the same time. Hand-painted with peonies and chrysanthemums in shocking shades of pink and red, they draw the eye into swirls of petals and ruffled edges. It sits on little brass feet inside a matching tray with an ornate bowl worked like a large leaf set beneath the tap.

“It looks Russian,” I say, since I have to tell the truth. But the truth, I realize at this point, is that I have no idea why I’m still here listening to all this. But I am, and I don’t seem to be going anywhere. What has my life come to that I am considering staying here?

Erzebet laughs. I have surprised her. “Yes, it is Russian. Very good. It belonged to Maria Feodorovna, mother of the last Tsar. A distant relative by marriage to a cousin of mine.” She makes a small expression of distaste, but I can’t tell if it’s for the Tsarina or her cousin.

“Starlight goes in this one. You must collect it only on cold, clear nights. It is to be boiled down for seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds exactly. Drinking it produces dreams and visions for when a person needs that sort of thing.

“We have a group of Moroccans who come in every other Thursday to argue about the Qur’an and poetry and drink hot mint tea. They tell me that my mint tea is the best outside Rabat, and ask how I do it, which I never tell them, but the secret is two sprigs of lemon verbena and one of basil mixed in with the mint. I grow all three in golden pots sitting in my kitchen window; facing east, of course.

“Adil Ali Boulami—espresso with five sugars when it’s not mint tea—he is the main instigator of their arguments. I give him the starlight quite often. His grandfather was a Sufi mystic and Adil Ali has a power of his own. His poetry demands the starlight, even if the others don’t believe me when I tell them what I’m pouring into his glass. People don’t always get what they want in their dreams—I’m sure you understand—but poets . . . they are always pulling out their dreams to capture on paper, so they are not afraid.

“But . . .” She holds up a finger in warning. “You must never serve it during the dark of the moon, even to the poets.” She shudders. “Some doors must stay closed.”

Something about the way she says this freaks the hell out of me and I find myself promising not to before we move on.

“I keep Death in the fifth samovar,” she says, gesturing to the other silver one, the tallest and most complicated of them all. It takes me a few seconds to absorb her words and I must have made a sound without realizing it because she nods and continues.

“Yes, dear, Death. Poison, really.” She sighs. “No matter what the spy novels say, it’s nearly impossible to create something colorless, odorless, tasteless, and untraceable, yet completely lethal, but I keep trying. At the moment, ours tastes like pink lemonade. I place an almond on the plate beneath the tap to remind myself not to give it out to children at tea.”

Holy crap. Wrong turn. Poison? Can she be serious? “You can’t be . . .” I trail off at the look on her face.

“Oh, I’m very serious, dear. Some come here for my Death specifically. I’m well known for it. Gentle and sure, Erzebet’s Death is; that’s what they all say. Sometimes that’s the way you want it, though you’re probably too young to have such thoughts. Wait until you’re my age.”

She brightens. “But Death is the most useful to mix with the others. A few drops with Love to let someone go. Or one full shot mixed with the Truth to believe your own lies.

“I’ve only had to kill a dream once, though, in all this time. Death and Starlight make a bitter drink, and I wept alongside her as she drank the cup dry.” She sighs. “A sad day.” Then she smiles. “Not like today. New apprentices always make me happy.”

Wait. What? “What do you mean ‘apprentice’? I’m your new barista.”

Erzebet laughs. “Are you sure? The sign on the counter appears to the right person, you know. After that disaster with the last girl, I tweaked the spell. A sensible girl. A practical girl. I told you. I knew as soon as you ordered.

“And anyone else would have run out of the shop long before now.”

Before I can respond, she gestures to the last two, brass, on the counter, the ones closest to the register. “The sixth is for Love, and what do you think it tastes like?”

“I’m here to make espresso, not serve Love to the heartsick,” I say, half to myself. But I’m inhaling deeply before I can stop myself. “Cherries?”

“Oh, cherries?” A huge grin breaks out on her face. “I haven’t had someone with cherries in the longest time. Not since my late cousin Elek met his future bride, Magdolna, on the street out front. Goodness, what a wedding. Seven children and all of them full of color and ideas and . . .” She winks at me. “You could have an interesting time ahead of you, I’m sure, if you want to try a sip.” I blush, but think about coming back to it later.

Maybe.

“Love tastes different for everyone; I can tell from the smell, usually, but not always. Vanilla with cinnamon is quite common, but then again, most loves are, don’t you think? Everyday things that keep their feet moving forward, but nothing special. But my Love will thaw the coldest heart, I guarantee it. Only my mother made better.

“We have a writer, Annika—normally Darjeeling with milk and honey—who comes in for a cup of Love on the last Friday of the month before she meets her lover. I can tell because her Love smells of oranges and fennel and honey—a wild love—but you would not know for looking at her. A girl should never go out without lipstick, I always say, but obviously her lover doesn’t seem to mind.

“And whatever your Love tastes like, it always goes well with chocolate.” She shows me a small basket of chocolate bars wrapped in pink foil on the front counter by the register. “It’s the one thing I won’t let Sandor do. I grind the chocolate with chiles and almonds and turmeric; it inflames the tongue and prepares the heart.”

Life. Death. Love. Dreams. Witch. Apprentice. What did I get myself into?

And clearly, at this point, I’m staying. Why? Do I . . . want this? Do I acknowledge to myself that I felt right from the minute I walked in yesterday? That I knew I was going to apply to work here even before I ordered my drink? I don’t know what to think.

“And what’s in the last one?” I ask before I can help it. What else could there be?

“The seventh . . . ?” She’s surprised, as if it weren’t obvious. “The seventh one contains coffee. What else? Strong-brewed with cinnamon and vanilla.” And just to prove it, she puts a cup beneath the little brass faucet, turns the key and pulls a full mug. The spicy scent of the coffee, already sharp in the air from the espresso machine, takes on new overtones. She sits the cup in front of me, and I realize I need it.

“This is for when the real work needs to be done, when decisions must be made. Love and Death and Starlight will only take a person so far, you know. Living requires hard work no matter what the drink, and sometimes there’s nothing to do but sit down, have a cup of coffee and talk about it.

“Besides, crafting the rest of them requires long hours and I need the coffee to get going in the morning.”

I take a deep drink. It’s so hot it scalds my tongue and the roof of my mouth, but I like how it makes me feel. Sharp and present. Like I’m right here. Ready for anything. And I realize that with my coffee, I have decided. I’ll stay and see how it goes.

And now we’re at the register. To my right, Sandor has finally finished and the wooden boards are regally piled with almond horns and small quiches and rugelach. He makes one last adjustment to a pile of molasses-brown spice cookies and is satisfied at last. Erzebet touches his arm in thanks as he passes by, and he nods at us both before he goes back to the kitchen.

“Double sweet green tea; a gentle drink for someone so particular, really . . .” She turns back to me. “Customers coming in for a latte or a cup of chamomile on a bad day will ask you about the samovars. Most think as you did, that they are just for decoration. You just tell them that when they need what the samovars hold, it will be waiting for them.

“You have it clear, then? Yes?”

I nod. What the hell. When she first mentioned “other duties, as assigned,” I assumed she meant cleaning the bathrooms and running deliveries. Instead . . . let’s give this a try.

Erzebet smiles and in her expression, I see my entire conversation with myself writ large.

“Perfect. I just know this is going to work. A sensible drink tells true, I always say. Now open the door and let us see who must be taken care of today. My samovars are full, and the water is boiling.”

© 2012 Peter Sursi

Peter Sursi was born on All Saint’s Day, which he likes to point out to people. His parents said he was almost a trick, but he reminds them of his “treat” potential. He lives with his long-suffering wife and completely ridiculous children outside of Washington, D.C. When he’s not writing, he does lots of boring stuff for the federal government.

Heartless
Holly Black

O Moon! old boughs lisp forth a holier din

The while they feel thine airy fellowship.

Thou dost bless every where, with silver lip

Kissing dead things to life.

—John Keats, from Endymion

Across the landscape of the battlefield, men stared sightlessly into the sky, their armor black with blood, their steaming intestines spread over the ground. Swarms of crows covered them in a jumping, fluttering carpet. Camp women scavenged among the corpses, cutting the throats of the dying and looting the bodies for anything of worth.

Ada bent close to one man, his mouth already darkened like a bruise on his pallid face. For a dizzying moment her sight narrowed until all she could see was a gore-clotted eyelash, a stitch of livery, the twist of a pale worm. She gagged, but a second quick breath steadied her. Ada was surprised the stench could still make her choke. It reminded her that she hadn’t always been a camp follower; her hair hadn’t always hung in knots and the hem of her dress hadn’t always been stiff with filth. It reminded her of things better forgotten.

The army’s food had already been cooked and distributed—boiled horseflesh, cabbages, onions, and what dried stores the Baron’s men had managed to frighten out of the local churls. The camp women had a few hours before they must return to the fire pits, to scour the pots and begin planning for tomorrow. Ada had to move quickly if she wanted her share of what was left on the field.

The dead man had a good set of spurs, new-looking, with bronze details. She stripped them off his sabatons and tied them up in her skirts.

The next man she squatted near was still breathing. His brow was sweaty, and his eyes moved feverishly under closed lids. She held her knife near his throat. She had been warned never to leave a man alive while you robbed him: he might wake at any time, and even a wounded soldier was dangerous. Still, she hesitated. No matter how many times she told herself that it was like killing a sow, it still wasn’t. Maybe it was the memory of compassion that nagged at her, the remembrance of what she had been before she’d bespelled her heart into her finger bone.

“Help me.” The soldier’s mouth began to move before his eyes opened. He spoke in a dreamy monotone.

Ada jumped back, the blade just nicking the flesh of his throat.

“Help me,” he repeated. He didn’t seem to notice that he’d been cut.

“No,” Ada said. She’d had enough of knights and their commands. She had to feed them, to bind their wounds and be bothered by them when she sought only sleep. Just because she hadn’t killed him quickly didn’t mean she owed him anything.

“I am Lord Julian Vrueldegost.”

She wondered whether or not he had been one of the men who had burned her village. At one time, that would have mattered to her.

“I’ll die,” he said. “Please.”

Ada sighed. “And if I help you, what? You’ll go back to your hawks and greyhounds, your hunts and feasts, your feather beds and spiced wines. And what will I go back to?”

He looked confused. “The Count, my father—he would double the size of your land. Please. My side feels as if it is on fire.”

“What land?” She wished that he would just go ahead and die so that she could get back to robbing him, but instead she dipped her finger into a nearby pool of blood and smeared it across his neck. She brought her face close to his. “Play dead, your lordship, and hope none of the other women find you. They are even less kind than I.”

The part of her that would have been pleased by his pleading and his fear was long gone, and with it the part that might have pitied him. She reached for the grubby string around her neck and felt the smooth bone hanging there. Her mother had cut off the end of her finger once the spell was complete, but Ada could never bring herself to get rid of it. Her heart.

The wind picked up, whipping at her as she walked back to the encampment. She thought little of it until she noticed that the leaves on the nearby trees remained still. Then something tore at her skirts, ripping them enough so that the spurs dropped onto a carpet of oak leaves and acorns. A cawing started overhead as a mass of black birds circled and began to land around her.

“Stop it!” she called. Her knowledge of magic was poorer than her mother’s, but even she could see this was the work of some spirit. “What are you? What do you want?”

Invisible hands grabbed hers, pulling her in the direction of the battlefield.

“Show yourself,” she demanded, sitting down on the cold ground and ignoring the crows. “I’ll not stir from this place.”

A shape leaped down from the branches above her. It had the head of a raven, but its body had the thin limbs of a boy, dusted here and there with feathers. She had never seen a manes up so close. It must belong to Lord Julian. Only a nobleman could afford the conjuring that trapped an ancestor into the shifting flesh of a spirit. Manes drank blood from their charges, she knew that much. She had heard that great ladies would sit at tournaments with their manes suckling voluptuously at their wrists.

“Hedge-witch,” it said, coming closer on all fours and regarding her with unblinking eyes.

“Hedge-witch no more,” Ada said. Without her heart, she couldn’t cast even the simplest of spells. There were other, darker enchantments that required a bespelled heart, but she didn’t know any of those.

The manes pointed to the bone around her neck. “I know what that is. You should hide it. One snap and your life is undone.”

Ada touched the string reflexively. “I don’t want to lose it,” she said.

It turned its head quizzically and regarded her with black eyes. “Help my master and I will tell you a place you can hide it where it will be safe always.”

When dealing with spirits, her mother had told her, it was usually easier to acquiesce. Ada picked up the spurs and began to tie them up in the remains of her dress. She made a mental list of what she would need for Julian: a blanket, some water, bindings for his legs, honey to slather over his wounds. Those things were easy to come by, especially with so many men dead.

When Ada returned to the battlefield laden with supplies, she found a crone hunched over Lord Julian, stripping off his gauntlets with knobbed fingers.

The woman looked up and Ada recognized her from the camp—Clarisse. People said she’d once been very beautiful. Despite the fact that she was bent with age, she still tied filthy ribbons in her hair and tinted her cheeks with the juice of berries, or sometimes with blood.

“What is this here? A lovely turquoise ring.”

Ada narrowed her eyes. “That’s a signet. If anyone sees you with it, they’ll know it was stolen.”

“Perhaps they’ll mistake me for a duchess.” Clarisse cackled. Then she suddenly clutched her wrist and dropped the ring.

Puzzled, Ada bent closer. Long red marks had appeared on the old woman’s forearm.

“You did it! You summoned spirits to attack me!” Clarisse pulled a crude knife from her belt.

“What?” Ada stepped back. Her own knife was close to hand, but she didn’t want to drop the things she was carrying to get to it. She considered explaining about the manes and then decided that would make Clarisse more suspicious rather than less. “If I could summon spirits, I would put them to better use than scratching old women,” Ada said finally.

Clarisse clapped her hand to her cheek as if she’d been struck. “You wretch! I’m not old.”She stood up and then looked around her, at the field of the dead and dying, as if she didn’t know how she’d come to be in such a place. “Take him if you want him so much. My other suitors give me plenty of gifts.” She began to stagger off, rubbing her arm.

Ada knelt beside Julian and watched Clarisse go. She was so stunned that she almost forgot about the ring in the dirt. It was the blue of the stone that drew her eye. Gingerly, she picked it up. The gold was heavy in her hand. She smeared away mud to reveal a coat of arms with three ravens on it.

“I’m just holding on to it for him,” she said aloud as she tucked it into the folds of the sash at her waist. Then she started stripping off his gilt-inlaid armor. The leather-and-cloth padding underneath was stained with sweat and blood. He moaned as Ada tugged him onto the blanket. Pulling his body over the field made her muscles ache. By the time they reached the burned village, she was exhausted. He had barely stirred.

Even in the dying light, Ada easily found the way to her mother’s old house. She tugged at the blackened hatch to the root cellar. It opened in a great gust of soot.

“That’s the best I can do,” she said. “I can’t carry him down the stairs, and you don’t want me throwing him down.”

A sudden gust of air made cinders whirl across the floor. The manes appeared and scuttled closer, pressing its beak so close to the wound that she wondered if its tongue would snake out for a taste.

“Julian’s people will come,” it said. “The crows have brought my message. Just get him down there. You only need help a little while longer.”

“As you say.” Ada pressed lightly on the skin just to one side of Julian’s injury, but it was enough to make him awaken with a gasp. The manes cawed loudly, and she wondered what would happen to it if Julian died.

The knight looked up at her, disoriented and afraid. “Your creature wants me to hide you. Can you stand?” He reached up and touched a stray lock of her hair, running it between his fingers as if he were spinning it into thread. “I don’t know your name.”

She narrowed her eyes, confused. “Ada,” she said finally. “Ada,” he repeated. “You have hair like my sister’s. Jeanne. She will be twelve soon.”

“I’m fifteen,” Ada said. “Now get up.”

He managed a thin smile. She could see his hands tremble as he rose. Pressing her shoulder under his arm, she led him down the stairs. He moved slowly, like a sleepwalker. The earthen room still stank of fire, but otherwise it was unchanged from her memory of it. By the dim moonlight, she could see well enough to wash his wound with the water she brought and to smear it with honey. He tried to hold still, but sometimes he shuddered convulsively, or gasped.

“The gash doesn’t stink yet,” she said. “That’s a good sign.” Julian moaned again, flushed with fever, moving restlessly into something like sleep.

“Maybe it would be better to be dead,” Ada said to no one in particular.

It was fully dark when she stumbled back to the campsite. Most of the men were sleeping on their pallets of rushes, but a few still argued over dice beside dying fires. As Ada approached her own blankets, she saw that one of the Baron’s men was waiting for her. Her eye was drawn to where his red beard was split by a scar that ran from his chin to his ear.

“You’ve cheated us out of a prisoner, is that correct?”

“No,” Ada lied automatically. She’d seen a girl hanged for stealing a silver cup and did not want to join her.

He snorted. Without warning, he seized her sash and ripped it. Her knife tumbled out, along with a few copper coins and the knight’s signet ring.

The man leaned down and picked up the ring from the dirt.

“I found it,” she said hurriedly.

“That old hag said different.” He shrugged. “Where is the owner of this ring?”

“Dead. Clarisse found it on him, but I scratched her and took it. She means to repay me with trouble.”

He grabbed hold of her hair and pulled her close to him. She could smell the onions on his breath and the rot of his teeth. “His body isn’t on the field. Do you know who this belongs to, slattern? You’ve hidden the Count’s son. The Baron wants a corpse by dawn.”

She had known as much, but somehow had failed to comprehend the import of it. After all, what would it matter if Julian were the King himself when even a common man-at-arms was so far above her?

“He’s in a root cellar in the village.” She was pleased, just then, that she didn’t have a heart to trouble her.

The man let go of Ada’s hair, and she fell to her knees. He rested the heel of his boot against her throat. She felt her pendant of bone pressing against her skin and knew that it could crack along with her neck. She would die. But still she could not really be afraid.

“He’s alone?” the man demanded.

“Yes,” she gasped.

He removed his foot and she gulped breaths of air.

“Get up,” he said. “You’ll be taking me to him.”

Ada pushed herself to her feet and allowed him to lead her to his horse. The dappled gray courser was chewing on the rope that secured it to a post. She noticed that it had already been saddled and that the man had strapped a sword and a crossbow to the leather belts across its rump. It did not lift its white muzzle as she fitted her wooden shoe into one stirrup and hauled herself onto its back.

The man laughed as he untied the horse and then swung up behind her, pushing his body against her back lewdly. “Through the battlefield,” she said.

“Very well, then.” One of his hands held the reins, but the other snaked around to cup her breast. She knew that should disturb her, but the voice that told her why seemed so distant.

“What did he promise you?” the man asked. “Gold? Riches? A tumble?”

“Nothing,” she said, with a shake of her head.

“You’re a cold one,” he said. His fingers dug painfully into her breast, kneading it. She winced. “Or a bit simple.

“Or maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe you’re one of the Count’s women, a spy. What do you think I would make of that?”

She shook her head again, as though she were simple and didn’t understand him. She considered what would happen when Julian was dead and she was alone in the house with the man-at-arms. Would he kill her? She imagined him heating up her mother’s old fire-tongs to find out for himself if she was a spy. She imagined other things. And still she was numb to dread.

Did she really care for nothing, not even herself?

Ada noticed the lack of a heart in a way she had not before. She pushed around her thoughts like a child pushing her tongue into the sore space left by a missing tooth.

“I know a cure for your silence,” he said as they picked their way over the field of rotting bodies.

She looked down at the field of corpses, their faces turned to burnished silver in the moonlight. They were beyond caring too. Dead.

Ada remembered how, long before the war, she had cried over the death of a cat that had ranged around their corncribs. Yet with the finger bone dangling around her neck, she had buried her mother without a single tear. She could not even remember where she’d dug the grave.

Surely it was better not to feel. What was the purpose in courting pain?

But then she thought of all the different sorts of pain, all the ones she hadn’t been able to avoid.

She imagined taking the finger bone off her neck and snapping it in two. Even though that would kill her, she could not bring herself to care. That troubled her. She knew she should care. She shouldn’t stand by and allow her own death. She didn’t want to be dead.

Her heart was still missing, so she wasn’t afraid when she broke the string around her neck with a sharp tug. The method for undoing the spell was simple. She didn’t even flinch as she swallowed the bone whole.

Pain stabbed her chest, a thousand sharp needles, as in a foot kept too long in one position. She pressed her hands between her breasts and felt a steady drumming. Tears burned in her eyes.

Then, abruptly, she was overwhelmed by fear, fear that bit through her flesh to bury itself in her marrow

This was a mistake, she thought. I can’t do this. She started to shake.

The man-at-arms tightened his grip on her and laughed. She thought of Julian, of the way that he had touched her hair. She didn’t want him to die. She didn’t want anyone to die anymore.

“You know where we’re going, don’t you? You haven’t lost your way?”

They had come to the edge of the village without her noticing. Looking out at the remains of the houses, black and indistinguishable, she knew what she had to do.

“He’s in there,” she said. Pointing to where a neighbor had once brewed ale and kept chickens, she found that she could hardly breathe. It was harder to lie now, when she was afraid.

“Is he armed?” The man-at-arms shifted on the saddle. She shook her head. “He’s badly hurt. Defenseless.”

“Dismount,” he ordered.

She climbed off the horse. He drew his sword and jumped down after her. Trailing him to the house, Ada hoped he would go in first, hoped he would give her a moment to get away from him.

He signaled with his chin for her to go through the door. Once inside, he would see that she had lied. She hesitated. “Get in there,” he whispered.

She had hoped for more of an advantage, but there was no more time. Ducking away from his arm, she ran back to the horse and pulled the crossbow from the horse’s rump. The bow was drawn tight, but she fumbled getting the bolt in place.

A loud shout came from the doorway. The manes had appeared, cawing and capering, surprising the man-at-arms into giving her another few moments of time. She slammed the bolt into the notch and pointed it in his direction.

His eyes went wide and his mouth curled into a sneer. “Don’t be stupid.”

“I want to live,” she said, and shot him.

The bolt hit him just below the throat. His scream stuttered as blood stained the front of his leather doublet. He reached up a hand and staggered toward her. Then he fell heavily onto the dirt.

Tears burned her eyes, streaking her cheeks with lines of salt.

She didn’t know how long she had been there when she noticed Lord Julian stood behind her. His fingers touched her shoulder as she turned. He still looked pale, but his fever seemed to have broken. She noticed for the first time that he was young and that he needed a haircut. “Thank you,” he said softly. She nodded. She wanted to say something—to tell him that she hadn’t done it for him, to ask about his sister, or to say that she was glad that he was awake—but she didn’t know how to say all of those things at once, so she was silent. The manes settled near the man-at-arms and began to tear at his wound with its beak.

“It’s hard to see so much death.” Lord Julian looked off into the deep shadows. “Was he the first man you’ve killed?”

“No,” she said. “He was the last.”

Julian paused at that. After a moment, he spoke again. “Do you recall when I offered to double your land?”

“You said your father would double it.”

He smiled. “But you refused me. Let me make you another offer. Anything. A position in the castle? A commission? Tell me what it is that you want.”

She wanted her mother to be alive again, for the war to end, for everything to be as it had once been. She wanted to scream, to weep, to shout.

Ada laughed out loud even as tears stung her eyes. “Yes, that’s it,” she said, leaning back to look up at the stars. “That’s exactly it. I want.”

© 2005 by Holly Black.

Originally published in Young Warriors: Stories of Strength, edited by Tamora Pierce & Josepha Sherman.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Holly Black is the author of bestselling contemporary fantasy books for kids and teens. Some of her titles include The Spiderwick Chronicles (with Tony DiTerlizzi), The Modern Faerie Tale series, The Good Neighbors graphic novel trilogy (with Ted Naifeh), and her new Curse Workers series, which includes White Cat and Red Glove. She has been a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award, a finalist for an Eisner Award, and the recipient of the Andre Norton Award. She currently lives in New England with her husband, Theo, in a house with a secret door.

Monsters, Finders, Shifters
Nina Kiriki Hoffman

My father’s family had produced monster-finders for several generations. More monsters were being born than ever; our village didn’t have enough finder power to track them all, or shaper power to abort or fix those the finders found, so many people had to offer their offspring to the Shadows.

My parents had seven children, in hopes that all of us would be monster-finders. None of us were monsters—my parents’ and the village’s good fortune. Three older brothers and a sister had passed threshold age without a flicker of finder talent. I, Bertram, was the fifth of my parents’ children.

I woke one morning in my twelfth year feeling strange, shaky, and confused. Instead of fighting my siblings at the dining table to snatch a piece of Ma’s breakfast bread, I snuck out the dog door in the back of the house.

Outside, the air was cool and damp, and smelled of earth and wood smoke. Spring had pushed green fingers up through winter’s dead leaves. Birdcalls mixed with the rush of water chuckling past the stepping stones in the stream. The creek willows had already leafed out in curved green scimitars.

I crossed the creek to our neighbor Kalinda’s house, a rounded hardclay building at the edge of a meadow. I had watched many storms under the overhang of its curved clay porch. Kalinda’s one luxury—an oriole-nest swing—hung from that roof. Her husband had bought it for her from wandering traders. Somewhere, birds larger than people wove nests made of supple, wiry black withes, big enough to hide in, tight enough to block the wind.

Pa said people made the nests, and pretended birds had done it. He hadn’t been inside the nest, hadn’t touched the downy feathers carpeting the bottom, each as big as a hand.

Maybe monsters made nests like this, my older sister Ari whispered to me after all the lights had been blown out and our brothers and sisters were breathing slow in sleep. The monsters lived with the Shadows, far off in the forest to the northwest, a direction we called Not There. When the wind was right, sometimes we smelled faraway smoke from Not There, or heard music made by instruments none of us knew.

The nest was my favorite thinking place. That morning when I woke feeling strange, I slipped in through its narrow circle opening and huddled inside among the feathers to consider my state.

Kalinda took care of us when Ma was at the village bakery and Pa was monster-finding. Kalinda was nice to me, especially when my brothers Ethan, Dark, and Clay beat me up. Her wound salve was so cold it took the sting out of bruises and scrapes. She talked me out of feeling bad when my big sister Ari said cutting things to me. Kalinda let me sit in her nest swing anytime I liked; it was the only place I could hear myself think some days, there was so much racket at home.

Kalinda came out of her front door while I was curled up in the nest. “Hey, Bert. I just baked. Want some?” She held a plate of sundrop cookies in front of the round opening of the nest.

The shivers and shakes inside me ran like melted metal from my toes and fingers into my stomach, collecting into a hot, simmering ball. I looked at Kalinda. My eyes burned, and then I saw a strange shape curled inside her belly. Not a baby, exactly, but something, with head, torso, arms, and legs. Its tail wrapped around it like a spear-pointed rope, and soft spikes lay flat along its head.

I laid my hand on Kalinda’s stomach. I hadn’t even known she was pregnant.

“What are you doing, Bert?” She stepped back so my hand fell away.

It was too late. I knew my neighbor had a monster in her.

When monster-finders found monsters, they were supposed to notify the wifewatchers, who lived in a house on the central square, near the headwoman’s house. Wifewatchers did tests to find out how much monster was in the embryo, and then the village council decided what to do next: whether to let the baby be born the way it was, or try to shift it so it was human and then let it be born, or whether there was not enough human in it to save.

A monster-finder located the monsters. Not all monster-finders had shaping powers to shift them.

If I told the wifewatchers I’d found a monster, Kalinda would have to stay in the Consideration House and be tested. The whole town would know.

Kalinda had carried two monsters before, and they had been stopped before they were born, too far from human to let live. Her husband had left her after the second one, searching for someone who could give him a live child.

No woman was allowed to stay pregnant if she had quickened three monsters. This was Kalinda’s last chance.

“No, Bert,” she whispered.

The longer she kept the baby, the worse it would be for her when she lost it.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Kalinda said.

“Everybody will know you’re pregnant soon.” The baby had a shape to her. She must have been inside Kalinda awhile to grow so real.

Kalinda took both my hands and laid them on her stomach. “How bad is it?”

I sensed, making sure what I had felt at first was right. “She has a tail. And head spikes.”

She started crying. “Jat was the only one who would sleep with me, after I lost my first two. I thought this one would be different.” She pressed her hands on top of mine. “Can you shift her, Bert? Don’t let the watchers take her from me.”

I felt the baby’s shape in the palms of my hands, and I could see it, too. I had seen others shape monsters into humans. I wasn’t sure how they did it. Pa hadn’t trained me in the skills of monster-shaping, not knowing I’d get the talent.

“Please,” said Kalinda. “Save her.”

“I don’t know how,” I whispered.

She held my hands against her stomach. Tears ran down her face. She smelled like sundrop cookies fresh from the oven, and safety, and jasmine soap.

Blistering heat rose from my center. My hands sizzled with purpose. I thought, Warmth, go into Kalinda’s baby and make it human.

Heat flowed out of my hands and into Kalinda’s belly. She gasped and shuddered, but I sent the heat into her anyway. It flowed into the baby, flushed through her systems.

What is human? something in me asked, but I didn’t know. A torso, neck, and head. Two arms, with one shoulder, elbow, and wrist each, two hands, each with four fingers and a thumb. Two legs, hips, knees, feet with five toes each. No tail. Hair on the head instead of spikes.

Shrink, tail, and put your pieces to work in the body so it will look human. Be human. Energy moved from me into Kalinda, until I was so tired I faded.

I woke in the nest, feathers and their slightly musty smell pressed against my cheek, a blanket over me. I had slept there before, so I wasn’t surprised. I rubbed my eyes and peeked out the circle door toward the sky, dark, with scatterings of stars. I was so thirsty I wanted to drink a river, and my stomach had tied knots in itself clenching on things that weren’t there.

I tried to get out of the nest, but it swayed wildly and made me queasy. I was so weak. It was so cold. I managed to eel over the nest’s edge and fall on the porch, but then I lay there, too tired to get to my feet. I wondered whether I’d freeze before morning.

“Bert?” said a hoarse voice in the darkness.

I rolled my face toward the porch chairs. Kalinda’s silhouette rose, knelt beside me. Her warm hand felt my forehead. She gathered me to her and carried me into her darkened house, laid me on the couch. Embers still glowed on the hearth. She fed the fire small sticks and draped a blanket over me.

“Are you all right?” I whispered when she came to me with a brown pottery mug whose contents steamed.

“I don’t know.” She propped me up with pillows and held the mug to my mouth. I sipped. Vegetable broth flavored with garlic. When I’d finished it, she set the mug on a table. She crossed her hands over her belly. “I feel strange and sick and different. What’s inside me now?”

I took a couple breaths and tried to wake my new power. I touched her stomach. I didn’t feel anything. “I don’t know,” I said. I pulled the blanket up over my head.

“Your ma was calling for you around supper time,” Kalinda said presently. “I told her you’d come over here sick, and I’d take care of you.”

“Thanks.”

She rose, stood with her back to me. “Get some sleep.” She went away.

I watched the flames until they died.

The scent of fresh breakfast bread woke me. I felt ravenous. I sat up. A fire burned again in the round clay fireplace, chasing the spring chill from the room. The warm orange and red rug on the floor reminded me I was at Kalinda’s. I remembered the rest of yesterday, and felt sick again.

Kalinda came in and set a plate of buttered breakfast bread on the table next to me.

My fingers and toes tingled. Heat gathered in my belly.

“How are you?” Kalinda asked, her voice remote, her eyes not quite looking at me.

I put my hand on her belly and felt a baby there. No head spikes. No tail. “It’s all right,” I whispered. “She’s human.”

She sat beside me on the couch and wept.

We didn’t find out until later that I’d hurt the inside of the baby’s head. By then, she was a couple months old, hard set in who she was, beyond fixing, so they said. By then, I was training with Pa and other monster-finders and shapers to get my talents under control.

Once my older brothers found out I got the talent, they hit me more than ever. They were all training to be clay masons, and Ethan, especially, was an artist with clay; the flamelizards who cured the clay liked him well and did his bidding. Pa had been proud of him. Now I was Pa’s favorite, and that drove all three brothers crazy. Also, I went to special school and got to skip a lot of the learning we all hated.

It took me months to figure out how to use my shifter talent on my oldest brother Dark so he’d stop hurting me. I had to use it again to stop him from telling the wifewatchers I was misusing my talent.

Nobody was supposed to be able to shift someone much beyond birth. That was what everybody said, anyway, and my teachers acted as though they believed it. But I figured out how to quiet Dark’s voice, how to lock his hands against his thighs, how to shift his toes enough to make him trip every time he took a step.

The first time I did it was after he blacked my eye and made my nose bleed all over my favorite shirt. When he raised his hand to hit me again, shifter power rose in me and lashed out at him, and he fell to the floor, tears coming from his eyes, but no sound from his mouth. He clawed at his throat.

At first I was terrified. Power had gone out of me into my brother and done something I hadn’t planned. This was nothing like the lessons I was learning at school.

I knelt beside Dark. I searched him with finder power and found that he was not dying.

Once I was sure he could breathe, I let Dark suffer until my nose stopped bleeding. We were alone. If Ma or Pa had been near, Dark wouldn’t have hurt me so badly. Usually he hit me so the bruises were under my clothes, then taunted me into keeping them secret.

Finally Dark turned to me and clutched my arms. His eyes were wild. His mouth moved, and nothing came out. He gripped me so hard it hurt, and I pushed him away. My eye still stung, and blood was drying on my shirt.

He knelt in front of me and touched his forehead to the floor, and then I was frightened. I wasn’t sure I could shift him back. It crashed down on me then, that this was the second time I’d sent out power without knowing how or what, and last time hadn’t worked out so well. Plus, as old as he was, Dark was supposed to be unshiftable.

At last I laid my hands on his shoulders and tried to feel what was different about him. Then I sensed the tracks my power had left, a small, tight net across something in his throat. We hadn’t had that body part in anatomy yet. I let shifter power reach out and pull the net away.

Dark gasped and fell back. “What did you do?” he demanded.

Siti, Kalinda’s daughter, didn’t speak. She made noises—moans, mostly, sometimes soft questioning sounds. She cried a lot. She grew like a normal child, walking at twelve months, pulling things down from tables, putting everything in her mouth. She seemed to hear and see all right, but she didn’t learn or remember. If she ate a berry one day that made her sick, she was just as likely to eat it again the next day. It made caring for her a chore. I took care of her when Kalinda needed rest.

One afternoon I had her with me in the think room, where I was studying a particular shift for babies who might be born with extra toes or fingers. The think room was a room we’d added to the house after my youngest sister was born. It was supposed to be a place where everybody could do things quietly, alone or together. Ethan designed it—rounded inside and out, the walls rough, warm, sandy clay, windows across from each other that could be opened or shut to train the breeze through or let in light, the outside black in winter to summon sun’s heat, white in summer to reflect sun’s glare, the floor a mash of soft seed cotton we changed every couple months. Ethan was too young to build it by himself, but he had his guild come and make it.

I had a pregnant dog and special permission to work her. Siti liked the dog. I had to keep Siti behind me while I worked so she didn’t get mixed up in the shifts I was making inside the dog’s belly.

Siti was curled up against my back when Dark came in. Most of the others stayed outside while I did my homework, but Dark didn’t.

Dark said, “Why do you spend so much time with that idiot child?”

The dog had four puppies inside, very young yet, their paws just starting to bud fingers and toes. I sensed and traced the connections. I gave one of the puppies an extra toe on each front foot. The plasm was easy to shift in its current state. I waited, sensing all the systems inside the mother dog as they responded to my shift. Her breathing remained calm. The fluid in her stayed stable. I had shifted the puppy without hurting it, the mother, or the others.

I finally looked at Dark. Now that he knew I could hurt him and he couldn’t stop me, our relationship had changed. Sometimes he was the only one I could talk to. “She’s company,” I said.

“Kalinda should put her out in the forest with the other monsters.”

“She is not a monster,” I said. I lifted one hand toward him, bent my fingers as though summoning my talent.

“All right, all right.” He waved a hand to stop me. “Just wondering. You have to admit she isn’t much good to anyone.”

I stroked the air above the dog to loose her from the still state I had put her in. She sighed and lay quiet. I wondered if my shifting inside her felt good. She never ran from me the way practice animals ran from the other shifter students.

Siti tugged on my tunic. “Uh, uh, uh.”

I turned, helped her stand. She was almost two now, and ran everywhere if I didn’t slow her down. She often fell without someone’s hand to hold. Ignoring Dark, I took Siti to the kitchen and got her a piece of dessert bread, soft and sweet from Ma’s baking that morning. She put the whole thing in her mouth. Most fell out again. I had forgotten to break it into small pieces, and that started the familiar voice in my head: I was smarter than Siti. I should remember how to care for her. I had no business shifting anyone. All I did was destroy people. No one should trust me . . .

I cleaned up after her. While I knelt on the floor with a wet rag, giving myself a mental beating, she ran outside. I dropped the rag and ran after her. She wasn’t anywhere I could see.

She was hiding. My first fear was always the stream. Siti could barely stay on her feet; I was afraid to let her near the water. I ran to the water and looked in the deepest pool, near the stepping stones across to her mother’s house.

She was not in the pool, nor in the fast part of the stream where it rushed past small rocks. I quieted my panic and looked at the yard. The herb and vegetable garden was full of small green plants struggling up through the chill, empty of Siti.

I stood by the stream and reached for my skills. Siti was not a monster, but I should be able to sense her the way I could sense other humans.

I found her, crouched amid bushes in a little thicket of trees beside the house. When I picked her up, she clung to me. Her breathing was noisy, her face smeared with dusty tears.

“It’s nothing,” I said. I took her to the kitchen and washed her face. We went back to the think room, where I let her play with the dog. Dark had gone.

That day I held Siti’s head in my hands and tried to sense my way into her brain. I did it almost every time I was with her. My dream was that I would figure out how to fix her brain. My teachers had all told me that one couldn’t shift people after they were born, but I had proved them wrong with Dark. I was not going to work on Siti until I was sure of my ground, though.

I knew what Siti’s brain looked like, if it was anything like the dead brains we studied in shifter anatomy classes. Between my hands it did not feel like that. I cupped a bowl of liquid light, with shafts of darkness and small storm systems moving through. The colors of light changed. When Siti was happy, the light was golden and warm. If she was upset, it got cold and blue. Other colors were harder for me to decode. Just now, with my hands holding her head, and her hands tangled in the dog’s fur, her mind was alight with orange-yellow-gold glow. Three small dark lightning-spitting storms swept into the sky.

Could I still them? I thought quiet at the storms, and the clouds disintegrated a piece at a time, fading and lightening until they melted into the general gold of her mind.

I blinked out of shifter senses and looked down. Siti stared up into my face, her wide blue eyes blank of thought and response.

I wondered if she liked the storms. Maybe I should have left them alone.

I dropped back into the tranquil bowl of her mind and said, “Siti? Can you hear me?” Each word troubled the water with ripples of blue and green, melting into each other and interweaving.

Just then Ethan and Clay breezed into the think room, talking and tossing a small leather sand-sack back and forth. They saw us and stilled, and then Clay said, “What are you doing with that girl?”

These words shot through Siti’s mind like blazing embers. She curled her arms and legs closer to her body.

“Is that what interests you, Bertram, a girl who can’t resist you?” Ethan asked. His words were dark purple in Siti’s mindscape. “She the only one who’ll let you get close?”

An answering rage rose up. There was a girl my age in shifter class. Her name was Lane, and I liked her, but she never looked at me. She wouldn’t partner with me, even though there were only five in our class. Sometimes I knew why she wouldn’t look my way. I had made terrible mistakes. I’d never told anyone, and I was sure Kalinda hadn’t either, but I thought finders ought to be able to tell about past mistakes just by looking at people. Sometimes I watched Lane chase after Rush, the oldest and most accomplished in our class, and knew she longed for one who didn’t want her, the same way I longed for her.

I let go of Siti’s head and pulled her into my lap, where I hugged her. She was hard-edged and awkward, one elbow against my stomach and the other in the soft flesh of my upper arm. She kicked me where it hurt, and I opened my arms.

“Brother, what have you done to her?” asked Ethan, and now he sounded truly alarmed.

“Nothing.”

Siti ran to the chest where we kept toys for visiting children. She threw open the lid, pulled toys out, and crawled inside, closing the lid.

Ethan punched me in the arm. “What did you do to her?”

“I didn’t do anything! You’re the ones who upset her!”

“How could we? She’s an idiot, isn’t she?”

“She doesn’t like the sound of your voices.”

“There’s something unnatural in your fascination with that child,” Ethan said, but Clay punched his shoulder and said, “Leave it! Who cares?” He stooped to pick up the toss-toy. “Let’s go outside.”

After they had left, I went to the toy chest and sat beside it, reached for Siti’s thoughts. The storms fought each other, then slowed as time passed. Finally quiet weather was there again, but the sky had settled to pale blue instead of the yellow I interpreted as contentment or happiness.

“I’m going to open the lid now,” I said. My words didn’t disrupt her sky. So I lifted the lid.

She looked up at me, and her eyes were empty. Golden light filled her sky, though. She let me lift her and carry her home.

In shifter class the next day, the dead embryo-monster my teacher had given me sat in front of me unchanged while the rest of the class shifted their tiny corpses to look more human.

“Bertram!” said Neala, my teacher. I hadn’t even noticed her approach. “What is wrong with you?”

“I didn’t sleep well last night,” I muttered. I cupped my hands near the tiny corpse before me and thought its feathered hands human. I could shift Dark: fingers, toes, voice, face, all those things could be shifted for a little while, as I liked, because they knew how they were supposed to go, and when I gave them permission to shift back, they returned to their original shapes. I knew my shifts were stretching them sideways, away from natural.

I couldn’t do that to Siti’s brain. It didn’t know any other natural way than the way it already was. I had shifted it before it got set.

I turned the monster baby’s four-toed, taloned bird feet into human feet. Things were much easier to shift after they were dead. The systems inside them didn’t cling to familiar ways. Whatever animated them was gone.

“Good,” said Neala. “Have you been practicing? You’re so swift.”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. Work on the head.”

My dead baby had head spikes and a bird’s tail. It reminded me of Siti—before. I soothed the spikes from its head, but then I had to go and be sick.

“What’s the matter with you?” Neala asked. She had followed me to the outhouse, opened the door while I was still retching.

“Teacher,” I said. I left the outhouse and went to the bowl and pitcher by the back door of shifter school. I dipped water to rinse my mouth, poured some over my hands and soaped them.

“What kind of sickness have you brought to school?” Neala asked.

“It’s in my head, not in my belly.”

“What’s wrong with your head?”

I looked toward the creek willows. “Do you know shifts for thoughts?” I asked.

Neala’s voice had sharpened, and she gripped my upper arm so tightly it hurt. “Who have you been talking to?”

“No one! I have thoughts I wish I could shift. Is it possible?”

“It is forbidden.” She loosened her hand. “What are your bad thoughts? What’s troubling you, Bertram? How can one as young as you be so unhappy?”

I wished I could tell her. If the village elders knew what I had done to Siti before her birth, though, it would probably mean exile for Siti, and for me. Siti they might offer to the Shadows; I couldn’t let her walk there alone. Before that happened I would take her and run. But where?

The nearest village was Yahara, two days’ walk over the mountains, and I had heard people there were even stricter than they were here in Intil. They had no shifters. They let their monsters be born, and then disposed of them.

Beyond that, the nearest town was the city Pishtil, five days’ walk, in the lowlands. All rumors of valley towns said they were people without gods or morals. I never wished to go there, though I knew Ethan and Dark pined to go to a trading fair in Rayal. They wanted to see more people in one day than we had seen in our lifetimes.

Neala put her hand on my shoulder and stared into me the way only a monster-finder could, looking for hidden structures and abnormalities. Her gaze probed through me like a spoon stirring through cooking noodles.

Was there a way to shift thoughts? Neala had asked me who I had talked to. Therefore, there must be someone I could talk to about it, if I only knew who.

“Come back to class,” she said.

I rinsed my mouth and spat water on a weed, then followed her into the school, back to my dead child.

“Shift its skin color,” she said.

The baby’s skin was dead and gray. I reached for its ability to shift at my urging, and found only a few colors it could be. I nudged it toward the brownish pink of living skin. For that to happen, it needed to be breathing and have blood running through it. I asked for these things to happen.

“Bert!” my teacher cried, shaking my shoulder.

The embryo had been preserved in pickling juice after the mother gave it up. Elements and liquids were there; all they needed were persuasion and power to shift into something else. I summoned and persuaded. Shifts moved over and through the small dead thing until its systems restructured themselves, rekindled and reknit, remembered how they had worked before it died. There were missing connections because of the way I had already shifted the baby away from its nature. Its skin shifted to pink. Its heart beat. Breath moved in and out of it with a horrible rasping, gurgling in the nose.

I reached to see if its mind had come back, and caught a glimpse of black water, untroubled by current, before Neala slapped me and I fell to the floor, gasping.

“What did you do?” she screamed.

I stared at her and realized I was trembling and tired. I let my head drop, let darkness take me.

I woke in a room in the Consideration House. I had visited a cousin there once, before they took her child.

The room was made to comfort pregnant women. Every hard surface in it was covered with something soft. The blanket I lay under was finest lambswool, pale yellow. Orange mossweave carpeted the floor, and pale green and blue tapestries, threaded here and there with silver, draped the walls. The only windows were narrow slits near the ceiling, too high to show anything but sky. A round door in the far wall had no knob on it. Against the wall, a chamber pot.

A bowl of washwater, a mug of drinking water, and a loaf of bread waited on a table beside the bed. I sat up, washed, ate, drank.

I waited.

I examined the walls, lifted hangings to find bare clay behind them. I looked under the carpet: more clay. The door was wooden. I leaned against the door and searched it with shifter sense: thick wood, with a bolt of iron, its tongue in a piece of iron bolted to the wall with more iron. I sought lifesparks nearby and found no one.

I went back to the bed and lay with the blanket covering me. Dark would talk to them now, when I was locked up and couldn’t stop him. They would cast me out or kill me.

Light moved across the floor into afternoon. Finally, when the sky was darkening, someone opened the door. I folded the blanket away from my face. The visitor was Alitala, the village listener. “We’re ready to consider your case now,” she said.

I got up and washed my face again, straightened my tunic, and followed her to the council chamber, a large round room whose roof opened to the sky when desired. Twilight sent fading light into the room, and fire bubbles clung to the walls. Five village elders, including Galowa, the headwoman, and seven deciders sat behind a table facing me. My family and Kalinda, four-year-old Siti by her side, stood against the back wall. Some other people were there as well.

“Who advocates for Bertram?” asked one of the elders.

Kalinda stepped forward, Siti clinging to her skirts. “I will,” she said.

“Those who testify against him, step forward.”

Neala, my teacher, came away from the back wall.

“State your case where Bertram can hear,” said Galowa. She wore a white robe like the clothing in which we buried corpses. She was old and very wrinkled, but her black eyes were bright. “Bertram, you understand, we have heard and considered all charges before we brought you here.”

I nodded. It sounded like the wifewatcher decision process.

“I charge that Bertram has rogue shifter power and can do more than he should be able to,” Neala said. “I classify him a monster.”

Kalinda said, “Bert has power and the will to do good. He is an asset to the village.”

Neala turned on her. “Do you deny that Bert used his power unsupervised on your own child?”

Kalinda put her hand on Siti’s head. “I do not deny it. I asked for Bert’s help before he had been trained. He did the best he could.”

Someone gasped. I didn’t know who. I felt an unwinding inside me, the release, finally, of a secret clutched too close.

“Bertram made your daughter wrong-headed,” said one of the elders.

“Bertram made my daughter human,” Kalinda countered. “Before that, she was a monster.” She picked Siti up and held her. Siti stared at the council, her eyes wide and blue. “I contend that Bert can do great things for us.”

“Other charges have been placed. Step forward, Ethan Clayman.”

Ethan walked in front of me, stood with his legs spread, his hands gripping the sides of his trousers.

“You have told this council of transgressions Bertram committed against family. Repeat them in his presence.”

“What if he does something to me?” Ethan said. He glanced back at me with narrow eyes.

“We have the village’s six most powerful shifters in the room to restrain him,” said an elder.

I turned and looked at the people against the back wall, saw that some of them were shifters I had studied with, others shifters I admired.

“You will be protected,” said the elder.

Ethan faced front again, so that I looked at the back of his tunic, his hunched shoulders, the untidy upstanding shock of hair at his crown. “He has done things to our brother Dark.”

“Why does Dark not testify on his own behalf?”

“I don’t know,” said Ethan.

“Dark, step forward.”

Dark unglued himself from the wall and walked up beside Ethan.

“Are you afraid of Bertram?” asked an elder.

“No,” said Dark.

“Is it true he has used power on you against your will?”

“Sure, he used to,” Dark said, and shrugged. “Not for a long time.”

“What did he do?” asked one of the deciders.

“Made me listen.”

Someone laughed, maybe Pa. Strange, drifty hope woke in me. I couldn’t understand why Dark wasn’t raging against me.

“That is not a proper answer,” said the elder. “We need to know specifics. That he shifted someone your age is already an abomination. Tell us what he can do.”

“I don’t choose to,” said Dark.

“Do you fear him?”

“Why should I? He’s my brother.”

“Give us the information we need to make a decision.”

“Ask Bert. Ask this tattletale Ethan if you like. Leave Bert alone,” Dark said. “He could hurt people bad if he wanted to, but he hasn’t.”

“Bertram Monster-Finder, step forward.”

I went to stand beside Dark. He looped an arm over my shoulders. Strangeness moved through me.

“Bertram, what did you do to your brother?” asked the eldest.

“I stilled his voice,” I said. “I shifted his hands and feet so he couldn’t use them against me. I restored him when he promised to leave me alone.”

“Could you do such things to any one of us?” she asked.

“I suppose I could,” I said.

“Show us.”

Dark unhooked his arm and held it out in front of him. “Change my hand,” he said.

I couldn’t believe he was so relaxed about this, that he would invite me to act on his body, after our history. Best, though, if I changed him, and not the eldest or anyone else.

I used shifter sense to understand everything about Dark’s hand. He was right, I realized: I hadn’t shifted anything about him in a year or more, and he had changed since then. He was stocky and solid now, and he hadn’t teased me in a long time. His hand was larger, more muscled in different ways because of all the claywork he’d been doing. I learned its systems and structures, and then shifted. I gave him an extra finger, using material from all the rest of his hand so no one thing suffered much change. I had been practicing this shift on my unborn puppies, so it was easy, even connecting its control to his brain.

Dark turned his hand over, closed and opened his fingers. The new one worked in concert with the others. He curled it separately. “Nice,” he said.

His original form agitated, wanting to reject the shift, but I quieted it. My brother held up his hand to show the council. No one spoke, until at last the eldest said, “Who knows when this has happened before?”

The listener stepped forward, and said, “Histories tell of one who could do this more than two hundred years ago, but that was before the age of monsters. She was considered a healer.”

“Bertram, you may speak in your own defense,” said the eldest.

“I’m trying to find a way to help Siti,” I said. “I regret that I didn’t know what I was doing when I shifted her.”

“Would you take direction from this council and cease your explorations in late shifts?” she asked.

I looked at Siti. She came out from her mother’s skirts and peered up at me. I knelt and she came to me. I touched her head. The lake was there, still and untroubled. Could I promise never to look for a way to help her? I couldn’t.

I looked at the council members and shook my head.

“Go back to your room and await our decision,” said the eldest.

After dinner at home that night, I asked Dark if he wanted to lose the extra finger. He said he liked it, and asked me to give him one on his other hand as well.

“What if they think it makes you a monster?” I asked.

He shook his head. “They won’t. They’ll know where it came from.”

“I won’t be here to change you back,” I muttered.

He gripped my shoulder with his extra-fingered hand and shook me a little. “They’ve made a stupid choice,” he whispered. Then he hugged my head against his chest. He smelled of smoke and earth and sweat and garlic. He smelled of home, and his heartbeat drummed slow and steady in my ear.

Then he held out his other hand, and I gripped it, studied it, and changed it.

“You’re sure?” I asked when I had finished the intricate work of change.

He curled his fingers, uncurled them, and nodded.

I did the final settling of change, convincing his self that this was its own way, not something put on him by an outside force. He sighed, pressed his hands palm to palm, then gave me a one-armed hug and left.

Ma put together a pack for me, three mornings’ worth of breakfast bread layered with chewing leaves, and lots of packets of the flat airless bread she baked for travelers. She added dried fruit and jerked meat, two tunics Ethan had outgrown, and a blanket from my own bed bay. All my books and one of my old toys. Ari gave me three sheets of blank paper. Ethan gave me a cookpot he had fired extra hard so it wouldn’t break, and my younger sisters gave me a gourd water flask they had made in practical crafts class. Pa gave me a copy of a shifter’s textbook I hadn’t studied yet. Dark gave me a walking stick. Clay gave me an apple and a shrug.

My whole family went with me to the edge of Not There. The direction was my choice. The council had said I could go anywhere so long as it was away.

Ma took me to a rock at the edge of the clearing that was as far as any villager ever went in the direction of Not There. “This is a message place,” she whispered. “Leave us notes here. If you need anything, ask, and we’ll leave it here the next night.”

Three curled pieces of paper lay in a narrow hole in the rock. Ma hid them in her apron pocket. “Someone comes every day,” she whispered. “When you get there, ask for Sordi. He’ll look out for you.”

A wisp of smoke from Not There drifted into the clearing. It smelled like roasting meat. My mother kissed my forehead and sent me away with a push between my shoulder blades.

I walked slowly at first, on ground no one I knew had walked, between trees that looked much like those in our part of the forest. A faint track led the way.

Presently I heard music: drums, flutes, and fiddles, faint and wild, a tune that made my feet want to dance. I walked faster.

© 2012 Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Over the past thirty years, Nina Kiriki Hoffman has sold adult and YA novels and more than 250 short stories. Her works have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Endeavour awards. Her first novel, The Thread that Binds the Bones, won a Stoker Award, and her short story “Trophy Wives” won a Nebula Award. Nina’s middle-school novel Thresholds, the first in the Magic Next Door series, was published by Viking in August, 2010. Its sequel, Meeting, was published in August, 2011. Fairwood Press will publish Permeable Borders, a collection of Nina’s short stories, in 2012. Nina does production work for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She teaches a short story writing class through her local community college, and she works with teen writers. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Author Spotlight: Walter Jon Williams
Moshe Siegel

The future you envision is nebulous, with blurred lines between humans and animals (nanoassembly), humans and plant-life (the Green Leopard Plague), and technology and nature (an exotic island-cum-outdoor laboratory). Is this homogenization of society and nature—ironically brought about by mucking around in the gene-pool, the most unnatural of technologies—the outcome you predict, once humanity gets into the business of genetic manipulation?

Freeman Dyson wrote enthusiastically about the biodiversity that would result when genehacking kits get into the hands of “housewives and schoolchildren” (his phrasing, not mine). It's nice that he credits housewives with creativity, though he seems to have decided to ignore the example of what happened when teenagers started getting ahold of powerful computational tools.

Dyson aside, though, I think if genetic engineering is combined with inexpensive methods of rebuilding human, animal, and vegetable bodies, you're going to see it used for reasons both profound and trivial. You'll be improving biodiversity, targeting disease, rebuilding extinct species, and engineering people free of genetic defects—and at the same time you'll be giving cool animal bodies to teenagers to help them stay in fashion.

Wouldn't most people get a different body if the opportunity were available? My suspicion is that this would result in a devaluation of beauty—physical beauty won't matter so much once everyone can be beautiful. Style and originality would be far more valuable than mere attractiveness.

Michelle’s parents restrict their daughter to her original body until she reaches adulthood, despite the latest fads; Terzian’s martial muscle-memory—the lingering benefit of neglected Kenpo training—saves his life in a confrontation with Transnistrian assassins. If you, a martial artist in your own right, lived in Michelle the Mermaid’s customizable future, would you argue in favor of discipline and physical training, versus “cheating” via gene-splicing and nanoassembly, as the most worthwhile means of self-improvement?

I think I'm in favor of whatever leads to actual human achievement. If you spend many years dedicating yourself to martial arts mastery, you'll have developed actual skill and wisdom of which you can be rightly proud. If you stick a martial arts chip in your brain and download the skill, you may gain some abilities but you'll have missed the point. There's no actual achievement. It's the difference between climbing a mountain and playing a video game of mountain climbing.

But if you equip yourself with artificially-acquired skills in order to accomplish something genuinely your own, it's not cheating, it's enabling.

Michelle may have rebuilt herself as a mermaid, but she's not just sitting on the beach and posing, she's doing actual research and actual marine biology. Whatever her flaws might be, she isn't interested in merely being decorative.

The reality of death, be it realdeath or the temporary inconvenience of starting over in a new body, informs the motives of nearly everyone we meet in this novella. Rage, it seems, is the primary reaction to death, as displayed by Terzian and Stephanie, whereas for Michelle, death (murder!) itself becomes a soothing balm for the painful demise of her relationship with Darton. Indeed, even grief-stricken Terzian makes the argument that starvation, newly threatened by the papiloma which may end world hunger, is a required facet of the global socio-economic balance, and that crashing the food market would crash all of society. Does this reinforce the idea that death is a natural part of organic life, and that any human effort to thwart death would likely end in far greater disaster for the species as a whole?

Rage is a natural reaction to death, for all that the rage is pretty much futile. Death doesn't really care if we have a snit.

True, death is a part of the human condition, but then so is smallpox. I'm in favor of getting rid of both.

Just because ending death—along with, say, war and hunger—would result in massive change doesn't mean we shouldn't try to achieve these goals. There will be disruptions, but nothing as disruptive as, for example, bubonic plague.

The Four Horsemen have had the run of our planet long enough. And I, for one, have every hope of living forever.

Michelle witnesses the gradual heat-death of love as her “deathless” society grows ever more ancient. Yet Michelle’s passions run hotter, she being a younger mind, and outrage regarding Darton’s betrayal fuels her romantic reading of Terzian’s historical relationship with Stephanie—as well as inspiring repeated acts of homicide. Michelle musters an emotional reaction not common in her elders: Is the implication that without the risk of “realdeath” (what you and I would just call death), life eventually loses much of its point? Will Michelle, too, inevitably lose the fire of passion over the ages?

I'm considerably older than Michelle is in the story, but I'd like to think I've not lost my passion or my lust for life. Passion doesn't have to die; but if you're lucky, it gets tempered with wisdom.

One of the aspects of Michelle's background is that realdeath has become so remote that she can view it as a sort of game. Death has become something she plays with, as I (fortunate enough never to have been in an actual war) might play a wargame on my Xbox.

Terzian’s professionally inconvenient mingling of disciplines—economics, science, philosophy—leaves him in a unique position to refine and perfect the arguably narrow approach that Stephanie and her cohorts take towards solving global problems. In the end, Terzian uses his ability to see big-picture, long-term context to form the foundation of a new world order. Are you frustrated by contemporary society’s approach to hunger, the environment, and economics? Do we need to diversify and mingle specialties, perhaps with more philosophic consideration, to advance the human agenda of prolific survival?

I'm a synthesist myself: my own knowledge and skills are all over the map. Many of my stories come about when ideas from different spheres collide with each other.

Government and academe rarely offer niches for synthesists. The problem is not so much that specialists aren't useful, but that they spend their time talking only to each other.

And it has to be said that most solutions to large-scale problems generally lack creativity. Feeding the hungry is admirable; but making hunger impossible requires imagination.

It should also be said that most of the problems besetting humanity are, in fact, solvable. And if imagination is, unfortunately, not a part of the solution, plodding along from one point to the next will probably get us there eventually.

To what degree can you be found in your characters? We’ve already covered the Terzian/Kenpo connection, but what about Stephanie’s morally-ambiguous philanthropic impulse, and Michelle’s instinct and eagerness for historical research, as related to your own historical writing (and presumed research methods)?

I tend to view my characters more as bugs under a microscope than as extensions of myself. If I equip a character with skill and knowledge that I might possess in real life, it's for the sake of convenience—it saves me the effort of researching something I don't know.

And while I have on rare occasions identified strongly with one of my characters, it would be a mistake to consider this as autobiography.

Wishful thinking, perhaps.

And for the obligatory soapbox question: Are there any past/present/future projects you’d care to mention while we have you?

I should mention that “The Green Leopard Plague” and two stories set in the same College of Mystery sequence, “Pinocchio” and “Lethe,” are available in my new collection, conveniently titled The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories.

I also have a hefty novella arriving this autumn. “The Boolean Gate” is the secret history of an actual friendship, between Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla, and will be available in Subterranean Magazine as well as appearing in chapbook form, conveniently appearing just in time for the holidays! Be considerate of your friends, and send them Twain and Tesla as a gift!

Moshe Siegel works as a slusher and proofreader at Lightspeed, interns at the pleasure of a Random House-published author, is a Publisher’s Assistant at Codhill Press, and freelance edits hither and yon. His overladen bookshelf and smug e-reader glare at each other across his upstate New York home office, and he isn’t quite sure what to think about it all. Follow tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.

Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro
Caleb Jordan Schulz

In your story, “My Wife Hates Time Travel,” the husband and his wife discover how inconvenient it can be to know that something will happen in the future, but they may or may not be able to prevent it. This opens the gate to the debate over fate and predestination, but also choice. Do you believe that it would be better to know your future or to be surprised?

I think a little uncertainty goes a long way, and would appreciate a little reassurance that everything’s going to be all right, but having your hands held every step of the way takes the joy out of everything.

Throughout the story, you don’t give names to the main characters, but instead simply refer to them as husband and wife. Why did you decide to give them this anonymity?

Who says I decided? Every once in a while a story dictates its own form. This one takes the form of an extended complaint about an impossible situation, and I felt no moment where the introduction of names felt natural or needed.

As the husband and wife are warned ahead of time of movies to avoid, books to skip, restaurants to pass on, I couldn’t help but be reminded of how much our “choices” are becoming more and more tailored to us—Amazon recommendations, Google Ads, TV programming, etc. If this continues, do you see this as something to embrace or be wary of?

I do wish people paid less attention to the latest list of blockbusters—which is often by design that which offends the tastes of the smallest number of people—and devoted more effort to authors, movies, and music less targeted at the vast monolithic public. There’s really a lot of great stuff out there, and if you complain, for instance, that the latest megabudget Hollywood bomb insulted your intelligence, but won’t cross the street to see a smaller but potentially more interesting indie, then you only have yourself to blame. Seek out that which isn’t aggressively sold, and you will find yourself frequently surprised. So, yeah, I’m wary of mass marketing . . . while simultaneously being an author who depends on it.

Disguised beneath this cautionary tale is, at its core, a love letter. Was this intended from the beginning or did it evolve as the story unfolded?

It was always a love letter, on some level. My wife is the wife of the title. She’s as big a science fiction fan as I am, but has always been driven to distraction by time-travel stories, and complains bitterly about paradoxes in particular. (This despite a special love for Doctor Who: she is large, and contains multitudes.) I began writing the story when she told me one too many times that she hated time travel. She meant the sub-genre. I wondered what it would be like if the same complaint was directed at the actuality.

Of course there is the Elephant In The Room Question: If you somehow learned that you would be the inventor of time travel (if you took the path to lead to it) would you want that responsibility?

If I could ensure that I was the only one with access to the tech, sure. I’d zip all over the place. I’d custard-pie Hitler, and all that fun stuff. But never in a million years would I want it to be technology that people, as a group, could have. It’s doomsday weaponry.

Finally, do you have any new projects you’d like to announce?

Oh, absolutely. Folks, go over to the children’s section of your local bookstores and check out Gustav Gloom and the People Taker, first in an extended series of middle-grade novels about the uncanny adventures of a very strange young boy raised by a society of sentient shadows. Four books in the series are already written, and more are coming; they are epically funny, world-spanning spookiness complete with dire mysteries, uncanny revelations, vicious bad guys, surreal locations, hairs-breadth escapes, ravenous monsters, shadows out of time, and bottomless pits. The first book will be out by the time you read these words . . . and the second, Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault, will be out early next year.

Caleb Jordan Schulz is a writer, illustrator, and nomad, currently finding himself in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His fiction can be found in Subversion, Scape, the Crossed Genres Year Two anthology, Ray Gun Revival, and Innsmouth Free Press. In between his work for Lightspeed Magazine, he’s a freelance editor, and blogs occasionally at: theright2write.blogspot.com.

Author Spotlight: Harry Harrison
Robyn Lupo

Harry Harrison wasn’t always an author. This is probably unsurprising for those who have read Harrison’s work; he was trained and worked as an illustrator, comic artist and an art director. This likely accounts for the lively visuals in his prose.

He didn’t exactly start in fiction, either. As he told Paul Tomlinson for Octocon in 2009, “I’d moved into packaging comics, and I ended up writing a lot for them, and moved on to writing whatever editors wanted. Westerns and men’s adventures, which paid a lot, and true confessions—I had a lot of experience writing and selling before I wrote my first science fiction story. And I was illustrating science fiction magazines for a year or two before I submitted a story.”

His first story was serendipitous; after getting the flu, he wrote a short story called “I Walk Through Rocks.” Not knowing what to do with it, he asked Damon Knight, who had commissioned Harrison to illustrate the magazine Worlds Beyond. “I typed a story out and asked Damon what to do with it, and he bought it for $100. My agent then was Fred Pohl, and Fred anthologized it, and I got another $100. So I did very well with my first story: I haven’t done that well with a single story since, I’ll tell you!” The story appeared as “Rock Diver” in the February 1951 issue of Worlds Beyond.

The progression from artist to writer—though he would continue with both in his future—was slower than his initial success would suggest. Harrison would package pulp magazines, edit the same, and even write to fill rather peculiar needs for the magazines, like adventure stories and true confessions. “‘I climbed Kilimanjaro with my Fingernails,’ ‘I Went Down with My Ship,’ things like that. I did a lot of confession stories as well: ‘My Iron Lung Baby,’ ‘He Threw Acid in My Face,’ ‘I Ate a Pigmy,’ interesting stuff like that!”

“The Streets of Ashkelon” is now Harrison’s most anthologized story, appearing in over fourteen languages. Regarding the story, he told Alyce Wilson, editor of Wild Violet, “With one of my stories, ‘The Streets of Ashkelon,’ the hero’s an atheist. My agent said, ‘You can’t sell it.’ He happened to be right.

“But the world has changed, and now it’s been anthologized forty or fifty times. It’s been anthologized in the Jesuit monthly. That’s pretty good.”

“The Streets of Ashkelon” was originally written for an anthology edited by Judith Merrill, who wanted the contributors to ignore the current taboos in force in the SF world. Unfortunately, the anthology didn’t go to print. It was more than a year before Harrison sold the story, and six years before it saw print in the United States.

Sadly, shortly before this issue went to press, Harrison died; he was 87.

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: Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear
Erin Stocks

Your short story “Boojum” happens to be one of my favorite science fiction stories written in the last few years, and I’m delighted we’re reprinting it in this issue. Some of our readers might recognize a “Boojum” as a dangerous kind of snark, a fictional animal species invented by Lewis Carroll, or maybe the intercontinental supersonic cruise missile dreamed up in the 1940s (and never completed) for the U.S. Air Force. Was the creation of the Lavinia Whateley influenced by either one of those?

We got the word from Lewis Carroll. The second story set in this universe, “Mongoose,” features monsters called toves, raths, and bandersnatches.

(Sarah: I don’t remember how we thought of crossing Lewis Carroll and H. P. Lovecraft, but since “The Hunting of the Snark” is one of my favorite poems, in retrospect it seems utterly inevitable. Bear: True story: Sarah and I once drove around Madison after a rainstorm looking at an enormous triple rainbow and reciting “The Jabberwock” to one another from memory. The intersection of Lovecraft, Carroll, whimsy, and horror seems inevitable once you’ve hit upon it.)

How did you go about writing this story? Any particular challenges you faced, or was it one of those stories that seemed to write itself down on the page?

This one was remarkably easy—once we’d figured out what they found in the hold of the Josephine Baker (and for two writers deeply familiar with Lovecraft, it wasn’t hard), the rest of the story just rolled itself out like a carpet. It took us a little while to find the right ending, but once we’d hashed that out, it fell into place beautifully.

You’ve co-authored several Norse fantasy books together in addition to this story. Does your co-writing process change at all depending on the genre, or have you found a rhythm now that works no matter what?

Our process is the same: One of us writes until she gets stuck or bored or whomped with another commitment, and then she sends it to the other—who writes until she gets stuck or bored or whomped with another commitment, and sends it back. We try not to go too long on either side without giving it back. As a process, it seems to be very robust.

Any chance one or both of you will return to this world of the Lavinia Whateley again?

We already have! The second story in what we call the Boojum’verse, “Mongoose,” was published in Ellen Datlow’s Lovecraft Unbound anthology, and we’re working on a third story called “The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward.”

Do you have any advice to give out regarding what you’ve learned in writing together?

We apparently co-author the same way Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore did, only they did it with a typewriter in their shared study and we do it via email. (Sarah: I’d love to try the typewriter version sometime, but it’s hard when one of us lives in Wisconsin and the other in Massachusetts and I don’t think either of us owns a typewriter. Bear: I think that would be awesome.) But it is not the way everybody co-authors, so as usual, the best advice we can offer is the old chestnut: Do whatever works for you.

Are you working on any other joint projects right now?

We’re working on “The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward,” but that will probably be produced by Drabblecast before this interview runs. (Hint: go to Drabblecast & listen!) We’re also working on the third Iskryne novel, An Apprentice to Elves, the sequel to A Companion to Wolves and The Tempering of Men. And more projects are likely to sprout.

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, The Colored Lens, and Polluto Magazine. Follow her on Twitter @ErinStocks.

Author Spotlight: Brooke Bolander
Theodore Quester

In your story, “Sun Dogs,” you start from historical fact. What drew you to this subject, and how did you research it?

I believe at some point during my stint at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop I stumbled across an old film strip with actual footage of Laika, and to see this happy, healthy, unassuming dog—a very charismatic one, too; she looked a lot like a Jack Russell—and to know how her story ended was sort of heart-rending. I started reading about her and learning things (I never knew she was a random stray, for example) and the story went from there.

Is this your first story to take such an unusual point of view? What challenges did it pose? Do you feel a lot of empathy for animals?

The first one published, anyway. Early on I tried writing from a dog POV once or twice, but it’s very difficult to strike a balance between thought and instinct and not have it come out either horribly saccharine or confusing to the point of unreadability. Animals, especially the smarter ones, are essentially aliens living among us. They don’t think like us, they don’t see the world in the same way; they are coming from a completely different place. And yet they are thinking. That enormous chasm between their world and ours is what makes how much we do understand one another so amazing. Anyone who has ever watched a sheepdog trial or an agility competition is in essence watching a human and an alien intelligence work together to solve a problem. That is just incredible to me.

The best fiction about animals takes this otherness into consideration. Dogs aren’t tiny humans wearing fur coats. They are what they are, and on a certain level it’s just as mysterious as anything from Mars.

You give your main character a choice in this story, the possibility of a happy ending, when its real life counterpoint had neither. Was this a conscious decision? Do you believe in choices, in happy endings?

She deserved it, didn’t she? In real life none of us are assured happy endings. We have choice and free will, but that also means we’re free to make terrible, wrongheaded decisions. That’s just part of being alive. If anyone is helpless at the hands of fate, it’s a dog, which is part of what makes the Laika story so heart-wrenching. It’s not like she got into a bad relationship, dropped out of college, and had to sign up with the space program to make ends meet. She was a Moscow stray that humans plucked off the street and shot into the stars. We’re such mercurial gods. It’s a wonder dogs don’t stay terrified 24/7.

Was this a difficult story to write?

It was a Clarion story, so maybe difficult in some ways and quite easy in others. My method during those six weeks—and I would not recommend it to any aspiring workshop students, let me throw that disclaimer out there first—was to get an idea, ruminate over it until the evening before my turn-in day, then spend the entire night writing in a delirious, caffeine-wired fugue state. “Vixens,” “Tornado’s Siren,” and “Sun Dogs” were all finished that way. Deadlines and large doses of stimulants are a girl’s best friend, apparently.

What else do you have coming down the pipeline?

I’ve got a flash piece coming up in Superficial Flesh at some point in the next few months, and the griffin novel I mentioned last time continues to percolate in the busted drip coffee machine that is my brain. Will something delicious pour out, or a charred, tarry mess? Stay tuned.

Theodore Quester spent three years after college in Europe and now speaks seven languages; he spends his days teaching two of them to high school students. He is obsessed with all things coffee—roasting, grinding, pulling espresso—and with food, especially organic and locally grown. He earned his geek street credentials decades ago, publishing an article in 2600 Magazine as a young teenager, then writing reviews for SF Eye and interning at Omni Magazine. In his spare time, he swims, bikes, runs, and reads a little bit of everything; when inspired, he writes fiction, mostly for children and young adults.

Author Spotlight: Scott Edelman
Andrew Liptak

What can you tell us about the origins of your story, “The Last Supper?”

My mind is often drawn to the extremes, and when it comes to a given fantasy trope or science-fictional conceit, I often think of the first or last person to experience such a situation. Those thought experiments don’t always become stories, but sometimes they do—as with my short story “The Last Man On the Moon,” written for Peter Crowther’s anthology Moon Shots. Rather than focus on the first man on the Moon, I thought—what must it be like for the last man to have visited the Moon, once that visit is over? And since I’ve written so many zombie stories, it was inevitable I’d write about a zombie at the end of things. That is—what happens after the last human is gone, and all that remains in the world for the undead is hunger?

We see the story from the point of view from the zombie, Walter, and I’m reminded a little of Lovecraft’s famous story, “The Outsider.” Was this story an influence, or were there other influences?

I’m honored that anything I’ve written would remind anyone of Lovecraft, but alas, no, “The Outsider” wasn’t in the back of my mind as I wrote “The Last Supper.” However, since I first encountered Lovecraft in my teens, and had probably devoured everything the man had written by my mid-’20s, his work was added early to the compost heap from which all of my stories come. So if you say touches of this story are there, who’s to say that it’s not present somehow, without me even being conscious of it?

Zombie fiction often doubles as a form of social commentary. In this story, we follow Walter, who is driven to eat, even at the cost of his existence; do you see parallels in the way we live our everyday lives?

I did not consciously intend social commentary. What I wanted to do was convey to the reader as truthfully as possible what it would feel like to live through the events of my story. I intended things to be taken for what they are, and not as metaphors. As Freud (perhaps apocryphally) said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a zombie is just a zombie. But as with your feeling that Lovecraft is hiding beneath the surface of my tale, if you choose to see a high moral purpose hidden here, I won’t stop you.

What do you have in your zombie survival kit? Any plans in case the dead rise up again?

Now that I’m living in the wilds of West Virginia, my arsenal contains a couple of tools I never thought I’d own back when I was growing up in an apartment building on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn—a chainsaw and a 12-gauge shotgun. And since my neighbors are either similarly or better armed, in the event of a zombie uprising, I’m staying right here!

Lastly, what do you have coming up that we should be looking forward to?

My next short story—a sequel of sorts to Saki’s “The Open Window”—will appear in the anthology The Monkey’s Other Paw: Revived Classic Stories of Dread and the Dead, edited by Luis Ortiz, followed quickly by a tale in Pete Crowther’s magazine Postscripts.

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: Peter Sursi
Earnie Sotirokos

“The Seven Samovars” combines alchemy and a local coffee shop. Did you come up with the idea for this story while sipping a hot beverage brewed by your local barista?

Actually, the phrase “the seven samovars” popped into my head while I was taking a walk. Then I had to figure out where there would be seven samovars in one place, and a witchy coffee shop seemed just right.

Part of the background of each patron is told with their specific drink order. What do you think you can learn from a person based on the type of food and drink they enjoy?

A lot, actually. The idea of referring to people by their drinks came from my sister, who worked as a barista for a while. She said it was a weird dynamic, since you saw these same people, morning after morning, and you did get to know them—but only by their regular orders, never their names. I liked the idea that a modern-day witch would use a drink order as the key to get to know the inner life of her patrons.

Besides, you know you judge that person in line next to you as you listen to them order. What led her to the conclusion that fifteen shots of caramel syrup was the right number in that venti soy latte she is about to consume? Is fourteen really not sweet enough? Do you even actually like coffee at that point?

Using Death as a mixer to modify the effects of the other components produced some interesting results. After a few weeks on the job do you think the apprentice would start experimenting with the contents of the samovars?

Wouldn’t you? Of course you would. If you’ve already said yes to the idea of being there in the first place, then you wouldn’t be able to help yourself. Okay, maybe you save Death for a few more weeks, but a little Dream or Life surely couldn’t hurt. Much.

Food and servingware pairings were also a key part to getting each order just right. Why did you choose to include these non-liquid parts of the ritual?

Everyone’s coffee ritual is very specific—the same time of day, in that specific cup, with a banana or an oatmeal scone. Everything just fell into place when I started telling the mini-stories within the larger story. And, as I wrote more and more of her, Erzebet’s personality seemed to call for a mix of casual disregard for some things (like Death being the same color as lemonade) and very precise instructions (like the method for brewing Dreams).

You decided to feature regular old coffee just as much as the other fantastical ingredients. Do you think that a good cup of joe would have as much of an impact on your day as a love potion or truth serum?

Well I’m not sure that regular coffee would be as inadvertently hilarious as a little Love in the office coffeemaker, but as a facilitator of great conversations, it’s the best. And the right conversation at the right time will change your life; that’s how I ended up married.

What can we expect from you in the future?

I’m currently working on some short stories and am halfway through the first draft of a novel. I hope you’ll see a lot more of me in the future.

Earnie Sotirokos grew up in a household where Star Trek: The Next Generation marathons were only interrupted for baseball and football games. When he’s not writing copy for radio or reading slush, he enjoys penning fiction based on those influences. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.

Author Spotlight: Holly Black
Robyn Lupo

“Heartless” begins with the aftermath of a battle. How hard was this story to write? What was the idea that got you started on this story?

This story was incredibly difficult for me to write. For a long time, I wrote the beginnings of stories and couldn’t write the endings. It wasn’t until after I finished my first novel, Tithe, that I understood enough about structure to finish short stories. This was the second one I completed.

The thing I wanted to write about was being so cut off from one’s emotions that they’d become inaccessible. And I’ve always been fascinated with the story of the wizard who put his soul into his own finger, so that he couldn’t be killed. I thought that if I changed “soul” to “heart” then I could do something new with the tale.

The desolation in the story, the “adultness” of the world, makes Ada’s age all the more striking. What prompted this choice?

I think I’d first thought of this as a kind of plague story and did a lot of medieval plague research, but I settled on a battlefield instead. It allowed for a lot of mythic and fairy tale elements—crows, knights, the young heroine in Ada, etc.—along with the gritty and horrific descriptions that I hoped would create tension in that they promised a potentially darker ending.

The timing was interesting for Ada to break the spell on herself. Why do you think she chose to do so right then?

Well, the spell is metaphoric as much as anything else. The moment she chose to break it was the moment that her humanity was starting to wake up again and the numbness was starting to recede. She was ready to feel again.

You’re wildly successful in the writing world. Do you have any advice for the newbies?

Thank you! My best advice is to write to please your reader-self rather than your writer-self. The stuff that thrills you as a reader will most likely be the exact same stuff that thrills other readers.

Do you have any writer’s rituals, i.e. a tea before settling in to work?

Coffee, definitely. Other than that, putting on headphones and listening to music while I’m working helps me focus. I try to turn off the internet for stretches of time; sometimes I am more disciplined about that than I am at other times.

I try really hard not to have too much of a ritual, because I think it’s important to be able to write in lots of different places under a variety of circumstances.

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: Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Jennifer Konieczny

What inspired your story “Monsters, Finders, Shifters?”

I worked on it a while ago, and can’t now remember where the original idea came from. The story was waiting to be the first chapter of a book, but I had other projects I had to do, so that hasn’t happened yet. Finally I took another look and thought it could stand on its own.

Bertram has to answer “What is human?” at a young age. How would you answer that question at Bert’s age? Would you give the same answer now?

When I was twelve, I’m pretty sure I thought people and human meant the same thing. Bert grew up in a culture where the dividing line between human and monster is clearly defined, and in his world, the chances of being born with “monster” traits are much higher, so I think he has a more difficult time with this question than I did.

These days, I think “human” defines our species, and “people” has a much wider meaning. We share the planet with all kinds of beings. We have differing senses, intelligences, body structures, cognition, desires, and fears. All of these things interest me.

Bert trades security and family for the potential to learn and develop. Given the same choice, which would you take?

I think this is the choice I did make. I moved out of my mother’s house and went away to college; I live at a distance from my siblings, although we communicate by email and visit each other. I don’t think it’s an “either/or” choice for me, or for Bert, just a shift in priorities.

Bert has many siblings whom he doesn’t always get along with, but he has their support by the end. You’ve said that you were competitive with your own siblings growing up. Are you close now?

I love my brothers and sister and enjoy seeing them when I can. We have a good time together. We had a reunion in May, 2012, which was fun. It had been a while since we saw each other before that.

What’s next for you?

More short stories! I’m also working on a young adult novel called Ghost Attachment Disorder for Sharyn November at Viking. Beyond that, the choices are wide open.

Jennifer Konieczny studied English and History at Villanova University and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She currently resides in Philadelphia and enjoys volunteering as a slush reader, author interviewer, and editorial assistant at Lightspeed Magazine, and inflicting her medieval-studies self on her students.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in October, in Lightspeed . . .

We’ll have original fantasy by L. B. Gale (“Spindles”) and Megan Arkenberg (“The Suicide's Guide to the Absinthe of Perdition”), and fantasy reprints by David Barr Kirtley (“The Black Bird”) and Brian Ruckley (“Beyond the Reach of His Gods”).

Plus, we’ll have original science fiction by Robert Reed (“Flowing Unimpeded to the Enlightenment”) and Benjamin Parzybok (“Bear and Shifty”), along with SF reprints by Pat Cadigan (“Nearly Departed”) and Nancy Kress (“Art of War”).

For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella will be “Dragonfly” by Ursula K. Le Guin, and of course we’ll have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with Ursula K. Le Guin and David Brin.

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!