Editorial, October 2012
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue twenty-nine of Lightspeed!

As I write this, I’m just back from Worldcon and the Hugo Awards, where I lost not one but two Hugos (and for the second year in a row!). But what they say is true: it truly is an honor to be nominated. Congratulations to all of the winners and other nominees.

Speaking of award nominations, we have one more nomination to announce: I’ve again been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, at least in part for my work on Fantasy, Lightspeed’s former sister-magazine, which—to paraphrase those great philosophers, the Borg—we later assimilated and added its creative distinctiveness to our own. The rest of the nominees are available here: worldfantasy.org/awards.

But the big news this month is that on October 1, we’ll be debuting Lightspeed’s new sister-magazine, Nightmare. If you enjoy horror and dark fantasy, be sure to check it out. Our first issue features four all-new stories by Laird Barron, Sarah Langan, Jonathan Maberry, and Genevieve Valentine, and upcoming issues will contain new fiction from the likes of Ramsey Campbell, Jeff VanderMeer, Daniel H. Wilson, and many others. Just visit www.nightmare-magazine.com, and either read it for free online, or buy one of our ebook editions—or subscribe!

With all that out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

We 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 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 is “Dragonfly” by Ursula K. Le Guin, and of course we have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with Ursula K. Le Guin and David Brin. And our excerpt this month is from Gwenda Bond’s debut YA novel, Blackwood.

Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for The Hydrogen Sonata, the latest entry in the acclaimed Culture series by Iain M. Banks. 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 four-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.

Blackwood
Gwenda Bond

(An excerpt of the novel published by Angry Robot Books, September 2012.)

1

Miranda

The first time Miranda Blackwood checked the back of her closet for a portal to another world she was eleven. That was the year her mother died. After the closet, she tried other places. She wandered small patches of woods, seeking doors hidden in twisted trees, and peered into mirrors, searching for reflections that weren’t her own.

But Miranda grew up. She no longer hoped to step over a secret threshold and leave Roanoke Island behind forever. Instead, she grabbed whatever escapes were in reach, no matter what they were. No matter that she stayed right here.

For three summers running, her best escape had been interning for The Lost Colony at Waterside Theater. She sanded wood, hammered nails, sewed seams, and did whatever else needed doing to make the show’s version of history—complete with musical numbers—come alive for the tourists. In exchange for those hours of scutwork done without complaint, the stage manager, Polly, let Miranda join her at the side of the outdoor stage every night to watch the show’s final scenes.

The set’s faux oak tree, hollow boulders, and packed dirt floor passed for an abandoned settlement, except for the shining spotlights. While Miranda half-listened for her favorite part, she cocked her head back to take in the stars lightyears above. The view was as familiar to her as the small constellation of calluses dotting her palms, or as the lines of the play drawing to a close beside her. As familiar and set as everything in Miranda’s life.

The season was almost over, and then she’d endure senior year. Everyone was talking about college, preparing for the next act in their lives. She wasn’t going anywhere. She wouldn’t even have this. After she graduated, it’d be time to get a year-round job that paid more bills.

“They’ve survived!”

The bullish voice of the actor playing Governor John White snapped her attention back to the stage. The line signaled his return to the site of the colony after his trip to England.

Surrounded by sailors, White gasped as he pointed at the oak on the far side of the stage, the simple cloak around his shoulders flying out with the gesture. Miranda couldn’t see the word from where she stood, but the famous Croatoan was carved into the bark in desperate, crooked letters. White went on, overacting like crazy, “My granddaughter, I will see her beautiful face!”

Miranda and Polly exchanged a look. Polly shook her head, her prematurely gray ponytail bobbing. Director Jack, aka His Royal Majesty, would give the actor a scathing note on that later.

The governor froze, along with the sailors in the background, and the lights dimmed. This cued up the final reveal. Miranda could never help wondering where the colonists had gone. Disappearing was some trick to pull off, even hundreds of years ago when there were more wild places left. The standard theories involved bad endings and tragedy. Even on such a humid night, not knowing—knowing that no one would ever know the truth—was enough to give her a small shiver.

A single low spotlight fixed on a solemn young blonde girl as she wandered ghost-slow through the frozen men. Her face was chalk pale.

His Royal Majesty’s biggest change to this year’s show had been making Virginia Dare the show’s deadpan narrator. The actress, Caroline, was a local kid, seven years-old and a mean-girl-in-training, and yet, the casting worked.

Miranda leaned over to see how the scene was playing for the crowd. The show wasn’t sold out, but the curving rows of the amphitheater were nearly full. Probably about twelve hundred people, riveted and silent as Caroline haunted the stage.

The shadow appeared at the back of the audience. Miranda had no idea what it might be—it was definitely not part of the show—only that it was there. The large unformed shape was simply a growing darkness until it resolved into an immense, old-fashioned black ship. The kind of ship used long ago by colonists and pirates. Strange gray symbols bloomed on each of three billowing black sails, the shapes a mix of straight lines and arcs, a half-moon curving above a circle at the top. The sailcloth rippled in a wind that she didn’t feel on her skin.

Miranda blinked. The ship was still there.

She put her hand up, and her hand was in front of an immenseblack ship with tall gray sails. And the ship was movingforward now, swallowing the audience row after curving row.

In a few seconds half the audience was gone beneath it, and Miranda’s breath caught in her throat. The ship glided steadily closer. When she turned to Polly, the stage manager smiled at her with the normal relief of reaching the end of the night. She gave off no hint of concern.

But the ship was heading straight toward the actors, those odd symbols shifting on the sails in curving and slashing lines. The black monster gathered speed, moving faster and faster–

When Caroline hit her mark at center stage, only a dozen feet separated her from the black ship. She gave no sign of seeing it either. She might be a brat, but she was also seven.

“Look!” Miranda pointed and staggered forward onto the stage. Caroline opened her mouth to speak and Miranda threw herself at the girl, shielding her with her arms.

There were a few shocked cries. Miranda closed her eyes and waited for the impact.

And waited.

There were more murmurs and questions from the crowd. But nothing else.

Caroline squirmed in her grasp, struggling. Miranda opened her eyes and the massive curving prow loomed above her unmoving, throwing a heavy shadow over her and Caroline and then—between one blink and the next—it vanished.

The spotlight blared into Miranda’s face and she squinted, not used to the bright heat. She glanced over her shoulder, still holding the wriggling Caroline tight. Governor White stared murder at her, but none of the men broke character. They were supposed to remain frozen until the lights came down, and they were.

Caroline said, “Let me go, Blackwood.” Miranda didn’t understand right away, didn’t understand anything that had just happened. Caroline yanked a handful of her hair.

“Ow.” And Miranda realised: the spotlight was still on. That meant the show wasn’t over.

She’d interrupted the performance because a giant ship had appeared. A giant ship no one else seemed to have seen. From the side of the stage, Polly said, “Miranda! Get. Over. Here.”

The knowledge that she’d disappointed Polly finally got her moving. She released her hold on Caroline, and hurried off stage. Polly grabbed her arm. “What was that?”

Caroline looked like an angry ghost, her face pink instead of white. Polly brushed at the sleeve of Miranda’s shirt where the girl’s make-up had rubbed off.

“I’m so sorry,” Miranda said.

Polly frowned, but stepped next to her to wait while rosy-cheeked Caroline managed her last lines.

“The one hundred and fourteen men, women, and children of the Roanoke colony remain lost, their fate unknown. A mystery trapped in time.”

At last, the spotlight died.

Walking out from backstage at the end of the night, Polly was trying her best to pull an explanation out of Miranda without passing judgment. Miranda nodded along and kept silent, barely absorbing Polly’s chatter about how she knew Miranda loved the theater and would never sabotage the show, but she just couldn’t understand what had caused her to interrupt…

At a hastily called post-show meeting, His Royal Majesty had informed cast and crew that he had never had anyone disrupt a performance while it was in progress before—let alone a member of the crew. And a lowly intern at that.

The handful of locals in the cast and crew were already muttering that having a Blackwood around was asking for bad luck. That anyone could have predicted Miranda would screw something up eventually. That she’d done it in such spectacular, inexplicable fashion didn’t surprise them.

The director had finally ended with a caution that he’d be consulting with the stage manager about Miranda’s future employment and praising the cast for not breaking character. Not finishing the show despite the interruption would have meant ticket exchanges. They couldn’t have that.

Polly defended her, saying there must have been some explanation and she’d talk to Miranda. The problem was Miranda couldn’t tell her the reason.

She had listened closely to everyone talking about what she’d done. No one else said anything about a big black ship with billowing sails. No one said anything even close. She was the only one who had seen it. But she had seen it. Hadn’t she?

“I hate for you to go straight home after that,” Polly said. She stopped next to head of the trail that looped along the coast to the complex where the non-locals lived. “Come out to the Grove and I’ll sneak you a margarita. We can talk more about it tomorrow, okay?”

Miranda bit her lip. She had to ask, to make sure. “You didn’t notice anything…”

“Anything?” Polly prompted.

“I don’t know. . .Odd?”

Polly frowned again. She’d never seen Polly frown this much. “You mean besides what you did?”

Yes. “Was there anything else?”

Polly’s response was careful. “No. I didn’t notice anything else odd. Did you?”

So Miranda really was the only person who’d seen the ship. “Probably not. I better go on home.”

“Sure?” She waited, giving Miranda a chance to say more. Then, “Okay. Be careful. We’ll figure this out.” Polly split off toward the trail with a wave, rushing to catch the people who’d left a few minutes earlier.

One of the reasons Miranda liked the theater so much was that the out-of-towners who worked summer stock didn’t know much of anything about her or her family. They had always treated her like they treated each other. Normal. That was over.

She knew all too well how losing normal status felt. The kids at school hadn’t truly decided to turn on her until she was thirteen. Her mother was dead, which was bad enough, but then the new police chief’s kid—Phillips Rawling, radiating cool like all new kids did—had humiliated her in front of everyone. She didn’t believe he’d done it on purpose, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was he’d given the others the confirmation they needed that she’d never be like them.

And her night just kept getting worse. The instant Miranda hit the pavement of the mostly-deserted parking lot, her incredibly sad nemesis Bone’s pickup truck roared alongside her. There were a dozen Tarheels stickers pasted on the bumper and back window. Basketball was the closest thing North Carolina had to a state religion. He was a devoted member of the faithful.

He rolled down the window and Miranda asked, “What?”

That his rich kook of a dad had to force him to work at the theater didn’t usually get to her. Life wasn’t fair. That she already knew. The fact she hallucinated a phantom ship and that she knew he was about to remind her yet again of her family’s reputation, well, that got to her.

Bone’s elbow jutted out the window. He was gawky, skin and bone, the source of his nickname.

“Sorry about your Blackwood luck,” he said.

Grrrr. “Sorry you’re a jerk.”

“I’m going to hang out with some friends. Where are you going? To pick up your dad?”

Miranda raised her hand and made a shooing motion. “Leave, begone, scram.”

He hesitated, stumped for a comeback. Finally he said, “I will,” and roared away.

Miranda reached her beloved car, Pineapple, and patted the pale yellow hood. “Thank you for not roaring.”

When she started working at the theater, she’d bought Pineapple for a few hundred bucks. The original make was impossible to determine, and she never had to figure it out. She’d never signed on the dotted lines of any insurance or registration papers. Her dad claimed that forms and laws were for other people. Respectable people.

Miranda drove out of Fort Raleigh, the plastic hula girl stuck to Pineapple’s dash wobbling seductively with each turn. Downtown Manteo, the island’s main drag, was packed with tourists on this warm summer Wednesday. The town center resembled a perfect model of itself, preserved Victorian houses and Colonial-style storefronts with the Sound’s peaceful waters as scenic backdrop. Gelato shops and fancy restaurants were tucked next to pricey B&Bs that offered tickets for fishing expeditions and dolphin spotting.

Her street was off a more remote stretch of highway, a small pocket of cheap, mostly rental houses shoved where the tourists would never see. A different kind of lost colony.

Miranda pulled into her usual spot at the curb and got out. Maybe she’d hallucinated the ship, like when Gaius Baltar hung out with his not-really-there Cylon girlfriend on BSG. Maybe. She gripped her keys so their teeth stuck out through her fist. Her dad had shown a rare flash of concern when she started at the theater, forcing her to promise this little action whenever she was outside at night alone.

Walking quickly, she crossed the patchwork yard to the house. The white paint had been flaking for years. The porch light was off, and in the darkness she tested the front door. It was locked.

A golden retriever loped across the yard to join her. Miranda reached down to scruff the fur under his neck. “Hey, Sidekick, hey pretty boy.” Sidekick had shown up a couple of years ago out of nowhere. He got his name because sidekicks were always the characters she liked most. TV binge-a-thons were her other main escape.

Miranda fished her keys from her messenger bag and fumbled at the lock. “The great provider must not be home, huh?”

She managed to drop both her bag and the keys with a clunk. With a sigh, she bent to pick them up. The low, angry sound of Sidekick’s bark made her jump. His yellow head whipped toward the street. His body stretched tight from nose to tail as his throat rumbled.

He rarely barked. And never like this.

Then the others started.

Every dog in earshot bayed and howled in a riotous symphony devoid of any melody. Sidekick’s neck craned to the sky, more wolf on a postcard than happy golden retriever.

Miranda refused to look up, afraid she’d see the ship again. She jammed the key into the door’s lock and twisted it hard. The knob spun and the door gave. She kicked her bag inside. Hesitating halfway in, she held open the door, and said, “Come on, boy, come on.”

Sidekick arched his head at her and whined. His eyes glinted in the dark.

“Sidekick,” she said. She fought to keep the panic out of her voice. “Now!”

Sidekick came, galumphing through the door. His growling quieted once he hit the threshold. The howling outside continued without pause, without song.

Miranda slammed the door and slid the deadbolt into place. She pulled aside the faded blue curtain and checked outside.

No ship. Nothing but a cloud floating across the pale moon. The dogs’ racket ended, just like that.

She settled down on the too-soft cushions of the old beige couch, and dragged in a breath. What a night. At least the room that surrounded her was normal—the easy chair covered by the red slipcover she’d made from an old blanket, the ancient floor model TV, and, above that, the grinning photo of her mom playing tourist beside the mast of the Elizabeth II at Festival Park. Sidekick panted at her with his usual mellow-dog grin.

“Honey?” A voice called from up the hall. “Is that you?”

Her father was home after all. He stumbled up the hall with the clumsy but somehow sure-footed steps of a professional alcoholic, weaving into the room. Sidekick leapt up next to her, pressing against her side.

“It’s me,” she said, when her dad paused and squinted at her.

His face was stained a red that meant nothing anymore. His skin stayed that way. The distinctive snake-shaped birthmark that crawled up his cheek toward his temple was nearly hidden by the permanent flush. Too many years of drinking for his angry pores to ever calm down.

“Of course it is, kiddo. I’m headed out…” His voice trailed off.

She could have traced a thought bubble and provided the caption showing the dot-dot-dots as his mind went blank. It broke her heart a little, every time.

“Do you need me to give you a ride somewhere?” She didn’t want to go back out, but she had to offer.

“Nah,” he said. “Fine. . .evening for a walk.”

Miranda dropped her head back against the sofa, closed her eyes to a flash of the black ship behind them. She bolted upright to find him watching her.

He’d be safe out there, wouldn’t he? Safe as he ever was? “Have a nice time,” she said, “but call if you need me.”

Usually that would have been his cue to stumble the rest of the way to their small kitchen for his keys, then out the door and to whichever bar in Manteo he was welcome at that week. Tonight he hesitated, wavering on his feet, focusing on her with an expression she didn’t recognise.

“You’re a good daughter,” he said.

She ruffled Sidekick’s fur, not sure what to say.

Wavering, wavering, and he said, “I want you to know,” before completing the circuit to the kitchen and the front door, where he fought the deadbolt and won. He closed the door behind him well enough that she was able to stay put on the couch, half-waiting for the dogs outside to go crazy again. There was only quiet.

Miranda had a firm policy of never being the silly girl—the kind who went to see what noise that was, or who would believe she’d seen something no one else had. The kind who would call Polly and confess why she’d ruined the show. The kind who wanted someone she could talk to, period. There was no one for her to tell everything or anything, no matter what she wanted. She’d best stick with the policy.

Plumping the waiting pillow, she eased onto her side and let her eyes close with Sidekick’s head on her hip. Her dad would wake her when he stumbled back in later.

But this way she’d know he made it home okay.

The Silence

A realtor wearing high heels and too much lipstick clicked her way across the gas station parking lot, returning to the pumps.

The fluorescents inside lit the building like a blaze, but no one had answered when she called out at the counter. She’d taken a pack of cinnamon chewing gum. She hadn’t shoplifted anything since high school and stealing the gum was a thrill, a memory of what it felt like to get away with something.

She opened the door of her Prius, and then heard a baby crying. Nearby.

She considered ignoring it. Instead, she slid one acrylic fingernail around the edge of the gum to open the pack, took out a piece and chewed. She tossed the red sealing cord and wrapper onto the ground and walked toward the baby’s cries, telling herself nothing was wrong. Rounding the pump, she could see that the gas nozzle was in the side of the minivan. But no one was watching it. The minivan’s window was cracked and, as she neared, the baby’s crying got louder. She looked back at her own car. She chewed her gum. She got closer, seeing the fat baby thrashing in a car seat inside. Still, no one came.

She eased open the car door, feeling more like a criminal than she ever had in her life. She’d stolen gum, but she wasn’t going to steal a baby.

The smell wiped away her guilt. She cupped her hand over her mouth, replacing the foul odor with the warm sweet scent of the stolen gum. The fat little baby must have been alone for a while. She needed to call someone, needed to get the baby out of there.

Something wasn’t right.

The man woke up and couldn’t place what was wrong. He threw an arm over the other side of the bed and found it empty. Empty? He sat up.

“Honey?” he called. Her name wasn’t Honey, but she didn’t mind the endearment.

No answer.

He stood, waiting for a response. When none came, he wandered through the house. Checked the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room. Her fancy headphones were next to the doorway, so she wasn’t out jogging. She worked late at the office the night before. He’d taken three round white melatonin tablets and turned in early. He hadn’t wanted her to wake him when she came home.

He went back to the bedroom and looked at her pillow, covered in ivory Egyptian cotton, the high thread count she liked. The pillow’s surface was plump, save the outline of where his hand had landed.

He walked outside to check for her car. The sedan sat in the driveway. He tore across the yard, wet grass soaking his bare feet.

The driver’s side door hung open. Her purse lay on the ground next to the car. He made an awful sound. . .

The girl and her friends had stayed up late, first drinking margaritas, then moving on to tequila shots. One of them had eaten the worm. They’d laughed and passed out. She’d stayed on their couch because she didn’t think she could make it to her own rental a few doors down.

Now she couldn’t find them. Were they mad at her? Everything had been fine the night before. How could they have left without waking her? They’d have had to go right past the couch. She usually woke at any strange noise.

She screwed up her courage—they probably weren’t mad at her, she hadn’t done anything, right?—and called each of their cell phones. In turn, they chirped, sang, beeped.

She heard them. None of these girls would ever leave the house without their cell phones. She would never go anywhere without hers.

She’d spent her life watching too much TV. She wondered if they’d been kidnapped, were trussed up by some serial killer with a bloody dissection in mind. She’d have been taken, too, though. Wait. What if someone was still in the apartment? But, no, she’d checked. She was alone here. All alone.

A breeze blew in through the screen door. She’d left the door open when she checked outside. A tiny drink umbrella all pink and yellow and blue cheer spun off the edge of the sticky kitchen table.

It hit the floor and twirled away.

[End Excerpt]

From the book Blackwood by Gwenda Bond.

Copyright © 2012 Gwenda Bond.

Reprinted by permission of Angry Robot Books.

All rights reserved.

Gwenda Bond’s debut novel, Blackwood, is out now from Strange Chemistry, the new YA imprint of Angry Robot Books. Her second novel, The Woken Gods, is coming next year. She is also a contributing writer for Publishers Weekly, regularly reviews YA for Locus, and guest-edited a special YA issue of Subterranean Online. Her nonfiction work has appeared in the Washington Post, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among others, and she has been a guest on NPR's Weekend Edition. She has an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts' program in writing for children and young adults. Readers of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet may know her best as everyone's Dear Aunt Gwenda. She lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband, author Christopher Rowe, and their menagerie.

Dragonfly
Ursula K. Le Guin

I. Iria

Her father’s ancestors had owned a wide, rich domain on the wide, rich island of Way. Claiming no title or court privilege in the days of the kings, through all the dark years after Maharion fell they held their land and people with firm hands, putting their gains back into the land, upholding some sort of justice, and fighting off petty tyrants. As order and peace returned to the Archipelago under the sway of the wise men of Roke, for a while yet the family and their farms and villages prospered. That prosperity and the beauty of the meadows and upland pastures and oak-crowned hills made the domain a byword, so that people said “as fat as a cow of Iria,” or “as lucky as an Irian.” The masters and many tenants of the domain added its name to their own, calling themselves Irian. But though the farmers and shepherds went on from season to season and year to year and generation to generation as steady and regenerative as the oaks, the family that owned the land altered and declined with time and chance.

A quarrel between brothers over their inheritance divided them. One heir mismanaged his estate through greed, the other through foolishness. One had a daughter who married a merchant and tried to run her estate from the city, the other had a son whose sons quarreled again, redividing the divided land. By the time the girl called Dragonfly was born, the domain of Iria, though still one of the loveliest regions of hill and field and meadow in all Earthsea, was a battleground of feuds and litigations. Farmlands went to weeds, farmsteads went unroofed, milking sheds stood unused, and shepherds followed their flocks over the mountain to better pastures. The old house that had been the center of the domain was half in ruins on its hill among the oaks.

Its owner was one of four men who called themselves Master of Iria. The other three called him Master of Old Iria. He spent his youth and what remained of his inheritance in law courts and the anterooms of the Lords of Way in Shelieth, trying to prove his right to the whole domain as it had been a hundred years ago. He came back unsuccessful and embittered and spent his age drinking the hard red wine from his last vineyard and walking his boundaries with a troop of ill-treated, underfed dogs to keep interlopers off his land.

He had married while he was in Shelieth, a woman no one at Iria knew anything about, for she came from some other island, it was said, somewhere in the west; and she never came to Iria, for she died in childbirth there in the city.

When he came home he had a three-year-old daughter with him. He turned her over to the housekeeper and forgot about her. When he was drunk sometimes he remembered her. If he could find her, he made her stand by his chair or sit on his knees and listen to all the wrongs that had been done to him and to the house of Iria. He cursed and cried and drank and made her drink too, pledging to honor her inheritance and be true to Iria. She swallowed the mouthful of wine, but she hated the curses and pledges and tears, and the slobbered caresses that followed them. She would escape, as soon as she could, if she could, and go down to the dogs and horses and cattle. She swore to them that she would be loyal to her mother, whom nobody knew or honored or was true to, except herself.

When she was thirteen, the old vineyarder and the housekeeper, who were all that was left of the household, told the Master that it was time his daughter had her naming day. They asked if they should send for the sorcerer over at Westpool, or would their own village witch do. The Master of Iria fell into a screaming rage. “A village witch? A hex-hag to give Irian’s daughter her true name? Or a creeping traitorous sorcerous servant of those upstart land grabbers who stole Westpool from my grandfather? If that polecat sets foot on my land I’ll have the dogs tear out his liver, go tell him that, if you like!” And so on. Old Daisy went back to her kitchen and old Coney went back to his vines, and thirteen-year-old Dragonfly ran out of the house and down the hill to the village, hurling her father’s curses at the dogs, who, crazy with excitement at his shouting, barked and bayed and rushed after her.

“Get back, you black-hearted bitch!” she yelled. “Home, you crawling traitor!” And the dogs fell silent and went sidling back to the house with their tails down.

Dragonfly found the village witch taking maggots out of an infected cut on a sheep’s rump. The witch’s use-name was Rose, like a great many women of Way and other islands of the Hardic Archipelago. People who have a secret name that holds their power the way a diamond holds light may well like their public name to be ordinary, common, like other people’s names.

Rose was muttering a rote spell, but it was her hands and her little short sharp knife that did most of the work. The ewe bore the digging knife patiently, her opaque, amber, slotted eyes gazing into silence; only she stamped her small left front foot now and then, and sighed.

Dragonfly peered close at Rose’s work. Rose brought out a maggot, dropped it, spat on it, and probed again. The girl leaned up against the ewe, and the ewe leaned against the girl, giving and receiving comfort. Rose extracted, dropped, and spat on the last maggot, and said, “Just hand me that bucket now.” She bathed the sore with salt water. The ewe sighed deeply and suddenly walked out of the yard, heading for home. She had had enough of medicine. “Bucky!” Rose shouted. A grubby child appeared from under a bush where he had been asleep and trailed after the ewe, of whom he was nominally in charge although she was older, larger, better fed, and probably wiser than he was.

“They said you should give me my name,” said Dragonfly. “Father fell to raging. So that’s that.”

The witch said nothing. She knew the girl was right. Once the Master of Iria said he would or would not allow a thing, he never changed his mind, priding himself on his intransigence, since in his view only weak men said a thing and then unsaid it.

“Why can’t I give myself my own true name?” Dragonfly asked, while Rose washed the knife and her hands in the salt water.

“Can’t be done.”

“Why not? Why does it have to be a witch or a sorcerer? What do you do?”

“Well,” Rose said, and dumped out the salt water on the bare dirt of the small front yard of her house, which, like most witches’ houses, stood somewhat apart from the village. “Well,” she said, straightening up and looking about vaguely as if for an answer, or a ewe, or a towel. “You have to know something about the power, see,” she said at last, and looked at Dragonfly with one eye. Her other eye looked a little off to the side. Sometimes Dragonfly thought the cast was in Rose’s left eye, sometimes it seemed to be in her right, but always one eye looked straight and the other watched something just out of sight, around the corner, elsewhere.

“Which power?”

“The one,” Rose said. As suddenly as the ewe had walked off, she went into her house. Dragonfly followed her, but only to the door. Nobody entered a witch’s house uninvited.

“You said I had it,” the girl said into the reeking gloom of the one-roomed hut.

“I said you have a strength in you, a great one,” the witch said from the darkness. “And you know it too. What you are to do I don’t know, nor do you. That’s to find. But there’s no such power as to name yourself.”

“Why not? What’s more yourself than your own true name?”

A long silence.

The witch emerged with a soapstone drop spindle and a ball of greasy wool. She sat down on the bench beside her door and set the spindle turning. She had spun a yard of grey-brown yarn before she answered.

“My name’s myself. True. But what’s a name, then? It’s what another calls me. If there was no other, only me, what would I want a name for?”

“But,” said Dragonfly and stopped, caught by the argument. After a while she said, “So a name has to be a gift?”

Rose nodded.

“Give me my name, Rose,” the girl said.

“Your dad says not.”

“I say to.”

“He’s the master here.”

“He can keep me poor and stupid and worthless, but he can’t keep me nameless!”

The witch sighed, like the ewe, uneasy and constrained.

“Tonight,” Dragonfly said. “At our spring, under Iria Hill. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” Her voice was half coaxing, half savage.

“You ought to have your proper nameday, your feast and dancing, like any young ’un,” the witch said. “It’s at daybreak a name should be given. And then there ought to be music and feasting and all. A party. Not sneaking about at night and no one knowing . . .”

“I’ll know. How do you know what name to say, Rose? Does the water tell you?”

The witch shook her iron-grey head once. “I can’t tell you.” Her “can’t” did not mean “won’t.” Dragonfly waited. “It’s the power, like I said. It comes just so.” Rose stopped her spinning and looked up with one eye at a cloud in the west; the other looked a little northward of the sky. “You’re there in the water, together, you and the child. You take away the child-name. People may go on using that name for a use-name, but it’s not her name, nor ever was. So now she’s not a child, and she has no name. So then you wait. In the water there. You open your mind up, like. Like opening the doors of a house to the wind. So it comes. Your tongue speaks it, the name. Your breath makes it. You give it to that child, the breath, the name. You can’t think of it. You let it come to you. It must come through you and the water to her it belongs to. That’s the power, the way it works. It’s all like that. It’s not a thing you do. You have to know how to let it do. That’s all the mastery.”

“Mages can do more than that,” the girl said after a while.

“Nobody can do more than that,” said Rose.

Dragonfly rolled her head round on her neck, stretching till the vertebrae cracked, restlessly stretching out her long arms and legs. “Will you?” she said.

After some time, Rose nodded once.

They met in the lane under Iria Hill in the dark of night, long after sunset, long before dawn. Rose made a dim glow of werelight so that they could find their way through the marshy ground around the spring without falling in a sinkhole among the reeds. In the cold darkness under a few stars and the black curve of the hill, they stripped and waded into the shallow water, their feet sinking deep in velvet mud. The witch touched the girl’s hand, saying, “I take your name, child. You are no child. You have no name.”

It was utterly still.

In a whisper the witch said, “Woman, be named. You are Irian.”

For a moment longer they held still; then the night wind blew across their naked shoulders, and shivering, they waded out, dried themselves as well as they could, struggled barefoot and wretched through the sharp-edged reeds and tangling roots, and found their way back to the lane. And there Dragonfly spoke in a ragged, raging whisper: “How could you name me that!”

The witch said nothing.

“It isn’t right. It isn’t my true name! I thought my name would make me be me. But this makes it worse. You got it wrong. You’re only a witch. You did it wrong. It’s his name. He can have it. He’s so proud of it, his stupid domain, his stupid grandfather. I don’t want it. I won’t have it. It isn’t me. I still don’t know who I am. I’m not Irian!” She fell silent abruptly, having spoken the name.

The witch still said nothing. They walked along in the darkness side by side. At last, in a placating, frightened voice, Rose said, “It came so . . .”

“If you ever tell it to anyone I’ll kill you,” Dragonfly said.

At that, the witch stopped walking. She hissed in her throat like a cat. “Tell anyone?”

Dragonfly stopped too. She said after a moment, “I’m sorry. But I feel like—I feel like you betrayed me.”

“I spoke your true name. It’s not what I thought it would be. And I don’t feel easy about it. As if I’d left something unfinished. But it is your name. If it betrays you, then that’s the truth of it.” Rose hesitated and then spoke less angrily, more coldly: “If you want the power to betray me, Irian, I’ll give you that. My name is Etaudis.”

The wind had come up again. They were both shivering, their teeth chattering. They stood face to face in the black lane, hardly able to see where the other was. Dragonfly put out her groping hand and met the witch’s hand. They put their arms round each other in a fierce, long embrace. Then they hurried on, the witch to her hut near the village, the heiress of Iria up the hill to her ruinous house, where all the dogs, who had let her go without much fuss, received her back with a clamor and racket of barking that woke everybody for a half mile round except the master, sodden drunk by his cold hearth.

II. Ivory

The master of Iria of Westpool, Birch, didn’t own the old house, but he did own the central and richest lands of the old domain. His father, more interested in vines and orchards than in quarrels with his relatives, had left Birch a thriving property. Birch hired men to manage the farms and wineries and cooperage and cartage and all, while he enjoyed his wealth. He married the timid daughter of the younger brother of the Lord of Wayfirth, and took infinite pleasure in thinking that his daughters were of noble blood.

The fashion of the time among the nobility was to have a wizard in their service, a genuine wizard with a staff and a grey cloak, trained on the Isle of the Wise; and so the Master of Iria of Westpool got himself a wizard from Roke. He was surprised how easy it was to get one, if you paid the price.

The young man, called Ivory, did not actually have his staff and cloak yet; he explained that he was to be made wizard when he went back to Roke. The Masters had sent him out in the world to gain experience, for all the classes in the school cannot give a man the experience he needs to be a wizard. Birch looked a little dubious at this, and Ivory reassured him that his training on Roke had equipped him with every kind of magic that could be needed in Iria of Westpool on Way. To prove it, he made it seem that a herd of deer ran through the dining hall, followed by a flight of swans, who marvelously soared in through the south wall and out through the north wall; and lastly a fountain in a silver basin sprang up in the center of the table, and when the master and his family cautiously imitated their wizard and filled their cups from it and tasted it, it was a sweet golden wine. “Wine of the Andrades,” said the young man with a modest, complacent smile. By then the wife and daughters were entirely won over. And Birch thought the young man was worth his fee, although his own silent preference was for the dry red Fanian of his own vineyards, which got you drunk if you drank enough, while this yellow stuff was just honeywater.

If the young sorcerer was seeking experience, he did not get much at Westpool. Whenever Birch had guests from Kembermouth or from neighboring domains, the herd of deer, the swans, and the fountain of golden wine made their appearance. He also worked up some very pretty fireworks for warm spring evenings. But if the managers of the orchards and vineyards came to the master to ask if his wizard might put a spell of increase on the pears this year or maybe charm the black rot off the Fanian vines on the south hill, Birch said, “A wizard of Roke doesn’t lower himself to such stuff. Go tell the village sorcerer to earn his keep!” And when the youngest daughter came down with a wasting cough, Birch’s wife dared not trouble the wise young man about it, but sent humbly to Rose of Old Iria, asking her to come in by the back door and maybe make a poultice or sing a chant to bring the girl back to health.

Ivory never noticed that the girl was ailing, nor the pear trees, nor the vines. He kept himself to himself, as a man of craft and learning should. He spent his days riding about the countryside on the pretty black mare that his employer had given him for his use when he made it clear that he had not come from Roke to trudge about on foot in the mud and dust of country byways.

On his rides he sometimes passed an old house on a hill among great oaks. Once he turned off the village lane up the hill, but a pack of scrawny, evil-mouthed dogs came pelting and bellowing down at him. The mare was afraid of dogs and liable to buck and bolt, so after that he kept his distance. But he had an eye for beauty, and liked to look at the old house dreaming away in the dappled light of the early summer afternoons.

He asked Birch about the place. “That’s Iria,” Birch said—“Old Iria, I mean to say. I own that house by rights. But after a century of feuds and fights over it, my granddad let the place go to settle the quarrel. Though the master there would still be quarreling with me if he didn’t keep too drunk to talk. Haven’t seen the old man for years. He had a daughter, I think.”

“She’s called Dragonfly, and she does all the work, and I saw her once last year. She’s tall, and as beautiful as a flowering tree,” said the youngest daughter, Rose, who was busy crowding a lifetime of keen observation into the fourteen years that were all she was going to have for it. She broke off, coughing. Her mother shot an anguished, yearning glance at the wizard. Surely he would hear that cough, this time? He smiled at young Rose, and the mother’s heart lifted. Surely he wouldn’t smile so if Rose’s cough was anything serious?

“Nothing to do with us, that lot at the old place,” Birch said, displeased. The tactful Ivory asked no more. But he wanted to see the girl as beautiful as a flowering tree. He rode past Old Iria regularly. He tried stopping in the village at the foot of the hill to ask questions, but there was nowhere to stop and nobody would answer questions. A wall-eyed witch took one look at him and scuttled into her hut. If he went up to the house he would have to face the pack of hellhounds and probably a drunk old man. But it was worth the chance, he thought; he was bored out of his wits with the dull life at Westpool, and was never slow to take a risk. He rode up the hill till the dogs were yelling around him in a frenzy snapping at the mare’s legs. She plunged and lashed out her hoofs at them, and he kept her from bolting only by a staying spell and all the strength in his arms. The dogs were leaping and snapping at his own legs now, and he was about to let the mare have her head when somebody came among the dogs shouting curses and beating them back with a strap. When he got the lathered, gasping mare to stand still, he saw the girl as beautiful as a flowering tree. She was very tall, very sweaty, with big hands and feet and mouth and nose and eyes, and a head of wild dusty hair. She was yelling, “Down! Back to the house, you carrion, you vile sons of bitches!” to the whining, cowering dogs.

Ivory clapped his hand to his right leg. A dog’s tooth had ripped his breeches at the calf, and a trickle of blood came through.

“Is she hurt?” the woman said. “Oh, the traitorous vermin!” She was stroking down the mare’s right foreleg. Her hands came away covered with blood-streaked horse sweat. “There, there,” she said. “The brave girl, the brave heart.” The mare put her head down and shivered all over with relief. “What did you keep her standing there in the middle of the dogs for?” the woman demanded furiously. She was kneeling at the horse’s leg, looking up at Ivory. He was looking down at her from horseback, yet he felt short; he felt small.

She did not wait for an answer. “I’ll walk her up,” she said, standing, and put out her hand for the reins. Ivory saw that he was supposed to dismount. He did so, asking, “Is it very bad?” and peering at the horse’s leg, seeing only bright, bloody foam.

“Come on then, my love,” the young woman said, not to him. The mare followed her trustfully. They set off up the rough path round the hillside to an old stone and brick stableyard, empty of horses, inhabited only by nesting swallows that swooped about over the roofs calling their quick gossip.

“Keep her quiet,” said the young woman, and left him holding the mare’s reins in this deserted place. She returned after some time lugging a heavy bucket, and set to sponging off the mare’s leg. “Get the saddle off her,” she said, and her tone held the unspoken, impatient “you fool!” Ivory obeyed, half annoyed by this crude giantess and half intrigued. She did not put him in mind of a flowering tree at all, but she was in fact beautiful, in a large, fierce way. The mare submitted to her absolutely. When she said, “Move your foot!” the mare moved her foot. The woman wiped her down all over, put the saddle blanket back on her, and made sure she was standing in the sun. “She’ll be all right,” she said. “There’s a gash, but if you’ll wash it with warm salt water four or five times a day, it’ll heal clean. I’m sorry.” She said the last honestly, though grudgingly, as if she still wondered how he could have let his mare stand there to be assaulted, and she looked straight at him for the first time. Her eyes were clear orange-brown, like dark topaz or amber. They were strange eyes, right on a level with his own.

“I’m sorry too,” he said, trying to speak carelessly, lightly.

“She’s Irian of Westpool’s mare. You’re the wizard, then?”

He bowed. “Ivory, of Havnor Great Port, at your service. May I—”

She interrupted. “I thought you were from Roke.”

“I am,” he said, his composure regained.

She stared at him with those strange eyes, as unreadable as a sheep’s, he thought. Then she burst out: “You lived there? You studied there? Do you know the Archmage?”

“Yes,” he said with a smile. Then he winced and stooped to press his hand against his shin for a moment.

“Are you hurt too?”

“It’s nothing,” he said. In fact, rather to his annoyance, the cut had stopped bleeding.

The woman’s gaze returned to his face.

“What is it—what is it like—on Roke?”

Ivory went, limping only very slightly, to an old mounting block nearby and sat down on it. He stretched his leg, nursing the torn place, and looked up at the woman. “It would take a long time to tell you what Roke is like,” he said. “But it would be my pleasure.”

“The man’s a wizard, or nearly,” said Rose the witch, “a Roke wizard! You must not ask him questions!” She was more than scandalized, she was frightened.

“He doesn’t mind,” Dragonfly reassured her. “Only he hardly ever really answers.”

“Of course not!”

“Why of course not?”

“Because he’s a wizard! Because you’re a woman, with no art, no knowledge, no learning!”

“You could have taught me! You never would!”

Rose dismissed all she had taught or could teach with a flick of the fingers.

“Well, so I have to learn from him,” said Dragonfly.

“Wizards don’t teach women. You’re besotted.”

“You and Broom trade spells.”

“Broom’s a village sorcerer. This man is a wise man. He learned the High Arts at the Great House on Roke!”

“He told me what it’s like,” Dragonfly said. “You walk up through the town, Thwil Town. There’s a door opening on the street, but it’s shut. It looks like an ordinary door.”

The witch listened, unable to resist the lure of secrets revealed and the contagion of passionate desire.

“And a man comes when you knock, an ordinary looking man. And he gives you a test. You have to say a certain word, a password, before he’ll let you in. If you don’t know it, you can never go in. But if he lets you in, then from inside you see that the door is entirely different—it’s made out of horn, with a tree carved on it, and the frame is made out of a tooth, one tooth of a dragon that lived long, long before Erreth-Akbe, before Morred, before there were people in Earthsea. There were only dragons, to begin with. They found the tooth on Mount Onn, in Havnor, at the center of the world. And the leaves of the tree are carved so thin that the light shines through them, but the door’s so strong that if the Doorkeeper shuts it no spell could ever open it. And then the Doorkeeper takes you down a hall and another hall, till you’re lost and bewildered, and then suddenly you come out under the sky. In the Court of the Fountain, in the very deepest inside of the Great House. And that’s where the Archmage would be, if he was there . . .”

“Go on,” the witch murmured.

“That’s all he really told me, yet,” said Dragonfly, coming back to the mild, overcast spring day and the infinite familiarity of the village lane, Rose’s front yard, her own seven milch ewes grazing on Iria Hill, the bronze crowns of the oaks. “He’s very careful how he talks about the Masters.”

Rose nodded.

“But he told me about some of the students.”

“No harm in that, I suppose.”

“I don’t know,” Dragonfly said. “To hear about the Great House is wonderful, but I thought the people there would be—I don’t know. Of course they’re mostly just boys when they go there. But I thought they’d be . . .” She gazed off at the sheep on the hill, her face troubled. “Some of them are really bad and stupid,” she said in a low voice. “They get into the school because they’re rich. And they study there just to get richer. Or to get power.”

“Well, of course they do,” said Rose, “that’s what they’re there for!”

“But power—like you told me about—that isn’t the same as making people do what you want, or pay you—”

“Isn’t it?”

“No!”

“If a word can heal, a word can wound,” the witch said. “If a hand can kill, a hand can cure. It’s a poor cart that goes only one direction.”

“But on Roke, they learn to use power well, not for harm, not for gain.”

“Everything’s for gain some way, I’d say. People have to live. But what do I know? I make my living doing what I know how to do. But I don’t meddle with the great arts, the perilous crafts, like summoning the dead,” and Rose made the hand sign to avert the danger spoken of.

“Everything’s perilous,” Dragonfly said, gazing now through the sheep, the hill, the trees, into still depths, a colorless, vast emptiness like the clear sky before sunrise.

Rose watched her. She knew she did not know who Irian was or what she might be. A big, strong, awkward, ignorant, innocent, angry woman, yes. But ever since Irian was a child, Rose had seen something more in her, something beyond what she was. And when Irian looked away from the world like that, she seemed to enter that place or time or being beyond herself, utterly beyond Rose’s knowledge. Then Rose feared her, and feared for her.

“You take care,” the witch said, grim. “Everything’s perilous, right enough, and meddling with wizards most of all.”

Through love, respect, and trust, Dragonfly would never disregard a warning from Rose; but she was unable to see Ivory as perilous. She didn’t understand him, but the idea of fearing him, him personally, was not one she could keep in mind. She tried to be respectful, but it was impossible. She thought he was clever and quite handsome, but she didn’t think much about him, except for what he could tell her. He knew what she wanted to know and little by little he told it to her, and then it was not really what she had wanted to know, but she wanted to know more. He was patient with her, and she was grateful to him for his patience, knowing he was much quicker than she. Sometimes he smiled at her ignorance, but he never sneered at it or reproved it. Like the witch, he liked to answer a question with a question; but the answers to Rose’s questions were always something she’d always known, while the answers to his questions were things she had never imagined and found startling, unwelcome, even painful, altering her beliefs.

Day by day, as they talked in the old stableyard of Iria, where they had fallen into the habit of meeting, she asked him and he told her more, though reluctantly, always partially; he shielded his Masters, she thought, trying to defend the bright image of Roke, until one day he gave in to her insistence and spoke freely at last.

“There are good men there,” he said. “Great and wise the Archmage certainly was. But he’s gone. And the Masters . . . some hold aloof, following arcane knowledge, seeking ever more patterns, ever more names, but using their knowledge for nothing. Others hide their ambition under the grey cloak of wisdom. Roke is no longer where power is in Earthsea. That’s the Court in Havnor, now. Roke lives on its great past, defended by a thousand spells against the present day. And inside those spell-walls, what is there? Quarreling ambitions, fear of anything new, fear of young men who challenge the power of the old. And at the center, nothing. An empty courtyard. The Archmage will never return.”

“How do you know?” she whispered.

He looked stern. “The dragon bore him away.”

“You saw it? You saw that?” She clenched her hands, imagining that flight, not even hearing his reply.

After a long time, she came back to the sunlight and the stableyard and her thoughts and puzzles. “But even if he’s gone,” she said, “surely some of the Masters are truly wise?”

When he looked up and spoke it was with reluctance, with a hint of a melancholy smile. “All the mystery and wisdom of the Masters, when it’s out in the daylight, doesn’t amount to so much, you know. Tricks of the trade—wonderful illusions. But people don’t want to know that. They want the illusions, the mysteries. Who can blame them? There’s so little in life that’s beautiful or worthy.”

As if to illustrate what he was saying, he had picked up a bit of brick from the broken pavement, and tossed it up in the air, and as he spoke it fluttered about their heads on delicate blue wings, a butterfly. He put out his finger and the butterfly lighted on it. He shook his finger and the butterfly fell to the ground, a fragment of brick.

“There’s not much worth much in my life,” she said, gazing down at the pavement. “All I know how to do is run the farm, and try to stand up and speak truth. But if I thought it was all tricks and lies even on Roke, I’d hate those men for fooling me, fooling us all. It can’t be lies. Not all of it. The Archmage did go into the labyrinth among the Hoary Men and come back with the Ring of Peace. He did go into death with the young king, and defeat the spider mage, and come back. We know that on the word of the King himself. Even here, the harpers came to sing that song, and a teller came to tell it.”

Ivory nodded. “But the Archmage lost all his power in the land of death. Maybe all magery was weakened then.”

“Rose’s spells work as well as ever,” she said stoutly.

Ivory smiled. He said nothing, but she saw how petty the doings of a village witch appeared to him, who had seen great deeds and powers. She sighed and spoke from her heart— “Oh, if only I wasn’t a woman!”

He smiled again. “You’re a beautiful woman,” he said, but plainly, not in the flattering way he had used with her at first, before she showed him she hated it. “Why would you be a man?”

“So I could go to Roke! And see, and learn! Why, why is it only men can go there?”

“So it was ordained by the first Archmage, centuries ago,” said Ivory. “But . . . I too have wondered.”

“You have?”

“Often. Seeing only boys and men, day after day, in the Great House and all the precincts of the school. Knowing that the townswomen are spell-bound from so much as setting foot on the fields about Roke Knoll. Once in years, perhaps, some great lady is allowed to come briefly into the outer courts . . . why is it so? Are all women incapable of understanding? Or is it that the Masters fear them, fear to be corrupted—No, but fear that to admit women might change the rule they cling to—the purity of that rule—”

“Women can live chaste as well as men can,” Dragonfly said bluntly. She knew she was blunt and coarse where he was delicate and subtle, but she did not know any other way to be.

“Of course,” he said, his smile growing brilliant. “But witches aren’t always chaste, are they? . . . Maybe that’s what the Masters are afraid of. Maybe celibacy isn’t as necessary as the Rule of Roke teaches. Maybe it’s not a way of keeping the power pure, but of keeping the power to themselves. Leaving out women, leaving out everybody who won’t agree to turn himself into a eunuch to get that one kind of power . . . who knows? A she-mage! Now that would change everything, all the rules!”

She could see his mind dance ahead of hers, taking up and playing with ideas, transforming them as he had transformed brick into butterfly. She could not dance with him, she could not play with him, but she watched him in wonder.

“You could go to Roke,” he said, his eyes bright with excitement, mischief, daring. Meeting her almost pleading, incredulous silence, he insisted—“You could. A woman you are, but there are ways to change your seeming. You have the heart, the courage, the will of a man. You could enter the Great House. I know it.”

“And what would I do there?”

“What all the students do. Live alone in a stone cell and learn to be wise! It might not be what you dream it to be, but that, too, you’d learn.”

“I couldn’t. They’d know. I couldn’t even get in. There’s the Doorkeeper, you said. I don’t know the word to say to him.”

“The password, yes. But I can teach it to you.”

“You can? Is it allowed?”

“I don’t care what’s ‘allowed,’” he said, with a frown she had never seen on his face. “The Archmage himself said, Rules are made to be broken. Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them. I have the courage, if you do!”

She looked at him. She could not speak. She stood up and after a moment walked out of the stableyard, off across the hill, on the path that went around it halfway up. One of the dogs, her favorite, a big, ugly, heavy-headed hound, followed her. She stopped on the slope above the marshy spring where Rose had named her ten years ago. She stood there. The dog sat down beside her and looked up at her face. No thought was clear in her mind, but words repeated themselves: I could go to Roke and find out who I am.

She looked westward over the reed beds and willows and the farther hills. The whole western sky was empty, clear. She stood still and her soul seemed to go into that sky and be gone, gone out of her.

There was a little noise, the soft clip-clop of the black mare’s hoofs, coming along the lane. Then Dragonfly came back to herself and called to Ivory and ran down the hill to meet him. “I will go,” she said.

He had not planned or intended any such adventure, but crazy as it was, it suited him better the more he thought about it. The prospect of spending the long grey winter at Westpool sank his spirits like a stone. There was nothing here for him except the girl Dragonfly, who had come to fill his thoughts. Her massive, innocent strength had defeated him absolutely so far, but he did what she pleased in order to have her do at last what he pleased, and the game, he thought, was worth playing. If she ran away with him, the game was as good as won. As for the joke of it, the notion of actually getting her into the school on Roke disguised as a man, there was little chance of pulling it off, but it pleased him as a gesture of disrespect to all the piety and pomposity of the Masters and their toadies. And if somehow it succeeded, if he could actually get a woman through that door, even for a moment, what a sweet revenge it would be!

Money was a problem. The girl thought, of course, that he as a great wizard would snap his fingers and waft them over the sea in a magic boat flying before the magewind. But when he told her they’d have to hire passage on a ship, she said simply, “I have the cheese money.”

He treasured her rustic sayings of that kind. Sometimes she frightened him, and he resented it. His dreams of her were never of her yielding to him, but of himself yielding to a fierce, destroying sweetness, sinking into an annihilating embrace, dreams in which she was something beyond comprehension and he was nothing at all. He woke from those dreams shaken and shamed. In daylight, when he saw her big, dirty hands, when she talked like a yokel, a simpleton, he regained his superiority. He only wished there were someone to repeat her sayings to, one of his old friends in the Great Port who would find them amusing. “I have the cheese money,” he repeated to himself, riding back to Westpool, and laughed. “I do indeed,” he said aloud. The black mare flicked her ear.

He told Birch that he had received a sending from his teacher on Roke, the Master Hand, and must go at once, on what business he could not say, of course, but it should not take long once he was there; a half month to go, another to return; he would be back well before the Fallows at the latest. He must ask Master Birch to provide him an advance on his salary to pay for ship passage and lodging, since a wizard of Roke should not take advantage of people’s willingness to give him whatever he needed, but pay his way like an ordinary man. As Birch agreed with this, he had to give Ivory a purse for his journey, the first real money he had had in his pocket for years: ten ivory counters carved with the Otter of Shelieth on one side and the Rune of Peace on the other in honor of King Lebannen. “Hello, little namesakes,” he told them when he was alone with them. “You and the cheese money will get along nicely.”

He told Dragonfly very little of his plans, largely because he made few, trusting to chance and his own wits, which seldom let him down if he was given a fair chance to use them. The girl asked almost no questions. “Will I go as a man all the way?” was one.

“Yes,” he said, “but only disguised. I won’t put a semblance spell on you till we’re on Roke Island.”

“I thought it would be a spell of change,” she said.

“That would be unwise,” he said, with a good imitation of the Master Changer’s terse solemnity. “If need be, I’ll do it, of course. But you’ll find wizards very sparing of the great spells. For good reason.”

“The Equilibrium,” she said, accepting all he said in its simplest sense, as always.

“And perhaps because such arts have not the power they once had,” he said. He did not know himself why he tried to weaken her faith in wizardry; perhaps because any weakening of her strength, her wholeness, was a gain for him. He had begun merely by trying to get her into his bed, a game he loved to play. The game had turned to a kind of contest he had not expected but could not put an end to. He was determined now not to win her, but to defeat her. He could not let her defeat him. He must prove to her and himself that his dreams were meaningless.

Quite early on, impatient with wooing her massive physical indifference, he had worked up a charm, a sorcerer’s seduction spell of which he was contemptuous even as he made it, though he knew it was effective. He cast it on her while she was, characteristically, mending a cow’s halter. The result had not been the melting eagerness it had produced in girls he had used it on in Havnor and Thwil. Dragonfly had gradually become silent and sullen. She ceased asking her endless questions about Roke and did not answer when he spoke. When he very tentatively approached her, taking her hand, she struck him away with a blow to the head that left him dizzy. He saw her stand up and stride out of the stableyard without a word, the ugly hound she favored trotting after her. The hound looked back at him with a grin.

She took the path to the old house. When his ears stopped ringing he stole after her, hoping the charm was working and that this was only her particularly uncouth way of leading him at last to her bed. Nearing the house, he heard crockery breaking. The father, the drunkard, came wobbling out looking scared and confused, followed by Dragonfly’s loud, harsh voice—“Out of the house, you drunken, crawling traitor! You foul, shameless lecher!”

“She took my cup away,” the Master of Iria said to the stranger, whining like a puppy, while his dogs yammered around him. “She broke it.”

Ivory departed. He did not return for two days. On the third day he rode experimentally past Old Iria, and she came striding down to meet him. “I’m sorry, Ivory,” she said, looking up at him with her smoky orange eyes. “I don’t know what came over me the other day. I was angry. But not at you. I beg your pardon.”

He forgave her gracefully. He did not try a love charm on her again.

Soon, he thought now, he would not need one. He would have real power over her. He had finally seen how to get it. She had given it into his hands. Her strength and her willpower were tremendous, but fortunately she was stupid, and he was not.

Birch was sending a carter down to Kembermouth with six barrels of ten-year-old Fanian ordered by the wine merchant there. He was glad to send his wizard along as bodyguard, for the wine was valuable, and though the young king was putting things to rights as fast as he could, there were still gangs of robbers on the roads. So Ivory left Westpool on the big wagon pulled by four big cart horses, jolting slowly along, his legs dangling. Down by Jackass Hill an uncouth figure rose up from the wayside and asked the carter for a lift. “I don’t know you,” the carter said, lifting his whip to warn the stranger off, but Ivory came round the wagon and said, “Let the lad ride, my good man. He’ll do no harm while I’m with you.”

“Keep an eye on him then, master,” said the carter.

“I will,” said Ivory, with a wink at Dragonfly. She, well disguised in dirt and a farmhand’s old smock and leggings and a loathsome felt hat, did not wink back. She played her part even while they sat side by side dangling their legs over the tailgate, with six great halftuns of wine jolting between them and the drowsy carter, and the drowsy summer hills and fields slipping slowly, slowly past. Ivory tried to tease her, but she only shook her head. Maybe she was scared by this wild scheme, now she was embarked on it. There was no telling. She was solemnly, heavily silent. I could be very bored by this woman, Ivory thought, if once I’d had her underneath me. That thought stirred him almost unbearably, but when he looked back at her, his desire died away before her massive, actual presence.

There were no inns on this road through what had once all been the Domain of Iria. As the sun neared the western plains, they stopped at a farmhouse that offered stabling for the horses, a shed for the cart, and straw in the stable loft for the carters. The loft was dark and stuffy and the straw musty. Ivory felt no lust at all, though Dragonfly lay not three feet from him. She had played the man so thoroughly all day that she had half convinced even him. Maybe she’ll fool the old men after all! he thought. He grinned at the thought, and slept.

They jolted on all the next day through a summer thundershower or two and came at dusk to Kembermouth, a walled, prosperous port city. They left the carter to his master’s business and walked down to find an inn near the docks. Dragonfly looked about at the sights of the city in a silence that might have been awe or disapproval or mere stolidity. “This is a nice little town,” Ivory said, “but the only city in the world is Havnor.”

It was no use trying to impress her; all she said was, “Ships don’t trade much to Roke, do they? Will it take a long time to find one to take us, do you think?”

“Not if I carry a staff,” he said.

She stopped looking about and strode along in thought for a while. She was beautiful in movement, bold and graceful, her head carried high.

“You mean they’ll oblige a wizard? But you aren’t a wizard.”

“That’s a formality. We senior sorcerers may carry a staff when we’re on Roke’s business. Which I am.”

“Taking me there?”

“Bringing them a student—yes. A student of great gifts!”

She asked no more questions. She never argued; it was one of her virtues.

That night, over supper at the waterfront inn, she asked with unusual timidity in her voice, “Do I have great gifts?”

“In my judgment, you do,” he said.

She pondered—conversation with her was often a slow business—and said, “Rose always said I had power, but she didn’t know what kind. And I . . . I know I do, but I don’t know what it is.”

“You’re going to Roke to find out,” he said, raising his glass to her. After a moment she raised hers and smiled at him, a smile so tender and radiant that he said spontaneously, “And may what you find be all you seek!”

“If I do, it will be thanks to you,” she said. In that moment he loved her for her true heart, and would have foresworn any thought of her but as his companion in a bold adventure, a gallant joke.

They had to share a room at the crowded inn with two other travelers, but Ivory’s thoughts were perfectly chaste, though he laughed at himself a little for it.

Next morning he picked a sprig of an herb from the kitchen garden of the inn and spelled it into the semblance of a fine staff, copper-shod and his own height exactly. “What is the wood?” Dragonfly asked, fascinated, when she saw it, and when he answered with a laugh, “Rosemary,” she laughed too.

They set off along the wharves, asking for a ship bound south that might take a wizard and his prentice to the Isle of the Wise, and soon enough they found a heavy trader bound for Wathort, whose master would carry the wizard for goodwill and the prentice for half price. Even half price was half the cheese money; but they would have the luxury of a cabin, for Sea Otter was a decked, two-masted ship.

As they were talking with her master a wagon drew up on the dock and began to unload six familiar halftun barrels. “That’s ours,” Ivory said, and the ship’s master said, “Bound for Hort Town,” and Dragonfly said softly, “From Iria.”

She glanced back at the land then. It was the only time he ever saw her look back.

The ship’s weatherworker came aboard just before they sailed, no Roke wizard but a weatherbeaten fellow in a worn sea cloak. Ivory flourished his staff a little in greeting him. The sorcerer looked him up and down and said, “One man works weather on this ship. If it’s not me, I’m off.”

“I’m a mere passenger, Master Bagman. I gladly leave the winds in your hands.”

The sorcerer looked at Dragonfly, who stood straight as a tree and said nothing.

“Good,” he said, and that was the last word he spoke to Ivory.

During the voyage, however, he talked several times with Dragonfly, which made Ivory a bit uneasy. Her ignorance and trustfulness could endanger her and therefore him. What did she and the bagman talk about? he asked, and she answered, “What is to become of us.”

He stared.

“Of all of us. Of Way and Felkway, and Havnor, and Wathort, and Roke. All the people of the islands. He says that when King Lebannen was to be crowned, last autumn, he sent to Gont for the old Archmage to come crown him, and he wouldn’t come. And there was no new Archmage. So the King put on his crown himself. And some say that’s wrong, and he doesn’t rightly hold the throne. But others say the King himself is the new Archmage. But he isn’t a wizard, only a king. So others say the dark years will come again, when there was no rule of justice, and wizardry was used for evil ends.”

After a pause Ivory said, “That old weatherworker says all this?”

“It’s common talk, I think,” said Dragonfly, with her grave simplicity.

The weatherworker knew his trade, at least. Sea Otter sped south; they met summer squalls and choppy seas, but never a storm or a troublesome wind. They put off and took on cargo at ports on the north shore of O, at Ilien, Leng, Kamery, and O Port, and then headed west to carry the passengers to Roke. And facing the west Ivory felt a little hollow at the pit of his stomach, for he knew all too well how Roke was guarded. He knew neither he nor the weatherworker could do anything at all to turn the Roke wind if it blew against them. And if it did, Dragonfly would ask why? Why did it blow against them?

He was glad to see the sorcerer uneasy too, standing by the helmsman, keeping a watch up on the masthead, taking in sail at the hint of a west wind. But the wind held steady from the north. A thunder squall came pelting on that wind, and Ivory went down to the cabin, but Dragonfly stayed up on deck. She was afraid of the water, she had told him. She could not swim; she said, “Drowning must be a horrible thing—Not to breathe the air—” She had shuddered at the thought. It was the only fear she had ever shown of anything. But she disliked the low, cramped cabin, and had stayed on deck every day and slept there on the warm nights. Ivory had not tried to coax her into the cabin. He knew now that coaxing was no good. To have her he must master her; and that he would do, if only they could come to Roke.

He came up on deck again. It was clearing, and as the sun set, the clouds broke all across the west, showing a golden sky behind the high dark curve of a hill.

Ivory looked at that hill with a kind of longing hatred.

“That’s Roke Knoll, lad,” the weatherworker said to Dragonfly, who stood beside him at the rail. “We’re coming into Thwil Bay now. Where there’s no wind but the wind they want.”

By the time they were well into the bay and had let down the anchor it was dark, and Ivory said to the ship’s master, “I’ll go ashore in the morning.”

Down in their tiny cabin Dragonfly sat waiting for him, solemn as ever but her eyes blazing with excitement. “We’ll go ashore in the morning,” he repeated to her, and she nodded, acceptant.

She said, “Do I look all right?”

He sat down on his narrow bunk and looked at her sitting on her narrow bunk; they could not face each other directly, as there was no room for their knees. At O Port she had bought herself a decent shirt and breeches, at his suggestion, so as to look a more probable candidate for the school. Her face was windburnt and scrubbed clean. Her hair was braided and the braid clubbed, like Ivory’s. She had got her hands clean too, and they lay flat on her thighs, long strong hands, like a man’s.

“You don’t look like a man,” he said. Her face fell. “Not to me. You’ll never look like a man to me. But don’t worry. You will to them.”

She nodded, with an anxious face.

“The first test is the great test, Dragonfly,” he said. Every night as he lay alone in this cabin he had planned this conversation. “To enter the Great House. To go through that door.”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said, hurried and earnest. “Couldn’t I just tell them who I am? With you there to vouch for me—to say even if I am a woman, I have some gift—and I’d promise to take the vow and make the spell of celibacy, and live apart if they wanted me to—”

He was shaking his head all through her speech. “No, no, no, no. Hopeless. Useless. Fatal!”

“Even if you—”

“Even if I argued for you. They won’t listen. The Rule of Roke forbids women to be taught any high art, any word of the Language of the Making. It’s always been so. They will not listen. So they must be shown! And we’ll show them, you and I. We’ll teach them. You must have courage, Dragonfly. You must not weaken, and not think ‘Oh, if I just beg them to let me in, they can’t refuse me.’ They can, and will. And if you reveal yourself, they will punish you. And me.” He put a ponderous emphasis on the last word, and inwardly murmured, “Avert.”

She gazed at him from her unreadable eyes, and finally asked, “What must I do?”

“Do you trust me, Dragonfly?”

“Yes.”

“Will you trust me entirely, wholly—knowing that the risk I take for you is greater even than your risk in this venture?”

“Yes.”

“Then you must tell me the word you will speak to the Doorkeeper.”

She stared. “But I thought you’d tell it to me—the password.”

“The password he will ask you for is your true name.” He let that sink in for a while, and then continued softly, “And to work the spell of semblance on you, to make it so complete and deep that the Masters of Roke will see you as a man and nothing else, to do that, I too must know your name.” He paused again. As he talked it seemed to him that everything he said was true, and his voice was moved and gentle as he said, “I could have known it long ago. But I chose not to use those arts. I wanted you to trust me enough to tell me your name yourself.”

She was looking down at her hands, clasped now on her knees. In the faint reddish glow of the cabin lantern her lashes cast very delicate, long shadows on her cheeks. She looked up, straight at him. “My name is Irian,” she said.

He smiled. She did not smile.

He said nothing. In fact he was at a loss. If he had known it would be this easy, he could have had her name and with it the power to make her do whatever he wanted, days ago, weeks ago, with a mere pretense at this crazy scheme—without giving up his salary and his precarious respectability, without this sea voyage, without having to go all the way to Roke for it! For he saw the whole plan now was folly. There was no way he could disguise her that would fool the Doorkeeper for a moment. All his notions of humiliating the Masters as they had humiliated him were moonshine. Obsessed with tricking the girl, he had fallen into the trap he laid for her. Bitterly he recognised that he was always believing his own lies, caught in nets he had elaborately woven. Having once made a fool of himself on Roke, he had come back to do it all over again. A great, desolate anger swelled up in him. There was no good, no good in anything.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. The gentleness of her deep, husky voice unmanned him, and he hid his face in his hands, fighting against the shame of tears.

She put her hand on his knee. It was the first time she had ever touched him. He endured it, the warmth and weight of her touch that he had wasted so much time wanting.

He wanted to hurt her, to shock her out of her terrible, ignorant kindness, but what he said when he finally spoke was “I only wanted to make love to you.”

“You did?”

“Did you think I was one of their eunuchs? That I’d castrate myself with spells so I could be holy? Why do you think I don’t have a staff? Why do you think I’m not at the school? Did you believe everything I said?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry.” Her hand was still on his knee. She said, “We can make love if you want.”

He sat up, sat still.

“What are you?” he said to her at last.

“I don’t know. It’s why I wanted to come to Roke. To find out.”

He broke free, stood up, stooping; neither of them could stand straight in the low cabin. Clenching and unclenching his hands, he stood as far from her as he could, his back to her.

“You won’t find out. It’s all lies, shams. Old men playing games with words. I wouldn’t play their games, so I left. Do you know what I did?” He turned, showing his teeth in a rictus of triumph. “I got a girl, a town girl, to come to my room. My cell. My little stone celibate cell. It had a window looking out on a back street. No spells—you can’t make spells with all their magic going on. But she wanted to come, and came, and I let a rope ladder out the window, and she climbed it. And we were at it when the old men came in! I showed ’em! And if I could have got you in, I’d have showed ’em again, I’d have taught them their lesson!”

“Well, I’ll try,” she said.

He stared.

“Not for the same reasons as you,” she said, “but I still want to. And we came all this way. And you know my name.”

It was true. He knew her name: Irian. It was like a coal of fire, a burning ember in his mind. His thought could not hold it. His knowledge could not use it. His tongue could not say it.

She looked up at him, her sharp, strong face softened by the shadowy lantern light. “If it was only to make love you brought me here, Ivory,” she said, “we can do that. If you still want to.”

Wordless at first, he simply shook his head. After a while he was able to laugh. “I think we’ve gone on past . . . that possibility . . .”

She looked at him without regret, or reproach, or shame.

“Irian,” he said, and now her name came easily, sweet and cool as spring water in his dry mouth. “Irian, here’s what you must do to enter the Great House . . .”

III. Azver

He left her at the corner of the street, a narrow, dull, somehow sly-looking street that slanted up between featureless walls to a wooden door in a higher wall. He had put his spell on her, and she looked like a man, though she did not feel like one. She and Ivory took each other in their arms, because after all they had been friends, companions, and he had done all this for her. “Courage!” he said, and let her go. She walked up the street and stood before the door. She looked back then, but he was gone.

She knocked.

After a while she heard the latch rattle. The door opened. A middle-aged man stood there. “What can I do for you?” he said. He did not smile, but his voice was pleasant.

“You can let me into the Great House, sir.”

“Do you know the way in?” His almond-shaped eyes were attentive, yet seemed to look at her from miles or years away.

“This is the way in, sir.”

“Do you know whose name you must tell me before I let you in?”

“My own, sir. It is Irian.”

“Is it?” he said. That gave her pause. She stood silent. “It’s the name the witch Rose of my village on Way gave me, in the spring under Iria Hill,” she said at last, standing up and speaking truth.

The Doorkeeper looked at her for what seemed a long time. “Then it is your name,” he said. “But maybe not all your name. I think you have another.”

“I don’t know it, sir.”

After another long time she said, “Maybe I can learn it here, sir.”

The Doorkeeper bowed his head a little. A very faint smile made crescent curves in his cheeks. He stood aside. “Come in, daughter,” he said.

She stepped across the threshold of the Great House.

Ivory’s spell of semblance dropped away like a cobweb. She was and looked herself.

She followed the Doorkeeper down a stone passageway. Only at the end of it did she think to turn back to see the light shine through the thousand leaves of the tree carved in the high door in its bone-white frame.

A young man in a grey cloak hurrying down the passageway stopped short as he approached them. He stared at Irian; then with a brief nod he went on. She looked back at him. He was looking back at her.

A globe of misty, greenish fire drifted swiftly down the corridor at eye level, apparently pursuing the young man. The Doorkeeper waved his hand at it, and it avoided him. Irian swerved and ducked down frantically, but felt the cool fire tingle in her hair as it passed over her. The Doorkeeper glanced round, and now his smile was wider. Though he said nothing, she felt he was aware of her, concerned for her. She stood up and followed him.

He stopped before an oak door. Instead of knocking he sketched a little sign or rune on it with the top of his staff, a light staff of some greyish wood. The door opened as a resonant voice behind it said, “Come in!”

“Wait here a little, if you please, Irian,” the Doorkeeper said, and went into the room, leaving the door wide open behind him. She could see bookshelves and books, a table piled with more books and ink pots and writings, two or three boys seated at the table, and the grey-haired, stocky man the Doorkeeper spoke to. She saw the man’s face change, saw his eyes shift to her in a brief, startled gaze, saw him question the Doorkeeper, low-voiced, intense.

They both came to her. “The Master Changer of Roke: Irian of Way,” said the Doorkeeper.

The Changer stared openly at her. He was not as tall as she was. He stared at the Doorkeeper, and then at her again.

“Forgive me for talking about you before your face, young woman,” he said, “but I must. Master Doorkeeper, you know I’d never question your judgment, but the Rule is clear. I have to ask what moved you to break it and let her come in.”

“She asked to,” said the Doorkeeper.

“But—” The Changer paused.

“When did a woman last ask to enter the school?”

“They know the Rule doesn’t allow them.”

“Did you know that, Irian?” the Doorkeeper asked her, and she said, “Yes, sir.”

“So what brought you here?” the Changer asked, stern, but not hiding his curiosity.

“Master Ivory said I could pass for a man. Though I thought I should say who I was. I will be as celibate as anyone, sir.”

Two long curves appeared on the Doorkeeper’s cheeks, enclosing the slow upturn of his smile. The Changer’s face remained stern, but he blinked, and after a little thought said, “I’m sure—yes—It was definitely the better plan to be honest. What Master did you speak of?”

“Ivory,” said the Doorkeeper. “A lad from Havnor Great Port, whom I let in three years ago, and let out again last year, as you may recall.”

“Ivory! That fellow that studied with the Hand?—Is he here?” the Changer demanded of Irian, wrathily. She stood straight and said nothing.

“Not in the school,” the Doorkeeper said, smiling.

“He fooled you, young woman. Made a fool of you by trying to make fools of us.”

“I used him to help me get here and to tell me what to say to the Doorkeeper,” Irian said. “I’m not here to fool anybody, but to learn what I need to know.”

“I’ve often wondered why I let that boy in,” said the Doorkeeper. “Now I begin to understand.”

At that the Changer looked at him, and after pondering said soberly, “Doorkeeper, what have you in mind?”

“I think Irian of Way may have come to us seeking not only what she needs to know, but also what we need to know.” The Doorkeeper’s tone was equally sober, and his smile was gone. “I think this may be a matter for talk among the nine of us.”

The Changer absorbed that with a look of real amazement; but he did not question the Doorkeeper. He said only, “But not among the students.”

The Doorkeeper shook his head, agreeing.

“She can lodge in the town,” the Changer said, with some relief.

“While we talk behind her back?”

“You won’t bring her into the Council Room?” the Changer said in disbelief.

“The Archmage brought the boy Arren there.”

“But—But Arren was King Lebannen—”

“And who is Irian?”

The Changer stood silent, and then he said quietly, with respect, “My friend, what is it you think to do, to learn? What is she, that you ask this for her?”

“Who are we,” said the Doorkeeper, “that we refuse her without knowing what she is?”

“A woman,” said the Master Summoner.

Irian had waited some hours in the Doorkeeper’s chamber, a low, light, bare room with a window seat at a small-paned window looking out on the kitchen gardens of the Great House—handsome, well-kept gardens, long rows and beds of vegetables, greens, and herbs, with berry canes and fruit trees beyond. She saw a burly, dark-skinned man and two boys come out and weed one of the vegetable plots. It eased her mind to watch their careful work. She wished she could help them at it. The waiting and the strangeness were very difficult. Once the Doorkeeper came in, bringing her a mug of water and a plate with cold meat and bread and scallions, and she ate because he told her to eat, but chewing and swallowing were hard work. The gardeners went away and there was nothing to watch out the window but the cabbages growing and the sparrows hopping, and now and then a hawk far up in the sky, and the wind moving softly in the tops of tall trees, on beyond the gardens. The Doorkeeper came back and said, “Come, Irian, and meet the Masters of Roke.” Her heart began to go at a carthorse gallop. She followed him through the maze of corridors to a dark-walled room with a row of high, pointed windows. A group of men stood there. Every one of them turned to look at her as she came into the room.

“Irian of Way, my lords,” said the Doorkeeper. They were all silent. He motioned her to come farther into the room. “The Master Changer you have met,” he said to her. He named all the others, but she could not take in their names and masteries, except that the Master Herbal was the one she had supposed to be a gardener, and the youngest of them, a tall man with a stern, beautiful face that seemed carved out of dark stone, was the Master Summoner. It was he who spoke when the Doorkeeper was done. “A woman,” he said.

The Doorkeeper nodded once, mild as ever.

“This is what you brought the Nine together for? This and no more?”

“This and no more,” said the Doorkeeper.

“Dragons have been seen flying above the Inmost Sea. Roke has no archmage, and the islands no true-crowned king. There is real work to do,” the Summoner said, and his voice too was like stone, cold and heavy. “When will we do it?”

There was an uncomfortable silence, as the Doorkeeper did not speak. At last a slight, bright-eyed man who wore a red tunic under his grey wizard’s cloak said, “Do you bring this woman into the House as a student, Master Doorkeeper?”

“If I did, it would be up to you all to approve or disapprove,” said he.

“Do you?” asked the man in the red tunic, smiling a little.

“Master Hand,” said the Doorkeeper, “she asked to enter as a student, and I saw no reason to deny her.”

“Every reason,” said the Summoner.

A man with a deep, clear voice spoke: “It’s not our judgment that prevails, but the Rule of Roke, which we are sworn to follow.”

“I doubt the Doorkeeper would defy it lightly,” said one whom Irian had not noticed till he spoke, though he was a big man, white-haired, rawboned, and crag-faced. Unlike the others, he looked at her as he spoke. “I am Kurremkarmerruk,” he said to her. “As the Master Namer here, I make free with names, my own included. Who named you, Irian?”

“The witch Rose of our village, lord,” she answered, standing straight, though her voice came out high-pitched and rough.

“Is she misnamed?” the Doorkeeper asked the Namer.

Kurremkarmerruk shook his head. “No. But . . .”

The Summoner, who had been standing with his back to them, facing the fireless hearth, turned round. “The names witches give each other are not our concern here,” he said. “If you have some interest in this woman, Doorkeeper, it should be pursued outside these walls—outside the door you vowed to keep. She has no place here nor ever will. She can bring only confusion, dissension, and further weakness among us. I will speak no longer and say nothing else in her presence. The only answer to conscious error is silence.”

“Silence is not enough, my lord,” said one who had not spoken before. To Irian’s eyes he was very strange-looking, having pale reddish skin, long pale hair, and narrow eyes the color of ice. His speech was also strange, stiff and somehow deformed. “Silence is the answer to everything, and to nothing,” he said.

The Summoner lifted his noble, dark face and looked across the room at the pale man, but did not speak. Without a word or gesture he turned away again and left the room. As he walked slowly past Irian, she shrank back from him. It was as if a grave had opened, a winter grave, cold, wet, dark. Her breath stuck in her throat. She gasped a little for air. When she recovered herself, she saw the Changer and the pale man both watching her intently.

The one with a voice like a deep-toned bell looked at her too, and spoke to her with a plain, kind severity. “As I see it, the man who brought you here meant to do harm, but you do not. Yet being here, Irian, you do us and yourself harm. Everything not in its own place does harm. A note sung, however well sung, wrecks the tune it isn’t part of. Women teach women. Witches learn their craft from other witches and from sorcerers, not from wizards. What we teach here is in a language not for women’s tongues. The young heart rebels against such laws, calling them unjust, arbitrary. But they are true laws, founded not on what we want, but on what is. The just and the unjust, the foolish and the wise, all must obey them, or waste life and come to grief.”

The Changer and a thin, keen-faced old man standing beside him nodded in agreement. The Master Hand said, “Irian, I am sorry. Ivory was my pupil. If I taught him badly, I did worse in sending him away. I thought him insignificant, and so harmless. But he lied to you and beguiled you. You must not feel shame. The fault was his and mine.”

“I am not ashamed,” Irian said. She looked at them all. She felt that she should thank them for their courtesy but the words would not come. She nodded stiffly to them, turned round, and strode out of the room.

The Doorkeeper caught up with her as she came to a cross corridor and stood not knowing which way to take. “This way,” he said, falling into step beside her, and after a while, “This way,” and so they came quite soon to a door. It was not made of horn and ivory. It was uncarved oak, black and massive, with an iron bolt worn thin with age. “This is the garden door,” the mage said, unbolting it. “Medra’s Gate, they used to call it. I keep both doors.” He opened it. The brightness of the day dazzled Irian’s eyes. When she could see clearly she saw a path leading from the door through the gardens and the fields beyond them; on past the fields were the high trees, and the swell of Roke Knoll was off to the right. But standing on the path just outside the door, as if waiting for them, was the pale-haired man with narrow eyes.

“Patterner,” said the Doorkeeper, not at all surprised.

“Where do you send this lady?” said the Patterner in his strange speech.

“Nowhere,” said the Doorkeeper. “I let her out as I let her in, at her desire.”

“Will you come with me?” the Patterner said to Irian.

She looked at him and at the Doorkeeper and said nothing.

“I don’t live in this House. In any house,” the Patterner said. “I live there. The Grove.—Ah,” he said, turning suddenly. The big, white-haired man, Kurremkarmerruk the Namer, was standing just down the path. He had not been standing there until the other mage said “Ah.” Irian stared from one to the other in blank bewilderment.

“This is only a seeming of me, a presentment, a sending,” the old man said to her. “I don’t live here either. Miles off.” He gestured northward. “You might come there when you’re done with the Patterner here. I’d like to learn more about your name.” He nodded to the other two mages and was not there. A bumblebee buzzed heavily through the air where he had been.

Irian looked down at the ground. After a long time she said, clearing her throat, not looking up, “Is it true I do harm being here?”

“I don’t know,” said the Doorkeeper.

“In the Grove is no harm,” said the Patterner. “Come on. There is an old house, a hut. Old, dirty. You don’t care, eh? Stay a while. You can see.” And he set off down the path between the parsley and the bush beans. She looked at the Doorkeeper; he smiled a little. She followed the pale-haired man.

They walked a half mile or so. The round-topped knoll rose up full in the western sun on their right. Behind them the school sprawled grey and many-roofed on its lower hill. The grove of trees towered before them now. She saw oak and willow, chestnut and ash, and tall evergreens. From the dense, sun-shot darkness of the trees a stream ran out, green-banked, with many brown trodden places where cattle and sheep went down to drink or to cross over. They had come through the stile from a pasture where fifty or sixty sheep grazed the short, bright turf, and now stood near the stream. “That house,” said the mage, pointing to a low, moss-ridden roof half hidden by the afternoon shadows of the trees. “Stay tonight. You will?”

He asked her to stay, he did not tell her to. All she could do was nod.

“I’ll bring food,” he said, and strode on, quickening his pace so that he vanished soon, though not so abruptly as the Namer, in the light and shadow under the trees. Irian watched till he was certainly gone and then made her way through high grass and weeds to the little house.

It looked very old. It had been rebuilt and rebuilt again, but not for a long time. Nor had anyone lived in it for a long time, from the still, lonesome air of it. Yet it had a pleasant air, as if those who had slept there slept peacefully. As for decrepit walls, mice, dust, cobwebs, and scant furniture, all that was quite homelike to Irian. She found a bald broom and swept out the mouse droppings. She unrolled her blanket on the plank bed. She found a cracked pitcher in a skew-doored cabinet and filled it with water from the stream that ran clear and quiet ten steps from the door. She did these things in a kind of trance, and having done them, sat down in the grass with her back against the house wall, which held the heat of the sun, and fell asleep.

When she woke, the Master Patterner was sitting nearby, and a basket was on the grass between them.

“Hungry? Eat,” he said.

“I’ll eat later, sir. Thank you,” said Irian.

“I am hungry now,” said the mage. He took a hard-boiled egg from the basket, cracked, shelled, and ate it.

“They call this the Otter’s House,” he said. “Very old. As old as the Great House. Everything is old, here. We are old—the Masters.”

“You’re not very,” Irian said. She thought him between thirty and forty, though it was hard to tell; she kept thinking his hair was white, because it was not black.

“But I came far. Miles can be years. I am Kargish, from Karego. You know?”

“The Hoary Men!” said Irian, staring openly at him. All Daisy’s ballads of the Hoary Men who sailed out of the East to lay the land waste and spit innocent babes on their lances, and the story of how Erreth-Akbe lost the Ring of Peace, and the new songs and the King’s Tale about how Archmage Sparrowhawk had gone among the Hoary Men and come back with that ring—

“Hoary?” said the Patterner.

“Frosty. White,” she said, looking away, embarrassed.

“Ah.” Presently he said, “The Master Summoner is not old.” And she got a sidelong look from those narrow, ice-colored eyes.

She said nothing.

“I think you feared him.”

She nodded.

When she said nothing, and some time had passed, he said, “In the shadow of these trees is no harm. Only truth.”

“When he passed me,” she said in a low voice, “I saw a grave.”

“Ah,” said the Patterner.

He had made a little heap of bits of eggshell on the ground by his knee. He arranged the white fragments into a curve, then closed it into a circle. “Yes,” he said, studying his eggshells; then, scratching up the earth a bit, he neatly and delicately buried them. He dusted off his hands. Again his glance flicked to Irian and away.

“You have been a witch, Irian?”

“No.”

“But you have some knowledge.”

“No. I don’t. Rose wouldn’t teach me. She said she didn’t dare. Because I had power but she didn’t know what it was.”

“Your Rose is a wise flower,” said the mage, unsmiling.

“But I know I have something to do. Something to be. That’s why I wanted to come here. To find out. On the Isle of the Wise.”

She was getting used to his strange face now and was able to read it. She thought that he looked sad. His way of speaking was harsh, quick, dry, peaceable. “The men of the Isle are not always wise, eh?” he said. “Maybe the Doorkeeper.” He looked at her now, not glancing but squarely, his eyes catching and holding hers. “But there. In the wood. Under the trees. There is the old wisdom. Never old. I can’t teach you. I can take you into the Grove.” After a minute he stood up. “Yes?”

“Yes,” she said uncertainly.

“The house is all right?”

“Yes—”

“Tomorrow,” he said, and strode off.

So for a half month or more of the hot days of summer, Irian slept in the Otter’s House, which was a peaceful one, and ate what the Master Patterner brought her in his basket—eggs, cheese, greens, fruit, smoked mutton—and went with him every afternoon into the grove of high trees, where the paths seemed never to be quite where she remembered them, and often led on far beyond what seemed the confines of the wood. They walked there in silence, and spoke seldom when they rested. The mage was a quiet man. Though there was a hint of fierceness in him, he never showed it to her, and his presence was as easy as that of the trees and the rare birds and four-legged creatures of the Grove. As he had said, he did not try to teach her. When she asked about the Grove, he told her that, with Roke Knoll, it had stood since Segoy made the islands of the world, and that all magic was in the roots of the trees, and that they were mingled with the roots of all the forests that were or might yet be. “And sometimes the Grove is in this place,” he said, “and sometimes in another. But it is always.”

She had never seen where he lived. He slept wherever he chose to, she imagined, in these warm summer nights. She asked him where the food they ate came from. What the school did not supply for itself, he said, the farmers round about provided, considering themselves well recompensed by the protections the Masters set on their flocks and fields and orchards. That made sense to her. On Way, the phrase “a wizard without his porridge” meant something unprecedented, unheard-of. But she was no wizard, and so, wanting to earn her porridge, she did her best to repair the Otter’s House, borrowing tools from a farmer and buying nails and plaster in Thwil Town, for she still had half the cheese money.

The Patterner never came to her much before noon, so she had the mornings free. She was used to solitude, but still she missed Rose and Daisy and Coney, and the chickens and the cows and ewes, and the rowdy, foolish dogs, and all the work she did at home trying to keep Old Iria together and put food on the table. So she worked away unhurriedly every morning till she saw the mage come out from the trees with his sunlight-colored hair shining in the sunlight.

Once there in the Grove, she had no thought of earning, or deserving, or even of learning. To be there was enough, was all.

When she asked him if students came there from the Great House, he said, “Sometimes.” Another time he said, “My words are nothing. Hear the leaves.” That was all he said that could be called teaching. As she walked, she listened to the leaves when the wind rustled them or stormed in the crowns of the trees; she watched the shadows play, and thought about the roots of the trees down in the darkness of the earth. She was utterly content to be there. Yet always, without discontent or urgency, she felt that she was waiting. And that silent expectancy was deepest and clearest when she came out of the shelter of the woods and saw the open sky.

Once, when they had gone a long way and the trees, dark evergreens she did not know, stood very high about them, she heard a call—a horn blowing, a cry?—remote, on the very edge of hearing. She stood still, listening towards the west. The mage walked on, turning only when he realised she had stopped.

“I heard—” she said, and could not say what she had heard.

He listened. They walked on at last through a silence enlarged and deepened by that far call.

She never went into the Grove without him, and it was many days before he left her alone within it. But one hot afternoon when they came to a glade among a stand of oaks, he said, “I will come back here, eh?” and walked off with his quick, silent step, lost almost at once in the dappled, shifting depths of the forest.

She had no wish to explore for herself. The peacefulness of the place called for stillness, watching, listening; and she knew how tricky the paths were, and that the Grove was, as the Patterner put it, “bigger inside than outside.” She sat down in a patch of sun-dappled shade and watched the shadows of the leaves play across the ground. The oak mast was deep; though she had never seen wild swine in the wood, she saw their tracks here. For a moment she caught the scent of a fox. Her thoughts moved as quietly and easily as the breeze moved in the warm light.

Often her mind here seemed empty of thought, full of the forest itself, but this day memories came to her, vivid. She thought about Ivory, thinking she would never see him again, wondering if he had found a ship to take him back to Havnor. He had told her he’d never go back to Westpool; the only place for him was the Great Port, the King’s City, and for all he cared the island of Way could sink in the sea as deep as Soléa. But she thought with love of the roads and fields of Way. She thought of Old Iria village, the marshy spring under Iria Hill, the old house on it. She thought about Daisy singing ballads in the kitchen, winter evenings, beating out the time with her wooden clogs; and old Coney in the vineyards with his razor-edge knife, showing her how to prune the vine “right down to the life in it;” and Rose, her Etaudis, whispering charms to ease the pain in a child’s broken arm. I have known wise people, she thought. Her mind flinched away from remembering her father, but the motion of the leaves and shadows drew it on. She saw him drunk, shouting. She felt his prying, tremulous hands on her. She saw him weeping, sick, shamed; and grief rose up through her body and dissolved, like an ache that melts away in a long stretch of the arms. He was less to her than the mother she had not known.

She stretched, feeling the ease of her body in the warmth, and her mind drifted back to Ivory. She had had no one in her life to desire. When the young wizard first came riding by so slim and arrogant, she wished she could want him; but she didn’t and couldn’t, and so she had thought him spell-protected. Rose had explained to her how wizards’ spells worked “so that it never enters your head nor theirs, see, because it would take from their power, they say.” But Ivory, poor Ivory, had been all too unprotected. If anybody was under a spell of chastity it must have been herself, for charming and handsome as he was she had never been able to feel a thing for him but liking, and her only lust had been to learn what he could teach her.

She considered herself, sitting in the deep silence of the Grove. No bird sang; the breeze was down; the leaves hung still. Am I ensorcelled? Am I a sterile thing, not whole, not a woman? she asked herself, looking at her strong bare arms, the soft swell of her breasts in the shadow under the throat of her shirt.

She looked up and saw the Hoary Man come out of a dark aisle of great oaks and come towards her across the glade.

He stopped in front of her. She felt herself blush, her face and throat burning, dizzy, her ears ringing. She sought words, anything to say, to turn his attention away from her, and could find nothing at all. He sat down near her. She looked down, as if studying the skeleton of a last-year’s leaf by her hand.

What do I want? she asked herself, and the answer came not in words but throughout her whole body and soul: the fire, a greater fire than that, the flight, the flight burning—

She came back into herself, into the still air under the trees. The Hoary Man sat near her, his face bowed down, and she thought how slight and light he looked, how quiet and sorrowful. There was nothing to fear. There was no harm.

He looked over at her.

“Irian,” he said, “do you hear the leaves?”

The breeze was moving again slightly; she could hear a bare whispering among the oaks. “A little,” she said.

“Do you hear the words?”

“No.”

She asked nothing and he said no more. Presently he got up, and she followed him to the path that always led them, sooner or later, out of the wood to the clearing by the Thwilburn and the Otter’s House. When they came there, it was late afternoon. He went down to the stream and knelt to drink from it where it left the wood, above all the crossings. She did the same. Then sitting in the cool, long grass of the bank, he began to speak.

“My people, the Kargs, they worship gods. Twin gods, brothers. And the king there is also a god. But before the gods and after, always, are the streams. Caves, stones, hills. Trees. The earth. The darkness of the earth.”

“The Old Powers,” Irian said.

He nodded. “There, women know the Old Powers. Here too, witches. And the knowledge is bad—eh?”

When he added that little questioning “eh?” or “neh?” to the end of what had seemed a statement it always took her by surprise. She said nothing.

“Dark is bad,” said the Patterner. “Eh?”

Irian drew a deep breath and looked at him eye to eye as they sat there. “Only in dark the light,” she said.

“Ah,” he said. He looked away so that she could not see his expression.

“I should go,” she said. “I can walk in the Grove, but not live there. It isn’t my—my place. And the Master Chanter said I did harm by being here.”

“We all do harm by being,” said the Patterner.

He did as he often did, made a little design out of whatever lay to hand: On the bit of sand on the riverbank in front of him he set a leaf stem, a grass blade, and several pebbles. He studied them and rearranged them. “Now I must speak of harm,” he said.

After a long pause he went on. “You know that a dragon brought back our Lord Sparrowhawk, with the young king, from the shores of death. Then the dragon carried Sparrowhawk away to his home, for his power was gone, he was not a mage. So presently the Masters of Roke met to choose a new archmage, here, in the Grove, as always. But not as always.

“Before the dragon came, the Summoner too had returned from death, where he can go, where his art can take him. He had seen our lord and the young king there, in that country across the wall of stones. He said they would not come back. He said Lord Sparrowhawk had told him to come back to us, to life, to bear that word. So we grieved for our lord.

“But then came the dragon, Kalessin, bearing him living.

“The Summoner was among us when we stood on Roke Knoll and saw the Archmage kneel to King Lebannen. Then, as the dragon bore our friend away, the Summoner fell down.

“He lay as if dead, cold, his heart not beating, yet he breathed. The Herbal used all his art, but could not rouse him. ‘He is dead,’ he said. ‘The breath will not leave him, but he is dead.’ So we mourned him. Then, because there was dismay among us, and all my patterns spoke of change and danger, we met to choose a new warden of Roke, an archmage to guide us. And in our council we set the young king in the Summoner’s place. To us it seemed right that he should sit among us. Only the Changer spoke against it at first, and then agreed.

“But we met, we sat, and we could not choose. We said this and said that, but no name was spoken. And then I . . .” He paused a while. “There came on me what my people call the eduevanu, the other breath. Words came to me and I spoke them. I said, Hama Gondun!—And Kurremkarmerruk told them this in Hardic: ‘A woman on Gont.’ But when I came back to my own wits, I could not tell them what that meant. And so we parted with no archmage chosen.

“The king left soon after, and the Master Windkey went with him. Before the king was to be crowned, they went to Gont and sought our lord Sparrowhawk, to find what that meant, ‘a woman on Gont.’ Eh? But they did not see him, only my countrywoman Tenar of the Ring. She said she was not the woman they sought. And they found no one, nothing. So Lebannen judged it to be a prophecy yet to be fulfilled. And in Havnor he set his crown on his own head.

“The Herbal, and I too, judged the Summoner dead. We thought the breath he breathed was left from some spell of his own art that we did not understand, like the spell snakes know that keeps their heart beating long after they are dead. Though it seemed terrible to bury a breathing body, yet he was cold, and his blood did not run, and no soul was in him. That was more terrible. So we made ready to bury him. And then, as he lay beside his grave, his eyes opened. He moved, and spoke. He said, ‘I have summoned myself again into life, to do what must be done.’”

The Patterner’s voice had grown rougher. He suddenly brushed the little design of pebbles apart with the palm of his hand.

“So when the Windkey returned from the king’s crowning, we were nine again. But divided. For the Summoner said we must meet again and choose an archmage. The king had had no place among us, he said. And ‘a woman on Gont,’ whoever she may be, has no place among the men on Roke. Eh? The Windkey, the Chanter, the Changer, the Hand, say he is right. And as King Lebannen is a man returned from death, fulfilling that prophecy, they say so will the archmage be a man returned from death.”

“But—” Irian said, and stopped.

After a while the Patterner said, “That art, summoning, you know, is terrible. It is always danger. Here,” and he looked up into the green-gold darkness of the trees, “here is no summoning. No bringing back across the wall. No wall.”

His face was a warrior’s face, but when he looked into the trees it was softened, yearning.

“So,” he said, “now he makes you his reason for our meeting. But I will not go to the Great House. I will not be summoned.”

“He won’t come here?”

“I think he will not walk in the Grove. Nor on Roke Knoll. On the Knoll, what is, is so.”

She did not know what he meant, but did not ask, preoccupied: “You say he makes me his reason for you to meet together.”

“Yes. To send away one woman, it takes nine mages.” He very seldom smiled, and when he did it was quick and fierce. “We are to meet to uphold the Rule of Roke. And so to choose an archmage.”

“If I went away—” She saw him shake his head. “I could go to the Namer—”

“You are safer here.”

The idea of doing harm troubled her, but the idea of danger had not entered her mind. She found it inconceivable. “I’ll be all right,” she said. “So the Namer, and you—and the Doorkeeper?—”

“—do not wish Thorion to be archmage. Also the Master Herbal, though he digs and says little.”

He saw Irian staring at him in amazement. “Thorion the Summoner speaks his true name,” he said. “He died, eh?”

She knew that King Lebannen used his true name openly. He too had returned from death. Yet that the Summoner should do so continued to shock and disturb her as she thought about it.

“And the . . . the students?”

“Divided also.”

She thought about the school, where she had been so briefly. From here, under the eaves of the Grove, she saw it as stone walls enclosing one kind of being and keeping out all others, like a pen, a cage. How could any of them keep their balance in a place like that?

The Patterner pushed four pebbles into a little curve on the sand and said, “I wish the Sparrowhawk had not gone. I wish I could read what the shadows write. But all I can hear the leaves say is Change, change . . . Everything will change but them.” He looked up into the trees again with that yearning look. The sun was setting. He stood up, bade her goodnight gently, and walked away, entering under the trees.

She sat on a while by the Thwilburn. She was troubled by what he had told her and by her thoughts and feelings in the Grove, and troubled that any thought or feeling could have troubled her there. She went to the house, set out her supper of smoked meat and bread and summer lettuce, and ate it without tasting it. She roamed restlessly back down the stream bank to the water. It was very still and warm in the late dusk, only the largest stars burning through a milky overcast. She slipped off her sandals and put her feet in the water. It was cool, but veins of sun warmth ran through it. She slid out of her clothes, the man’s breeches and shirt that were all she had, and slipped naked into the water, feeling the push and stir of the current all along her body. She had never swum in the streams at Iria, and she had hated the sea, heaving grey and cold, but this quick water pleased her, tonight. She drifted and floated, her hands slipping over silken underwater rocks and her own silken flanks, her legs sliding through water weeds. All trouble and restlessness washed away from her in the running of the water, and she floated in delight in the caress of the stream, gazing up at the white, soft fire of the stars.

A chill ran through her. The water ran cold. Gathering herself together, her limbs still soft and loose, she looked up and saw on the bank above her the black figure of a man.

She stood straight up, naked, in the water.

“Get away!” she shouted. “Get away, you traitor, you foul lecher, or I’ll cut the liver out of you!” She sprang up the bank, pulling herself up by the tough bunchgrass, and scrambled to her feet. No one was there. She stood afire, shaking with rage. She leapt back down the bank, found her clothes, and pulled them on, still swearing aloud—“You coward wizard! You traitorous son of a bitch!”

“Irian?”

“He was here!” she cried. “That foul heart, that Thorion!” She strode to meet the Patterner as he came into the starlight by the house. “I was bathing in the stream, and he stood there watching me!”

“A sending—only a seeming of him. It could not hurt you, Irian.”

“A sending with eyes, a seeming with seeing! May he be—” She stopped, at a loss suddenly for the word. She felt sick. She shuddered, and swallowed the cold spittle that welled in her mouth.

The Patterner came forward and took her hands in his. His hands were warm, and she felt so mortally cold that she came close up against him for the warmth of his body. They stood so for a while, her face turned from him but their hands joined and their bodies pressed close. At last she broke free, straightening herself, pushing back her lank wet hair. “Thank you,” she said. “I was cold.”

“I know.”

“I’m never cold,” she said. “It was him.”

“I tell you, Irian, he cannot come here, he cannot harm you here.”

“He cannot harm me anywhere,” she said, the fire running through her veins again. “If he tries to, I’ll destroy him.”

“Ah,” said the Patterner.

She looked at him in the starlight, and said, “Tell me your name—Not your true name—Only a name I can call you. When I think of you.”

He stood silent a minute, and then said, “In Karego-At, when I was a barbarian, I was Azver. In Hardic, that is a banner of war.”

“Azver,” she said. “Thank you.”

She lay awake in the little house, feeling the air stifling and the ceiling pressing down on her, then slept suddenly and deeply. She woke as suddenly when the east was just getting light. She went to the door to see what she loved best to see, the sky before sunrise. Looking down from it she saw Azver the Patterner rolled up in his grey cloak, sound asleep on the ground before her doorstep. She withdrew noiselessly into the house. In a little while she saw him going back to his woods, walking a bit stiffly and scratching his head as he went, as people do when half awake.

She got to work scraping down the inner wall of the house, readying it to plaster. Just as the first sunlight struck in the window, there was a knock at her open door. Outside was the man she had thought was a gardener, the Master Herbal, looking solid and stolid, like a brown ox, beside the gaunt, grim-faced old Namer.

She came to the door and muttered some kind of greeting. They daunted her, these Masters of Roke; and also their presence meant that the peaceful time was over, the days of walking in the silent summer forest with the Patterner. That had come to an end last night. She knew it, but she did not want to know it.

“The Patterner sent for us,” said the Master Herbal. He looked uncomfortable. Noticing a clump of weeds under the window, he said, “That’s velver. Somebody from Havnor planted it here. Didn’t know there was any on the island.” He examined it attentively, and put some seed pods into his pouch.

Irian was studying the Namer covertly but equally attentively, trying to see if she could tell if he was what he had called a sending or was there in flesh and blood. Nothing about him appeared insubstantial, but she thought he was not there, and when he stepped into the slanting sunlight and cast no shadow, she knew it.

“Is it a long way from where you live, sir?” she asked.

He nodded. “Left myself halfway,” he said. He looked up; the Patterner was coming towards them, wide awake now.

He greeted them and asked, “The Doorkeeper will come?”

“Said he thought he’d better keep the doors,” said the Herbal. He closed his many-pocketed pouch carefully and looked around at the others. “But I don’t know if he can keep a lid on the ant hill.”

“What’s up?” said Kurremkarmerruk. “I’ve been reading about dragons. Not paying attention to ants. But all the boys I had studying at the Tower left.”

“Summoned,” said the Herbal, drily.

“So?” said the Namer, more drily.

“I can tell you only how it seems to me,” the Herbal said, reluctant, uncomfortable.

“Do that,” the old mage said.

The Herbal still hesitated. “This lady is not of our council,” he said at last.

“She is of mine,” said Azver.

“She came to this place at this time,” the Namer said. “And to this place, at this time, no one comes by chance. All any of us knows is how it seems to us. There are names behind names, my Lord Healer.”

The dark-eyed mage bowed his head at that, and said, “Very well,” evidently with relief at accepting their judgment over his own. “Thorion has been much with the other Masters, and with the young men. Secret meetings, inner circles. Rumors, whispers. The younger students are frightened, and several have asked me or the Doorkeeper if they may go—leave Roke. And we’d let them go. But there’s no ship in port, and none has come into Thwil Bay since the one that brought you, lady, and sailed again next day for Wathort. The Windkey keeps the Roke wind against all. If the king himself should come, he could not land on Roke.”

“Until the wind changes, eh?” said the Patterner.

“Thorion says Lebannen is not truly king, since no archmage crowned him.”

“Nonsense! Not history!” said the old Namer. “The first archmage came centuries after the last king. Roke ruled in the kings’ stead.”

“Ah,” said the Patterner. “Hard for the housekeeper to give up the keys when the owner comes home. Eh?”

“The Ring of Peace is healed,” said the Herbal, in his patient, troubled voice, “the prophecy is fulfilled, the son of Morred is crowned, and yet we have no peace. Where have we gone wrong? Why can we not find the balance?”

“What does Thorion intend?” asked the Namer.

“To bring Lebannen here,” said the Herbal. “The young men talk of ‘the true crown.’ A second coronation, here. By the Archmage Thorion.”

“Avert!” Irian blurted out, making the sign to prevent word from becoming deed. None of the men smiled, and the Herbal belatedly made the same gesture.

“How does he hold them all?” the Namer said. “Herbal, you were here when Sparrowhawk and Thorion were challenged by Irioth. His gift was as great as Thorion’s, I think. He used it to use men, to control them wholly. Is that what Thorion does?”

“I don’t know,” the Herbal said. “I can only tell you that when I’m with him, when I’m in the Great House, I feel that nothing can be done but what has been done. That nothing will change. Nothing will grow. That no matter what cures I use, the sickness will end in death.” He looked around at them all like a hurt ox. “And I think it is true. There is no way to regain the Equilibrium but by holding still. We have gone too far. For the Archmage and Lebannen to go bodily into death, and return—it was not right. They broke a law that must not be broken. It was to restore the law that Thorion returned.”

“What, to send them back into death?” the Namer said, and the Patterner, “Who is to say what is the law?”

“There is a wall,” the Herbal said.

“That wall is not as deep-rooted as my trees,” said the Patterner.

“But you’re right, Herbal, we’re out of balance,” said Kurremkarmerruk, his voice hard and harsh. “When and where did we begin to go too far? What have we forgotten, turned our back on, overlooked?”

Irian looked from one to the other.

“When the balance is wrong, holding still is not good. It must get more wrong,” said the Patterner. “Until—” He made a quick gesture of reversal with his open hands, down going up and up down.

“What’s more wrong than to summon oneself back from death?” said the Namer.

“Thorion was the best of us all—a brave heart, a noble mind.” The Herbal spoke almost in anger. “Sparrowhawk loved him. So did we all.”

“Conscience caught him,” said the Namer. “Conscience told him he alone could set things right. To do it, he denied his death. So he denies life.”

“And who shall stand against him?” said the Patterner. “I can only hide in my woods.”

“And I in my tower,” said the Namer. “And you, Herbal, and the Doorkeeper, are in the trap, in the Great House. The walls we built to keep all evil out. Or in, as the case may be.”

“We are four against him,” said the Patterner.

“They are five against us,” said the Herbal.

“Has it come to this,” the Namer said, “that we stand at the edge of the forest Segoy planted and talk of how to destroy one another?”

“Yes,” said the Patterner. “What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives. I will not let this dead hand touch me. Or touch the king who brought us hope. A promise was made, made through me. I spoke it—‘A woman on Gont.’ I will not see that word forgotten.”

“Then should we go to Gont?” said the Herbal, caught in Azver’s passion. “Sparrowhawk is there.”

“Tenar of the Ring is there,” said Azver.

“Maybe our hope is there,” said the Namer.

They stood silent, uncertain, trying to cherish hope.

Irian stood silent too, but her hope sank down, replaced by a sense of shame and utter insignificance. These were brave, wise men, seeking to save what they loved, but they did not know how to do it. And she had no share in their wisdom, no part in their decisions. She drew away from them, and they did not notice. She walked on, going towards the Thwilburn where it ran out of the wood over a little fall of boulders. The water was bright in the morning sunlight and made a happy noise. She wanted to cry, but she had never been good at crying. She stood and watched the water, and her shame turned slowly into anger.

She came back towards the three men, and said, “Azver.”

He turned to her, startled, and came forward a little.

“Why did you break your Rule for me? Was it fair to me, who can never be what you are?”

Azver frowned. “The Doorkeeper admitted you because you asked,” he said. “I brought you to the Grove because the leaves of the trees spoke your name to me before you ever came here. Irian, they said, Irian. Why you came I don’t know, but not by chance. The Summoner too knows that.”

“Maybe I came to destroy him.”

He looked at her and said nothing.

“Maybe I came to destroy Roke.”

His pale eyes blazed then. “Try!”

A long shudder went through her as she stood facing him. She felt herself larger than he was, larger than she was, enormously larger. She could reach out one finger and destroy him. He stood there in his small, brave, brief humanity, his mortality, defenseless. She drew a long, long breath. She stepped back from him.

The sense of huge strength was draining out of her. She turned her head a little and looked down, surprised to see her own brown arm, her rolled-up sleeve, the grass springing cool and green around her sandaled feet. She looked back at the Patterner and he still seemed a fragile being. She pitied and honored him. She wanted to warn him of the peril he was in. But no words came to her at all. She turned round and went back to the stream bank by the little falls. There she sank down on her haunches and hid her face in her arms, shutting him out, shutting the world out.

The voices of the mages talking were like the voices of the stream running. The stream said its words and they said theirs, but none of them were the right words.

IV. Irian

When Azver rejoined the other men there was something in his face that made the Herbal say, “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Maybe we should not leave Roke.”

“Probably we can’t,” said the Herbal. “If the Windkey locks the winds against us . . .”

“I’m going back to where I am,” Kurremkarmerruk said abruptly. “I don’t like leaving myself about like an old shoe. I’ll be here with you this evening.” And he was gone.

“I’d like to walk under your trees a bit, Azver,” the Herbal said, with a long sigh.

“Go on, Deyala. I’ll stay here.” The Herbal went off. Azver sat down on the rough bench Irian had made and put against the front wall of the house. He looked upstream at her, crouching motionless on the bank. Sheep in the field between them and the Great House blatted softly. The morning sun was getting hot.

His father had named him Banner of War. He had come west, leaving all he knew behind him. He had learned his true name from the trees of the Immanent Grove, and become the Patterner of Roke. All this year the patterns of the shadows and the branches and the roots, all the silent language of his forest, had spoken of destruction, of transgression, of all things changed. Now it was upon them, he knew. It had come with her.

She was in his charge, in his care, he had known that when he saw her. Though she came to destroy Roke, as she had said, he must serve her. He did so willingly. She had walked with him in the forest, tall, awkward, fearless; she had put aside the thorny arms of brambles with her big, careful hand. Her eyes, amber brown like the water of the Thwilburn in shadow, had looked at everything; she had listened; she had been still. He wanted to protect her and knew he could not. He had given her a little warmth when she was cold. He had nothing else to give her. Where she must go, she would go. She did not understand danger. She had no wisdom but her innocence, no armor but her anger. Who are you, Irian? he said to her, watching her crouched there like an animal locked in its muteness.

The Herbal came back from the woods and sat with him a while, not speaking. In the middle of the day he went back to the Great House, agreeing to return with the Doorkeeper in the morning. They would ask all the other Masters to meet with them in the Grove. “But he won’t come,” Deyala said, and Azver nodded.

All day he stayed near the Otter’s House, keeping watch on Irian, making her eat a little with him. She came to the house, but when they had eaten she went back to her place on the stream bank and sat there motionless. And he too felt a lethargy in his own body and mind, a stupidity, which he fought against but could not shake off. He thought of the Summoner’s eyes, and then it was he that felt cold, cold through, though he was sitting in the full heat of the summer’s day. We are ruled by the dead, he thought. The thought would not leave him.

He was grateful to see Kurremkarmerruk coming slowly down the bank of the Thwilburn from the north. The old man waded through the stream barefoot, holding his shoes in one hand and his tall staff in the other, snarling when he missed his footing on the rocks. He sat down on the near bank to dry his feet and put his shoes back on. “When I go back to the Tower,” he said, “I’ll ride. Hire a carter, buy a mule. I’m old, Azver.”

“Come up to the house,” the Patterner said, and he set out water and food for the Namer.

“Where’s the girl?”

“Asleep.” Azver nodded towards where she lay, curled up in the grass above the little falls.

The heat of the day was beginning to lessen and the shadows of the Grove lay across the grass, though the Otter’s House was still in sunlight. Kurremkarmerruk sat on the bench with his back against the house wall, and Azver on the doorstep.

“We’ve come to the end of it,” the old man said out of silence.

Azver nodded, in silence.

“What brought you here, Azver?” the Namer asked. “I’ve often thought of asking you. A long, long way to come. And you have no wizards in the Kargish lands.”

“No. But we have the things wizardry is made of. Water, stones, trees, words . . .”

“But not the words of the Making.”

“No. Nor dragons.”

“Never?”

“Only in old tales from the farthest east, from the desert of Hur-at-Hur. Before the gods were. Before men were. Before men were men, they were dragons.”

“Now that is interesting,” said the old scholar, sitting up straighter. “I told you I’ve been reading about dragons. You know these rumors of them flying over the Inmost Sea as far east as Gont. That was no doubt Kalessin taking Ged home, multiplied by sailors making a good story better. But a boy here swore to me that his whole village had seen dragons flying, this spring, west of Mount Onn. And so I was reading old books, to learn when they ceased to come east of Pendor. And in an old Pelnish scroll, I came on your story, or something like it. That men and dragons were all one kind, but they quarreled. Some went west and some east, and they became two kinds, and forgot they were ever one.”

“We went farthest east,” Azver said. “But do you know what the leader of an army is, in my tongue?”

“Edran,” said the Namer promptly, and laughed. “Drake. Dragon . . .”

After a while he said, “I could chase an etymology on the brink of doom . . . But I think, Azver, that that’s where we are. We won’t defeat him.”

“He has the advantage,” Azver said, very dry.

“He does. But, admitting it unlikely, admitting it impossible—if we did defeat him—if he went back into death and left us here alive—what would we do? What comes next?” After a long time, Azver said, “I have no idea.”

“Your leaves and shadows tell you nothing?”

“Change, change,” said the Patterner. “Transformation.”

He looked up suddenly. The sheep, who had been grouped near the stile, were scurrying off, and someone was coming along the path from the Great House.

“A group of young men,” said the Herbal, breathless, as he came to them. “Thorion’s army. Coming here. To take the girl. To send her away.” He stood and drew breath. “The Doorkeeper was speaking with them when I left. I think—”

“Here he is,” said Azver, and the Doorkeeper was there, his smooth, yellow-brown face tranquil as ever.

“I told them,” he said, “that if they went out Medra’s Gate this day, they’d never go back through it into a house they knew. Some of them were for turning back, then. But the Windkey and the Chanter urged them on. They’ll be along soon.”

They could hear men’s voices in the fields east of the Grove.

Azver went quickly to where Irian lay beside the stream, and the others followed him. She roused up and got to her feet, looking dull and dazed. They were standing around her, a kind of guard, when the group of thirty or more men came past the little house and approached them. They were mostly older students; there were five or six wizard’s staffs among the crowd, and the Master Windkey led them. His thin, keen old face looked strained and weary, but he greeted the four mages courteously by their titles.

They greeted him, and Azver took the word—“Come into the Grove, Master Windkey,” he said, “and we will wait there for the others of the Nine.”

“First we must settle the matter that divides us,” said the Windkey.

“That is a stony matter,” said the Namer.

“The woman with you defies the Rule of Roke,” the Windkey said. “She must leave. A boat is waiting at the dock to take her, and the wind, I can tell you, will stand fair for Way.”

“I have no doubt of that, my lord,” said Azver, “but I doubt she will go.”

“My Lord Patterner, will you defy our Rule and our community, that has been one so long, upholding order against the forces of ruin? Will it be you, of all men, who break the pattern?”

“It is not glass, to break,” Azver said. “It is breath, it is fire.”

It cost him a great effort to speak.

“It does not know death,” he said, but he spoke in his own language, and they did not understand him. He drew closer to Irian. He felt the warmth of her body. She stood staring, in that animal silence, as if she did not understand any of them.

“Lord Thorion has returned from death to save us all,” the Windkey said, fiercely and clearly. “He will be Archmage. Under his rule Roke will be as it was. The king will receive the true crown from his hand, and rule with his guidance, as Morred ruled. No witches will defile sacred ground. No dragons will threaten the Inmost Sea. There will be order, safety, and peace.”

None of the four mages with Irian answered him. In the silence, the men with him murmured, and a voice among them said, “Let us have the witch.”

“No,” Azver said, but could say nothing else. He held his staff of willow, but it was only wood in his hand.

Of the four of them, only the Doorkeeper moved and spoke. He took a step forward, looking from one young man to the next and the next. He said, “You trusted me, giving me your names. Will you trust me now?”

“My lord,” said one of them with a fine, dark face and a wizard’s oaken staff, “we do trust you, and therefore ask you to let the witch go, and peace return.”

Irian stepped forward before the Doorkeeper could answer.

“I am not a witch,” she said. Her voice sounded high, metallic, after the men’s deep voices. “I have no art. No knowledge. I came to learn.”

“We do not teach women here,” said the Windkey. “You know that.”

“I know nothing,” Irian said. She took another step forward, facing the mage directly. “Tell me who I am.”

“Learn your place, woman,” the mage said with cold passion.

“My place,” she said, slowly, the words dragging—“my place is on the hill. Where things are what they are. Tell the dead man I will meet him there.”

The Windkey stood silent. The group of men muttered, angry, and some of them moved forward. Azver came between her and them, her words releasing him from the paralysis of mind and body that had held him. “Tell Thorion we will meet him on Roke Knoll,” he said. “When he comes, we will be there. Now come with me,” he said to Irian.

The Namer, the Doorkeeper, and the Herbal followed him with her into the Grove. There was a path for them. But when some of the young men started after them, there was no path.

“Come back,” the Windkey said to the young men.

They turned back, uncertain. The low sun was still bright on the fields and the roofs of the Great House, but inside the wood it was all shadows.

“Witchery,” they said, “sacrilege, defilement.”

“Best come away,” said the Master Windkey, his face set and somber, his keen eyes troubled. He set off back to the school, and they straggled after him, arguing and debating in frustration and anger.

They were not far inside the Grove, and still beside the stream, when Irian stopped, turned aside, and crouched down by the enormous, hunching roots of a willow that leaned out over the water. The four mages stood on the path.

“She spoke with the other breath,” Azver said.

The Namer nodded.

“So we must follow her?” the Herbal asked.

This time the Doorkeeper nodded. He smiled faintly and said, “So it would seem.”

“Very well,” said the Herbal, with his patient, troubled look; and he went aside a little, and knelt to look at some small plant or fungus on the forest floor.

Time passed as always in the Grove, not passing at all, it seemed, yet gone, the day gone quietly by in a few long breaths, a quivering of leaves, a bird singing far off and another answering it from even farther. Irian stood up slowly. She did not speak, but looked down the path, and then walked down it. The four men followed her.

They came out into the calm, open evening air. The west still held some brightness as they crossed the Thwilburn and walked across the fields to Roke Knoll, which stood up before them in a high dark curve against the sky.

“They’re coming,” the Doorkeeper said. Men were coming through the gardens and up the path from the Great House, the five mages, many students. Leading them was Thorion the Summoner, tall in his grey cloak, carrying his tall staff of bone-white wood, about which a faint gleam of werelight hovered.

Where the two paths met and joined to wind up to the heights of the Knoll, Thorion stopped and stood waiting for them. Irian strode forward to face him.

“Irian of Way,” the Summoner said in his deep, clear voice, “that there may be peace and order, and for the sake of the balance of all things, I bid you now leave this island. We cannot give you what you ask, and for that we ask your forgiveness. But if you seek to stay here, you forfeit forgiveness, and must learn what follows on transgression.”

She stood up, almost as tall as he, and as straight. She said nothing for a minute and then spoke out in a high, harsh voice. “Come up onto the hill, Thorion,” she said.

She left him standing at the waymeet, on level ground, and walked up the hill path for a little way, a few strides. She turned and looked back down at him. “What keeps you from the hill?” she said.

The air was darkening around them. The west was only a dull red line, the eastern sky was shadowy above the sea.

The Summoner looked up at Irian. Slowly he raised his arms and the white staff in the invocation of a spell, speaking in the tongue that all the wizards and mages of Roke had learned, the language of their art, the Language of the Making: “Irian, by your name I summon you and bind you to obey me!”

She hesitated, seeming for a moment to yield, to come to him, and then cried out, “I am not only Irian!”

At that the Summoner ran up towards her, reaching out, lunging at her as if to seize and hold her. They were both on the hill now. She towered above him impossibly, fire breaking forth between them, a flare of red flame in the dusk air, a gleam of redgold scales, of vast wings—then that was gone, and there was nothing there but the woman standing on the hill path and the tall man bowing down before her, bowing slowly down to earth, and lying on it.

Of them all it was the Herbal, the healer, who was the first to move. He went up the path and knelt down by Thorion. “My lord,” he said, “my friend.”

Under the huddle of the grey cloak his hands found only a huddle of clothes and dry bones and a broken staff.

“This is better, Thorion,” he said, but he was weeping.

The old Namer came forward and said to the woman on the hill, “Who are you?”

“I do not know my other name,” she said. She spoke as he had spoken, as she had spoken to the Summoner, in the Language of the Making, the tongue the dragons speak.

She turned away and began to walk on up the hill.

“Irian,” said Azver the Patterner, “will you come back to us?”

She halted and let him come up to her. “I will, if you call me,” she said.

She reached out and touched his hand. He drew his breath sharply.

“Where will you go?” he said.

“To those who will give me my name. In fire, not water. My people.”

“In the west,” he said.

She said, “Beyond the west.”

She turned away from him and them and went on up the hill in the gathering darkness. As she went farther from them they saw her, all of them, the great gold-mailed flanks, the spiked, coiling tail, the talons, the breath that was bright fire. On the crest of the knoll she paused a while, her long head turning to look slowly round the Isle of Roke, gazing longest at the Grove, only a blur of darkness in darkness now. Then, with a rattle like the shaking of sheets of brass, the wide, vaned wings opened and the dragon sprang up into the air, circled Roke Knoll once, and flew.

A curl of fire, a wisp of smoke drifted down through the dark air.

Azver the Patterner stood with his left hand holding his right hand, which her touch had burnt. He looked down at the men, who stood silent at the foot of the hill, staring after the dragon. “Well, my friends,” he said, “what now?”

Only the Doorkeeper answered. He said, “I think we should go to our house, and open its doors.”

© 1998 by The Inter-Vivos Trust for the Le Guin Children.

Originally published in Legends, edited by Robert Silverberg,

from the author's collection, Tales from Earthsea.

Reprinted by permission of the Trust and the Trust’s agent, The Virginia Kidd Agency.

Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of innumerable SF and fantasy classics, such as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and A Wizard of Earthsea (and the others in the Earthsea Cycle). She has been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, and is the winner of five Hugos, six Nebulas, two World Fantasy Awards, and twenty Locus Awards. She’s also a winner of the Newbery Medal, The National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.

Interview: Ursula K. Le Guin
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of innumerable SF and fantasy classics, such as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and A Wizard of Earthsea (and the others in the Earthsea Cycle). She has been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, and is the winner of five Hugos, six Nebulas, two World Fantasy Awards, and twenty Locus Awards. She’s also a winner of the Newbery Medal, The National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.

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.

It’s been reported that some of the protestors at Occupy Oakland have been carrying shields in the image of books, including your novel The Dispossessed. How do you feel about that?

Terrific. I am proud and happy that a book—and actually a book printed quite a long time ago now—is still making some waves and being of some use to people thinking about this stuff.

Did you write any of those books intending to inspire action, or was it purely artistic?

I do try to separate my personal activism—showing up at a demonstration or something—from what I write. I don’t write tracts, I write novels. I’m not a preacher, I’m a fiction writer. I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they’re not blueprints for action, ever.

In 2008 you wrote an article in Harper’s called “Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading” in which you lamented corporate control of publishing. Have things changed at all—for better or worse—since you wrote that article?

I think they’ve gone downhill. I mean, I think corporate control has just increased as publishing goes into terminal panic about how to handle e-publishing. Maybe this is the dark part of the tunnel and we are going to figure out how to do it, and how to pay writers some kind of decent return for their writing, but at the moment—I don’t teach writing classes anymore, and I’m really glad I don’t, because I would feel very strange about telling people, “Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.” I mean, ha. The writers and the editors are very, very low on the totem pole in the world of corporate publishing, and I don’t think it’s very good for books, and I know it isn’t very good for what writers have to buy their peanut butter.

A few years ago, you resigned from the Authors Guild over their settlement with Google. Could you talk about that?

That was over the Google settlement, which appeared to be in many ways a wrong-headed and unjust settlement with Google, who was doing—and is continuing to do—a tremendous rip-off job of printing copyrighted material without asking or obtaining permission, and the Authors Guild seemed to be settling, saying, “Well, all right. You’re so big, and we’re so little. I don’t know.” So I was indignant, and I withdrew, and it made a much bigger stink than I expected it to. The Authors Guild had never really noticed me for about 35 years, but they noticed when I dropped out, and a lot of other people did too, and so I found myself helping along an anti-Google protest movement by writers—and readers—but mostly by professional writers—people who make their living from writing. And I was pretty well out of my depth in many ways, because it’s a terrifically complicated issue, but there were many very smart people and lawyers and such helping. And so we did get a protest movement going, and we were able to write Judge Chin, who was arbitrating the case, and I think make some points which persuaded him to judge as he did. So I found myself an activist where I never expected to be one.

You’ve expressed disappointment with some of the film and TV adaptations of your work. When it comes to adaptations, do you have any advice that you’d pass along to other writers?

Don’t believe what the people in Hollywood say! [laughs] Do not believe these people, these people do not speak truly. They tell you that they admire your work so much, and you’re going to have all the input over it and so on. Forget it. You don’t have artistic control. Nobody but Rowling ever got artistic control over a film made from their work, and she got it because she’s so wealthy. You’re not going to get it. Therefore you have to think: Do you mind if they make a travesty out of your work? Is the money worth it to you? If it is, go for it. Take the money and run, as whoever it was said. If it’s not worth it to you, just run away.

So, in retrospect, would you say it wasn’t worth it to you? Like, do you wish you hadn’t allowed the SyFy Channel adaptation of Earthsea?

Oh yeah, I very much wish I’d trusted my instincts, which said, “Don’t trust these guys. They have no respect for the work or for you, and they’re just going to make a mess out of it,”—which they did, turning everybody white, dipping them in the bleach, and so on. The one movie that I’m really glad I made that I’m still kind of proud of is the 1980 film of The Lathe of Heaven, in which I did play as much part as I wanted to—I couldn’t actually very much at the time, but that’s a good movie still, it still holds up. There was a pointless, meaningless remake of it that died almost instantly. One of the weirdest things about movie people is that they always want to remake everything. It must be easier somehow. But they keep coming with requests over and over—they talk about Earthsea and they talk about The Lathe of Heaven, as if I hadn’t written anything else. Maybe they don’t read. Maybe they just look at other people’s movies and think, “Oh, I could do that.”

Are there any other recent or upcoming adaptations of your work?

We’ve got a lot of requests on hand. Some of them do look rather promising and serious, but I can’t talk about them.

Wasn’t there a recent theatrical production of The Lathe of Heaven?

Yeah, in New York. Edward Einhorn did it. It was at a venue in the Village, I think. I’ve seen a little handheld video of it, and it looks really interesting. He did it with just four actors and really no set, but using projection slides, which is a lovely way to do fantasy on stage. And there was an opera this spring of my “Paradises Lost,” which is a novella, and it was made into a very beautiful opera, which they produced at the University of Illinois, and which I hope gets picked up by other opera companies, because it is really kind of cool. I think I do better on stage maybe than on film—on average—so far.

There’s been a large amount of academic criticism devoted to your work. Do you ever read any of that, and is there any that you think is particularly noteworthy?

Well, I read some of it. A lot of it’s kind of written for other academics, you know? But there are certain writers, like Brian Attebery or Jim Bittner, who I think really understand my work, and sometimes can explain it to me. “Oh, is that what I was doing? Hmm, never thought of that,” you know.

In the book reviews you write in The Guardian, you sometimes chide authors for saying that their work isn’t science fiction when it clearly is. For example, you wrote a review of Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, and you said, “I’m bothered by the curious ingratitude of authors who exploit a common fund of imagery while pretending to have nothing to do with the fellow authors who created it and left it open for all who want to use it.” Do you ever get responses to comments like that from the authors or their supporters?

Well, not that I know of. To tell you the truth, I’ve never checked it out. I am old enough that I grew up before there was an internet, and I just am not in the habit of using the internet to see what people think of me.

Speaking of authors who say they don’t write science fiction, Margaret Atwood has kind of become a lightning rod among some fans—

[laughs] I’ve been needling Maggie for years now. “Come on, Maggie, you do. You know you write science fiction.” She’s in a difficult position, obviously, with her publisher. She herself has sort of redefined science fiction to be “what Margaret Atwood doesn’t write.” That’s okay, because Margaret Atwood really can do no wrong in my book. But I do keep arguing with her, because it doesn’t really hold water, her definition. Science fiction is not about the impossible, the nonexistent—that’s fantasy. And she says that she only writes about what is possible, and so on. Well, a lot of science fiction does exactly that.

I think the whole argument is just withering away, because people don’t care that much anymore—a lot of people—whether you call it “sci-fi” or “science fiction” or “mainstream” or “realism” or whatever. It’s all getting mixed up together. It’s all literature, and that’s the way it ought to be, I think.

So are you optimistic that someday you might get her to concede that, “OK, Oryx and Crake was a little bit science fiction, you got me there”?

[laughs] I wouldn’t predict anything about Margaret Atwood, no.

Okay, so we had a couple questions from listeners. One of them says, “Growing up, my favorite book was The Tombs of Atuan, and it always struck me as being beautifully strange for not having the series protagonist show up until three-quarters of the way through.” And he’d like you to talk about why you made that choice, and it seems like maybe publishers would be wary of something like that?

Well, that’s kind of funny. It isn’t three-quarters of the way through. It’s—I would say—maybe a third of the way into the book, that Ged shows up. That book was written before series were invented in fantasy. Tolkien had written what was called a “trilogy”—although he didn’t call it a trilogy. I think trilogies were just beginning perhaps to be fashionable, but fantasies didn’t fall into these categories as they do now. Ged was not a “series hero,” he was the hero of a novel called A Wizard of Earthsea. This was a sequel. That’s all there was to it. In other words, fantasy was not controlled by the advertising department and what’s going to sell. Fantasy was controlled by the author to a larger extent than it is now. The book has two protagonists—a young woman and a slightly older man—and it’s their interaction that makes the book happen. That’s not an unfamiliar situation in novels. It’s just that, I think, this listener is used to conventional, mass-produced fantasy, where you have a series hero and certain things are done in certain ways, and so on.

Did you ever experience any pressure from publishers to make your work more conventional in any way?

Within the last few years only, on my three fantasy novels Gifts, Voices, and Powers. I had, as always, good editors to work with at Harcourt, where they were published, but there was an increasing pressure to make them more like Harry Potter—there’s just no getting around it. And since I write a very, very different type of fantasy and different type of literature from the Harry Potter series, there was no way I could go along with that. I just had to resist it. But, you see, that’s very late, and it’s happened as publishing was beginning to lose its sense of direction and its purpose, and get very confused by corporate pressures on all sides.

I’m a big fan of Philip K. Dick, and when I attended the Clarion writers workshop, Tim Powers and Karen Joy Fowler assigned each of us a book to read that they thought would resonate with us, and the book that they assigned me was The Lathe of Heaven, which they described as an homage to Philip K. Dick, and I’ve always wondered if that’s true?

Oh yeah, definitely. You know, I couldn’t write a Phil Dick book, but I could steal some of his tricks, in a way. Pulling reality out from under the reader all the time, changing reality on them, the way he does. Well, I did it through dreams. Phil would have done it another way. But yeah, homage to Phil Dick is right.

Did you know him at all?

We talked on the telephone, and we corresponded some, but we never actually met. Except, we must have met in high school, because we were at Berkeley High School at the same time, but nobody I know remembers him. He is the unknown man from my class at Berkeley High.

Well, that’s sort of funny, because in a lot of his stories . . . one that comes to mind is Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said—it’s about a guy who suddenly nobody knows who he is anymore. I wonder if that was autobiographical in any way?

Oh, must be. [laughs] I don’t know.

I’m rather proud of the fact that I was defending Phil Dick’s work early on, when he was not being paid much attention to and never kept in print. And I kept saying, “This guy is really good. This guy is writing completely original stuff. You know, it isn’t conventional, it isn’t run-of-the-mill. It’s different, but it’s really interesting.” And of course Phil picked up on that, and you always like it when another writer likes your stuff, you want to know that writer, so he may have written me or me him, and we talked some. I got a little bit bossy and told him that the women in his novels were kind of predictable. I didn’t think he’d really pay any attention, but he did. Apparently he really tried to think about the way he’d been handling women in his fiction. That touches me. You know, he didn’t have to pay any mind to anything I said.

Do you remember what year that was, that people would look for that sort of change in his fiction?

I think the novel where he tried to write women differently was V.A.L.I.S. So it’s kind of late. We’re getting into the novels after he had that sort of revelation thing he had, and began writing a rather different kind of book.

So years ago I read your two books on writing, Steering the Craft and The Language of the Night, and one thing that really struck me from those were your comments about how wrong-headed many of our so-called “rules” of grammar are. Are there any particular grammar rules that you’d like to see go away?

I was probably talking about the fact that the grammarians kept telling us that we can’t use “they” as a singular—like, “If anybody needs an abortion, he should have to tell his mother and father.” Would you only use “he,” because “he” is the generic pronoun? I mean, this is nonsense in English. And English has always used “they”—it’s in Shakespeare. You know, “Anybody needs an abortion, they should not have to tell their parents.” It’s one of these arbitrary bans that every now and then grammarians get away with, and that kind of thing—where there’s a moral influence from it—you have to talk about that. The thing with grammar is to just accept the rules and use them as you see fit. But you have to know them before you can break them. That’s the only rule I accept.

There’s a recent book called 80: Memories and Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin. How did that come about?

Oh, it’s what they call a “festschrift.” They get people together to celebrate somebody who’s having a birthday or something, and I had my 80th birthday, and so a lot of very nice people put a little book together, with some stories about me and some stories and stuff. It’s a nice present for a birthday.

There’s also a documentary in the works called Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. Is there anything you can tell us about that?

Arwen Curry is making it, and she and I have been working together on and off for a couple years now. I can’t tell you about the documentary itself because I haven’t seen it. I don’t really know where it’s at, just that she’s been coming here and filming on and off for the last couple years. We talk together, and we go places that are important in my life so she can film me there—like the ranch in the Napa Valley where I spent all my summers as a kid, and still go every summer. Or next month she’s going to meet me out in southeast Oregon at a farmhouse where we spend a week every year under Steens Mountain, which is country that I’ve come to love very much. So she’s going to put this all together and I don’t know what it’s going to be like, but I trust Arwen Curry to do it well.

We mentioned that for the second half of our show today, we’ll be talking about Ray Bradbury. Do you have any memories relating to Bradbury that you’d like to share?

I only met Ray two or three times, always down in L.A., because he was not a traveler, as you know. He was always very genial, and a little bit overbearing [laughs] . . . kind of a great big football player of a guy. He was very nice. You had this sense of his warmth, of the personality that comes through in his books too. You know, I don’t know anybody who has anything against Ray Bradbury. Maybe there are people, but he seemed not to have made enemies, which is pretty good going for a writer that successful, and living in Los Angeles.

Are any of his books particular favorites of yours?

Oh, The Martian Chronicles. You know, it came out a long time ago. I was in my twenties at most, I guess. I just loved it. He was making science fiction romantic. Science fiction often gets kind of hard-edged and dry and a little over-intellectual. And I just thought, “Oh, wow, look what he’s doing. He’s making it beautiful and romantic, with this warmth of human feeling in it.” And that was important then.

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

This fall, all six books in the Earthsea series will finally be published in a uniform edition in the United States, which is a real joy to me. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is putting out the hardcover, and Simon & Schuster is doing the paperback. I don’t have a publication date yet, but I guess September, probably. And also I have a new and selected poems [volume], which means that it’s a kind of retrospective selected from my six poetry books, and a whole set of new poems, and that’s coming out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt this fall too, and I’m very pleased about that. It’s called Finding My Elegy. And I’ve got a story coming out in Tin House called “Elementals.” Kind of a fantasy, along the lines of Borges, I guess, a little.

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 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 four-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.

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

Interview: David Brin
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

David Brin is a scientist, technology speaker, and author. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare, and the world wide web. A 1998 movie by Kevin Costner was based on The Postman. His novels, including New York Times Bestsellers, have been translated into more than twenty languages, and won Hugo and Nebula awards. His new novel from Tor Books is Existence.

This interview first appeared in slightly different form 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.

Tell us about your new novel, Existence. What’s it about?

Existence portrays a near-future world, roughly 2050, in which terrible things have happened, but guess what? People reacted by coping, as they always have. Only now you can scroll through all the overlays of augmented reality that lay upon the surface world of the “merely real.” Google’s Project Glass was announced the same day Existence came out, taking us a step in that direction. I take it 40 years into the future.

The book is set against a puzzle of our age, the Fermi paradox—that the universe ought to be filled with all sorts of lifeforms, species that came onto the galactic stage before us. Yet we see no signs of them, not even in the rocks beneath our feet. Earth was prime real estate for 2 billion years, with an oxygen atmosphere and nothing living on land higher than slime molds. Visitors who flushed a toilet or tossed a Coke bottle would have changed everything in ways we’d notice. The great silence—or absence—is mystifying.

There’s this astronaut in my novel, in the first chapter he’s out there using a space lariat—a tethered device that NASA’s actually developing—to remove space debris so that form of pollution won’t destroy our access to low-Earth orbit. He snags something unusual, a crystal, about a meter long, that appears to be a message in a bottle, sent by other civilizations. Hence the question—Is it a hoax? And if not, what might be the motives of the virtual aliens inside?

Neal Stephenson has said that some mainstream critics accuse him of being grandiose for titling his novel The System of the World. Have you heard from any of those same critics about titling your novel Existence?

Not really, except in a joking way. “Well, Brin, you had better live up to this.” Later, many of them write back to say, grudgingly, “Oh, all right, you did.”

But there’ll always be snarkers, and my answer is this: If you have useful criticism that I can learn from—great! Join my gang of tough pre-readers who catch mistakes in manuscript.

This book predicts that bags of urine might be worth something in the future. Given the current economic situation, would you advise that we all dump our stocks and invest in urine instead?

The great phosphorous mines of Florida are being tapped out. Soon it’ll be just Morocco and a couple other places that remain with large phosphate deposits. And so, in my novel’s near future, men are expected to either pee on plants, outside, or into phos-urinals that collect the precious phosphorous. Phos-urinals. P.U. Hey, who says predicting the next eco-crisis can’t be fun?

In Existence, an autism plague features prominently. Why does autism interest you and what approach should we be taking to dealing with it?

There’s been a steep rise in discovery of autistic spectrum syndrome cases. Some of it may be due to better diagnosis, and some caused by environmental factors. I posit that another source may the fact that they’re not dying anymore! Instead, some autistics are starting to flourish in a world where the online opportunities to express themselves are computer-mediated, possibly enabling even the severely affected to flourish and lead productive lives. In which case, are they sick at all? An interesting question that’s already been answered decisively by some, at one end of the spectrum. Ask those internet billionaires who are clearly from Planet Asperger. Anyway, Existence got a terrific blurb from Temple Grandin, so I must not have portrayed this topic too wrong.

The book also explores the idea that self-righteous indignation might be a form of addiction. Could you talk a bit about that?

I gave a talk about this at the National Institutes for Drugs and Addiction. (I was trained as an astrophysicist, but I do guerilla raids into random areas of science from time to time. Guild boundaries are no longer as fiercely defended as they once were—take the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination that we’re setting up at UCSD, merging every branch of the arts and sciences.)

Back on topic, studies show that “addiction” is rooted in the most natural of human processes, the reinforcement of positive activities through internally stimulated pleasure. You’ve heard the phrase “addicted to love.” We need to become addicted to our kids! Other positive fixations can focus on comradeship, team effort, creativity, or the joy of exercising a skill. All great stuff.

But you can deliberately enter less salubrious mental states. There’s gambling, or thrill addiction, or rage. And strong evidence suggests that self-righteous indignation is another of those self-induced, self-doped drug highs. Heck, any honest person knows this. We’ve all wallowed in indignant snits. Next time, look in a mirror and admit, “This feels great! I’m so much smarter and better than my enemies! They are so wrong, and I’m so right!”

Yes, like alcohol, some of us can pull indignant snits on occasion, then say, “Enough.” Others seem to live for the high, truly as if it were a drug addiction. Indeed, self-righteousness junkies have the stamina and will to take over almost every political or advocacy group they set their eyes on. How else to explain America’s current bilious, illogical, and pathological “culture war,” in which half the country dismisses the other half as being just shy of satanic?

I’ve heard that you have a list of over a hundred possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Could you talk about that?

The Fermi Paradox is the perplexing question of why we’ve seen no indications that advanced civilizations ever sailed the interstellar sea. Alas, usually, whenever this comes up, all the smart guys—from Paul Davies and Michio Kaku to Stephen Hawking—tend to pick one explanation and say, “This is it, obviously!” I don’t see the purpose served by that. I mean, why leap to conclusions in the only scientific topic without any subject matter?

It’s far, far better and more useful to catalog these things, and so in my 1983 paper, I compiled about 70 explanations—(in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society—you can fetch it at davidbrin.com)—summarizing the dizzying array of explanations that have been proposed for The Great Silence. There have been about 30 or 40 more, since then. But all suffer from various flaws.

My favorite, that might reduce the numbers a whole lot, without being horribly pessimistic, is the water worlds hypothesis. It turns out that our Earth skates the very inner edge of our sun’s continuously habitable—or “Goldilocks”—zone. And that may be anomalous. Circling so close to our sun, we might have an anomalously oxygen-rich atmosphere, and an unusually high 32 percent continental mass. In which case, creatures like us, with hands and fire and all that, could be rare. When we do build starships and head out there, perhaps we’ll find life worlds like Polynesia. Intelligent life forms, but they’re all dolphins, whales, squid, who could never build their own starships.

What a perfect universe for us! Lots of interesting neighbors but nobody could boss us around. We’ll be the voyagers, the Star Trekkers, and so on. Alas, most “Fermi explanations” are nowhere near as nice.

What do you think about the current approach to SETI, and is there anything you’d do differently?

Some recent research shows that the SETI Institute’s search strategy—using the Paul Allen radio telescope array to look for extra-terrestrial intelligent life—is brilliant, it’s clever . . . and designed entirely wrong to detect the kinds of messages alien cultures might send.

If ETs want to contact new tech races, they’re not likely to waste time and resources on gigantic beacons. They’ll know the thousand—or ten thousand, or fifty thousand—life worlds around them that have oxygen atmospheres. But the odds that any one of those has a shiny new civilization will be very small, at any one time. So they’ll just send a ping to each of them, once every hundred years—or maybe once a year—saying, “Is there anybody there yet?” Because that’s cheap to do.

Another option that I talk about in Existence is dispatching probes. Now, any one physical probe is going to be vastly more expensive than sending a radio ping. It’s costly to accelerate even a small package or bottle to ten percent of light speed with a laser. But once it arrives in the destination system, it can then wait for millions of years till—say—a tech civilization arises nearby. In contrast, a brief radio signal is cheap, but you have to keep sending them over and over across those millions of years.

You wrote an article called “World Cyberwar and the Inevitability of Radical Transparency,” which is a follow-up to your 1998 book The Transparent Society. What motivated that article?

Put aside the ridiculous, lobotomizing talk about “left vs. right” for a minute. (An absurdly stupid metaphor that no one can even define.) What we’re seeing right now—what every generation across the 300-year-old Enlightenment has had to face—is repeated attempts to reinstate the old pattern of human government—feudalism.

It’s the standard form of governance and probably woven into our genes. Ninety-nine percent of human civilizations that had agriculture were pyramidal in structure, ruled by obligate oligarchies, a ruling caste, that made sure its powers were inherited—because that’s Darwinism at work. The child of a peasant would remain a peasant, never getting to compete fairly against sons of the lords. (And note, I include the Soviet Nomenklatura caste as one of these feudal-oligarchic cliques.)

Look, we’re all descended from the harems of guys who pulled off this trick! How else to explain why feudal or kingly or wizard symbolisms grab our hearts so easily? Once, in 6000 years, an alternative approach has been tried. Our enlightenment uses stiff rules and division of power to maximize the number of participating competitors, so that the old failure mode of top-down cheating will fail, whether it is tried by kings or bureaucrats or priests or a new caste of owner-lords.

Today we hear that “rules are the enemy.” But just try running a major sports league without them. That’s a sure guarantee for competition to fail. Alas, the left has forgotten that competition is the great creative force. And the right forgets that competition only works on a level playing field. (You can see why I despise the “left-right axis.”)

So how do we restore a level, competitive playing field without stifling it with too many meddlesome rules?

What? Just because I peer ahead a bit, you think I have definite answers? Still, you can expect one prescription from the author of The Transparent Society: unless we have open information flows—and that may require radical transparency—the Enlightenment Experiment will surely fail. Barring floods of light, empowering billions with information, this attempted putsch by a new aristocracy is going to succeed, or the next one will.

More and more of the world’s wealth is being hidden. The latest estimate is 20 trillion dollars has been squirreled away, and nobody knows where. Half of the wealth produced by some developing nations may have been robbed by their own kleptocracies. Can you imagine how rapidly the middle class in those countries could rise if that money were returned? Or left in Switzerland but reassigned, so the interest would come home? Do I sound like a socialist? What’s socialist about saying that everything should be above board?

One of the gods of the right, Friedrich Hayek, founder of the Austrian School of Economics, said the absolute necessity of capitalism is for all players to know most of what’s going on most the time, so they can make good, self-interested decisions. Even a laborer or peasant can make the best deal for the fish he just caught or the yam he just grew. The greatest hypocrisy right now is for those who defend capitalism not to favor radical transparency.

Your Uplift series explores boosting the intelligence of animals such as dolphins and chimps. How close are we to achieving that?

Uplift is one of the more popular themes I’ve put in some novels. People love to read where I portray the endgame, 200 years in the future, when dolphins and chimps are almost ready—they can talk, add their wisdom to our culture. A wonderful thing, expanding the range of citizens who participate, compete, and partake in this wonderful enlightenment.

(In Existence, I explore this expansion of diversity further—how we may add artificial intelligences, or autistic savants, who will suddenly be technologically empowered to communicate. We’ll probably resurrect Neanderthals, and even more surprises.)

People write to me about that end product 200 years in the future, and I’m flattered! But in honesty I respond. “You’re just looking at a hypothetical end product. Are you prepared to get this project started, knowing that the road will be a hard one filled with mistakes and pain?”

Oh, sure, the mistakes and pain will be minimized if instead of doing this secretly or stupidly, we take this road wisely and in the open. Not to make them slaves, as Boulle, Smith, and Wells portrayed, but trying to get additional voices for our culture. Still, there would be years of pain. Hence, if anybody tried to get started on an uplift project, they’d get pounded from both right and left. It’s a quandary that I explore in Existence, which (among many other things) shows how the uplift project might get started, despite all that.

The idea of boosting primate intelligence was recently dealt with in the prequel movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Did you see that movie, and what did you think of how they handled the idea of boosting of primate intelligence?

I was won over. They departed from the standard Frankenstein/we’re going to treat them like garbage notion. Instead of the humans-are-all-vile cliché, in this film individual human beings make mistakes, or act shitty. Science, in fact, creates something terrific! Then it makes a bunch of mistakes because of secrecy. It’s not our oppression of ape slaves, but a transparency error that winds up killing us.

Speaking of movies, you’ve been highly critical of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. What sort of reactions do you get when you criticize such popular stories?

I’ll tell you, I didn’t get anywhere near as much hate mail for my dissing of Star Wars and Yoda as I got for pointing out that our personal computers don’t have Basic—or any other reliably simple-accessible gateway programming environment—on them anymore. The geeks came out in droves to attack me for that. But people can look it up. “Why Johnny Can’t Code” points out that the computers and tablets kids have these days don’t have a good, universally accessible, entry-level way for a kid to learn programming.

But The Lord of the Rings? Well, I respect Tolkien. My essay calls him the most honest of the Romantics. I deem nostalgic romanticism to be a deeply harmful addiction. But Tolkien was the truly honest Romantic, pointing out the very flaws of his beloved elves. Anyway, if I had gone to World War I like he did, and watched the flower of my generation mowed down by machine guns, I might have turned against modernity too.

There’s a big distinction between Tolkien and George Lucas, who was given everything by modernity, and who has spent the last thirty years relentlessly denouncing it, preaching Romantic claptrap about demigods and mystic warriors and snarling against democracy. Can you name one moment when he shows the Old Republic functioning at all, at any level, in any way? Or normal people serving as anything but squires and spear carriers?

The same question applies to Yoda, perhaps the most relentlessly evil character I’ve ever seen onscreen. Name one scene in which Yoda is ever helpful to anybody, ever true to his duty to the Republic, or says anything genuinely wise.

“Do or do not, there is no try.”

Really? That utter crap is wise? Up yours, you horrible little oven mitt! “Try” is how human beings get better. That’s how people learn! Some motions bring you toward your goal, others farther from it. We learn by reinforcing what works and repressing what doesn’t. It’s how Obi-Wan taught Luke, in the excellent, enjoyable first film. Enough with the abhorrent, junior high school cartoon-Zen.

Anyway, I had fun being the ornery “prosecuting attorney” in the debate book—Star Wars on Trial. Matthew Woodring Stover, one of Lucas’s novelizers, organized the defense. Huge fun—a lot of snapping of suspenders and shouting “objection!” and calling witnesses back and forth on a dozen different themes. And come on, you don’t think I take any of this seriously, do you? It’s just another fun riff off the biggest science fiction hit of all time.

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

Well, people ask why it has been nine to ten years between major Brin novels. First, Existence was so complicated! Had to make sure it was dramatic and fast paced and easy to read, as well.

But I’ve also been doing other projects, in parallel. One is my first science fiction comedy. Folks will groan, but whether in appreciation or despair, we won’t know for a while! Comedy is hard. Another project: a YA series. Aliens kidnap a California high school . . . and eventually regret it.

Then . . . finally . . . I’ll write about how those dolphins finally make it home.

Perhaps even to a civilization that has forged ahead. One we all had a hand in making better.

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 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 four-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.

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: R.J. Palmer

Artist Spotlight: R.J. Palmer
J. T. Glover

R.J. Palmer is an up-and-coming freelance concept artist and illustrator. He’s currently a student at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. He arrived at fantasy and science fiction by way of dinosaurs, and he’s busy building his own world . . .

Can you tell us how you came up with the central character of “Air?” From the mechanical dragon on her hand to the feather-like belt she wears, there are plenty of details to draw the viewer’s eye.

“Air” was done as part of a project for a class last year at Academy of Art University. We had complete freedom to illustrate a character fitting one of the elements: earth, fire, air, and water. I really wanted to show air and wind through her design, as well as give her a touch of steampunk. The whole design clicked for me when I came up with the gills on her ribcage. I thought she could inhale regular air through these gills and breathe it out through her mouth as a sort of magic air that she could manipulate. Once I had this idea, I went to work thinking of ways to use this. As you can see, she can bring artificial life to her creations, like the little mechanical bird perched on her finger, as well as use this magic breath to fill balloons to keep her aloft. I added some bird-like qualities to her design as well, such as the keel-like sternum armor and the feathered belt. Of the four elemental character illustrations I did, she is certainly the most successful and unique in my eyes.

Do you tend to plan your work heavily in advance, or are you more likely to start a sketch and see where it takes you?

I do a lot of concept and idea sketching to see what sort of things I might be interested in working on next. Once I get an idea that I would like to take to finish, I try to make sure I have most of the elements of the work designed beforehand, so the actual illustration process progresses as smoothly and painlessly as possible. However, there have certainly been many times when I have a very strong idea and just jump into the first sketch I do without the numerous thumbnails; and sometimes I just pump out a sketch that I like and take that to finish.

Which artists do you look to for inspiration?

I try to look to life as much as possible for my inspiration. I spend hours and hours on Google Images and just looking around the world. Once I get inspired to work on something, I then will search out other works in a similar vein to my piece to see how other artists might handle a situation that may be stumping me. My favorite artists and art teams are: Kev Walker, Jason Chan, Wes Burt, the Prince of Persia team, and the Monster Hunter team.

What brought you to fantasy and science fiction? Were you looking to tell stories, or was the sheer freedom of the imagery more of a draw?

Honestly, I think the reason I ended up in fantasy/science fiction stuff is because of dinosaurs. I started drawing when I was three years old with dinosaurs and Godzilla. Dragons were a natural evolution from that, and then fantasy and science fiction from that. Contemporary illustration has just never really interested me very much. I guess I’m a sucker for swords and armor.

What’s your dream illustration assignment?

I would love to be the lead illustrator for a Monster Hunter, Final Fantasy, or Assassin’s Creed type of project. I just want to design creatures and characters for months and really develop a world. I absolutely love seeing my designs and ideas come to fruition.

What have been some of the most significant changes you’ve seen in your work since you started at the Academy of Art University?

My work has gotten better in every regard since I started at the Academy of Art. The greatest things I have learned in my time here are anatomy, color theory, and a much better understanding of light. This school is a magnificent resource, and I’ve learned an absurd amount here.

Are there particular properties you’d like to work on, or are you more interested in developing your own world? Would it be Arvalis, or something else?

I am first and foremost interested in developing my own world. I’ve been working with a few friends from high school on a long-term goal of developing a love letter to Japanese RPGs. One of my greatest pleasures is seeing how our world and characters have changed and grown over the years. There are, of course, major properties I would love a hand in, such as Prince of Persia, Monster Hunter, Sonic the Hedgehog, and anything featuring dinosaurs.

Can you tell us a little bit about your working methods?

I do most of my work these days 100% digital, though I do on occasion do thumbnails and concept sketches on paper. I try to get a solid composition down with a strong creature or character design prominently featured. Once I have that, I’ll move into establishing my color palette. Then, once all of the pieces lock into place, I start fleshing it out until I’m satisfied enough to call it complete . . . or I’m out of time.

Have you found any tricks or shortcuts with your own art that you’ve never seen elsewhere?

I think the greatest workflow shortcut I have come across is setting up all the brushes you use in Photoshop as tool presets on the side. Like many of my peers, I have a large number of brushes installed and it can kind of lag Photoshop when you open the brush menu. Once I set them up as tool presets, I found myself freed up to use as many brushes as my heart desired and was able to increase my speed and efficiency tenfold.

What projects are you working on right now?

Currently I have been working on finishing up some long in-progress work to get ready to send out a more polished portfolio. I have been doing freelance illustrations and private commissions in between personal work. I also have been trying to maintain a certain amount of time to do studies and try new things, to make sure my artistic blade stays as sharp as possible.

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.

Flowing Unimpeded to the Enlightenment
Robert Reed

The Rude Man

Kartar is forty and Irish-Indian, blessed with an avatar’s sterling looks and a fine deep voice that lingers in the mind. He wears a piezosuit and a bright necktie advertising Chinese wetware, and a new Everything is pinned to his broad lapel. Twenty admirers have him surrounded. They seem like a pleasant bunch. Standing with his back against the brick wall, Kartar expertly manages his audience. When someone asks about recent travels, he launches into brief descriptions of an AI birth in Christchurch and an earthquake milking at Palmerston North. A few insider details give the show its tech-steroid heft, and then he generously throws out one fresh idea: New Zealand should bioengineer its native tuatara, creating a forty-foot reptile that swims like a sea serpent, working its way up and down that scenic, tourist-infused coastline.

Oohs and laughter lead to another question: How does he like the conference so far?

“Business Opportunities Through SETI,” is the official theme. Kartar gives away nothing about his keynote address, concentrating on happy noises about the other guests and his gracious hosts. But he admits that he could use some free time. Walking is his passion and San Francisco is so beautiful, at least what he sees through his hotel room window. And someone immediately takes the bait, warily confiding that they aren’t in San Francisco. This is Cincinnati.

“Oh, I forgot,” Kartar deadpans. “The maid must have dinked with my virt-setting.”

People laugh hard while the half-circle moves closer. More questions are offered, but Kartar answers one that he hasn’t heard yet. Next month is a quick trip to China, where he gets to kick the proverbial tires on the Long March 12 nuclear rocket. That leads to a few pointed comments about the Martian mission and why Ceres would be the smarter target. “But at least our colon flora finally get what they want, a free ride to an empty, vulnerable world,” he concludes.

Minds chew on that poignant notion.

Kartar smiles, waits a beat, then warns everyone that he shouldn’t tell them this, but he has a five-day contract job with a game company that he doesn’t dare name, what with the draconian contracts he had to sign. And he certainly can’t talk about the game that he might or might not be building for them, or when it might be released, and why would anyone even attempt to keep secrets in the modern superfluid world of data? But the topic of clandestineness puts him in the mood to say a few choice words about . . .

A single bright tone emerges from his Everything.

The famous man seemed ready to discuss immersion games or the public life of incandescent secrets, or maybe he was going to make an oblique mention about his consultancy work for Langley. Audiences are always hungry for insider stories about the CIA. But no, without a word, Kartar deploys his Everything. Short fingers dance inside the bright holo cloud. Abstract symbols need to be pushed and dragged. No one speaks. Genius is allowed its important silences, and the man lends mesmerizing grace to an everyday chore. And after twenty seconds of shoving and herding—just as the first gazes wander—Kartar says, “I am sorry.”

To nobody in particular, he says, “I don’t mean to be rude.”

“Oh, really?” one man yells out from the back row.

Some turn to look, but polite people keep their faces forward, pretending to be deaf. In his fifties, maybe older, the loud man has white hair mixed with black and a gaunt, chiseled face built around a pair of close-set dark eyes. He wears what might be a smile. His voice is sturdy and quick. “When you say that you don’t want to be rude, you surrender two bits of useful information: You know exactly how rude you are, and you want to underscore your poverty of manners.”

Bystanders look at the ceiling and walls and the suddenly fascinating floor.

No one else speaks.

“You should pay attention to us,” says the heckler, “and not your next dental appointment, or whatever.”

It is hard to tell what Kartar notices. A few more pushes at jellyfish and important arrowheads, and then he looks up, considering everyone else before meeting the challenger’s eyes.

“You’re right,” Kartar says. “I’m totally in the wrong here.”

“An opinion held by two.”

Kartar deploys two facial recognition packages.

“Dominick,” the heckler says.

“Excuse me?”

“Ask me. I’d tell you my name.”

“All right, Dominick. Hello.”

“Hello to you.”

“Do I know you, Dominick?”

The man grimaced. “How can I say? I can’t see your brain.”

People begin to back away.

Keeping his voice even and slow, Kartar asks, “Have we met before, Dominick?”

“Yes. We certainly have.”

Kartar clucks his tongue, signaling his security software, and he stares at the narrow, slightly wild face that needs a life story.

“So ask me your next question,” Dominick says.

“Where did we meet?”

“No. There’s a much better question waiting.”

The audience has parted in the middle, save for three individuals who have decided to put themselves closer to the troublemaker—two beefy fellows, and for some reason, a girl who looks like a skinny seventeen.

“You seem rather angry,” says Kartar.

“Maybe I am.”

“Are you angry with me?”

The man shrugs.

“Why do you feel this way, Dominick?”

“Well, maybe because of what you do.”

“And what do I do?”

“You’re a professional thief,” Dominick says. “You steal ideas for a living.”

Kartar winks at his self-appointed bodyguards, and the men smile back at him, glad for this sign of approval.

“Except I’m not a thief,” Kartar says. “Thieves take objects of intrinsic value. They pocket money, jewels, what-have-you. What I deal in is knowledge, in memes, which is an entirely different business. Once created, there is no practical, sober way to keep a good meme from being owned by every person.”

“‘Ideas are mutable and graceful and slick,’” Dominick begins to quote.

Then half of the audience helps finish the famous line. “‘And knowledge is happiest when it flows unimpeded to the Enlightenment.’”

Kartar gives more winks and a smile. “Well, I can guess what’s going on here. You think I stole some idea of yours. Isn’t that right?”

The heckler doesn’t react.

“You’re a bright fellow, Dominick. I have a nose for quality, and sure, maybe I have taken one or two gems from you in the past, and now you’re pissed. And for what it’s worth, I can see your point of view. But none of us made today’s world; we just have to live in it. And this is how things are done.”

Dominick snorts. “Yeah, that says a helluva lot.”

A security alert flashes in privacy-mode. Kartar reads the first sentence and skims the highlights, learning a tiny amount about this man. What matters are the weapons that Dominick carries, and the most dangerous object is inside his left front pocket—a pointed car key belonging to an elderly Ford.

The heckler steps closer.

Kartar waves his right hand, and his Everything retreats back into its vial.

“You don’t understand,” says Dominick. “You think you do, but you don’t.”

“What don’t I understand?”

“You’re not looking at this in the proper light.”

“No?” The brick wall presses against Kartar’s back. “Maybe I don’t see what you see. True enough. But I want to tell you something, Dominick. I intend to be rude now. I don’t like you, and I don’t want to be near you, and you need to turn and walk away. Right now, before this situation gets out of control.”

The older man sighs, and then with weary resignation takes another step forward.

The two male bodyguards grab Dominick under the arms, lifting him off the floor. But he squirms and starts to kick, and maybe on purpose he cracks the one young man hard in the shin.

That’s when the girl steps up.

Her tiny right fist strikes the heckler in the chin, and his head leaps back. Then she dives in close with her left fist and another right and a second left, battering the chest as the unprepared bodyguards drop Dominick in order to reach for her. But the girl uses her feet, kicking her victim’s legs out from under him, and she slaps aside every hand as she dives low, punching and jabbing at the exposed face while those amazingly strong legs cling to the gasping, useless body.

The Goddess

She doesn’t know who the important guy is. That’s the funniest part of this story.

She hears that smart voice performing and sees all of those backs, a bunch of people hanging on the guy’s words. The guy likes to boast about this and that. God, he sounds busy, going everywhere and seeing every damned thing in the world. She guesses that he can’t be married, and he’s probably rich, which interests her. A lot of things interest her. She’s not the idiot that people usually think she is. That her parents think she is. College was a bit of a disaster, sure. She admits that now. But not everything about her life is her fault. Besides, she reads plenty, and she knows how to read people, which is a surprisingly rare talent in this world, and pushing her way to the front row, she finds herself getting interested in the goofy guy with his power suit and billboard tie and the fancy floating Cloud-of-Knowledge, or whatever they’re calling these auxiliary brains this week.

Her name is Rhonda, but she hasn’t used that ugly business since she was ten.

Artemis is a name pulled from myth, and that’s what friends call her, and strangers, and it’s how phantoms refer to her when she’s walking inside her own dreams.

Artemis is standing up front when the crazy guy starts complaining. In some ways, the power-suit guy seems cool and sharp under fire. He probably gets a ton of shit from people, and he knows how to handle most idiots. Call them by their name, for instance. Dominick this, Dominick that, my dear goddamn Dominick. But as she watches him, and as she listens deeper into his voice, it becomes obvious that he doesn’t have control of the situation. Not like he believes he does. With all those fancy tools in the Cloud, this rich, lonely travel-everywhere guy feels invulnerable, amusing himself before his next speaking appearance or lunch date or jump in the sack.

When the two fat guys move toward the crazy guy, she joins in.

No, she doesn’t have a plan. If you run on instinct, you never need plans. At least that’s the way Artemis figures it.

Then the traveling man tells the crazy man to leave, which is stupid. And then the fat guys, working from some shared misunderstanding of what needs to be done, pick the troublemaker off the floor.

The world gets messy fast.

Her first swing is harmless enough. Give Mr. Crazy one good pop, and win the war. But Artemis doesn’t have many off switches, which can be a problem. After that first swing, her head comes up with reasons why battering the guy is a fine idea. Maybe Mr. Crazy is dangerous. He might have a knife, a gun, or weapons-grade uranium up his ass. But the best thought comes later, after she lets the fat boys pull her off and her victim is rolling in pain. That’s when she catches the traveling man staring at her, like he’s never stared at any woman before. He is stunned. He feels lost. His little boat is bouncing in the rapids, and he doesn’t know what’s ahead, maybe there’s a big waterfall after the next bend, and this is going to be a neat opportunity, if she plays it right.

“Shit,” says the traveling man.

“Twice a day, whether I need to or not,” Artemis says.

He looks at the bloody face on the floor and then at her again, and she tells him, “I don’t know. Maybe I saved your life here.”

“He doesn’t have weapons,” the man says.

She wonders about his name. But instead of asking, she says, “You can’t know what the guy has.”

“Yes, I do,” he says. Then he launches into this long song about his fancy see-through-everything software, and the traveler believes his noise, too. That’s what Artemis keeps seeing and seeing. Not a clue that he’s an idiot, and the idiot words keep running wild.

People are helping the bloodied, crazy man. These aren’t the same people who were part of the audience, and they have no trouble pushing paper towels against the wounded face, making soothing noises when they aren’t asking the man for updates about his pain.

“A car key,” says the traveling man. “That was the most dangerous thing on his person.”

“Really,” says Artemis.

“Yes,” he says.

She says, “Okay, use the same tricks and look at me.”

The half-smart Cloud crawls out of its genie bottle again, letting loose who-knows-how-many kinds of tricks.

“What are my weapons?” she asks.

But the traveling man isn’t watching her. One of the convention center’s cops is talking to someone on a phone, begging for the real police.

And that’s when Artemis gives her new friend one clean shot to the diaphragm—not hard and not even half-hard—and the traveling man bends in the middle.

She puts her face in front of his face.

Nothing else exists in the world but her.

“You’ve got a lot to learn,” she says. “And lesson one is that you can steal all the knowledge you want, but you just aren’t that smart.”

The Traveling Man

Problems want solutions. That’s the nature of nature. But these ugly problems don’t belong to Kartar. Representatives from the conference promise as much. Witnesses have come forward to tell what happened, and at least two security cameras offer vantage points—and that’s before anyone counts the phones and tablets and Everythings that were absorbing the scene. The local police act as if Kartar had no role beyond the incidental, the accidental. And even though the afternoon is rolling past, it seems unlikely that he’ll have to miss his early dinner with the Goldilocks Project.

Administrative offices have been borrowed for purposes of the investigation. Kartar sits in the small lobby. Dominick isn’t here. The poor man—and that’s how Kartar thinks of him now—is safe in a side office, receiving stitches. Witnesses are being brought through the lobby door and past Kartar. Everybody wants to smile at him. One by one, they are led into a sunny office where indoor tomatoes grow in living pots and images of two nameless children drift across the white walls. Each witness is interviewed in brief, and Kartar eavesdrops. The accounts are more similar than not, but there are differences. Kartar never teased Dominick, and he resents the implication. He never claimed to remember the man, and he didn’t mean to insult anybody when he talked about wanting to be rude. Then one woman from the front row claims that Kartar works for the Central Intelligence Agency. At that point Kartar has to stand and shove his face into the unfamiliar office, telling the two officers, “That’s not true, not at all.”

“Please, sir,” says the female officer. “We’ll get to you in a few moments.”

But this is stupid. Everything is ridiculous. They have the videos, and even if the audio is poor, there’s excellent software that can wring the words said by the people out of the video. Besides, Dominick wasn’t badly injured. Faces like to bleed, but the man was soon sitting up and talking, and he never lost consciousness.

The girl is the danger here. That much is obvious. For some reason they stuck her in the lobby with Kartar, sitting across from him and looking only at him, and whenever he foolishly looks her way, she smiles with an eerie expression.

Her name is Rhonda. The police checked and found that real name hiding behind some ludicrous Artemis label. Kartar can do the same trick and probably better, but he keeps his Everything inside the vial. This is one of those rare occasions when he has no desire to know more about another person.

“Who are you?” asks the smiling girl.

He drops his gaze, saying nothing.

“I call you Traveling Man, but I bet that’s not your name.”

She sits handcuffed to her chair, and she wears a drop-bracelet, of course. Two private security guards are sitting nearby, enjoying the adventure and their coffee.

“By the way,” says Rhonda, “I really liked that one line of yours.”

Kartar watches the worn carpeting, then the back of his left hand.

“‘Flowing unimpeded to the enlightenment.’ Did I get it right?”

“Yes.” God, did he actually respond to her?

“So, Traveling Man . . .” she begins.

Something here is funny. One guard laughs, which makes Kartar self-conscious. His irritation causes him to glance at the girl, who looks small and safe when she’s cuffed to her chair.

“. . . what brings you to Ohio?”

“The conference brought me,” he says.

“Yeah, but I can’t figure something out. Why did they put the conference here?”

“Because of the WOW! signal,” he says.

She says nothing, waiting for enlightenment.

Kartar can’t help but explain. “Back in 1977, astronomers in Ohio saw a radio signal from the constellation of Sagittarius. It was loud and narrow, and it moved in intriguing ways. So it might have been extraterrestrial. Maybe.”

He paused, and she waited.

So he said, “People have watched that part of the sky since, for short periods but with better radio telescopes. Only nothing has been heard. And maybe it was nothing. But the signal’s strength and frequency were very close to what we imagine finding, when we finally identify a genuine ET signal.”

She laughs loudly, apparently at him. “Yeah, I already know everything about the WOW!”

“You do?”

“I just wanted to know why Cincinnati. Did this convention get a deal on the hotel, or what?”

Both guards laugh.

“I don’t know why,” Kartar admits.

“I suppose you wouldn’t.” The girl is halfway pretty and older than Kartar first imagined, and she smiles at him, acting as if maybe she’s hoping for more than conversation.

“Ask me a question,” she says.

“Why are you so strong?”

“You’re smart; make a guess.”

“Adrenal implants,” he says. “Or neural enhancers for quick-twitch reactions. Or maybe you’ve grafted synthetic muscles onto what’s real.”

“Everything is real,” she says mysteriously.

“Each of those solutions has health dangers,” he says.

“How nice,” she says with a hopeful tone. “You’re worrying about me.”

Kartar looks at the carpet again. “No.”

Rhonda/Artemis shakes the handcuffs. “Don’t worry, Mr. Traveler. You’re way too old for my tastes.”

He wants to take solace from that, but can’t.

“Ask me something else,” she says.

“Why are you here?”

The young woman leans forward, making sure that she has his eyes. “I read a lot. You don’t believe it, but I know a lot about a lot. Life is inevitable and should be common in the universe, and if the sky isn’t jammed full of smart old aliens, then nothing about our universe makes any damned sense.”

Kartar finds himself nodding. “Actually, I disagree with you.”

“Sure you do.”

“The best evidence shows that life might be very common, but intelligence is a rare and often fragile result. The distance between us and our nearest neighbors is on the order of five thousand light-years.”

She shrugs, saying, “Now that sounds like crazy talk.”

He bristles. “But why are you at this conference? Do you have some business proposal, an investment that pays off when the next WOW! arrives?”

“You’re trying to make fun of me.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re right. You aren’t.” She sits back in the chair. “I’m here because aliens are common. They just damn well have to be. If I was one of them, and if I happened to be visiting the earth, this is exactly the sort of place I would visit. You know, just to see what the new dogs in the neighborhood are doing.”

He almost laughs. “You’re looking for aliens, you mean.”

“You aren’t?”

He does laugh, hard, glancing at the security guards. But the men seem to have lost all interest in the conversation.

“You don’t mean that,” Kartar says.

“Maybe not,” she responds. “Or maybe I thought you were an alien.”

“Me?”

“Tell me you aren’t.”

“I’m not from outer space, no.”

“And that’s got to bother you,” she says.

Kartar feels suddenly tired and very bored. The real police are reviewing the digitals and talking to each other. He can’t make out words but the tone has changed. Sitting back in his chair, he looks at the Everything riding his lapel, thinking of fifty tiny chores that might be accomplished in the next two minutes. And then the cuffs rattle, and Rhonda/Artemis dips her head, eyes fighting to meet his eyes.

“I know something else,” she says.

He stays silent.

“Something you don’t know but you should.”

“I don’t care.”

“You would, if you knew.”

“Leave me alone,” he says.

“Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to tell you,” she says.

He doesn’t say anything.

“Later,” she says.

“There is no ‘later,’” he says.

Laughing, the girl asks, “How can you know there won’t be?”

What Kartar knows is that this ugliness has to be over soon. Closing his eyes, he wishes hard for rescue, and that’s the moment when the police officers step out into the lobby.

But his joy evaporates in an instant.

“This is what we think happened,” says the woman officer. Then before explaining anything, she adds, “And this is what the victim wants in lieu of charging both of you with assault-and-battery.”

Dominick

His face hurts, and one eye keeps tearing, and several teeth seem to have migrated along the bottom jaw. But the pain isn’t important. The pain is bearable, and it’s sure to weaken with time. What matters is how this beating will affect his sleep habits. Is he going to have bad dreams? Night terrors? Or will he just lie awake for hours on end, alone in bed with his racing brain?

Dominick is curious about the aftereffects.

That is the best word: Curious.

The man knows depression and he knows mania, and his adult years have been spent managing the first when he isn’t riding the second. Not that he would admit this to anyone, but he’s wondering if today’s stress is going to pay dividends: feelings of vulnerability and mortality allowing him fresh perspectives in areas that he had never noticed before and should have cared about.

Seeing possible gain, he laughs to himself.

“This isn’t funny,” Kartar says.

But all of this is humorous. Obviously. Dominick nearly says as much, but when he looks across the borrowed office—looks at somebody’s two kids gliding along the squidskin wall—he decides on a different course. “I liked what you said about the tuataras,” he says. “That was a nice thought, making them into the local sea serpent.”

Kartar sits on a hard little sofa, warily staring at Dominick’s bloody face. “Okay,” he says. “Thank you.”

“Where did you steal that idea?” Dominick asks.

Kartar grimaces.

Dominick lets the quiet mature. Then when the moment feels right, he says, “A conversation. That’s what I want, and then I won’t insist on charges.”

“I didn’t hit you,” Kartar says, and not for the first time.

“But you had your people hit me.”

“They aren’t my people.”

“You nodded at them,” Dominick says. “The video shows it clearly.”

“I was glad for the help. I thought. But I didn’t know their names, and I certainly had no idea who, or what, that girl was.”

“You have an Everything.”

“So what?”

Dominick sits on an office chair pulled from behind the desk. Whoever owns those children in the wall is shorter than him, judging by the chair’s setting. But he doesn’t change anything, long legs stretched out into the middle of the room. “You have the world’s best facial recognition software. You can learn as much as you want about anybody, which means that you have a difficult—maybe impossible—task of proving that you’re ignorant about anyone.”

“Deeply unfair,” Kartar says.

“It’s the world we live in,” Dominick reminds him. “We all have the mind of God.”

Kartar sighs and crosses his arms in front of his chest.

“The tuatara,” says Dominick.

“There was a boy in Christchurch.”

“How old?”

Kartar frowns. “Does it matter?”

“I bet he was a bright middle-schooler.”

“Lucky guess,” says Kartar.

“Hardly. That’s the good age for boundless thinking.”

This meeting has rules: Half-an-hour of civil conversation and nobody gets to use his Everything. But that doesn’t keep Kartar from glancing at the machine on his lapel, presumably counting the minutes left in this unbearable sentence.

Twenty-seven minutes remain.

“Of course I knew you stole that tuatara idea,” Dominick says. “It was too fresh and original for you. You’re what I like to call a ‘harvester.’ You are a big, busy machine that rolls across a field, picking up the grains and fruits grown by others.”

“And what are you? A fruit tree?”

Unperturbed, Dominick shrugs his shoulders. “Who got you thinking about human bacteria on Mars?”

“Is that where we’re heading? Retracing my sources?”

“I hope not.”

Kartar leans forward. “What do you want?”

“You harvest ideas,” Dominick says again.

“I freely admit that.”

“Gather up other people’s crops.”

“And I stole one of your oranges, didn’t I?” Kartar glances into the lobby. The private guards are supposedly ready to jump in if these egos come to blows, but it’s impossible to tell which guard is closer to sleep. “I stole your best idea and ran with it as if it was my own. Isn’t that right?”

“You didn’t steal anything,” says Dominick. “I gave it to you, free and clear.”

“Well then. What’s wrong?”

“You don’t remember me.”

Kartar looks at the floor, then his Everything, and then into the lobby again. “I meet a huge number of people, practically every day.”

“On that day, you were twelve years old.”

Kartar acts as if he isn’t listening. But he seems to slowly piece together what should be a simple concept, and when nothing makes sense, he looks at the battered face, saying, “I still don’t know who you are.”

“My nephew was your classmate.”

“Oh, we’re talking about school days.”

“An honors science class,” Dominick says. “I was invited to talk about my work. I was thirty and you were sitting in the front row with your notebook open, ready to write down anything that struck you as interesting.”

The dimmest, frailest hint of recognition confuses his face.

“I was talking about memes and how ideas have lives of their own and how humans aren’t important except as carriers of memes that are retained by nature only if they’re valuable, and thrown away if they’re not.”

Kartar squints. “What’s your nephew’s name?”

“I won’t tell you.”

“I’ll find out after this,” he says.

“Certainly so,” Dominick says. “But this is my point: You were sitting up front, and I talked about ideas as being vivid organic beings, how they collect together to form communities, and some of these communities are strong and enduring, while others perish in a day or twenty years. You were the only student who was truly paying attention, which is why I remembered you. That and because your teacher got defensive when I talked about religion being a toxic set of memes that survive by relentlessly murdering their opponents.”

“Oh,” says Kartar. “Now I remember you.”

“And now do you see why I’m in a lousy mood? The linchpin of your life, and the idea came partly from me—maybe entirely from me—and like any pickpocket working the crowd, you don’t have a goddamn clue whose pocket you got the treasure from.”

Dominick feels angry all over again.

Yet Kartar acts impressed and maybe even happy, nodding as he lets his eyes dip, ignoring his companion’s mood.

“By the way,” says Dominick. “Walking around the conference today, attending the lectures and workshops, I had an insight. Something became obvious, something that should be very interesting to a person like you.”

Kartar leans forward, flashing a glorious smile.

“Yes?” he says.

“No, no,” says Dominick. “I’m going to savor this meme for myself.”

And without another sound, he pulls the car key from his pocket and leaves Kartar sitting with those two strange children.

Enlightenment

Sixteen years later, the one bioengineered tuatara is scheduled to be released into the open sea. The first invitation to this historic event is sent to the project’s author and initial champion, who also happens to be a Big Name who brought attention to what is a one hundred million dollar publicity stunt.

Kartar flies to New Zealand on the Maser Albatross. The subsonic flight is very green but very slow, and he doesn’t appreciate the long boost phases where the craft punches into the stratosphere, its wings/collection dishes gathering up enough juice for the next three hundred miles. But at least he has a supreme-class seating and time to work. Another ten thousand words of his memoir grow from his logic-thread, and he has productive conversations with various friends, half of them human, and the Everywhere woven into his skull gives him an assortment of articles and blogs and overheard conversations from the world and from orbit, each of which has to be studied with an expert eye to see what notions are ripe for the harvesting.

A three-hour wave-sleep takes his tired mind hostage—a late-middle-aged mind now—and then it is released again, back in working order.

Kartar is enjoying one of the revamped Stephen King classics during the descent into Auckland. He had already written and spoken extensively about the blessings to come from ending most copyrights. No artist should have a chokehold on his property, certainly not one lasting for decades. This particular version of The Shining was created by a robot and aimed at a robot audience. The faces from the original cast have been retained—appearance is another property that shouldn’t be fortified—and the author reworked the outdated text and rewrote the songs while pretty much playing hell with the plotline.

No, eighteen months was plenty of protection for intellectual property.

Eighteen months is certainly long enough for Kartar’s purposes, and those fools that push that barrier always learn that Kartar has endless tools, and he is willing to keep an exceptional team of legal software very busy.

Down goes the plane and a call from a very good friend finds him, and what is most promising are her opening words: “Is this line secure?”

Everything that Kartar does is wrapped in twenty cloaks of security.

“Of course this isn’t for release now,” she says.

“We’re talking about the Far Eye?”

“Maybe,” she said.

Which means, “Yes.”

“Sightings?” he asks.

“When I call again, you’ll have a one-hundred-second jump on the official channels. Just don’t make too much of your lead, okay?”

What does “too much” mean? “I promise to be good,” he says.

Far Eye is moving past Jupiter’s orbit, and after years of technical troubles and brilliant fixes, the array is gathering data in ways and in quantities never seen before, beyond the scope that anyone hoped to imagine.

“How many sightings?” Kartar asks.

She says, “I’m only talking about confirmed sightings.”

“Is it a thousand?”

She hesitates. Then she asks, “Does a thousand sound like a lot to you?”

“A thousand living worlds, Earth-like and otherwise? And each world showing traces of civilized life, of industrial life, or agriculture or terraforming, or whatever?” He laughs for many fine reasons, but mostly because this was going to be the best day in his life. “Yeah, a thousand civilizations in our wing of the galaxy does sound like a lot to me.”

“Not to me,” she says cryptically.

Kartar looks around the cabin. None of the other dozen passengers has a clue that everything is about to change.

“It’s more than a thousand,” he says.

“Make a guess.”

“Ten thousand.”

“Come on, boy. Get brave.”

“Okay. One hundred thousand worlds.”

She hesitates. Then with a careful tone, she says, “Remember, Kartar. What I’m talking about are confirmed sightings. Worlds and structures that Far Eye AIs have analyzed in detail, finding no fault with them at all.”

“Give me some help,” he says.

“Why not guess fifty million?”

“Is it?”

“And then multiply that number by one thousand.”

Kartar leans forward, waiting for his voice to return.

“And these are just the definite, undeniable sightings. Sun-washed planets, sunless rogues, terraformed bodies of every size. None are cloaked, which is why we can see them. But with few exceptions, each one is technologically advanced and very efficient with energy use. Fifty billion worlds and the only radiation leaking out of them is the drabbest trace of waste heat.”

“How close?” he manages.

“You mean to us?” she says. “Well, the nearest thousand are inside our Oort cloud. Little ones, each following its own trajectory.”

“Aliens,” he whispers.

“And those fifty billion are the obvious few,” she adds. “Far Eye can’t handle all of the candidates, but we’re guessing it’s in excess of six trillion.”

“Inside our galaxy.”

“Just rattling around inside our one little arm of the galaxy,” she says. “Which is amazing, and mortifying, and do you know what’s most astonishing? At least to me, a girl who likes to talk all day and all night?”

“What?” he asks.

“We have no evidence, none, that anybody is talking to anybody out there. Which makes you wonder if it isn’t worth it, chatting it up with your neighbors and all that. A lot of Big Lessons at play here, and I have no idea which one to pick.”

Once again, Kartar can’t find his old voice.

“Anyway,” she says, “I have to make a few more calls. I’ve got friends that deserve a thirty-second jump on the networks.”

The secure line closes.

Kartar remains pitched forward, staring at the carpet between his feet.

Maybe this is the enlightenment, he thinks. Life inevitably cloaks itself in blankets and a relentless silence.

For the first time in years, he finds himself dwelling on that crazy man and the crazier woman he met in Ohio. Both of them claimed some epiphany that they didn’t want to share with him. Was this it? That the sky is thick with aliens, but nobody talks because the gains don’t equal the costs?

What were the names of those two people?

But after a few moments, and for many small reasons, Kartar decides to put the question aside, focusing instead on this uninvited, mystifying enlightenment.

© 2012 Robert Reed

Robert Reed is the author of more than 200 short stories, which have been published in magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Daily SF, and Tor.com. Much of his short work has been collected in three volumes: The Dragons of Springplace, The Cuckoo’s Boys, and Eater-of-Bone and Other Novellas. Reed is a Hugo Award winner (and an eight-time nominee), and he has also been a finalist for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and John W. Campbell awards. His latest novel, The Well of Stars, is part of his Great Ship milieu, in which he is currently writing a new trilogy.

Nearly Departed
Pat Cadigan

“Three things,” I said, and held up a matching set of three fingers.

Nelson Nelson looked tolerantly amused. “Run ’em.”

“One—” I curled my index finger. “I don’t do empaths. Two—” I bent my ring finger. “I don’t get physical. Three—” I pointed the remaining finger at the old fox on the other side of the desk. “I don’t rob graves.”

The couch creaked as NN rolled over onto his back and folded one arm behind his head. “Is that all that’s bothering you? Kitta Wren hasn’t been buried.”

“I don’t do dead people. If God had meant me to pathosfind dead people, he wouldn’t have invented the Brain Police.”

A broad smile oozed over NN’s saggy features as he reached for a cigarette. He was smoking those lavender things again. They smelled like young girls. “What’s the matter, Allie? Are you scared of a dead person’s brain?”

“I’m scareder of some live ones I know. Fear isn’t the issue. I just have certain beliefs and this job you’re asking me to take goes against every one of them.”

“Such as?”

Sighing, I shifted position on my couch and scratched my forearm. The vulgar gold lamé upholstery NN was so enamored of was giving me a rash. You can dispute taste but you can’t stop it. “Such as, death is the end. The end means there is no more. Dead people should be allowed to rest in peace instead of having their brains plundered and looted for any last bit of—of treasure, like Egyptian tombs.”

“Eloquent. Really eloquent, Deadpan,” NN said after a moment. “You’re probably the most eloquent mindplayer this agency has ever employed. Someday you might talk yourself out of a job, but not this time.” He winked at me. “Actually, I respect your feelings. Those are good feelings, especially for someone who trades on the name Deadpan Allie.”

“Being deadpan doesn’t mean you don’t have feelings. You just don’t show them.”

“I personally don’t share them. I feel there’s a lot of validity in, say, going in and getting the last measures of unfinished music from a master composer who dropped dead at the harpsitron, or mining the brain of a gifted writer for the story that was unwritable in life. Postmortem art is highly regarded and a large number of artists, including Kitta Wren, signed postmortem art contracts. It’s a sort of life after death—the only one we know about for sure.”

I scratched my rash some more and didn’t say anything.

“Kitta Wren wanted a postmortem. It’s not grave robbing. If she hadn’t signed the contract, it would be different.”

“Kitta Wren was a five-star lunatic. She had a psychomimic’s license and when she wasn’t writing her poetry, she was bouncing off the walls.”

“Ah, but she was brilliant,” NN said dreamily. I blinked at him, astounded. I’d had no idea he liked poetry. “When it came to her work, she was totally in control. Somehow I always thought that control would bring her down. In a thousand years, I never would have guessed anyone would kill her.”

I wanted to tear my hair and rend my garment. “NN,” I said as calmly as I could, “I hate murder. I am not the Brain Police. If they want to find out who did her, let them send in one of their own to wander around in her mind.”

“Oh, they will,” Nelson Nelson said cheerfully. “Right after the postmortem.” A cloud of lavender smoke dissipated over my head as NN flipped his cigarette into the suckhole in the center of his desk. “The Brain Police can’t do anything until that’s taken care of. Otherwise whatever poetry is left in there could be fragmented and irretrievably lost.”

The rash had crept up past my elbow. I kept scratching. “There are mindplayers who postmortem for a living.”

“I’ll pardon the expression. Wren’s manager hired you. Come along, now, it’ll take you somewhere you’ve never traveled.”

“I’ve never been to the heart of a white dwarf star and I don’t see why I should go.”

NN exhaled with a noise that was almost a growl. “Do you want to work for me?”

“I’m thinking.”

He gave me that oozy smile again. “Deadpan, this is important. And you might learn something.” He raised up on one elbow. “Just give it a chance. If you can’t do it once you’re in, fine. But try it.”

I sat up, scrubbing my arm through my sleeve. “Don’t make a habit of signing me up for postmortems.”

My eyes popped out. I held them in my palms until I felt the connections to my optic nerves break and then lowered them gently into the bowl of solution. The agency’s hypersystem would have removed them for me, but I’ve always preferred doing that little chore myself.

I lay down on the slab and felt it move me head first into the system. Even blind, I could sense the vastness of it around me as it swallowed me down to my neck. It was the size of a small canyon, big enough to spend the rest of your life in just wandering around. All I wanted at the moment was some basic reality affixing and reassurance. If I was going to run barefoot through a dead lunatic’s mind, I needed all the reinforcement I could get. After an hour of letting the system eat my head, I almost felt ready.

I hadn’t been gassing Nelson Nelson as to how I felt about postmortems just to cover a corpse phobia. To me, you ought to be able to take something with you—or at least make sure it goes the same time you do—and if it’s your art, so be it. Hell, there were plenty of living artists with a lot to offer. Stripping a dead person’s mind for the last odds and ends seemed close to unspeakable.

I supposed the appeal of postmortem art was partly what Nelson Nelson had said—life after death. But there seemed to be more than a little thanatophilia at work. Art after death made me think of sirens on rocks, and I wasn’t the only one who heard them singing. Occasionally there’d be an item in the news-tube about some obscure holographer or composer—holographers and composers appeared to be particularly susceptible—found dead with a note instructing that an immediate postmortem be performed because the person had been convinced that the unreachable masterpiece he/she had been groping for successfully in life could be liberated only by the Big Bang of death.

So there’d be the requested postmortem and the mindplayer who hooked into the brain, which was all wired up and floating in stay-juice like a toy boat lost at sea, would come out not with a magnificent phoenix formed of the poor deader’s ashes, but with a few little squibs and scraps from half-completed thoughts that had turned in on themselves, swallowing their own tails for lack of substance, vortices that had gone nowhere and never would. Some people aren’t happy just with being alive. They have to be dead, too.

At least Kitta Wren hadn’t been one of those. The information Nelson Nelson had dumped into the data center in my apartment was freckled with little details, but rather sketchy taken all together. I punched her picture up on my screen and sided it with her bio.

She’d been a very ordinary woman, squarish in the face, with a high forehead and medium brown untreated hair. Her only physical affectation had been her eyes. Since the advent of biogems, everyone had at least a semi-precious stare. Jade and star sapphires had always been popular choices and moonstones proliferated among entertainers of the more mediocre stripe. I hadn’t seen very many people with my own preference for the shifting brown of cat’s-eye and it takes a certain coloring to carry off diamonds effectively, but Kitta Wren had gotten herself something I’d never seen before.

Her eyes seemed to be shattered blue glass, as if someone had deliberately smashed the gems before putting them in. Her pupils were spiderwebbed with white cracks. I enlarged them for detail and paused, staring at them. I was wrong. Her eyes weren’t spiderwebbed with cracks—they were spiderwebbed with spiderwebs, thickened as if coated with dew or frost. “Come into my lunatic parlor,” I muttered, wondering if the webs had been a manifestation of her psychosis, or some kink she’d always wanted to indulge, or if there was any way of separating her own ideas from her psychosis.

She’d gotten her psychomimic’s license at nineteen and spent the five years after that almost continuously crazy, with a few months off here and there for extended periods of writing. Later she had begun limiting her psychotic times to summers while she worked on a cycle of poetry. The result, a long series called Crazy Summer had given Wren her first major recognition. From there, she’d gone to being crazy only at night, then only during the day, and once she’d spent six months orbiting the moon in high mania.

When she died, which had been—I punched for the date—just the day before, she’d been a week into a general schizophrenia no one seemed to know anything about. Cause of death—I blanched a little—disembowelment. There was a photograph of her office where she’d gotten it. She’d been strong all the way to the end, going clear across the room before collapsing. Dead just under an hour when her manager had found her. Not too bad—five hours was about the limit for an untreated brain. After that, it’s not worth trying to hook in with it. No suspects and no murder weapon; the Brain Police were holding off their investigation of her brain until after the postmortem was performed. Standard procedure—their technique tended to wipe a mind clean.

Under Miscellaneous, I found a small picture of Wren’s manager, a gold-skinned androgyne named Phylp with fan-shaped eyebrows. The request for a pathosfinder was entered as well. It seemed Phylp wanted someone who wouldn’t treat her like just another deader. Sounded to me as if Phylp were hoping Wren hadn’t left behind as little as he/she suspected.

A morgue is a morgue is a morgue. They can paint the walls with aggressively cheerful primary colors and splashy bold graphics, but it’s still a holding place for the dead until they can be parted out to organ banks for burial in the living. Not that I would have cared normally, but my viewpoint was skewed. The relentless pleasance of the room I sat in seemed only grotesque.

The other two people in the room didn’t see it that way. One had introduced himself as Matt Sabian, postmortem supervisor. The other was unmistakably Phylp. He/she overshadowed Sabian despite the latter’s silver hair, garnet eyes, and polished skin. Phylp was the flashiest androgyne I’d ever seen—most of them preferred no higher an appearance profile than anyone else, but Phylp handled major talent. It was probably advantageous to have such a memorable manager. If anyone could remember the talent after seeing the manager, the talent must be pretty major. Show biz.

“I understand this is your first dead client,” Sabian was saying. The absurdity of the statement made me want to laugh, but they don’t call me Deadpan Allie and lie.

“Up till now, I’ve worked only with living minds, yes.” I sneaked a glance at Phylp, who was more arranged in a chair than seated in it.

“You shouldn’t have any trouble,” Sabian said. His voice had an odd hint of disappointment. “Your own mind will have to provide a good deal of visualization, except for her memories and the like, so I hope you’re not given to bizarre symbolism. Other than that, everything in a living mind is present in a dead one. Except life, of course. We leave this world as we come into it—without thoughts, personality, memories, talent. When life fades, it leaves these things behind, just like any other material item we have. You’ll have to actively stimulate the mind to obtain any of them. It can’t offer you anything voluntarily. It takes life to do that.” He pulled his left ankle up onto his right knee and played with the elastic cuff of his pants. “It’ll be very much like hooking into a computer program of Kitta Wren’s identity, actually.”

I sat up a little straighter. “But it’s not really that simple, is it?”

Sabian opened his mouth to answer but Phylp spoke up for the first time. “That’s why I wanted a pathosfinder for her.”

“Pardon?” I asked.

“Someone who would understand that it’s not just a matter of searching out data.” The throatiness I had momentarily taken for emotion was Phylp’s normal speaking voice. “I want whatever it is that comes out to come out sounding alive. Because she was alive when she created it.”

Sabian pointedly did not look at Phylp, who returned the favor. It clicked for me then. Sabian, postmortem supervisor. If Phylp hadn’t insisted on hiring a pathosfinder, Sabian would have been doing this job. A nice sweet plum of a job, too, doing a postmortem on someone of Kitta Wren’s stature. I did a sight reading of his Emotional Index, but I couldn’t tell who he was angrier at, me or Phylp. I supposed I could understand how he felt, but it was still extra stress I didn’t need.

“How well did you know Kitta Wren?” I asked Phylp.

“Not at all. I managed her, but she was a stranger to me.”

That was a lot of help. “What about family?”

“Only two brothers. One is at the South Pole. The other is under the Indian Ocean in a religious trance.”

“Do you know anything about her early life?”

Phylp almost looked sheepish. “Only that her parents gave the children to the state and vanished.” He/she spread his/her hands gracefully. “That’s all anyone knows. In the five years I’ve handled her, she never showed the slightest inclination of opening up to me or anyone else. It was a major disclosure if she told me she liked her contracts.”

“That sort of self-isolation isn’t exactly normal behavior for a poet, is it?”

“Nothing about her behavior was normal.” Phylp frowned at me. “She was crazy. All the time she was crazy, and when she wasn’t, she wanted to be. God knows what she got out of it. I don’t.”

Her poetry, apparently. I turned my attention back to Sabian. “What about the psychotic dead mind? Is the psychosis still operable?”

“Very much, though in a strictly mechanical way. And it probably doesn’t know it’s dead.”

I hesitated. “Which do you mean—the psychosis or the mind?”

“Both, I would think.”

“How does a mind not know it’s dead?”

Sabian’s chin lifted defensively. “How does yours know it’s alive?” I didn’t answer. “It’s the same question, really.” Not the way I saw it, but I let him go on. “Minds contain information, but it takes the presence of life for it to know anything. What does a computer program know?” The polished skin stretched in a tight, triumphant smile, as if he’d given me a glimpse of Big Truth.

“And where is the brain?” I asked after a moment.

“Here.” Sabian pointed his toe like a dancer and pressed a panel in the floor. A section of the far wall slid back and there it was. What had waited behind Kitta Wren’s spiderwebs in life now hung in a tall, clear canister of stay-juice, trailing wires like the streamers on a Portuguese man-of-war. The wires went down through the bottom of the canister to the maintenance box, which kept a minimum number of neurons firing. Two more wires leading from the visual center were coiled on top of the canister.

“We’re still within the optimum time to go in. In another day, the neurons will begin to cease firing efficiently and after that deterioration will be rapid. I hope you’ll be able to get everything on the first try.”

I hoped so, too.

They left me alone so I could set up my portable system. Assembling the three large components and five smaller ones was a kind of busy work. There are comparable systems that need no assembly, but there’s a lot to be said for the ritual of preparation as relaxation therapy. I never needed it more than I did just then.

I worked in silence, rolling the system over to the brain and then fitting the pieces together until I had the familiar unbalanced-looking but actually quite stable quasi-cubist structure. Nothing showed in the way of circuits, wires, or guts of any kind. Good equipment, NN was fond of saying, doesn’t have to show its guts.

Pulling out the drawer with the connections and thermal tank for my eyes, I paused. I would have hooked a living client into a relaxation exercise such as making colors, building landscapes, or running mazes, but what could I do with a dead one? It couldn’t get much more relaxed. Or could it? I wouldn’t have thought. On the other hand, I wanted it functioning a little more than minimally when I made contact.

In the end I decided on some abstract moving visuals since I would be connecting directly with the visual center anyway. I dragged over one of the chairs and made myself comfortable.

Despite the apprehension I’d felt about the job from the beginning, something like professional reflex took over. It didn’t take any longer than usual to calm myself into a smooth, alert state of receptivity. I had positioned the thermal tank on the maintenance box next to the canister, where I could reach it easily. When I was absolutely sure of its location, I thumbed my eyes out and let them down into the solution. It never ceased to amaze me how well I could function blind, but most mindplayers had superior short-term eidetic memory.

I had only to hold the system connections under my eyelids; they crept in and found their way to my optic nerves by themselves. After a few moments, awareness of my body faded and I was through the system and in Kitta Wren’s mind.

Every mind is different. Every mind is the same. Those are the first two laws of mindplay. Recognition in an unfamiliar land always came as a surprise to me no matter how often I met clients mind-to-mind. I was even more surprised to find that the initial impressions and sensations of contact with Kitta Wren’s mind were not dissimilar to those I associated with living minds.

Normally I would have made my presence felt gradually so as not to startle my client by bursting in like an invader. But this client couldn’t know that trauma and I was coming directly into the visual center instead of the less abrupt route through the optic nerve. After the usual slight disorientation of passing through the barriers of personality and identity, I found myself in the thick of random pictures and arbitrary memories. Around me, the mind seemed to tense as it felt the addition of something new and unpredictable. Then it ground on as before, accepting me as just another thought.

The abstract visuals program was still running and I was awash in lazy spiral rainbows and harlequin rivers. I set it for gradual fade-out. The program’s wane uncovered more of the brain’s own pictures, some of them mundane objects remembered for no reason, some of them vignettes from Kitta Wren’s life. I let them swirl around while I decided on the best way to go about the postmortem. Hitch a ride on a memory? Follow a random thought? Get hold of some false starts or blind alleys and reconstruct them?

I had caught a false start when the mind tried to think me. There was almost no warning. The false start was in my grasp and I was receiving multiple over- and undertones accompanied by the memory of its creation and the frustration Kitta Wren had felt before finally giving up on it. A walk in the rain in the middle of the night during late summer. Taste of rain dissolving on lips and tongue and the first line. Do I drink the rain or does the rain drink me . . . drink? Think? I was searching it for possible salvage when the mind clamped down on me and Kitta Wren’s old, unfinished poem together.

It thought the poem piece by piece, starting with the memory. It remembered the night and then the season (why not the season and then the night, I wondered), and then moisture, pausing to associate it with varieties of wetness. I was overwhelmed by the smell of the ocean, followed by a brief image of a coffin covered with barnacles lying on the sea bottom. The taste of rain returned more strongly, eradicating the picture of the coffin (my brother, that’s all) but not quite managing to suppress a fleeting thought of snow. Do I drink the rain . . . I drink the rain and the rain drinks me . . . drinking the rain I am drunk and am drunk by drunken rain . . . The mind niggled and gnawed out each variation from the original line (what was it about rain that fascinated poets, anyway?). When it was through, I was next.

I made a mask of my face and then took it off. The mind reached down for me in its purely mechanical probing and I threw my face into its processes. Traveling at the speed of thought, my face was everywhere as the mind tried to find the correct association for it. Curiously, I saw it materialize on the smooth, blank surface of a writing slate before I slipped through a half-remembered dream—images of cold stone carvings on a cathedral wall and a quick impression of I should write about a mad cathedral—and found myself down in Kitta Wren’s back burner.

There isn’t a mind in the world that doesn’t have a back burner and it was usually a lot more difficult to get a client to open it up. Sometimes the incomplete puzzlements and notions stewing there were capable of growing into full-fledged ideas; other times they changed into false starts or shrank away into un-existence. Kitta Wren’s back burner was so full of images that some of them were teetering half-dissolved on the edge of forgotten, as if she had deliberately pushed every idea that occurred to her to the back of her mind and then tried to forget all of them. Not the most productive way to work. I propelled myself through them to see what I might be able to salvage, which, I thought, would yield more results than looking at material she’d given up on. I was learning.

It was like holo-collage, the self-indulgent beginner’s exercise for holographers who aspired to feature-length work, with her inner voice fading in and out where she had found words to go with the pictures. In quick turn I was looking up from the bottom of a deep, narrow hole at a circle of innocent blue sky, staring across the surface of a bed at eye level, watching two people, their faces in shadow, touch hands and listening to the indistinct murmur of their low, womanly voices (each was Wren). I was caught in a storm in the desert with rare rain beating straight down (there was that rain again, she seemed to return to it over and over), observing a street scene populated only by machines with my cheek pressed against the pavement, tasting an empty cup and pretending there was something in it. I went back and reviewed that last one to see where she’d gotten it.

Something from nothing, Kitta Wren’s intelligent inner voice said. Something from nothing. I saw a chrysanthemum in the bottom of the cup; it metamorphosed from live to painted on. The center of the flower was an eye. Something from nothing. I fill me with something from nothing.

I had almost focused on what she had meant to taste in the cup when I began to get the feeling I wasn’t alone. Which was absurd—even she wasn’t there anymore. I turned my attention from the cup and waited. Possibly what I had felt was the mind reaching out for me again. Lowering my energy level as much as possible, I moved in among the jumble of unfinished ideas and waited. Rain punched dents in the sand. The sideways view of the street shimmered in the soggy desert sky like a mirage.

The mind spasmed. I had given it a new combination of thoughts to think by the way I had juxtaposed her old fragments. It fixed on me just as the madness hit.

That was what I had felt approaching, her psychosis, and it struck like a concentrated, highly localized storm. I thought my perception of it had been colored by my exposure to the desert scene, but it remained stormlike even after the mind separated me from its own familiar concepts, and I realized the nature of what Kitta Wren had done to herself.

Had she still been alive, I would have been witnessing a localized psychotic episode, a variety of seizure meant to produce not a convulsion but an altered state of consciousness. Except there was no consciousness. The seizure tore into her ideas and images and they flew up, dropped, rose again and fell flat with no one to pick them up and use them. The rest of the mind seemed to come to a standstill while the storm raged on. She’d been hoping for a literal brainstorm, a creative madness that would tear through her mind, stirring her thoughts into new and better patterns, giving her the stimulation she had refused to seek outside of herself. The mind seemed to shimmer and its perception of me grew vague. I slipped away down to an area of learned reflexes and automatic behavior to wait things out. As soon as the seizure had passed, I would go back, collect her ideas, memorize them and get out. Phylp had been wrong. I would have to treat this strictly as a data retrieval operation, I couldn’t deal with the mind as if it were living.

Reaching for a cigarette with only a dim awareness of the act I/she felt the first pain. I/she looked down at the slate on the desk and the stylus in my/her hand. It gleamed like a knife. (Memory run; it was a go; humans keep memories packrat style, who would have thought this one would be in Habits and Mannerisms?) But it couldn’t cut away the blankness of the slate to reveal the words that should have been there. Stuck in my/her brain.

Then I was past the memory pocket and the mind had me again. Tropism. I should have known. Minds were meant to live and be conscious. Except there was no consciousness but mine. And if mine was there, then the mind must be alive.

Alive. It pulled at me and I passed through the psychosis like a kite in a high wind. The madness clutched at me, searching for a way in almost as if it were a separate, living intelligence as alien as I was. I tasted anger and spat it out; it came back to me distorted, a sea of strange faces registering disappointment, confusion, and hate. Kitta Wren’s view of the world, vinegar laced with poison. The mind dragged me onward and I went, trailing the madness and the memory and the madness of the memory through the fireworks display of her emotional life.

Something from nothing. I looked to see who she was speaking to but there was no one. Just an affirmation. Give me nothing, I take nothing. Offer me nothing; thank you. His eye may be on the sparrow but the Wren looks out for herself. She had worked hard for her unhappiness and her mind showed her efforts to me as though they were trophies and prizes. A coffin under the Indian Ocean, something she’d never seen, an image invented and embellished for her own meditation. A silhouette in a blizzard at the bottom of the world. Empty pedestals labeled Mother and Father and an arena of thick, sweaty faces demanding a show, their greedy voices orchestrated by a golden-skinned androgyne. Give them what they want. Something from nothing. Give me nothing. You take something.

In her office, she faced the invisible, hungry multitude. Her mind tried to push me back into the memory but I clamped down and kept out of her perspective. The seizure had leaked into her visual center and the slate on the desk swelled to enormous size. She backed away from it, hallucinating patterns on the slate. Faces again. Give them what they want.

The pain doubled her over. She straightened up slowly, both hands on her belly. There was a dark stain on the stretchy material of the secondskins, just below navel level. Something from nothing. Give them what they want. Her fingers gripped the cloth. Psychotics frequently displayed extraordinary physical strength. And then there were those with a touch of telekinesis, unusable until a moment of crisis. It didn’t matter if the crisis took the form of a hallucination brought on by an anxiety attack.

Her hands fell away. She didn’t explode, or convulse, or even scream. She simply opened up and thirty years of misery poured out.

The memory went black, along with everything else. Then the mind stirred itself again and wrapped around me. Kitta Wren may have died, but her mind wanted life. Any life. Mine would do just fine.

Listen, she said. The memory was so worn only her words remained. All they want is the show. Give them what they want, but never ask anything of them. Something from nothing. The Wren looks out for herself.

I pulled back, preparing to withdraw. The mind flexed and the feel of it was almost plaintive now. Without warning I was face to face with the image of Kitta Wren as she had been, spiderwebs glistening. They still looked like shattered gems at first glance and they always would. I concentrated on that thought, sending it toward the image in steady waves. After some timeless interval, new lines appeared in the webs, running like fissures. The mind fought, trying to maintain solidity, but I was right. The cracks crept over her face slowly. I had to strain to keep them going, but they went, dividing her forehead into myriad little territories, fragmenting her cheeks, sundering her mouth. The image shuddered, almost held, and then just came apart, every piece sailing away from every other piece. When they were all gone, I withdrew without difficulty.

The first thing I saw after I put my eyes back in was the brain in the canister. The stay-juice looked milky now, a sign of imminent decay. Without really thinking about it, I leaned forward and shut the maintenance box off.

Nelson Nelson held up an official-looking chip-card. “This is a lawsuit.”

I nodded. He put the card down on his desk and picked up another one.

“And this is a lawsuit.”

I had my own card and I held it up. “And this is a countersuit. In case anyone actually has the nerve to go to court.”

NN looked tired. “Everything’s already being settled out of court. The agency took your side of course. No one can say I don’t back my people, isn’t it so?”

It was so. But I could tell by the way that puckered old mouth was twitching that he’d probably thought about filing against me himself for taking it upon myself to shut off the maintenance box. If the morgue laboratory had not come out and said that the composition of the stay-juice had indicated degeneration beyond the point where the mind could be re-entered, I would most likely have been signing my next thirty years of salary over to Nelson Nelson.

“Why’d you do it, Deadpan? What got into you?”

“She was dead. And nothing at all got into me.”

“Sabian says the brain couldn’t have deteriorated so quickly between the time you went in and the time you came out. Could it?”

I didn’t attempt an answer right away. The brain had been a lot deader when I came out than it had been when I’d gone in. I kept thinking in the back of my mind that I had something to do with it even though I couldn’t have proved it one way or the other. Was there telekinesis after death as well as art? I didn’t know and didn’t want to know.

“Maybe the solution was defective,” I said after a bit. “Or hadn’t been changed often enough.” That was the argument in my countersuit anyway, that Sabian had allowed me to hook into an unstabilized brain, which caused me to act in an irresponsible manner by shutting my client off instead of calling for him so he could do it. Sabian was just bitched because it meant he couldn’t enter the mind after I was through to do his own little postmortem, figuring he could sell Phylp all the stuff I’d missed. He wasn’t gassing me. Nobody filed a lawsuit over a protocol violation.

NN shrugged. “Phylp’s charge is more serious.”

“Seriouser and seriouser. It’ll never hold up. He/she got all the postmortem fragments I could find. I had them all memorized. I did my job. It’s not my fault he/she thinks none of them were worth the effort. And he/she can’t sue me for the wrongful death of someone already dead.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, Allie.”

“But that’s what it amounts to. He/she’s charging that before I broke contact—”

“Prematurely broke contact.”

“—I dissolved her Self and killed her a second time, compounding that by turning off the box.”

“That’s the way it looks in the transcript of your report.”

“That’s the way it was.”

I thought Nelson Nelson was going to choke. I sat up, rubbing the small of my back with both hands.

“Just between you and me, NN, yes. That’s exactly what I did.”

He reached down and fiddled with something on the side of the desk facing him. Of course; he’d been recording. He was always recording. This one would have to be doctored.

“You know how a dead body will twitch when you send a current through it? A dead mind’ll do the same. It takes more than current, but it’s a good comparison. They had the neurons firing so well, it forgot it was supposed to be dead, and it tried to use me to come back.”

“Could it have?”

“I don’t know. It didn’t work. I killed it.”

“But what do you think?”

I sighed. “Possibly I might have ended up incorporating elements of her personality and some of her thoughts and memories. Then you’d have had to have me dry-cleaned to get rid of her.”

NN raised his invisible eyebrows. “Now there’s an interesting situation.”

“Not for me. I wouldn’t want any of that woman in me.”

“I mean in terms of the legal definition of existence. If such a thing had happened and the agency did have you dry-cleaned, would we, in fact, have been killing her all over again?”

I glared at him. “No. She was already dead.”

“But if she returned to life in you—well, never mind, Allie. It’s just an intellectual exercise at this point.” He waved the subject away. “All this aside, tell me. Did you learn something?”

From a bitter woman who had literally torn herself apart? “I learned she shouldn’t have been buying psychoses. She was already fogged in.”

“No, now really, Allie. Wasn’t there anything in there at all—some insight, or a vision beyond—ah, any final knowledge of any kind?”

I lit a cigarette by way of stalling. How old was Nelson Nelson anyway? And how old was he expecting to get? I wanted to tell him that if there was an answer—or an Answer—it wouldn’t have been in a dead mind because you couldn’t ask the right questions in there. If you don’t know now, you can’t know then. Instead, I lay down on the couch again and blew smoke at the ceiling. “Life’s a bitch. Then you die.”

I could almost hear NN’s mouth drop. There was a long, thick moment of silence and then he began to laugh. “That’s a good one, Deadpan,” he said finally, wiping his eyes. “You almost had me there.”

I’d almost been there myself, but I just grinned as if he had caught me out. For his own sake, I hoped he always thought it was funny. Just to be on the safe side, I put myself in for dry-cleaning as soon as the lawsuits were settled. Just to be sure.

© 1983 by Pat Cadigan.

Originally published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Pat Cadigan sold her first professional science fiction story in 1980; her success as an author encouraged her to become a full-time writer in 1987. She emigrated to England with her son in 1996. She is the author of fifteen books, including two nonfiction books on the making of Lost in Space and The Mummy, a young adult novel, and the two Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novels Synners and Fools. Pat lives in gritty, urban North London with the Original Chris Fowler, her musician son Robert Fenner, and Miss Kitty Calgary, Queen of the Cats. She can be found on Facebook and Google+, and tweets on Twitter as @cadigan.

Art of War
Nancy Kress

“Return fire!” the colonel ordered, bleeding on the deck of her ship, ferocity raging in her nonetheless controlled voice.

The young and untried officer of the deck cried, “It won’t do any good, there’s too many—”

“I said fire, Goddammit!”

“Fire at will!” the OD ordered the gun bay, and then closed his eyes against the coming barrage, as well as against the sight of the exec’s mangled corpse. Only minutes left to them, only seconds . . .

A brilliant light blossomed on every screen, a blinding light, filling the room. Crewmen, those still standing on the battered and limping ship, threw up their arms to shield their eyes. And when the light finally faded, the enemy base was gone. Annihilated as if it had never existed.

“The base . . . it . . . how did you do that, ma’am?” the OD asked, dazed.

“Search for survivors,” the colonel ordered, just before she passed out from wounds that would have killed a lesser soldier, and all soldiers were lesser than she . . .

No, of course it didn’t happen that way. That’s from the holo version, available by ansible throughout the Human galaxy forty-eight hours after the Victory of 149-Delta. Author unknown, but the veteran actress Shimira Coltrane played the colonel (now, of course, a general). Shimira’s brilliant green eyes were very effective, although not accurate. General Anson had deflected a large meteor to crash into the enemy base, destroying a major Teli weapons store and much of the Teli civilization on the entire planet. It was an important Human victory in the war, and at that point we needed it.

What happened next was never made into a holo. In fact, it was a minor incident in a minor corner of the Human-Teli war. But no corner of a war is minor to the soldiers fighting there, and even a small incident can have enormous repercussions. I know. I will be paying for what happened on 149-Delta for whatever is left of my life.

This is not philosophical maundering nor constitutional gloom. It is mathematical fact.

Dalo and I were just settling into our quarters on the Scheherezade when the general arrived, unannounced and in person. Crates of personal gear sat on the floor of our tiny sitting room, where Dalo would spend most of her time while I was downside. Neither of us wanted to be here. I’d put in for a posting to Terra, which neither of us had ever visited, and we were excited about the chance to see, at long last, the Sistine Chapel. So much Terran art has been lost in the original, but the Sistine is still there, and we both longed to gaze up at that sublime ceiling. And then I had been posted to 149-Delta.

Dalo was kneeling over a box of mutomati as the cabin door opened and an aide announced, “General Anson to see Captain Porter, ten-hut!”

I sprang into a salute, wondering how far I could go before she recognized it as parody.

She came in, resplendent in full-dress uniform glistening with medals, flanked by two more aides, which badly crowded the cabin. Dalo, calm as always, stood and dusted mutomati powder off her palms. The general stared at me bleakly. Her eyes were shit brown. “At ease, soldier.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Welcome, ma’am.”

“Thank you. And this is . . .”

“My wife, Dalomanimarito.”

“Your wife.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“They didn’t tell me you were married.”

“Yes, ma’am.” To a civilian, obviously. Not only that, a civilian who looked . . . I don’t know why I did it. Well, yes, I do. I said, “My wife is half Teli.”

And for a long moment she actually looked uncertain. Yes, Dalo has the same squat body and light coat of hair as the Teli. She is genemod for her native planet, a cold and high-gravity world, which is also what Tel is. But surely a general should know that interspecies breeding is impossible—especially that interspecies breeding? Dalo is as human as I.

The general’s eyes grew cold. Colder. “I don’t appreciate that sort of humor, captain.”

“No, ma’am.”

“I’m here to give you your orders. Tomorrow at oh five hundred hours your shuttle leaves for downside. You will be based in a central Teli structure that contains a large stockpile of stolen Human artifacts. I have assigned you three soldiers to crate and transport upside anything that you think has value. You will determine which objects meet that description and, if possible, where they were stolen from. You will attach to each object a full statement with your reasons, including any applicable identification programs—you have your software with you?”

“Of course, ma’am.”

“A C-112 near-AI will be placed at your disposal. That’s all.”

“Ten-hut!” bawled one of the aides. But by the time I had gotten my arm into a salute, she was gone.

“Jon,” Dalo said gently. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yes. I did. Did you see the horror on the aides’ faces when I said you were half-Teli?”

She turned away. Suddenly frightened, I caught her arm. “Dear heart—you knew I was joking? I didn’t offend you?”

“Of course not.” She nestled in my arms, affectionate and gentle as always. Still, there is a diamond-hard core under all that sweetness. The general had clearly never heard of her before, but Dalo is one of the best mutomati artists of her generation. Her art has moved me to tears.

“I’m not offended, Jon, but I do want you to be more careful. You were baiting General Anson.”

“I won’t have to see her while I’m on assignment here. Generals don’t bother with lowly captains.”

“Still—”

“I hate the bitch, Dalo.”

“Yes. Still, be more circumspect. Even be more pleasant. I know what history lies between you two but nonetheless she is—”

“Don’t say it!”

“—after all, your mother.”

The evidence of the meteor impact was visible long before the shuttle landed. The impactor had been fifty meters in diameter, weighing roughly 60,000 tons, composed mostly of iron. If it had been stone, the damage wouldn’t have been nearly so extensive. The main base of the Teli military colony had been vaporized instantly. Subsequent shockwaves and airblasts had produced firestorms that raged for days and devastated virtually the entire coast of 149-Delta’s one small continent. Now, a month later, we flew above kilometer after kilometer of destruction.

General Anson had calculated when her deflected meteor would hit and had timed her approach to take advantage of that knowledge. Some minor miscalculation had led to an initial attack on her ship, but before the attack could gain force, the meteor had struck. Why hadn’t the Teli known that it was coming? Their military tech was as good as ours, and they’d colonized 149-Delta for a long time. Surely they did basic space surveys that tracked both the original meteor trajectory and Anson’s changes? No one knew why they had not counter-deflected, or at least evacuated. But, then, there was so much we didn’t know about the Teli.

The shuttle left the blackened coast behind and flew toward the mountains, skimming above acres of cultivated land. The crops, I knew, were rotting. Teli did not allow themselves to be taken prisoner, not ever, under any circumstances. As Human forces had forced their way into successive areas of the continent, the agricultural colony, deprived of its one city, had simply committed suicide. The only Teli left on 168-Beta occupied those areas that United Space Forces had not yet reached.

That didn’t include the Citadel.

“Here we are, Captain,” the pilot said, as soldiers advanced to meet the shuttle. “May I ask a question, sir?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Is it true this is where the Teli put all that art they stole from humans?”

“Supposed to be true.” If it wasn’t, I had no business here.

“And you’re a . . . an art historian?”

“I am. The military has some strange nooks and crannies.”

He ignored this. “And is it true that the Taj Mahal is here?”

I stared at him. The Teli looted the art of Terran colonies whenever they could, and no one knew why. It was logical that rumors would run riot about that. Still . . . “Lieutenant, the Taj Mahal was a building. A huge one, and on Terra. It was destroyed in the twenty-first century Food Riots, not by the Teli. They’ve never reached Terra.”

“Oh,” he said, clearly disappointed. “I heard the Taj was a sort of holo of all these exotic sex positions.”

“No.”

“Oh, well.” He sighed deeply. “Good luck, Captain.”

“Thank you.”

The Citadel—our Human name for it, of course—turned out to be the entrance into a mountain. Presumably the Teli had excavated bunkers in the solid rock, but you couldn’t tell that from the outside. A veteran NCO met me at the guard station. “Captain Porter? I’m Sergeant Lu, head of your assignment detail. Can I take these bags, sir?”

“Hello, Sergeant.” He was ruddy, spit-and-polish military, with an uneducated accent—obviously my “detail” was not going to consist of any other scholars. They were there to do grunt work. But Lu looked amiable and willing, and I relaxed slightly. He led me to my quarters, a trapezoid-shaped, low-ceilinged room with elaborately etched stone walls and no contents except a human bed, chest, table, and chair.

Immediately I examined the walls, the usual dense montage of Teli symbols that were curiously evocative even though we didn’t understand their meanings. They looked hand-made, and recent. “What was this room before we arrived?”

Lu shrugged. “Don’t know what any of these rooms were to the tellies, sir. We cleaned ’em all out and vapped everything. Might have been booby-trapped, you know.”

“How do we know the whole Citadel isn’t booby-trapped?”

“We don’t, sir.”

I liked his unpretentious fatalism. “Let’s leave this gear here for now—I’d like to see the vaults. And call me Jon. What’s your first name, Sergeant?”

“Ruhan. Sir.” But there was no rebuke in his tone.

The four vaults were nothing like I had imagined.

Art, even stolen art—maybe especially stolen art—is usually handled with care. After all, trouble and resources have been expended to obtain it, and it is considered valuable. This was clearly not the case with the art stolen by the Teli. Each vault was a huge natural cave, with rough stone walls, stalactites, water dripping from the ceiling, fungi growing on the walls. And except for a small area in the front where the AI console and a Navy-issue table stood under a protective canopy, the enormous cavern was jammed with huge, toppling, six-and-seven-layer-deep piles of . . . stuff.

Dazed, I stared at the closest edge of that enormous junkyard. A torn plastic bag bearing some corporate logo. A broken bathtub painted in swirling greens. A child’s bloody shoe. Some broken goblets of titanium, which was almost impossible to break. A hand-embroidered shirt from 78-Alpha, where such handwork is a folk art. A cheap set of plastic dishes decorated with blurry prints of dogs. A child’s finger painting. What looked like a Terran prehistoric fertility figure. And, still in its original frame and leaning crazily against an obsolete music cube, Philip Langstrom’s priceless abstract “Ascent of Justice,” which had been looted from 46-Gamma six years ago in a surprise Teli raid. Water spots had rotted one corner of the canvas.

“Kind of takes your breath away, don’t it?” Lu said. “What a bunch of rubbish. Look at that picture in the front there, sir—can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be. You want me to start vapping things?”

I closed my eyes, feeling the seizure coming, the going under. I breathed deeply. Went through the mental cleansing that my serene Dalo had taught me, kai lanu kai lanu breathe . . .

“Sir? Captain Porter?”

“I’m fine,” I said. I had control again. “We’re not vapping anything, Lu. We’re here to study all of it, not just rescue some of it. Do you understand?”

“Whatever you say, sir,” he said, clearly understanding nothing.

But then, neither did I. All at once my task seemed impossible, overwhelming. “Ascent of Justice” and a broken bathtub and a bloody shoe. What in hell had the Teli considered art?

Kai lanu kai lanu breathe . . .

The first time I went under, there had been no Dalo to help me. I’d been ten years old and about to be shipped out to Young Soldiers’ Camp on Aires, the first moon of 43-Beta. Children in their little uniforms had been laughing and shoving as they boarded the shuttle, and all at once I was on the ground, gasping for breath, tears pouring down my face.

“What’s wrong with him?” my mother said. “Medic!”

“Jon! Jon!” Daddy said, trying to hold me. “Oh gods, Jon!”

The medic rushed over, slapped on a patch that didn’t work, and then I remember nothing except the certainty that I was going to die. I knew it right up until the moment I could breathe again. The shuttle had left, the medic was packing up his gear without looking at my parents, and my father’s arms held me gently.

My mother stared at me with contempt. “You little coward,” she said. They were the last words she spoke to me for an entire year.

“Why the Space Navy?” Dalo would eventually ask me, in sincere confusion. “After all the other seizures . . . the way she treated you each time . . . Jon, you could have taught art at a university, written scholarly books . . .”

“I had to join the Navy,” I said, and knew that I couldn’t say more without risking a seizure. Dalo knew it, too. Dalo knew that the doctors had no idea why the conventional medications didn’t touch my condition, why I was such a medical anomaly. She knew everything and loved me anyway, as no one had since my father’s death when I was thirteen. She was my lifeline, my sanity. Just thinking about her aboard the Scheherezade, just knowing I would see her again in a few weeks, let me concentrate on the bewildering task in front of me in the dripping, moldy Teli vault filled with human treasures and human junk.

And with any luck, I would not have to encounter General Anson again. For any reason.

A polished marble doll. A broken commlink on which some girl had once painted lopsided red roses. An exquisite albastron, Eastern Mediterranean fifth century B.C., looted five years ago from the private collection of Fahoud al-Ashan on 71-Delta. A forged copy of Lucca DiChario’s “Menamarti,” although not a bad forgery, with a fake certificate of authenticity. Three more embroidered baby shoes. A handmade quilt. Several holo cubes. A hair comb. A music-cube case with holo-porn star Shiva on the cover. Degas’s exquisite “Danseuse Sur Scene,” which had vanished from a Terran museum a hundred years ago, assumed to be in an off-Earth private collection somewhere. I gaped at it, unbelieving, and ran every possible physical and computer test. It was the real thing.

“Captain, why do we got to measure the exact place on the floor of every little piece of rubbish?” whined Private Blanders. I ignored her. My detail had learned early that they could take liberties with me. I had never been much of a disciplinarian.

I said, “Because we don’t know which data is useful and which not until the computer analyzes it.”

“But the location don’t matter! I’m gonna just estimate it, all right?”

“You’ll measure it to the last fraction of a centimeter,” Sergeant Lu said pleasantly, “and it’ll be accurate, or you’re in the brig, soldier. You got that?”

“Yes, sir!”

Thank the gods for Sergeant Lu.

The location was important. The AI’s algorithms were starting to show a pattern. Partial as yet, but interesting.

Lu carried a neo-plastic sculpture of a young boy over to my table and set it down. He ran the usual tests and the measurements appeared in a display screen on the C-112. The sculpture, I could see from one glance, was worthless as both art or history, an inept and recent work. I hoped the sculptor hadn’t quit his day job.

Lu glanced at the patterns on my screen. “What’s that, then, sir?”

“It’s a fractal.”

“A what?”

“Part of a pattern formed by behavior curves.”

“What does it mean?” he asked, but without any real interest, just being social. Lu was a social creature.

“I don’t know yet what it means, but I do know one other thing.” I switched screens, needing to talk aloud about my findings. Dalo wasn’t here. Lu would have to do, however inadequately. “See these graphs? These artifacts were brought to the vault by different Teli, or groups of Teli, and at different times.”

“How can you tell that, sir?” Lu looked a little more alert. Art didn’t interest him, but the Teli did.

“Because the art objects, as opposed to the other stuff, occur in clusters through the cave—see here? And the real art, as opposed to the amateur junk, forms clusters of its own. When the Teli brought back Human art from raids, some of the aliens knew—or had learned—what qualified. Others never did.”

Lu stared at the display screen, his red nose wrinkling. How did someone named “Ruhan Lu” end up with such a ruddy complexion?

“Those lines and squiggles—” he pointed at the Ebenfeldt equations at the bottom of the screen “—tell you all that, sir?”

“Those squiggles plus the measurements you’re making. I know where some pieces were housed in Human colonies so I’m also tracking the paths of raids, plus other variables like—”

The Citadel shook as something exploded deep under our feet.

“Enemy attack!” Lu shouted. He pulled me to the floor and threw his body across mine as dirt and stone and mold rained down from the ceiling of the cave. Die. I was going to die . . . “Dalo!” I heard myself scream and then, in the weird way of the human mind, came one clear thought out of the chaos: I won’t get to see the Sistine Chapel after all. Then I heard or thought nothing as I went under.

I woke in my Teli quarters in the Citadel, grasping and clawing my way upright. Lu laid a hard hand on my arm. “Steady, sir.”

“Dalo! The Scheherezade!”

“Ship’s just fine, sir. It was a booby-trap buried somewhere in the mountain, but Security thinks most of it fizzled. Place’s a mess but not much real damage.”

“Blanders? Cozinski?”

“Two soldiers are dead but neither one’s our detail.” He leaned forward, hand still on my arm. “What happened to you, sir?”

I tried to meet his eyes and failed. The old shame flooded me, the old guilt, the old defiance—all here again. “Who saw?”

“Nobody but me. Is it a nerve disease, sir? Like Ransom Fits?”

“No.” My condition had no discoverable physical basis, and no name except my mother’s, repeated over the years. Coward.

“Because if it’s Ransom Fits, sir, my brother has it and they gave him meds for it. Fixed him right up.”

“It’s not Ransom. What are the general orders, Lu?”

“All hands to carry on.”

“More booby traps?”

“I guess they’ll look, sir. Bound to, don’t you think? Don’t know if they’ll find anything. My friend Sergeant Andropov over in Security says the mountain is so honey-combed with caves underneath these big ones that they could search for a thousand years and not find everything. Captain Porter—if it happens again, with you I mean, is there anything special I should do for you?”

I did meet his eyes, then. Did he know how rare his gaze was? No, he did not. Lu’s honest, conscientious, not-very-intelligent face showed nothing but pragmatic acceptance of the situation. No disgust, no contempt, no sentimental pity, and he had no idea how unusual that was. But I knew.

“No, Sergeant, nothing special. We’ll just carry on.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

If any request for information came down from General Anson’s office, I never received it. No request for a report on damage to the art vaults, or on impact to assignment progress, or on personnel needs. Nothing.

The second booby trap destroyed everything in Vault A.

It struck while I was upside on the Scheherezade, with Dalo on a weekend pass after a month of fourteen-hour days in the vault. Lu commlinked me in the middle of the night. The screen on the bulkhead opposite our bed chimed and brightened, waking us both. I clutched at Dalo.

“Captain Porter, sir, we had another explosion down here at oh one thirty-six hours.” Lu’s face was black with soot. Blood smeared one side of his face. “It got Vault A and some of the crew quarters. Private Blanders is dead, sir. The AI is destroyed, too. I’m waiting on your orders.”

I said to the commlink, “Send, voice only . . .” My voice came out too high and Dalo’s arm went around me, but I didn’t go under. “Lu, is the quake completely over?”

“Far as we know, sir.”

“I’ll be downside as soon as I can. Don’t try to enter Vault A until I arrive.”

“Yes, sir.”

I broke the link, turned in Dalo’s arms, and went under.

When the seizures stopped, I went downside.

We had nearly finished cataloguing Vault A when it blew. Art of any value had already been crated and moved, and of course all my data was backed up on both the base AI and on the Scheherezade. For the first time, I wondered why I had been given a C-112 of my own in the first place. A near-AI was expensive, and there was a war on.

Vault B was pretty much a duplicate of Vault A, a huge natural cavern dripping water and sediments on a packed-solid jumble of human objects. A carved fourteenth-century oak chest, probably French, that some rich Terran must have had transported to a Human colony. Hand-woven dbeni from 14-Alpha. A cooking pot. A samurai sword with embossed handle. A holo cube programmed with porn. Mondrian’s priceless Broadway Boogie-Woogie, mostly in unforgivable tatters. A cheap, mass-produced jewelry box. More shoes. A Paul LeFort sculpture looted from a pleasure craft, the Princess of Mars, two years ago. A brass menorah. The entire contents of the Museum of Colonial Art on 33-Delta—most of it worthless but a few pieces showing promise. I hoped the young artists hadn’t been killed in the Teli raid.

Three days after Lu, Private Cozinski, and I began work on Vault B, General Anson appeared. She had not attended Private Blanders’s memorial service. I felt her before I saw her, her gaze boring into the back of my neck, and I closed my eyes.

Kai lanu kai lanu breathe . . .

“Ten-hut!”

Lu and Cozinski had already sprung to attention. I turned and saluted. Breathe . . . kailanukailanu please gods not in front of her . . .

“A word, captain.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She led the way to a corner of the vault, walking by Tomiko Mahuto’s “Morning Grace,” one of the most beautiful things in the universe, without a glance. Water dripped from the end of a stalactite onto her head. She shifted away from it without changing expression. “I want an estimate of how much longer you need to be here, captain.”

“I’ve filed daily progress reports, ma’am. We’re on the second of four vaults.”

“I read all the reports, captain. How much longer?”

“Unless something in the other two vaults differs radically from Vaults A and B, perhaps another three months.”

“And what will your ‘conclusions’ be?”

She had no idea how science worked, or art. “I can’t say until I have more data, ma’am.”

“Where does your data point so far?” Her tone was too sharp. Was I this big an embarrassment to her, that she needed me gone before my job was done? I had told no one about my relationship to her, and I would bet my last chance to see the Sistine Chapel that she hadn’t done so, either.

I said carefully, “There is primary evidence, not yet backed up mathematically, that the Teli began over time to distinguish Human art objects from mere decorated, utilitarian objects. There is also some reason to believe that they looted our art not because they liked it but because they hoped to learn something significant about us.”

“Learn something significant from broken bathtubs and embroidered baby shoes?”

I blinked. So she had been reading my reports, and in some detail. Why?

“Apparently, ma’am.”

“What makes you think they hoped to learn about us from this rubbish?”

“I’m using the Ebenfeldt equations in conjunction with phase-space diagrams for—”

“I don’t need technical mumbo-jumbo. What do you think they tried to learn about Humans?”

“Their own art seems to have strong religious significance. I’m no expert on Teli work, but my roommate at the university, Forrest Jamili, has gone on to—”

“I don’t care about your roommate,” she said, which was hardly news. I remembered the day I left from the university, possibly the most terrified and demoralized first-year ever, how I had gone under when she had said to me—

Kai lanu kai lanu breathe breathe . . .

I managed to avoid going under, but just barely. I quavered, “I don’t know what the Teli learned from our art.”

She stared at my face with contempt, spun on her boot heel, and left.

That night I began to research the deebees on Teli art. It gave me something to do during the long, insomniac hours. Human publications on Teli art, I discovered, had an odd, evasive, overly careful feel to them. Perhaps that was inevitable; ancient Athenian commentators had to watch what they said publicly about Sparta. In wartime, it took very little to be accused of giving away critical information about the enemy. Or of giving them treasonous praise. In no one’s papers was this elliptical quality more evident than in Forrest Jamili’s, and yet something was clear. Until now, art scholars had been building a vast heap of details about Teli art. Forrest was the first to suggest a viable overall framework to organize those details.

It was during one of these long and lonely nights, desperately missing Dalo, that I discovered the block on my access codes. I couldn’t get into the official records of the meteor deflection that had destroyed the Teli weapons base and brought General Anson the famous Victory of 149-Delta.

Why? Because I wasn’t a line officer? Perhaps. Or perhaps the records involved military security in some way. Or perhaps—and this was what I chose to believe—she just wanted the heroic, melodramatic holo version of her victory to be the only one available. I didn’t know if other officers could access the records, and I couldn’t ask. I had no friends among the officers, no friends here at all except Lu.

On my second leave upside, Dalo said, “You look terrible, dear heart. Are you sleeping?”

“No. Oh, Dalo, I’m so glad to see you!” I clutched her tight; we made love; the taut fearful ache that was my life downside eased. Finally. A little.

Afterward, lying in the cramped bunk, she said, “You’ve found something unexpected. Some correlation that disturbs you.”

“Yes. No. I don’t know yet. Dalo, just talk to me, about anything. Tell me what you’ve been doing up here.”

“Well, I’ve been preparing materials for a new mutomati, as you know. I’m almost ready to begin work on it. And I’ve made a friend, Susan Finch.”

I tried not to scowl. Dalo made friends wherever she went, and it was wrong of me to resent this slight diluting of her affections.

“You would like her, Jon,” Dalo said, poking me and smiling. “She’s not a line officer, for one thing. She’s ship’s doctor.”

In my opinion, doctors were even worse than line officers. I had seen so many doctors during my horrible adolescence. But I said, “I’m glad you have someone to be with when I’m downside.”

She laughed. “Liar.” She knew my possessiveness, and my flailing attempts to overcome it. She knew everything about me, accepted everything about me. In Dalo, now my only family, I was the luckiest man alive.

I put my arms around her and held on tight.

The Teli attack came two months later, when I was halfway through Vault D. Six Teli warships emerged sluggishly from subspace, moving at half their possible speed. Our probes easily picked them up and our fighters took them out after a battle that barely deserved the name. Human casualties numbered only seven.

“Shooting fish in a barrel,” Private Cozinski said as he crated a Roman Empire bottle, third century C.E., pale green glass with seven engraved lines. It had been looted from 189-Alpha four years ago. “Bastards never could fight.”

“Not true,” said the honest Sergeant Lu. “Teli can fight fine. They just didn’t.”

“That don’t make sense, Sergeant.”

And it didn’t.

Unless . . .

All that night I worked in Vault D at the computer terminal that had replaced my free-standing C-112. The terminal linked to both the downside system and the deebees on the Scheherezade. Water dripped from the ceiling, echoing in the cavernous space. Once, something like a bat flew from some far recess. I kept slapping on stim patches to stay alert, and feverishly calling up different programs, and doing my best to erect cybershields around what I was doing.

Lu found me there in the morning, my hands shaking, staring at the display screens. “Sir? Captain Porter?”

“Yes.”

“Sir? Are you all right?”

Art history is not, as people like General Anson believe, a lot of dusty information about a frill occupation interesting to only a few effetes. The Ebenfeldt equations transformed art history, linking the field to both behavior and to the mathematics underlying chaos theory. Not so new an idea, really—the ancient Greeks used math to work out the perfect proportions for buildings, for women, for cities, all profound shapers of human behavior. The creation of art does not happen in a vacuum. It is linked to culture in complicated, nonlinear ways. Chaos theory is still the best way to model nonlinear behavior dependent on small changes in initial conditions.

I looked at three sets of mapped data. One, my multi-dimensional analysis of Vaults A through D, was comprehensive and detailed. My second set of data was clear but had a significant blank space. The third set was only suggested by shadowy lines, but the overall shape was clear.

“Sir?”

“Sergeant, can you set up two totally encrypted commlink calls, one to the Scheherezade and one by ansible to Sel Ouie University on 18-Alpha? Yes, I know that officially you can’t do that, but you know everybody everywhere . . . can you do it? It’s vitally important, Ruhan. I can’t tell you how important!”

Lu gazed at me from his ruddy, honest face. He did indeed know everyone. A Navy lifer, and with all the amiability and human contacts that I lacked. And he trusted me. I could feel that unaccustomed warmth, like a small and steady fire.

“I think I can do that, sir.”

He did. I spoke first to Dalo, then to Forrest Jamili. He sent a packet of encrypted information. I went back to my data, working feverishly. Then I made a second encrypted call to Dalo. She said simply, “Yes. Susan says yes, of course she can. They all can.”

“Dalo, find out when the next ship docks with the Scheherezade. If it’s today, book passage on it, no matter where it’s going. If there’s no ship today, then buy a seat on a supply shuttle and—”

“Those cost a fortune!”

“I don’t care. Just—”

“Jon, the supply shuttles are all private contractors and they charge civilians a—it would wipe out everything we’ve saved and—why? What’s wrong?”

“I can’t explain now.” I heard boots marching along the corridor to the vault. “Just do it! Trust me, Dalo! I’ll find you when I can!”

“Captain,” an MP said severely, “come with me.” His weapon was drawn, and behind him stood a detail of grim-faced soldiers. Lu stepped forward, but I shot him a glance that said Say nothing! This is mine alone!

Good soldier that he was, he understood, and he obeyed. It was, after all, the first time I had ever given him a direct—if wordless—order, the first time I had assumed the role of commander.

My mother should have been proud.

Her office resembled my quarters, rather than the vaults: a trapezoidal, low-ceilinged room with alien art etched on all the stone walls. The room held the minimum of furniture. General Anson stood alone behind her desk, a plain military-issue camp item, appropriate to a leader who was one with the ranks, don’t you know. She did not invite me to sit down. The MPs left—reluctantly, it seemed to me—but then, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that she could break me bare-knuckled if necessary.

She said, “You made two encrypted commlink calls and one encrypted ansible message from this facility, all without proper authorization. Why?”

I had to strike before she got to me, before I went under. I blurted, “I know why you blocked my access to the meteor-deflection data.”

She said nothing, just went on gazing at me from those eyes that could chill glaciers.

“There was no deflection of that meteor. The meteor wasn’t on our tracking system because Humans haven’t spent much time in this sector until now. You caught a lucky break, and whatever deflection records exist now, you added after the fact. Your so-called victory was a sham.” I watched her face carefully, hoping for . . . what? Confirmation? Outraged denial that I could somehow believe? I saw neither. And of course I was flying blind. Captain Susan Finch had told Dalo only that yes, of course officers had access to the deflection records; they were a brilliant teaching tool for tactical strategy. I was the only one who’d been barred from them, and the general must have had a reason for that. She always had a reason for everything.

Still she said nothing. Hoping that I would utter even more libelous statements against a commanding officer? Would commit even more treason? I could feel my breathing accelerate, my heart start to pound.

I said, “The Teli must have known the meteor’s trajectory; they’ve colonized 149-Delta a long time. They let it hit their base. And I know why. The answer is in the art.”

Still no change of expression. She was stone. But she was listening.

“The answer is in the art—ours and theirs. I ansibled Forrest Jamili last night—no, look first at these diagrams—no, first—”

I was making a mess of it as the seizure moved closer. Not now, not now,not in front of her . . .

Somehow I held myself together, although I had to wrench my gaze away from her to do it. I pulled the holocube from my pocket, activated it, and projected it on the stone wall. The Teli etchings shimmered, ghostly, behind the laser colors of my data.

“This is a phase-space diagram of Ebenfeldt equations using input about the frequency of Teli art creation. We have tests now, you know, that can date any art within weeks of its creation by pinpointing when the raw materials were altered. A phase-state diagram is how we model bifurcated behaviors grouped around two attractors . . . what that means is that the Teli created their art in bursts, with long fallow periods between bursts when . . . no, wait, General, this is relevant to the war!”

My voice had risen to a shriek. I couldn’t help it. Contempt rose off her like heat. But she stopped her move toward the door.

“This second phase-space diagram is Teli attack behavior. Look . . . it inverts the first diagrams! They attack viciously for a while, and during that time virtually no Teli creates art at all . . . Then when some tipping point is reached, they stop attacking or else attack only ineffectively, like the last raid here. They’re . . . waiting. And if the tipping point—this mathematical value—isn’t reached fast enough, they sabotage their own bases, like letting the meteor hit 149-Delta. They did it in the battle outside 16-Beta and in the Q-Sector massacre . . . you were there! When the mathematical value is reached—when enough of them have died—they create art like crazy but don’t wage war. Not until the art reaches some other hypothetical mathematical value that I think is this second attractor. Then they stop creating art and go back to war.”

“You’re saying that periodically their soldiers just curl up and let us kill them?” she spat at me. “The Teli are damned fierce fighters, Captain—I know that even if the likes of you never will. They don’t just whimper and lie down on the floor.”

Kai lanu kai lanu . . .

“It’s a . . . a religious phenomenon, Forrest Jamili thinks. I mean, he thinks their art is a form of religious atonement—all of their art. That’s its societal function, although the whole thing may be biologically programmed as well, like the deaths of lemmings to control population. The Teli can take only so much dying, or maybe even only so much killing, and then they have to stop and . . . and restore what they see as some sort of spiritual balance. And they loot our art because they think we must do the same thing. Don’t you see—they were collecting our art to try to analyze when we will stop attacking and go fallow! They assume we must be the same as them, just—”

“No warriors stop fighting for a bunch of weakling artists!”

“—just as you assume they must be the same as us.”

We stared at each other.

I said, “As you have always assumed that everyone should be the same as you. Mother.”

“You’re doing this to try to discredit me, aren’t you,” she said evenly. “Anyone can connect any dots in any statistics to prove whatever they wish. Everybody knows that. You want to discredit my victory because such a victory will never come to you. Not to the sniveling, back-stabbing coward who’s been a disappointment his entire life. Even your wife is worth ten of you—at least she doesn’t crumple under pressure.”

She moved closer, closer to me than I could ever remember her being, and every one of her words hammered on the inside of my head, my eyes, my chest.

“You got yourself assigned here purposely to embarrass me, and now you want to go farther and ruin me. It’s not going to happen, soldier, do you hear me? I’m not going to be made a laughing stock by you again, the way I was in every officer’s club during your whole miserable adolescence and—”

I didn’t hear the rest. I went under, seizing and screaming.

It is two days later. I lie in the medical bay of the Scheherezade, still in orbit around 149-Delta. My room is locked but I am not in restraints. Crazy, under arrest, but not violent. Or perhaps the General is simply hoping I’ll kill myself and save everyone more embarrassment.

Downside, in Vault D, Lu is finishing crating the rest of the looted Human art, all of which is supposed to be returned to its rightful owners. The Space Navy serving its galactic citizens. Maybe the art will actually be shipped out in time.

My holo cube was taken from me. I imagine that all my data has been wiped from the base’s and ship’s deebees as well, or maybe just classified as severely restricted. In that case no one cleared to look at it, which would include only top line officers, is going to open files titled “Teli Art Creation.” Generals have better things to do.

But Forrest Jamili has copies of my data and my speculations.

Phase-state diagrams bring order out of chaos. Some order, anyway. This is, interestingly, the same thing that art does. It is why, looking at one of Dalo’s mutomati works, I can be moved to tears. By the grace, the balance, the redemption from chaos of the harsh raw materials of life.

Dalo is gone. She left on the supply ship when I told her to. My keepers permitted a check of the ship’s manifest to determine that. Dalo is safe.

I will probably die in the coming Teli attack, along with most of the Humans both on the Scheherezade and on 149-Delta. The Teli fallow period for this area of space is coming to an end. For the last several months there have been few attacks by Teli ships, and those few badly executed. Months of frenetic creation of art, including all those etchings on the stone walls of the Citadel. Did I tell General Anson how brand-new all those hand-made etchings are? I can’t remember. She didn’t give me time to tell her much.

Although it wouldn’t have made any difference. She believes that war and art are totally separate activities, one important and one trivial, whose life lines never converge. The General, too, will probably die in the coming attack. She may or may not have time to realize that I was right.

But that doesn’t really matter anymore, either. And, strangely, I’m not at all afraid. I have no signs of going under, no breathing difficulties, no shaking, no panic. And only one real regret: that Dalo and I did not get to gaze together at the Sistine Chapel on Terra. But no one gets everything. I have had a great deal: Dalo, art, even some possible future use to humanity if Forrest does the right thing with my data. Many people never get so much.

The ship’s alarms begin to sound, clanging loud even in the medical bay.

The Teli are back, resuming their war.

© 2007 by Nancy Kress.

Originally published in The New Space Opera, edited by Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

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

Bear and Shifty
Benjamin Parzybok

I ambled around the side of the after-market armored minivan and helped Mr. and Mrs. Perkinson load in the rest of the grocery goods, stashing them in the back and strapping them down. They were going to have a hell of a ride home, we all knew it, so when the work was done, I lingered there. I smiled and offered a cigarette and Mrs. Perkinson took me up on it with her one shaking hand. She was no smoker, it was easy to see.

We stared out into the bright sun of the desert, our backs against the rock formation, and my eyes went automatic for any ships, but it was clear.

In a stone cold voice, her man told me they’d lost their son, Alex. They lost him to infection over the winter, he said, and we all just stood there for a moment. Mr. Perkinson stared at his boots, still unused to the admission and unsure of what came next.

Mrs. Perkinson had lost her left hand the year before; she picked at the stump angrily now with the hand that held the cigarette, and I thought what rotten luck they had. Though it was a miracle they were both alive; hell, then again, for whom was it not?

After a moment I put my hand on each of their shoulders and told them it was going to be just fine. Mrs. Perkinson jumped a little, and then leaned into the touch. I pulled them in a little closer. I’m a big man, and it’s useful in situations like these, don’t I know it, to have something to lean into for a moment. For a bit of solidity. I’m not saying I always use my mass in the most honorable of ways, but in this I was certain, and I held onto them long enough that each of us was able to shed a tear—it’s easier when someone’s got a grip on you—until Mrs. Perkinson burned the tips of her fingers with the dying cigarette.

I wasn’t at all sure it was going to be fine. They had people to feed on the other side, another kid or two if I remembered correctly. But if there were any possibility that wishing things would go well actually affected the outcome—then for god’s sake wish, wish away.

I patted the back of their car as they drove off and then attended to the next customers.

In our partnership, I do what Roger calls the “dirty work.” I fill the emotive shoes. People talk to me. Roger doesn’t care for it, but he knows sometimes it can’t be helped, and that here in particular, people break down. When they get a little relief, when they get a little something extra, they cry. It’s only here that they see for certain what they’ve been doing without for so long. I’ve come to consider it part of the services we offer: one part border smugglers, one part chapel.

We raid old food stores deep in enemy lines. I happen to be pretty good at alien-speak and Roger is a crafty dodger. We make a good team. Both of us are big, and out here on the front that makes a difference, in the fights and the discouragement of fights. What we run is a sort of Robin Hood-style operation, but instead of giving it out for free, we charged for it, so I suppose that cuts against Robin’s ethics. Everybody’s got to live. Nevertheless, we give a good enough bargain to people we know. New customers, not so much—you have to trust them first.

I scratched deep in my beard. I hadn’t given myself a cut since ’169, and the hair covered my chest like a second shirt. I was a little self-conscious giving out hugs when I wasn’t sure what all might be stuck there.

The last customer that day was Shifty, as we called him, a skinny, pale-faced kid with a receding hairline and clothes that looked like they’d been buried with their previous owner. He’d come a couple times previously, once to try to sell us back some goods that I felt sure we’d sold someone else earlier that day. He stood at the back of the grover. It had the back opened up, showing what we had on display. You couldn’t tell if he was going to pull and start firing or just ask for a lower price on the canned goods.

Even so, I teased him. Couldn’t help it really. Roger says it’ll get me killed one day, pushing some sap so he doesn’t know himself anymore. I put my arm across his shoulders and let it sit there heavy and talked to him about what we saw on the other side, exaggerating just a little, and he began to get uncomfortable.

“See this?” I showed him the long, ugly scar I had down the back of my arm, making a flesh line through the old tattoos there. “Alien claw. Pretty, right? You want a nicer deal, you come with us next time, Shifty.”

“My name’s not Shifty.”

“Sure it ain’t,” I said and winked at Roger.

Shifty’s face turned red and he balled his fists.

“Come on,” I said, “let’s not get all riled about nothing.”

I picked up a can of garbanzo beans, severed the top with my knife, pulled back the tin and saw his shrunken face light up a little. The garbanzos were still good, judging by the smell. Then I put my arm back around Shifty, to keep him contained more than anything else, and told him to hold out his hands. I poured a dollop of garbanzos in them and he choked them back without a thought and I knew there’d be no fights today.

“Good, right?” I said. I held one of the beans up between my fingers—it looked surprisingly human-faced and so I pointed its nosy beak toward Shifty and talked it in a squeaky little voice, “I can keel uh alien by my own self! Tee hee hee!” Shifty stared at it in a sort of vacant horror and so I tried again. “I’m Sheriff Bean, the baddest bean in town! You ain’t be eatin’ my kinfolk, is you?”

I answered it in a bassy giant’s voice: “I will eat you all!” and popped it in my mouth. I squealed out its death-throes as I ate it, and then laughed at my own joke and fished for another garbanzo in the can. I offered the can to Shifty and elbowed him, “Come on, you try it. Talk a bean. It’ll make you feel better.”

He must have thought I was mocking him, because I was wrong about the fighting. A while later, when I was loading up, he put a knife in my back. I leaned against the grover with it stuck out of my shoulder blade and swore a spell. Roger held his gun on him, and even then Shifty demonstrated his lack of mental acuity as he tried to go after Roger with nothing but his dirty little fists.

He was just about to get himself shot when our problems got a lot worse. An alien notch-craft appeared in the sky out of nowhere and swooped in on us for a look-see. After the first pass, it turned back to gun us down. If you haven’t seen one of these yet, it’s worth a trip to the borderlands. A heavy, chunky saucer with notches cut out of it so it looks like a thick X, it’s a serious gunship. Best to run from.

Roger got a hold of Shifty’s hair as he stood ogle-eyed, shoved him into the vehicle, and I stumbled in beside him. We held on as Roger accelerated out of there, leaving our spot just as a hail of sound cratered where we’d been. I tried to hold as still as I could, cross-legged on the floor of the vehicle. I worried I might bump my back against something and drive the knife in further, but the knife was weakly lodged in a zone I only had nominal sensation in anyway, an old wound among many. After Roger hit a straight-away, I turned to Shifty and asked if he could help me out.

The boy—for I finally realized that under all that grime that’s what he was: eighteen, twenty at most—was spooked, but I was insistent and got his attention.

“Come on, you dumb kid! Get it out!” I hollered over the noise.

He turned around and faced the other way and I grabbed his shoulder and turned him back. “You put it there, you take it out.”

I realized there was some risk of his simply driving it in a bit further, but reason overtook him and he gave it a hard pull until it came free. I screamed, I admit somewhat dramatically, until Roger shushed me. I turned back to Shifty and smiled and saw he’d thrown up all over his shirt.

“Take it off,” I said, “you don’t want to be wearing that.” He didn’t look so good so I put my hand on his shoulder and told him it was going to be just fine and no hard feelings. Then I dug through our stash and found a crushed box of Sweet Os—a Cheerios knockoff—and opened it up. Maybe garbanzos weren’t Shifty’s thing. He was thin as a rail with his shirt off. I scooped him a handful and he munched on these quietly, catatonically.

I had some too. “Mmm,” I said, my mouth full. “Good, right?”

I offered them to Roger but he hollered, “Goddamnit, Bear!” at me. I looked at Shifty to acknowledge the unfairness, but the boy was just barely present.

The notch-craft flew low behind us, leaving craters all over the place, and the grover was getting bumped around pretty good, so that every once in a while the Sweet Os in my right hand geysered up out of the box.

We don’t have weapons on the grover that can handle a notch-craft, except for the one big one and that’s handheld, and there’s no point in trying to backseat drive Roger, so my policy is to ignore and be as pleasant as possible and let him do his job. I found an old Styrofoam cup, poured it full of Sweet Os, and scrambled my way up to the front where I put it in the cup holder. The grover was akin to a lightly armored, all-terrain racing RV. There were a couple of bunks where Roger and I slept, and a good deal of storage space for contraband. It was tightly made and could take a beating. Though Roger made us a hard target, notch-craft were reliably mediocre at hitting something on the run. On the other hand, I considered the possibility they might not want to hit us.

Back with Shifty, I realized he was in a state, gripping what he could and hyperventilating a little.

I asked him why he stabbed me.

He didn’t say anything, just looked a bit sicker. There were a few Sweet Os stuck to his chest in the vomit residue there. I rustled up a washcloth and dampened it and handed it over so he could clean himself up a little, but he just held onto it like I’d handed him the tail of a dead rat.

“Ah, buddy,” I said, and took the washcloth back and proceeded to do the cleanup job on him myself. It was a bit awkward, but I’d once had kids and was no stranger to cleaning up somebody else’s face. When I was finished, I handed him one of Roger’s shirts and he clutched that as well, as if he couldn’t quite get the mechanics of it, and I decided I’d hassled him enough for the time being.

I went to sit in the passenger seat. Roger weaved crazily about in an attempt to outmaneuver any torpedoes they sent at us, driving on and off the road, skirting the remains of dead automobiles and existing craters. There was a dust storm whipping up on the horizon.

While they’d obviously gotten a lot of things right when they invaded, they hadn’t counted on Earth dust, and it played holy hell with their equipment—which is why the Southwest is a human holdout.

Roger headed for an old city, the corridors too narrow for notch-craft flight, where we’d hunker and wait for the dust. I put my feet up on the dashboard and ate my Sweet Os.

“How’s it going?” I said.

Roger nodded and clutched the steering wheel, the sweat adding an angry sheen to him.

“Shifty has gone all freaky,” I said.

A crater opened directly in front of us and Roger slammed hard on the brakes and swerved to the right and yelled, “Cocksucker!”

“Can I get you anything?”

I knew that my general lack of reaction in the face of death tended to aggravate Roger a little. I’d been a prisoner between ’165 and ’169, and I’d pretty much had my fill of death. They took the lot of us, my wife and the two boys, when they were just getting a feel for how to deal with us humans, clumsy fuckers. I escaped in the end, and learned to cuss native alien, too. They were hard years, and I tried to put them behind me. The way I looked at it, fear and pain were sensations that’d been mostly dulled right out of me. I clumped a lifetime allotment of them into those five long years.

“You check him?”

“Shifty?” I said.

“Bet he works for them,” Roger grunted out, between clenched teeth.

“Hey?” I said.

“What else explains this? They got to him. He’s a dual.”

Shifty had positioned himself to stare right out the back at the oncoming notch-craft, which seemed like a bad idea for all kinds of reasons. But considering he’d already thrown up I supposed there wasn’t a lot of harm in it. I snuck up on him and checked behind his left ear. He seemed to notice me for the first time since we’d been in the grover. He turned and took a swing at me.

But I saw it: the silver dot marking a trans-comm installation, dual conscious. Probably installed by force or got promised off-world living or some other bullshit, i.e.: slave. The aliens were shit in the human resources department, though, and still couldn’t quite get a handle on human character. Shifty didn’t have the greatest natural intelligence about him.

He was still swinging and connected with my gut. I let out an involuntary grunt, then grabbed his wrists, looped a bit of rope about them, and hog tied him. I felt sick about the whole situation. “Who am I talking to?” I said gently, first in English, then in alien, the gravelly consonants ringing out dead and flat between us.

“My name’s Preston!” he yelled, and there was a blood-curdling panic to his proclamation.

Preston seemed like such an absurd name, from some other era entirely, that for a moment I tried to get my brain to spit out what the word meant in alien tongue, to no avail. “Okay,” I said finally, “hey, Preston.” I wondered what effort saying his own name had cost him.

Then, in alien, I asked who I was talking to again, and that did it. His eyes did the slightest roll and he spoke back to me in alien, letting me know that we should pull over immediately, that we had stolen contraband, that we were under arrest and would be terminated, and a lot of other things that frankly I lost interest in. The aliens must come from a culture where communication is a real, repetitive bore.

The trans-comm link in the brain is a little weak by design, a hacky bit of tech that lodges consciousness between two radio signals. It allows a consciousness switch, but I couldn’t bring back Preston. Honestly, I thought they’d stopped trying to install them, considering the failure rate, and so I never thought to check. Maybe they were getting better. He kept on with his alien lecture, and once he’d finished, he started it over from the top. I felt sorry for the kid and conflicted and put Roger’s pillow under his head and brushed his shaggy hair out of his eyes. Come on, I told him, trying to reach the human in there. He was too damn young. Come on, I said again, and then I got spooked out, the notch-craft tailing in close and their voice coming through this mangy young kid on the floor of the grover, so I went to the front to keep Roger company. I brought the big gun with me, just to hold onto something. Roger had made it to the city edges and the notch-craft dodged all manner of obstacles behind us in order to get a clean shot.

“You were right,” I said.

“Told you,” he said.

“So young.”

“Old enough.”

“Just a kid, with no real adventures under his belt.”

“Don’t go getting all weepy on me,” he said, “we got pressing shit going on.”

I checked our status again and saw we were out of the woods. Roger could handle a city cat and mouse game with his eyes closed. I patted him on the back and told him I was confident in him—he needed to hear this sometimes—and headed back to check on my boy.

Preston was still at it with the alien lecture, and the garbled syllables issued from him. I wish to hell I could unknow them, let them only be the foreign sounds they were. I gave him a good shake and called his name again. I called him Shifty, and futzed with the silver dot at the back of his ear—which I know I shouldn’t do. In the old days, when they’d just started making them, sometimes a little pressure could paralyze a man.

After a while, disgusted with us both, I sat back on my heels and just watched him, let him spew out. I wondered: Maybe the aliens knew what they were doing after all? Maybe they knew to pick the weak ones now, the kids, so they could get control. Out of habit, I reached back and touched the silver dot behind my own ear, hidden in my hair, just pretty decoration now. My consciousness had barred it access. I am not weak. But Shifty—he was young.

“We got to get somewhere!” I yelled to the front of the truck.

“What the fuck do you think I—”

“I want to work on the boy,” I said. “Somewhere calm for a few hours.”

My back wound stung and I rolled my shoulders and prepared myself for the task ahead. I could feel the tacky stickiness of a little blood that had made it down to my waistline.

Via Shifty, I told those alien sonofabitches that we were going to pull over, and to quit sucking their claws. A terrible insult if you’re an alien, and I felt like I heard an answering increase in firepower behind us.

Though I was one of the first, they didn’t seem to recognize me. After imprisonment, I’d grown this big beard, and to them it was like some kind of metamorphosis from which they had no vantage. I was changed and unrecognizable. And I suppose there was some truth in that.

Roger pulled down into an underground parking garage below a building. Oldest trick in the book. No way a notch-craft can follow. I put the odds at about 15% that they’d follow us on foot. Then again, we had their man. I gave Shifty a pat on his chest and wondered if I should blindfold him.

Underground there was a mini-encampment, four or five families, pushed against the very back parking slots, walls made of rubble and tarp. I smelled a cooking fire, which cut through the foul smell of twenty people living in a parking garage. The fire smelled good; I suspected they’d caught themselves a couple of birds to fry. They all came and looked at us as we screeched to a halt. They were thin and dead-eyed and a little hostile, bearing meager weapons, a pistol here and there. Poor sods. Immediately, I wanted to give them something. There were four boxes of Sweet Os remaining and I strode toward them, my gifts pushed out in front of me. Even so, they held their weapons on me for a moment to ascertain that the Sweet Os weren’t some kind of explosive device. They were scared and kept looking toward the opening, where I could hear the notch-craft hover as the aliens tried to decide what to do. But I assured them there’d be no alien trouble. We made quick friends and then I asked them for a cot so I could work on my sick comrade and they directed me to a dirty pile of blankets.

I pulled Shifty from the grover and carried him by his bonds. Beside me, Roger was keeping pace and cussing me out for messing with any of “this crap.” We had aliens to flee and work to do and all that, and he was right, and I knew it, but you know? Sometimes there’s an opportunity, sometimes it comes just out of nowhere, a chance for you to do something. Roger had the big gun out in case the aliens came into the garage. He’d be all right.

Shifty’s human mouth had tired of speaking the alien tongue, the muscles worn from it, and it was slurring and bumbling the words; they were cursing and giving us orders and threatening to come in after us, their big gunship circling the building. It occurred to me they could simply collapse the building, and that paused me right up in my tracks as I looked at all these refugees around me. Just then I heard a terrific boom and realized they’d had the same idea. The building shook, but it held. They didn’t try it again. I suspected they wanted their man back.

I set Shifty on the blankets and tried to talk to him. I knew every word I said went back into that damned notch-craft and got analyzed. He was their little radar. As long as he was here, they knew we were alive. I slapped Shifty’s face and pleaded with him, and then I gave him a bear hug, gripped him against me in a crushing embrace and whispered in his ear. I must have looked like an idiot. But I couldn’t reach him.

There are three ways to get someone out of dual captive consciousness.

The first is to put them under the knife and remove the trans-comm. A crap shoot for the best of our surgeons that just as often severed shit-all in a guy’s brain.

The second is to lure them back into human consciousness, by whatever fashion you can, if you can, and then teach them tricks for strengthening theirs, so that they have defenses against the switchover. In essence, you train the neural network to route around the trans-comm.

Roger appeared next to me. “Update,” he said.

“Coming along,” I said testily.

He raised his eyebrows at me in an exasperated face and I turned away. Roger didn’t ken no bullshit. “They’re not going away, Bear. They want you, or him, or us, I don’t know. And it’s only a minute before they start lobbing rollers into the opening and then they got all of us.”

I could see he was right and a shiver went through me. “I got this,” I said.

Shifty kept at it: Krkrl greklz yiddil qlkjl.

The third method is to kill them. From two consciousnesses to none. But I told myself he could be saved. Technique number two had been done to me by a man named Chester, over a period of a month’s time, before he was hunted down and killed.

After Roger stormed off, his giant gun swinging side to side, I covered Shifty’s mouth with my hand to stop the sound for a moment so I could think. I could not get the alien switched off.

Shifty breathed hard through his nose and stared up at me and I relaxed my hand for a minute and heard only more alien. Behind me I knew Roger was getting all military, getting the refugees to gather in one safe spot, wielding his big gun.

I leaned in close to Shifty and whispered in his ear, the one without the trans-comm. I whispered about us. About having a mother and a father, about elementary school and girlfriends and suppertime and Thanksgiving—I was a little hungry and I may have talked about food for a while—about his birthday. Did he remember when that was? I talked about sunsets and the moon, our moon. I said: sweat and eyelashes and fingers and piss and shit and I asked him to consider his genitalia, for that, too, especially that, was human. I spoke it in English and in alien, hoping to loose that grasp there with the dirty intricacies of this foreign species that we were. In his eyes I thought I saw a change.

I nodded to him, yes, we had gotten through, we were brothers. I would teach him how to block that foreign consciousness, how to disable the trans-comm. I would be his teacher and repay the debt I owed.

I needed this. Only in his rescue could I exact a little revenge, only in the saving of a life could I screw them a little.

But when he spoke it wasn’t right.

It was English, but the words were all wrong. He said: Hello. He said: Big planet. Little people. He said: Bugs.

“Preston!” I yelled into his face, “I want Preston!” like it was a telephone line and I could simply ask for the right person to be put on.

There was a hint of a smile on Preston’s face then, but it was not a human smile, but an approximation of one, and I grabbed his head and wrenched it quick to the right and snapped his spinal cord.

Then I smoothed back his hair and undid his bonds and shut his eyelids over his eyes. I hovered that way for a long while, one of his hands in mine, in the intimacy of my failure; I did not have the proper words, but I did my best.

When I looked up again the aliens were streaming into the opening of the parking garage like a river of ants, the refugees were huddled into a tight corner wailing with fear, and Roger was down, bleeding from his side.

There were projectiles peppering the air. I made my way quick to Roger and pulled him behind a concrete pillar and got the big gun off him.

They couldn’t speak my tongue, not without capturing one of our own, but I could damn well speak theirs. I charged them, calling them claw lickers and tail draggers and worlders and every other manner of alien insult and then I did them. I took out four who’d already made it to the level of the garage with the big gun. Big gangly suckers, weak-muscled and slow in our gravity, with wicked claws and helmeted heads shaped like balloons, armed with their alien weaponry. I mowed them down with the big gun, a monster to carry, which shot four barrels at the same time and turned its targets into mush. I got the next bunch on the ramp. I was a tornado, unstoppable in rage, speaking only alien, practically one of them, and I took that tornado out into the dusty sunshine and up into their landed ship and destroyed every thing on it, juiced them with the big gun so that their thin blood ran from the deck and out onto the corroded asphalt, an unrecognizable mass of bio carnage everywhere.

When it was done, I stood staring out through the blasted-out window of the notch-craft cockpit, looking about at the world unintelligibly, desiring more. I could hear a soft wailing issuing from the parking garage under the building, and an occasional click and groan from the ship as it resettled around its own metallic injuries.

Finally I lowered the big, hungry gun and left the notch-craft. For a moment, I considered just walking. Taking myself along the abandoned city streets and walking it all out, to the edge of the city, and then beyond, to the edge of the desert and the human world, walking to exorcise what evil remained in the world or perhaps just me. Briefly, I saw in my mind an elusive image of my youngest son, pre-capture, something that I thought had been prised from me, like so many other things, and it hit me like a gut wound. I tried to snatch it, to save it, but then it was gone. In that moment, as the pain faded, hovering on the edge of my consciousness, I felt I was on the verge of a revelation about our species. It was almost there, a moment of ultimate insight, some great truth looming, but as it hovered there and I worked at it, struggling to bring it into reach, I suddenly laughed; what need did I have for revelation? My friend was in a parking garage bleeding and there were families down there. What would I do with a fucking revelation, talk it like a bean?

As I walked down the ramp, I heard cheering. Who doesn’t liked to be cheered, even if it twists a little deeper the knife of regret—keep this silent, enjoy yourself, I told myself. Do not grimace, but smile. I was hugged and children followed me. They pointed at the big gun, and I locked the safety and leaned it against a concrete pillar where they could study and adore it like children do. A woman was caring for Roger; he would live. He was conscious and smiled at me and called me buddy, and I realized that I would never have this revelation. This revelation about our kind was not attainable, we were not meant to understand ourselves. And if we could not, what hope did the aliens have?

I opened up the doors of the grover and pulled out boxes of food and began to hand them out, playing my Robin Hood to the small, frightened clan. I was hungry myself. After, I sat on the floor of the garage with a small circle of little admirers around me and taught them how to talk a garbanzo bean. Mine, speaking in its funny falsetto, leering preposterously at the children, was comic and sad.

© 2012 Benjamin Parzybok

Benjamin Parzybok’s second novel, Sherwood Nation, is forthcoming. He's the author of the novel Couch, and has had short stories published in the Bellevue Literary Review, Strange Horizons, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. He has been the creator/co-creator of many other projects, including Gumball Poetry (a literary journal published in capsule machines), The Black Magic Insurance Agency (a city-wide, one night alternate reality game), and Project Hamad (an effort to free a Guantanamo inmate and shed light on Habeas Corpus). He's currently co-writing a novel with writer David Naimon. He lives in Portland with the artist Laura Moulton and their two kids. He blogs at secret.ideacog.net.

The Black Bird
David Barr Kirtley

The black bird on the mantelpiece spoke. It said, “Nevermore.”

Spade looked up from cleaning his pistol. The bird, a black-lacquered falcon statuette, sat motionless. Spade placed the pistol down on his desk, pushed back the brim of his hat, and approached the bird. “You talk?”

The bird watched him with two small black eyes. “Yes,” it answered. Its voice was eerily familiar somehow.

“How?” Spade demanded. “You’re just a statue.”

The bird’s lacquered beak moved when it talked, as if the statue were alive. “Sounds like a mystery to me.”

Spade lit a cigarette. “Well, I’m good with mysteries. I just solved one.”

“You didn’t solve squat.” The bird sneered.

Spade was perplexed. He had solved the case. The black bird was a fake—a decoy. They’d scraped away a bit of its lacquered exterior and instead of priceless jewels they’d found nothing but worthless lead. He said suspiciously, “What do you mean?”

“You never did find the real falcon,” the bird said. “Don’t you wonder where it is?”

Spade shrugged. “The Russian has it, probably. Let Gutman and the others go after it if they want. They’ll never find it.”

“Wrong,” said the bird. “The Russian doesn’t have it. In fact, it’s right around here somewhere.”

Spade studied the bird. Finally he said, “All right, I’m listening.”

“Good,” said the bird. “Listen closely. Because this is a real mystery—not like your usual work, which is always about who killed who, or who’s banging whose wife. That’s not a mystery, Spade. That’s hardly even a puzzle.”

Spade frowned.

“Real mysteries,” said the bird, “like—why do we exist? What’s the nature of truth? Is there a higher power?

“They don’t have solutions. That’s what makes them mysteries.”

Spade broke in. “So where’s the real falcon?”

The bird sighed. “It’s so obvious. I’d think you would have figured it out by now. You’re the detective, after all.”

“Tell me.”

“Didn’t you ever read ‘The Purloined Letter’? The best place to hide something is in plain sight, where no one will think to look for it.”

Spade walked across the room and lifted the black bird off the mantelpiece. It chuckled as he turned it all around. He walked over to his desk and set the bird down, then flicked open his pocketknife and began scraping off more of the black lacquer. Underneath, of course, was nothing but lead.

“You’re getting warmer,” said the bird.

Spade opened a drawer and took out an iron file. He began scraping away at the bird’s leaden neck.

“Oh, even warmer now.”

Spade scraped deeper and deeper. Then he took a deep breath and blew, sending filings flying away into the smoky air.

Beneath the lacquer and lead, the bird was made of gold and jewels, which sparkled even in the dim light of Spade’s office. “Congratulations,” cried the bird. “You solved the mystery! You’re rich! Case closed.”

“Something’s not right here,” Spade said.

He took up his pocketknife again, and used it to poke the largest jewel. The knife’s tip sank a few centimeters in, as if the jewel were made of chocolate.

“Oh boy,” said the bird. “Now you’ve done it. The plot thickens.”

Carefully, Spade started scraping away at the jewel.

“I should warn you,” the bird intoned ominously, “that if you keep digging into this matter, you may not like what you find.”

Spade ignored him.

“Of course,” the bird added, “people in mysteries always say that, don’t they? And does it ever happen? No way. The hero goes right ahead, catches the killer, and gets the girl. He gets his picture in the paper, and a handshake from the mayor. So go ahead, Spade. Don’t listen to me. Keep digging. Everything will probably turn out all right in the end.”

The faux jewels fell away like dry scabs. Beneath lay cogs, flashing lights, an intricate network of tiny machines.

“What’s this?” Spade said.

“Micro-circuitry,” the bird explained. “That’s what allows me to talk.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“Well!” said the bird. “Look who knows so much! Just because you’ve never seen micro-circuitry, you presume it can’t possibly exist. Read Hume some time, why don’t you?"

Spade poked at the micro-circuitry with his knife. “What is all this?”

“Computers,” said the bird. “Machines. That’s what it’s all about, Spade. Everything’s a machine, in one way or another—your body, the universe. One day you’ll probably be replaced by a machine. Who knows?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Sound improbable?” said the bird. “Why don’t you try scraping away at your own outer layer? You might be surprised at what you find.”

Absently, Spade ran a fingernail down the skin of his forearm.

“Leave well enough alone,” said the bird. “Just this once.”

“I think there’s something more,” Spade said. “A deeper layer.” He began to scrape away at the micro-circuitry.

Circuits popped and sparked and fell away. Motors broke and oozed hydraulic fluid. Lights went dark.

“You’re out of your league, Spade,” said the bird. “Why don’t you just go back to murder, adultery, that sort of thing. That’s more up your alley.”

“I’ve broken the machines,” Spade observed, “and you’re still talking.”

The bird nodded reluctantly. “Perhaps it isn’t the micro-circuitry after all.”

Beneath the circuitry was a pink, porous surface.

“Looks like skin,” Spade said.

“Maybe,” said the bird.

Spade filed away at the falcon’s beak, which cracked off and fell to the floor. He filed away its eyes, its throat. He scraped away tiny circuits and fake jewels, exposing more and more of the flesh.

“It’s a face!” he said.

“Oh, it gets better,” said the bird.

“It’s my face,” Spade said finally.

A living, miniature version of his own face stared back at him from the opening in the black bird’s head.

“So you see,” said the bird, “this is how I can talk. I’m actually alive, after all.”

Spade realized with a start why the bird’s voice sounded so familiar. It was his own. “Why do you look like me?”

“Because our perceptions of things, mysteries for example, are filtered through our own consciousness. If you keep digging for truth, eventually all you find is yourself.”

“There must be something deeper,” Spade insisted.

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

Spade raised his knife. The bird eyed it nervously. “Uh, Spade? What are you doing?”

Sam Spade had never failed to solve a mystery, and he didn’t intend to start now. “I want the truth.” With an unsteady hand he began to scrape away at the tiny face. Clear amber fluid oozed out. He scratched at the falcon’s throat.

“That’s the jugular vein,” the bird whispered. “You might want to be careful around that.”

“Will it kill you?”

“No.”

Spade sliced it, and blood billowed forth, splattering across the desk.

Spade gasped. “Blood?”

“Blood,” the bird confirmed. “That’s as deep as you’re going to get.”

Spade set down the knife. “That’s the answer to your mystery? Blood?”

“I never said there was an answer. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

Spade scowled. “That’s not a mystery.”

“Au contraire,” said the bird, “that is a true mystery. Real quests for the truth usually end in fits of self-destruction and bitter disappointment.”

“I’m not finished yet.”

“Oh no? What’s left to do? You’ve already—” It paused. “Uh-oh, Spade,” it added, “looks like you’re bleeding.”

“What?” Spade pressed his fingers to his neck, and his hand came away wet and sticky. He leapt to his feet, ran across the room, and looked in the mirror.

“I told you it wouldn’t kill me,” said the bird. “Beyond that, who’s to say?”

Blood oozed from a gory section of Spade’s cheek, and a deep gash ran across his throat. He seized a cloth to stanch the flow of blood from his neck, but the fabric soaked through instantly.

He spun around and stared at the bird.

“I said you might not like what you found,” the bird said, almost apologetically, “but you didn’t listen.”

Spade sank to his knees, his blood dripping wide, wet spots across the carpet.

“No girl for you,” the bird scolded. “No handshake from the mayor.” It hopped from the desk and strode across the carpet toward him. “I told you you were out of your league.” The bird shook its head ruefully. “But would you listen?”

Spade collapsed, his head striking the floor.

“Will Sam Spade live to solve another mystery?” the bird asked.

Spade watched as it loomed closer, its bleeding face a mirror of his own. Finally the bird stood before him, casting a long shadow over him.

“Nevermore,” it answered, chuckling. “Nevermore!”

© 2000 by David Barr Kirtley.

Originally published in Gothic.net.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

David Barr Kirtley is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He recently wrote a 12-part column for Wired.com covering Season 2 of Game of Thrones. He's also the co-host of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast, for which he's interviewed folks such as George R. R. Martin, Richard Dawkins, Paul Krugman, and Simon Pegg. He lives in New York.

Spindles
L.B. Gale

I

The first thing that went missing was the smell of onions cooking in butter. It took her a good long time to realize that this was gone, for she had never realized that onions were the cause of the smell. Onions remained, of course. Raw onions still smelled as they always did. They still made you cry when you cut them. But when you fried them: nothing. There was no smell. It was gone.

The second thing to go was also culinary in nature. It was the word “waffle.” It took twelve days for her to miss it. She noticed on the day her mother told her they’d be having pancakes for breakfast and then made waffles instead.

“Pass the pancakes,” her father had said, and when she said there were none, he ruffled her hair and replied, “You’re a strange girl Evelyn Jane. They’re right there in front of your face.”

II

The fifth thing that Evelyn missed was her dinosaur drawing. She had drawn it at the age of five with a broken green crayon and a brown marker. It looked nothing like a dinosaur. Evelyn’s father frequently referred to it as the “best drawing of a three-toed sloth” he’d ever seen.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” her parents both said in answer to her inquiries concerning the drawing’s whereabouts.

It was the first time she suspected that something had gone seriously wrong.

III

The twenty-seventh thing that went missing was the taste of money. On Christmas Eve, she discovered a penny near the car on their way back from church. It was a muddy brown, and the year had been rubbed off. She put it in her mouth while watching the moon follow the car to their driveway. It had been years since she’d tasted currency, and she knew it was a childish thing to do. It tasted like nothing, and she swallowed it for being so inoffensive.

IV

The twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth things that went missing were her parents. They were gone on Christmas morning. What puzzled her about this was that her presents were still there.

V

But it was not to be: The next things that went missing were her Christmas presents.

Evelyn tried calling extended family members to see if they still remembered her parents. Nobody picked up the phone. It wasn’t until she ventured out into the world to purchase food that she realized that everyone was gone. It made shopping easier but walking home harder.

VI

The first match snapped in half. The second one burned, but she wasn’t ready for its speed. She dropped it to the ground and blew it out there. The third one worked just fine.

She set it on her bedspread.

The flame died away.

She tried to leave three more lit matches on the bed. All three went out before they did any damage.

Gasoline, she realized, might be necessary. She didn’t know how to remove it from the car.

She examined a cleaning agent beneath the sink. “Highly Flammable.” Her entire mattress and bedframe were soon doused in an assortment of “Highly Flammables.”

She covered her eyes when she tossed the match on the bed.

But it didn’t matter. The match sat on her bed, burning away. Nothing ignited.

This was disappointing but reassuring. It at least confirmed what she suspected: The bed was the problem.

NULLA

“The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.”

Evelyn’s father closed the book.

“You just started,” Evelyn said. She had recently turned twelve.

His nightly read aloud was the one thing she could not abandon.

She tried to sit up in her new bed, but the position was too right, and she knew—instinctually knew—that if she untied the knot her body had happened upon, she’d not be able to retie it intentionally. This was the way to fall asleep tonight. A voice said: Maybe every night, maybe you’ll find it every night—this curl, this level of warmth, this feeling of cleanliness, this neck-to-pillow angle. The voice didn’t use those words, but she heard it. Another voice said: What if you never find this again? You’ll have to give it up soon enough. Chances are you’ll twist involuntarily in little more than an hour and lose it forever.

She did not sit up.

“What’s that?” her father asked. His hand was on the doorknob. Her mother was already downstairs. “Your voice was suffocated by that pillow.”

“Too soon,” she said slowly and loudly. “More.”

He slapped the light switch and walked to the side of the bed to give her a goodnight kiss.

“It’s late. Setting up the bed took time. Only a few paragraphs tonight. Tomorrow, all of Chapter One.”

She was asleep before he said “Chapter One.”

VII

She’d never used an axe before. She gripped the handle with her knees and cupped her hands just below the blade. It fell forward, smacking into the center of the bedframe.

The axe and Evelyn were both suddenly on the floor. Evelyn held up her hands and looked at them. She’d felt a small but powerful shock the moment the blade had hit the bedframe.

A faint hum emanated from the wood.

The hum was the only sign. No mark. No scratch. Nothing.

Something about the perfection of that spot bothered her. She clenched her jaw, grabbed the axe and swung again, harder. Like a designated hitter. A ball player. A man, she imagined.

A bright blue spark blew up from the point of impact. It erupted out of the wood like cannonball water.

The impact catapulted her into the wall; lightning-blue light left her squinting. She did not try again.

NULLA

“You’re sure you want this one?”

She nodded her head and laid back. She felt guilty with her shoes on, but her mother told her she had to try it out if they were to buy it.

“I like the little bed you have now,” her mother said. “The Toy Story comforter won’t fit this one, you know.”

“Oh well,” Evelyn said, inflecting as much annoyance into two words as she could.

Whereas her father’s nostalgia for her childhood endeared him to her, her mother’s overprotectiveness irked her. Somewhere, deep down, she knew that her mother longed to keep her in pigtails and Easter bonnets for eternity.

Two weeks later the mattress and the frame were delivered. It wasn’t some hand-me-down frame from a great-grandmother carved from the last tree in an evil forest. It was a Sears original. The mattress came from Sleepy’s, the mattress professionals.

Her mother and father had her room completely redone while she was at a friend’s for the weekend. Re-painted. The carpet removed. New dressers. Evelyn expected they would do this, so terrible were they at surprises.

She’d wanted a deep red for the walls, an adult color. Evelyn was thrilled when she first looked it over. In the dim light: a stylish, primordial cave. A woman’s primordial cave. Her mother didn’t tell Evelyn that the swatch termed the paint she selected “Midnight Bubblegum,” which was really just a dark pink.

II.IV

“See how much I go through to feed you, Professor?” she called out.

This was usually when she heard the familiar sound of dog nails clicking against the white kitchen linoleum, as Professor (or “The” Professor, as her father called him) ran in for breakfast. Before Evelyn registered that The Professor had not run in, she saw that the cans of dog food were all gone.

“Mom, where’s the Alpo?”

“Why would there be dog food in the house?” Mom called from the laundry room. She walked in, holding one of Evelyn’s favorite—but now stained—red shirts, “You’re not trying to give me a hint are you? You know that your father doesn’t want dogs in the house.”

She looked over to the refrigerator at the bare spot where the dinosaur drawing had been.

“But we had a dog,” she managed to say.

“We never had a dog,” Mom said, and then she walked over and grabbed Evelyn gently by the chin. She put her lips to Evelyn’s forehead.

“Are you all right? Your forehead’s not warm but you look pale. Extremely pale.” She grabbed her hands. “And you’re all clammy.”

Evelyn pulled her hands back. “I’m fine,” she said and ran upstairs. It wasn’t until she arrived in her room and fell onto the bed that she realized she was still holding the can opener. No matter how many times her mother cleaned it, the shiny metal pincers always reeked of dog food. But when she held it under her nose now, it smelled clean.

The Professor, of course, was the eleventh thing that went missing.

Her tears were not absorbed by the fabric of her pillowcase. But she did not notice. Instead, a realization entered her head for the first time:

This bed is eating my life, one memorable morsel at a time.

She didn’t think that; more accurately, she felt it. The can opener helped her make the connection: the bed and food and eating and destruction and whatnot. It was a scholarly deduction, to be sure.

If she really believed it at that point, she’d have avoided sleeping in the bed. She didn’t. With her tears rolling off the pillow as if it was covered in plastic, she fell asleep.

VIII

She stopped sleeping in her bed after it threw her into the Midnight Bubblegum wall opposite the door. Things no longer went missing after that, but she wasn’t sure if it was because she stopped sleeping in the bed or if it was because she stopped sleeping.

VI.V

A Purple Heart in a blue rectangular box used to sit on her father’s dresser. But between lighting the first match and pulling the axe out of the shed, the dresser went missing. Evelyn believed that its contents had disappeared along with their distressed oak container, but some of the clothes sat piled up on the floor when it had gone. She wanted to bunch them up and bury her face in them, but the smell on the clothes—her father’s shaving cream and soap—had already gone missing well before that.

Two days after the dresser went missing, she found the Purple Heart in the drawer of her father’s nightstand. She’d begun taking inventory of everything she had left and had already decided that this was gone. Had he a backup heart in the nightstand as well? No. Impossible. This was the one from the dresser. It had broken the rules, avoiding distinction by moving to a new spot.

She turned it over in her hand and gauged the sharpness of the pin against the tip of her finger.

Two minutes later she was gleefully stabbing the pin into her pillowcase and watching the tiny acrylic tufts that puffed out. George Washington witnessed her first successful attack on the villainous old Queen with stoic detachment, his eyes fixed on the pillow to his right. When Evelyn noticed his gaze she removed the heart and affixed it to the other pillow. It too was vulnerable to the small needle.

This inspired her to locate the axe. The axe is for the man of the house, her father said, when she watched him attempt to clear some of the bushes from the backyard. He gave up on the axe soon after his attempts to take out a thick stump failed.

She was the man of the house now, she decided.

The first thing she noticed upon lugging the axe to her room was the absence of the Purple Heart.

The evil Queen had eaten the heart. The forty-seventh thing to go.

She decided at that moment that the bed must have been her mother, who she realized she hadn’t missed at all. Her mother’s possessions all remained, especially the doll that Evelyn hated, which her mother kept on her parents’ bed. Its hair had become matted and its clothes looked like the kind of cutesy good-girlish nonsense that she knew her mother would want her to wear when she started high school in two years.

Now she knew—or she thought she knew—that the bed was her mother. And her mother remained in existence while her father was being eaten away, one piece at a time. Her father would destroy the bed, if only she knew how to help him.

NULLA

The splinter had gone deep. He told her that the pin would only prick, it wouldn’t harm. But it had gone too deep, and a bubble of blood slurmed out. She drew her hand away and said I told you.

She sucked in air and forgot to free it. The sight of blood had never paralyzed her. It did now.

“Don’t be afraid of blood,” her father said. He knew to go to great lengths whenever she entered this level of upset. He needed to play the jester.

“We eat it, you know, all the time.” He pretended to munch on her wrist. “And, sometimes, we make beautiful art with it.” He swiped the bubble off her knuckle and smeared it across his sweaty forehead.

Evelyn smiled.

Her mother came in and shook her head at the silliness.

“You only need to fear it when it burns. Sometimes, it burns,” he said. Taking her mother’s hand and bringing it to his reddened forehead, he mocked a sizzling psssssst.

The first two lines amused her. The burning did not.

He shook her mother’s hand as if to put out the imaginary fire that had consumed it.

“Does it burn?” he asked her mother, pulling her into his lap for a kiss. Evelyn ignored this, staring instead at the crimson bead that welled up once more on her knuckle.

“It does,” her mother replied, standing up again. But she used the burned hand to straighten Evelyn’s hair, and did so without wincing in pain.

“Do you want me to do this?” she asked.

Her father furrowed his war-painted brow and shook his head from behind her mother.

III.IX

“This is a noose, you know,” her father said. “It works slowly but it will eventually do me in.”

He removed the tie from around his neck and held it upside down, swinging it slowly. She sat on their bed, her knees to the side, the church penny in her belly. Her mother was changing in the bathroom, the door shut.

“That’s clever,” Evelyn said. He’d explained the concept to her before. “But it’s not your idea. Someone else said it. Besides, you wore that to church; it’s not a noose unless you wear it to work.”

“You’ll never have to hang,” he said, approaching her, ignoring her reasoning. “Girls don’t wear these.”

“Some do. You’d rather I wore one to school than what I want to wear.”

He hung the tie up in his closet, speaking from within.

“The alternative to dressing up the way you want—or, rather, the way some of those other girls make you think you want—is not dressing like a boy. That’s silly.”

“What becomes a noose for women, then?” Evelyn asked. “If we can’t wear ties?”

He emerged from the closet in his Christmas pajamas, the ones she’d seen nearly every morning for her previous eleven December the twenty-fifths—but would not see on her twelfth. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he rolled his white socks nearly up to his knees. Abruptly, he pulled her close to him. The movement jerked her neck, making it vibrate with that more-annoying-than-painful temporary paralysis.

“Fathers wear the nooses for you. That’s the point.”

“Tell me the truth.”

He kissed her forehead.

“It used to be a spindle, long ago. But that was not a noose; it was a knife that slowly tore into you. Such things don’t exist anymore.”

His voice became deeper now, guttural.

“You can thank me for that.”

Evelyn did not hear this last statement, nor the change in his voice, for she was deep in thought. Had “spindles” gone missing? They couldn’t have because when things ceased to exist for her, she still remembered them. How could her father remember something that she had no idea about?

The word sounded familiar, like something from a dream or a memory.

“Say goodnight to your mother,” her father said. “You look tired, and tomorrow’s Christmas. I’ll walk you to your room.”

IX

Delirious from the insomnia, she took a sturdy needle from her mother’s pincushion and drew a thin red line across her forehead.

When she tasted the drop that dripped just above her lip, she knew.

Her hand smeared with the midnight bubblegum flowing slowly from the needle-cut, she returned to her bedroom and painted a red streak up and down her bedspread. She left one blood print on the face of each pillow.

The match caught fire with such intensity that she clenched her entire body together in sleep-deprived zeal, and then quivered.

The moment that the entirety of the bed became engulfed in flames everything went missing. All of existence save her and the dying Queen.

Nothingness was not black, as she anticipated.

Nor was it the white she’d have expected, perhaps inspired by Daffy Duck’s famous woes with nonexistence.

Rather, it was the dull teal of a horrifying bridesmaid’s dress that, Evelyn realized, her father would have been happy to see her wear long before she donned the pure white that he dreaded.

X

The fire consumed the bed and left a ribbon of ashes in the limitless teal surroundings. Evelyn nestled herself amidst those smoking cinders. They were, after all, the only things left, save for her, that were differentiated from the teal. The smoke smelled of winter and cinnamon. She closed her eyes wanting nothing more than to sleep forever.

The second her consciousness drifted away, her eyes bolted open.

XI

“The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.”

Evelyn’s father closed the book.

She realized with horror that she was back.

In more ways than one.

She was back in the bed. Yes. It was back. She was back to the beginning, where it all began, true.

But she was back. She remembered. She always remembered everything just after the book closed and before the goodnight kiss.

39,856,164 times now.

She clenched her eyes shut. She had lost. She knew, as she always did, that she would not have the strength to leave the bed. That was all that was required to break the cycle. To escape. She needed to come back at the beginning with the courage to get out of bed before the kiss. But this time was like all the others: Nothing could make her leave this warmth now.

Nothing.

This past cycle had been nearly identical to the ones before it.

Only six little glitches had ever changed the pattern. Once, she realized the onion smell was gone on the very first day. Another time, her mother barked and The Professor spoke like a grown woman. Once, she was a boy. Twice, she killed herself. Once, she masturbated.

And then there had been the times when she brought something back with her: the essentials. The things she knew she needed to focus her mind on just before the kiss so that when she forgot herself the next morning, and it all started again, she’d at least be able to speed up the process of returning.

She’d learned on one revolution that she needed to bring the can opener to her room after losing The Professor. Another time she’d learned about checking the nightstand for the Purple Heart. Another time she’d discovered the shortcut to finding the secret to destroying the bed: the splinter memory.

But this last revolution was supposed to be far different than the others. Entirely different. The last one. The escape.

The storyteller was there with her.

There was no one to narrate those 39,856,163 times. That meant that this one would be different. She knew it. The same way that she knew that Wendy was different from all the other children that Peter had lured to Neverland—because the storyteller chose to tell us the story through her and not those other children. You read the story knowing Wendy would have to be special because why else would we hear her story? Wendy returned home. On her first try she broke the cycle. Because the storyteller was with her.

This was supposed to be the one where Evelyn would break out of it. But this one hadn’t been different at all. It was mostly the same.

But—hold on—the storyteller was still there. Wasn’t he? Isn’t he? She?

If he was—or if she is—then maybe it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe the event that would change everything was still on its way. Evelyn hoped this as she found her mouth involuntarily moving and her voice being forced from her throat.

XII

“You just started,” Evelyn said.

She tried to sit up in her new bed but the position was too right, and she knew, instinctually knew, that if she untied the knot her body had happened upon, she’d not be able to retie it intentionally. This was the way to fall asleep tonight . . .

She did not sit up.

This was the second event. The third event would end in the kiss and lead to the beginning of a new cycle.

She had only moments to discover whether or not the storyteller had something more planned for her. Something new.

The book had closed. The kiss was coming. Book then kiss. Book kiss. Book.

That was what was new.

The realization she just had.

The onion smell was always the first thing to be missing, she thought. But was it really first?

Her tormentors. Or her tormentor—whoever was responsible for her condition—had tricked her.

The book was the first thing that went missing.

There were no stories. That was always missing before the onion smell.

And suddenly she remembered spindles. The Fairy Tale. That’s what her father had been talking about. But she hadn’t been able to remember it at the time—not the movie, not the storybook, not even her Disney beach towel. Yet her father knew.

That made her queasy.

The rules that she thought ordered these cycles weren’t rules at all. Or at least not the natural rules she’d assumed they were, like leaves falling in autumn and gravity. They were created by someone. Enemies. And whoever her enemies were didn’t want her to remember stories because, she realized, that’s what will save me.

NULLA

“I want Dad!” she screamed through tears as the doctors sewed through her forehead.

Her mother hovered and promised it would be all right, that he was on his way from work.

Evelyn had been playing tag with her friends. Their front porch was home base and she’d run so furiously to get there that she tripped and cracked her head against the brick edge.

She threw up when she put her hand to her forehead and felt the blood course down her arm. Her mother sent the girls home and rushed her to the emergency room.

Stitches, they said, without fully explaining it.

Dad, Evelyn said, she wanted him.

And then when he finally came—

No! Evelyn cried from her bed.

Not with her mouth but with her mind.

What was this prank? This interlude? Why had her consciousness shot into that emergency room? Why did she need to force the camera way back here to her room and her bedthoughts?

Her enemies—her enemy—must be afraid.

They wanted to force her from her realization.

She thought, distantly, that perhaps the storyteller had betrayed her. She didn’t know for sure. She returned her mind to the task at hand.

She knew that just before the kiss she’d have to concentrate on those things that she needed to get through the next revolution: the can opener, the Purple Heart, the splinter. And now she needed to add a new thought: the book thought. The realization that would end it all. But what was it?

You have to write a story. She heard the words in her mind, in surround sound.

“Thank you,” she said, silently.

XIII

“What’s that?” her father asked. His hand was on the doorknob. Her mother was already downstairs. “Your voice was suffocated by that pillow.”

“Too soon,” she said slowly and loudly. “More.”

That was it: the third event. The kiss was coming.

Evelyn knew instantly what story she had to write. It came to her messily, like soda that bubbles out of a bottle, but she knew it. She knew the last thing to take with her in addition to the can opener, the Purple Heart, and the splinter memory.

She had to create the story with the spindle—but changed a bit. It will make her see. It would make her father see. Or it would defeat him. That was it. It would defeat him—not kill him, but defeat him. She needed to defeat him. The kisser. The kisser whose kiss puts her to sleep rather than wakes her to life. No. They were the same. My God, she needed to defeat him, and she never knew until just then.

Could he be defeated?

Perhaps she had to give birth to the book in the bed. Wait, that made no sense. Yes it did. Sleep sense. The sleep was coming. “She was only a little girl.” Birth the book, give it birthlife, afterbirth life.

She shook herself beneath the sheets, forcing one last minute of consciousness.

The evil fairy in the story makes the spindle death. The good fairy makes it sleep. The good fairy can’t overcome the evil one’s spell entirely, you see. She can only weaken it. It must remain something intolerable to the king. Then the good fairy must make the prick of the spindle not a sentence to slumber nor instantaneous death but the spider-bite or the gamma ray of the superhero, that will make me the Wild Woman, The Hedonist, the Spindle Snapper—the One my father fears, the spindle spell that’s worse to him than the spell of death or eternal sleep.

She thought this with the mind of one who had gone through 39,856,164 revolutions.

That will still satisfy the rules of the story: The good fairy will alter the magic of the evil fairy but not end it. She will still be cursed to live a life that is not of the king’s desire, that is entirely against the king’s desire. And it will show that the evil fairy, the good fairy, the king: They are all in cahoots. They were working together, all along. That is what they don’t tell the children. I will expose it in my story, and make it new. Make him listen, in his bed, the night before Christmas. And then I will escape. The bed needn’t burn then. That night, I will sleep and wake up, finally free.

But maybe that was what she always thought right then, just before the kiss.

Maybe she always thought she knew how to escape, and just forgot. That could be part of his game.

Was that possible?

She didn’t know. And she didn’t know if the storyteller was making her think she didn’t know. Because, she realized, he—and now she both knew it was a he and realized she regretted hating her mother so—he wanted to leave her with ambiguity because ambiguity was tastier to this storyteller than clarity. Pain was tasty to him—her pain, because he thought it was the same thing as truth. And so she realized what she had started to suspect even when he helped her: that he was also her enemy. Not the same as the evil-fairy-good-fairy-king. He was the tricksy kind that could help even as he hurts. But an enemy nonetheless, and a dangerous one too.

She forced herself to believe that this new plan was a new plan. The first time she had planned it. The last plan she needed.

And so she readied herself for the next revolution.

Her father slapped the light switch, and approached the bed while the door remained open and the hall light crept in.

The kiss was now imminent.

The third-to-last thought she thought before falling asleep was fueled by sheer determination: Can Opener. Purple Heart. Splinter Memory. And now she added: Books. Books. Stories. Stories will be missing when you wake up. Don’t forget stories. Don’t forget books. You need to write the story that’s missing. The spindle story. It must be written anew and read before Christmas. That will end it. Then you will win.

The second-to-last thought was once again of the terror of ambiguity.

The last thought lacked language. It was a thought of warmth and absolute contentment.

Her father kissed her forehead and spoke:

“It’s late. Setting up the bed took time. Only a few paragraphs tonight. Tomorrow, all of Chapter One.”

She was asleep before he said “Chapter One.”

© 2012 L.B. Gale

L.B. Gale received her Master’s degree from the University of Chicago, where she studied literary theory, fantasy, and mythology. She currently lives in New York. A good deal of her time is spent blogging about speculative fiction and the fantasy writing process. You can access her blog at lbgale.com and find her on Twitter @lbgale.

Beyond the Reach of His Gods
Brian Ruckley

An unseen log boomed against Wolfrun’s hull. In the last few days, Rhuan of the Grey Hall had taken to posting a lookout on the prow, to ward against just such events. This great, fat monstrosity of a river seemed at times to carry almost as much debris as it did water. Some of that flotsam weighed enough to punch a hole clean through the planking: mighty timbers, even whole trees; once, a clump of them that drifted on the current, riding upright on their raft of sodden earth and entangled roots. Their uppermost, trembling branches had reached almost as high as the masthead, and a lizard as long as a man’s arm perched amongst the boughs like the captain of that mad vessel. Such a sight would be unthinkable in Rhuan’s cold homeland, but these foul and foetid territories held much that ought to have been impossible.

An arrow clattered against the barrel next to Rhuan and fell beside him. Here was the reason why no watchman could now ride the wolf-headed prow, and why Rhuan himself hunched behind the gunwale of his longship: arrows too feeble to punch through anything but the thinnest hide, yet capable of killing a man if they so much as scratched exposed skin. The savages who loosed them set some dark, tarry matter about the points, and it gave any wounds they delivered a vile potency. Rhuan had already watched two of his men die agonizing, fevered deaths. One, whose hand had been transfixed by such an arrow, had lived long enough to see his arm turning black, stinking of rot, drawing attentive hosts of the flies that infested these jungles. They had cut it off and cast it overboard, and sealed the stump with fire, but still he had died. It was a cruel end. Crueler still for coming in exile, in a place so sodden, so bloated with water, that no funeral pyre could be built to ease his soul’s onward journey. A place beyond the reach of the Gods of their homeland. Beyond the reach, surely, of any god save a mad one.

Rhuan ventured a brief glance over the shields hung in protective rank along the side of the ship. There was, as ever, nothing to see save the wall of riotous vegetation. Trees and bushes of every ilk choked the bank of the river. They trailed their garlands of vines into the brown water, built turrets and parapets from their festoons of dark, glossy leaves. And hid, amidst their horrible vigor, the enemy Rhuan sought. Another arrow came arcing out toward Wolfrun, struck its shielded flank and fell back into the turbid river.

Rhuan glared at the small, brown-skinned man crouched close by: their guide, though since he spoke no tongue save his own his guidance amounted to little more than nodding and gesturing. His name, as best Rhuan had been able to determine, was something like Ahenotoc. At this moment, he appeared entirely untroubled by either Rhuan’s anger or the desultory volleys of arrows from which they sheltered. He smiled, his teeth bright. Rhuan growled in irritation.

“Faster!” he shouted down the length of the ship.

The oarsmen redoubled their efforts. They were bare-chested, every one, and their reddened, peeling backs shone with sweat as their muscles flexed. Not the beads or trickles of sweat that might adorn the brow of a farmer laboring in his field in a northern summer. No: So thick and sluggish was the air in this pestilential land, so oppressive the remorseless heat, that sweat came forth in torrents. Men wore it like a second skin.

Rhuan felt the ship respond to the increased beat of the oars. It surged on upstream, slicing through the opposing flow. Birds—as abundantly colored as the most garish of flowers—went squawking overhead. As their harsh voices faded, Rhuan realized that in their wake they left no sound save that of the grinding oars, and the gasping breaths of the men who worked them. No more arrows rattled against wood.

He straightened cautiously. Nothing. Just the faceless, formless jungle staring back at him. As before, the unseen savages had no desire for pursuit. They merely sought to kill those who happened to come within their reach. An idle kind of bloodlust drove them.

“What is he saying?” Rhuan muttered.

Garnok grimaced. “I am not sure, lord.”

The priest frowned as he tried to follow Ahenotoc’s fluid hand movements. “Possibly that we draw near to our destination?” he suggested doubtfully.

Ahenotoc grinned, pointing upriver, jabbing three fingers at Rhuan. Nodding with raised eyebrows. Rhuan leaned out over the gunwale and stared ahead. The broad river wound its bloated way into the distance, running between the endless green battlements of the jungle.

“I see nothing,” he muttered. “You are no longer of any use to me as a priest, Garnok. If you could make sense of this man’s . . . waving about, as you said you might, that would be at least some small compensation.”

“Not by my choice did we journey beyond the bounds of the known world,” said Garnok at once. “I spoke with the Gods on your behalf—brought forth favorable winds, and summoned birds to guide us—while we were still within earshot of their Stone Thrones. But there is no mortal voice could carry over such distances as we have traversed, and if there are other Gods who inhabit these noxious climes, I know not the language in which to beseech their aid, nor the rituals to foster their goodwill. None of us do.”

Rhuan made no reply to that. Though Garnok’s argumentative manner was troubling, he was far from the only one becoming restive. Every one of these men had willingly followed Rhuan into exile after his father’s execution, but he was not so foolish as to assume that their undoubted loyalty to him was the sole star by which they steered. Many had faced the same choice he had: exile or a hard death on the Blood Wheel. All had hoped that he would lead them to adventure, and glory, and plunder; discover for them fresh lands to raid, perhaps even rule.

Now, he knew, they began to doubt him. He had led them further than any of their people had ever gone. In half a year of relentless journeying, driven by angers and hungers he barely understood himself, he had surpassed the deeds of their greatest song-remembered heroes and outshone the most legendary of seafarers. Following the faintest of rumors—mere whispers of distant territories awash with gold—he had brought them to these unknown, undreamed of, shores. Where there was, as yet, little sign of gold. Fevers and sweat; sores and sunstroke. Swarms of blood-hungry insects, and a trackless wasteland of impenetrable jungle. Death, for some. But not gold. Not yet.

Ahenotoc gave an excited cry, and shook his outstretched hand.

Rhuan saw, as a long bend of the river slowly opened itself out ahead of them, a break in the monotonous, implacable jungle. A vast clearing spread back from the riverside. And there were, he could tell even at this distance, even as he blinked to clear the sweat that ran into his eyes, buildings there. His spirits soared at the sight. Perhaps now he could deliver to his followers the harvest their efforts deserved. Perhaps now he could claim for himself some of the riches and the glory he would need, if ever he was to return to the land of his birthplace and visit vengeance upon those who had slain his father and cast him out.

“All your strength!” he cried to the crew. “A few strokes more, and you can set aside those oars and take swords in your hands instead.”

A ragged cheer, blunted by the exhaustion of those who raised it, met his words. The air here was so lethargic and heavy that there was seldom even a breath of wind; when it did stir itself it came with torrential rain and lightning that shook the sky. Wolfrun’s sail had slumbered, useless, for days; there had been no respite for the oarsmen.

“A crowd gathers,” said Garnok.

There were indeed figures assembling along the riverside. They milled about, and though no sound carried down to the approaching ship, Rhuan thought he detected in their chaotic movement the signs of fear, perhaps even panic. All the better.

Those figures massed at the head of a shallow, shelving beach of sand. Several of the carved, hollowed-out logs these people used as boats were drawn up on it.

“Take us straight in,” Rhuan called to Panur the helmsman. “Run up onto that strand.”

Panur nodded firmly, his loose blond hair brushing at his shoulders. Rhuan stared out past the wolfish prow, counting. A hundred or more men and women were gathered there now, and he could see many others beyond them, running this way and that. He would have no more than thirty men at his back when he sprang ashore. It would be more than enough. Even as he watched, the crowd began to scatter. The people—most of them, at least—were slipping away into the surrounding forest.

Rhuan smiled. This was going to be even easier than he had imagined.

The first village they found, along the coast of this wild land, had been a disappointment: nothing more than a handful of rickety huts, clustered on the shore at one of the few points where the exuberant jungle did not overspill the land and merge itself with the sea in a forbidding tangle of looping stems and spines. They had driven the inhabitants off without difficulty, and torn most of the hovels apart in their determined search, but were rewarded with nothing of worth.

The second village, at the mouth of this very river, had appeared no more promising at first. Its inhabitants, though, had not fled. Perhaps forewarned, they abased themselves before Rhuan and his men, and produced gifts. Tribute, if such meager fare could be dignified with such a title. Wooden ornaments and seashells; bowls of strange-looking fruit and fishing spears tipped with bone. The people themselves offered no more promising an appearance. Most were all but naked, wearing the simplest and slightest of hide rags. Rhuan had felt a terrible, disappointed rage coming upon him then, but it had been stilled by a soft yellow glimmer amongst the polished wooden trinkets: a single, simple bead of gold.

Seeing his interest, the villagers had become excited. One—Ahenotoc—had come forward, and let fly an enthusiastic but incomprehensible stream of words. Again and again he had pointed first at the tiny ball of gold cupped in Rhuan’s palm, and then upriver. His meaning, his implied promise, had been clear.

As they surged toward the riverbank Rhuan reached for his patron God, Wen Iron-Arm. He did it out of habit. It had been many, many days since any such call had found an answer. There was but a trembling in his chest at the reaching; a tingling in the skin of his arms and down his spine. Not the burning fury and might that he could have called upon in his homeland. Here, his God could not hear him.

Some of his warriors were already on their feet, pulling on jerkins and mail shirts, settling shields upon their arms. Panur was shouting fierce encouragement to those who had not yet stowed their oars.

“Are we not the mightiest of races?” cried Rhuan, holding his sword and shield aloft.

The confirmatory roar was heartfelt.

“Are our blades not the sharpest, our Gods not the fiercest?”

Still louder, his men bellowed out their agreement.

“Then let us prove it now,” Rhuan shouted even as the keel ground into the sand and Wolfrun shivered to a halt.

He spun about and vaulted blindly over the gunwale, plummeting down into ankle-deep water. His knees buckled, but he drove himself upright and went pounding up the beach. He could hear the rest of them pouring after him, splashing ashore as he had done, rending the air with their wild war cries.

Rhuan ran into the clearing. The bare earth sent the sun’s noonday heat beating back at him. A dozen or more long timber huts—only a little less massive than the meet-halls of the glacier-clad north—were scattered about the clearing. And there was stonework: two low, step-sided mounds, like crude imitations of some rocky hill. Between them towered a tree that was not a tree. A single perfectly straight trunk thrust up from the earth, climbing to the height of eight or more men. It carried no limbs, though so great was its girth it must once have supported mighty boughs. Its surface bore a strange decoration. At its base, the image of a man had been cut into the wood, and a huge carved snake rose from him, spiraling up about the gigantic column.

Rhuan slowed, his gaze following the coiling ascent of that snake. Only a flicker of movement glimpsed from the corner of his eye saved him as a flimsy arrow came skimming in at his chest. He jerked his shield up to send the shaft tumbling away, and veered toward its source. Close to a dozen men awaited him, and he rushed gladly into their midst.

They were not dressed as Ahenotoc’s impoverished people had been, these dark-skinned warriors. Shells of hardened hide encased their chests, skirts of plated horn or shell hung from their hips. They held spears, and great clubs set with blades of bone.

Rhuan flung himself at them, howling wordless fury, spittle and sweat spraying indistinguishably from his lips. He saw their fear of him in their eyes. His shield shook at a blow from one of those cudgels; a thrusting spear grazed harmlessly along his flank. He permitted them nothing more than that.

A low, stooping slash and he cut the legs from under one man. A jab with his shield and he broke another’s nose, split his cheek with its iron boss. One long, stretching lunge and the point of his sword cracked through feeble hide armor and sunk into the belly beneath.

Others were at his side, axes rising and falling, blades sweeping back and forth. Their opponents soon fled, sprinting for the safety of the mute jungle that crowded in around the clearing. All danger did not depart with them, though.

The man next to Rhuan—Olf, with whom he had hunted and fished as a child—gave a startled yelp and looked down at the thin arrow that had found its way through a gap between tunic and belt. He pulled it from his flesh and looked in blank gloom at the thick, foul concoction that crusted its tip. He held it out to Rhuan, who grimaced in sympathy.

“Get back to the ship,” he said quietly, and went in search of more battles.

He found them, amongst the huts and the halls, and visited slaughter upon all those who would oppose him, fired now with a cold rage at the ugly death he so clearly saw lying in wait for Olf. Blood ran into the dusty earth, and vanished there, as if sucked deeper by hungry spirits. Sweat crawled over Rhuan’s skin and soaked his shirt. Soon enough, there was no one left to fight. Those who were not dead had vanished into the green ocean of trees.

Two of Rhuan’s men had fallen. One lay on his back almost in the centre of the clearing. The side of his head had been battered in by one of those ferocious, toothed clubs. Flies were already darting about the wound. Rhuan watched the other die. The man was sitting against the wall of a longhouse. His neck was run through by a thin spear. Blood and saliva bubbled in his mouth as he faltered.

“Search, then,” Rhuan muttered darkly to the survivors who gathered about him. “Find what we came for.”

The place yielded its secrets reluctantly, but yield them it did. From hollow wooden tubes stacked beside hammocks spilled granules of raw, unworked gold. From about the necks of a few dead men came golden pendants. Hanging from the struts of the roofs were strange, bloated idols with golden eyes. It could not be accounted profuse riches, but it was something.

Rhuan looked for Ahenotoc. If anyone would know what else might wait to be found, it would be the man who had brought them here in the first place.

“Where is he?” he demanded of Garnok.

The priest nodded up toward one of the strange stone-built platforms in the heart of the village. Rhuan lifted his eyes, and saw Ahenotoc crouched there, at the very summit. He shouted, but the villager did not seem to hear him.

Rhuan climbed the crude stone steps, feeling the sweat tracing a score of different paths down his back. The sun’s assault grew yet more brutal as he ascended. He had never dreamed the sky could harbor such a ferocious fire. The stench warned him of what he would find before he reached the top. He knew this compound of odors all too well: opened bowels; dried blood; exposed flesh.

Ahenotoc bent over the corpse of a young man dressed just as he was, with skin of just the same hue. The dead man was split open, from throat to groin. His ribs had been broken back to make of his chest an upturned, splayed hand of bony fingers. His entrails had been unwound and draped over his shoulders and thighs.

Rhuan grimaced and clamped a hand over his mouth and nose. Ahenotoc rocked slowly back and forth. It looked like mourning. There were more bodies—three of them—arrayed atop this stone hillock, blackening and rotting in the heat, attended by murmuring clouds of flies. All of them appeared to be of Ahenotoc’s people. All had been treated in the same cruel fashion.

Rhuan understood at once, and cursed himself for under-estimating the small, almost delicate, man.

“We are your vengeance, then?” he growled. “It was not gold at all that you brought us here for.”

Shouts from down below distracted him. He saw warriors pointing toward the fringes of the jungle. There were shapes moving there, in the gloomy shade; half-hidden, and difficult to distinguish, but clearly human. And clearly multitudinous. The edge of the forest teemed with people, more of them with every passing heartbeat. Scores, hundreds perhaps. Skulking there, mustering their courage. Readying themselves. Ahenotoc was, perhaps, not the only one he had misjudged.

“Enough,” he snapped, and roughly pulled Ahenotoc to his feet. He pushed the man before him down the crude stairway. He strode back toward the river, shouting as he went.

“To Wolfrun! All of you, leave what you can’t carry. Our time’s done!”

Panur knew his business well. He already had Wolfrun back from the beach, rocking in the shallows a dozen paces offshore, with knotted ropes hung over the side. The men went splashing out and swarmed back aboard with all the ease of seasoned raiders.

Rhuan was the last of them. He watched as Ahenotoc clambered nimbly up and out of sight, then turned, knee-deep in the river’s cooling waters, and looked back at the gigantic, unsettling pillar of carved wood that dominated the clearing. He could see people moving about it once again. Too late, he thought. Only by moments, but too late to claim any more of us. He allowed himself a moment of satisfaction, watching that scene, listening to the clatter of oars being readied, and to the sound of gentle waves slapping against Wolfrun’s hull. Then he reached for a rope and hauled himself up.

Olf was laid out on the boards, groaning as the poison wormed its way into the depths of his body. Rhuan averted his eyes, for fear of the weakening grief the sight might bring him.

Long, hard sweeps of the oars carried them out and across the current. The weight of the river’s endless waters was with them now, and it turned the prow quickly downstream. Rhuan stood at Panur’s side as the helmsman set himself to the task of holding a straight course.

“To the sea,” Rhuan murmured. The sea, where they belonged. Where the air might have some life to it, and the world would widen itself beyond the constricting banks of this loathsome waterway.

He looked back, and saw a great crowd already drawn up along the edge of the clearing, watching them depart. He held his sword high, to give those observers something to remember him by. They would tell tales, no doubt, in years to come, of the pale—

He frowned in puzzlement as a figure came out from amongst the faceless throng: a man, clad in a long gown or cloak, wearing an absurd, eruptive headdress of vibrantly colored feathers. A youth followed this newcomer down to the water’s edge and lay at his feet. The feathered man raised a knife, as if in answer to Rhuan’s own gesture. Or mockery of it, perhaps.

“Garnok,” Rhuan called, without looking away from the strange scene.

The figures were dwindling into the distance as the ship rushed on down the river, but still Rhuan could see the sun’s fire glint for a moment along the black blade of the knife. And then it plunged down into the chest of the youth, and the priest—for surely that must be what he was—sawed vigorously at the flesh and bones of his victim. Who did not struggle, Rhuan saw; who did not cry out at his own horrific destruction.

“What is it?” Garnok asked.

“A sacrifice?” Rhuan said, pointing with his sword.

Garnok grunted. “Too late for them to beg their gods for aid.”

The executioner stood erect once more, and now he held aloft not his knife but some smaller object. Gore trailed down his arm. Dark stains covered his gown.

“He cut the heart from one of his own,” Rhuan murmured in surprise. “Such savagery.”

“We’ll be out of sight soon,” Garnok said. “Put them from your mind. They cannot reach us now.”

“You hope. I fear there is more to these people than we imagined.”

The feather-headed priest flicked out his arm and cast his bloody prize into the river. They were too far off for Rhuan to see the splash of its disappearance into the brown water. He saw clearly enough what followed upon it, though, even at this distance: a foaming and boiling, spreading suddenly over the river’s surface, writhing out from the bank toward the very centre of the channel; a buckling of the water, drawing itself up into white-flecked humps; liquid convulsions spreading not in any natural pattern, but in a long, curving and re-curving line that wound its way downstream. As if reaching out for the ship.

Then they were around a bend and could see nothing more. Wolfrun was alone with the huge, silt-laden river, and with the disorderly armies of trees that jostled all along the banks. There was no sound save the rhythmic working of the oars, and Olf’s pained curses through clenched teeth. No sensation but the familiar movement of his ship beneath Rhuan’s feet, and the smothering weight of the sun’s heat on his scalp, his back. He sheathed his sword.

“Keep to the centre of the channel,” he told Panur, and turned reluctantly to confront Olf’s fate.

Instead, it was Ahenotoc that caught his eye. The little man knelt at the very edge of the deck, leaning over the shields, staring fixedly back up the line of their wake. Fixedly, and fearfully. Rhuan followed Ahenotoc’s gaze, but saw nothing save the track of fading eddies left by the oars, the separating, sinking waves that marked their progress.

“He knows something we do not,” he muttered to Garnok.

But the priest did not reply. He frowned, wincing. He shook his head once, sharply. Drops of sweat fell from the matted strands of his hair.

“Something is coming,” he whispered.

And come it did. A great, bulbous bow wave rounded the bend in the river behind them. Some mighty hidden force piled up the water as it powered through it, and then spilled it back into a churning maelstrom that encompassed the entire breadth of the channel. Flocks of birds burst from the riverside canopy, climbing in raucous, gaudy panic and speeding away over the roof of the forest.

Rhuan watched in mounting horror as the river rose behind them. The wave thickened and swelled as it drew near, building itself up into a wall of dark water that rushed toward their stern. Rhuan could hear it now, could hear the seething deep in the body of the river, the rumble of its immense disturbance.

He opened his mouth to cry out a warning, but the alarm went unuttered. Quite suddenly, the river calmed. Its waters slumped back, and that great threatening wave became dying ripples.

“It’s gone,” he said in bewilderment.

“No,” hissed Garnok, his voice a taut cord of strain. “Only deeper.”

A boom, shaking the bones of the ship. A splintering chorus of shattering oars. A violent lurching sideways of the deck, as the entire vessel was flung across the current. Spray and fragments of wood stung Rhuan’s face. He staggered, and had to seize Panur’s arm to steady himself. Startled cries filled the air. A loose barrel went tumbling across Rhuan’s field of vision. He saw it strike Garnok and send him reeling. Ahenotoc reached out a single, futile arm to try to save the priest, but too late. Garnok pitched silently over the stern.

Rhuan rushed to the gunwale and leaned out, searching the murky, roiling waters. He glimpsed Garnok’s head and shoulder as he rolled, and sank, and bobbed to the surface once more.

“Turn us about!” Rhuan shouted, but it was hopeless. A swift glance down the vessel’s flank revealed only the stumps of oars. Their blades had been sheared away, leaving only blunt and split stubs that flailed impotently at the water. Already, his proud ship was turning, drifting broadside to the river’s flow.

He looked back in time to see Garnok taken. A huge fat, blunt head, wider than Rhuan was tall, rose to the surface, engulfed the torpid form of the priest and bore it down into oblivion. Like the fist-tipped arm of some titanic riverine giant, a sleek and darkly gleaming body, all dull browns and greens, flowed after that head, a body that seemed to be a single mass of muscle cloaked in mottled scales. Its girth matched that of the whales Rhuan’s people hunted in the summer. A gargantuan monstrosity, this. Impossible. The waters closed, and hid the beast from him.

“Serpent!” Rhuan cried as he whirled away. “Make for the shore.”

But he could see Panur’s helplessness writ clear upon the helmsman’s face. He hauled mightily at his steerboard without effect. The ship wallowed and rolled. Rhuan could feel its struggle, its wounds, through his feet and in the shape of its faltering. The hull was breached, somewhere; the planking split. He could feel, with every long-honed instinct, the weight of the water slowly gathering in its shallow belly.

The men who had lost their oars were getting to their feet, reaching for swords, axes, shields. None had seen what Rhuan had, he guessed. They did not know what they faced, and how overmatched their weaponry was likely to prove.

The ship shook. The mast trembled, describing a widening circle. A rasping, grating groan ran through every timber as something massive scraped itself under the keel. Rhuan heard the first stirring of fear in the voices of his brave warriors as they looked this way and that. Some were trying to move oars across to replace those destroyed, but it was too late.

The river shrugged, and Wolfrun rose. Men sprawled and slipped. The stern bucked, throwing Rhuan to his knees. The mast creaked. Then the ship slapped back down and muddy waves broke over its sides. Rhuan struggled to his feet, water sloshing about his boots and soaking his leggings.

And suddenly the giant, malignant head rose upon the tower of its neck, the river falling away from its scaled body. It rose between Rhuan and the sun, and it cast its shadow upon him and it felt chill and heavy, as if he had fallen into the shade of some ice-bound mountain. He saw a spear lance up and rebound impotently from the glistening scales. And still the serpent reared higher and higher from the water, no end to it. A tongue, fat and forked, writhed out from its lipless mouth. The beast lifted its head until it over-topped Wolfrun’s mast, and it stared down upon the ship and its scrambling, shouting crew with eyes like worn red jewels. Then all its weight came crashing down.

Rhuan was thrown into the air, and he tumbled through a cacophony. The cracking of failing timbers. The howls of men, colored by rage or terror or pain. The river twisting and tearing itself into a storm of foam. As he fell, he caught glimpses of the world: the green mass of the jungle; the brown river strewn with broken wood, and a body floating face down; the serpent’s huge flank rippling as it tightened itself about Wolfrun.

He hit the water, and went under. There, in the roaring, crushing darkness, the sounds were deeper, and they rang in his breastbone and his skull. He could hear his ship dying, and its death throes were like the slow rumble of snow down a mountainside. The river took him in its irresistible grasp and swept him along. Invisible objects battered against his legs: rocks or men or debris, he could not tell. He blinked, and felt the grit of the river searing his eyes. There was, though, a hint of pale light, distant and frail but real.

Rhuan hauled himself to the surface, and found himself facing the riverside, staring at a jumble of rocks and dead wood overhung by a chaos of vegetation. He turned in the water, and bore witness to Wolfrun’s end. The serpent had thrown its vast coils around the ship’s midriff, once, twice, thrice. From that immense embrace, there could be no escape. As Rhuan watched, drifting numbly away downstream, Wolfrun’s back broke with a hollow crash, and her prow and stern folded up toward one another. The mast was smashed against the serpent’s back and snapped like so much kindling. Men spilled from the shattered vessel, plunging into the river.

Even as its body sank slowly down, taking the carcass of the ship to its dark grave, the monster’s head scythed back and forth over the river’s surface. It bludgeoned men and crushed them in its jaws and dragged them under. Flailing figures dotted the river across its whole turbulent width. Many of them could not swim, Rhuan knew. Many others had been wearing mail, or had gold about their necks and stuffed inside their shirts, and would live only if they could free themselves of it. Some were in the very middle of the channel, where the mindless grip of its current was most ferocious; they went racing away beneath the sun’s impassive, brutal glare, arms clawing at the air, cries fading quickly. The river took its share of the serpent’s bounty.

Amidst the slaughter, in a last great foamy gurgle, the carved wolf’s head of the prow was the last of the ship to disappear. It slipped slowly, almost solemnly out of sight, and Wolfrun was gone. Rhuan rolled grimly onto his front and swam for the shore. He had given up wearing his mail vest just two days ago: it was too burdensome to bear in this heat, and it had been rubbing sores into his shoulders. Still, the river wanted him. It pulled at him, and his sword was heavy at his hip. He might have succumbed, had not a long branch suddenly been extended and pushed into his hand. Gasping, Rhuan allowed himself to be dragged out onto the rocks, and looked blearily up into Ahenotoc’s narrow, thoughtful eyes.

Ahenotoc led him into a gloomy, frightful world; from the light and heat of the river to a suffocating and dank domain. The trees pressed so close together, in such profusion of form and size, that all beneath them was shadow and they had smothered the ground with their decaying leaves. The air was so burdened with moisture that it felt heavy in Rhuan’s lungs.

The awful sounds coming from the river faded slowly behind them. Rhuan felt a dull shame at his impotence in the face of such destruction, and a part of him would gladly have thrown himself back into those churning waters, to die with his men and with his ship. But Ahenotoc pulled him insistently along with little tugs at his sleeve and nagging mutters. An urgency possessed the man that Rhuan did not entirely understand.

No forest in his own lands could have prepared him for the overpowering abundance of this jungle. The tallest of the trees soared out of sight, merging themselves into the endless, many-layered roof of leaves. Vines and creepers and ferns dripped and tumbled from the trunks and branches. Great curving fronds tore at him with hooks as he stumbled along. And the noise: a throbbing, whining drone of sound came from every direction at once; innumerable insect voices blended into the single monotonous song of the forest itself. He felt a soft impact on his shoulder, and found a huge beetle clinging to him, its carapace spined and twisted like something a delirious child might shape from a memory of fever. He hissed in alarm and knocked it away.

Never had Rhuan known any place so remorselessly hostile and unsuited to human life. He could see no trail. He blundered into patches of vicious thorn, slipped on mossy rocks, started away from fleeting movements glimpsed and then gone before they could be given meaning. None of this troubled Ahenotoc, who drifted easily and silently through the madness, bare-footed and near naked, yet unscathed by any of the countless insults the jungle offered.

They climbed a long and shallow slope. Rhuan heard some animal crashing away through the treetops over their heads; he peered uneasily upwards, but saw nothing save a shower of tumbling leaves. His legs grew heavy. His thighs and knees ached. He grew angry—at Ahenotoc, at fate, at the intractable jungle and its utter indifference to his desires and ambitions—and slumped heavily down on the sloping root of a huge tree.

Ahenotoc, a little way ahead, turned and shook his head.

“I cannot walk forever,” Rhuan said. “My ship, my men—all gone. Leave me to mourn them. Leave me to my sorrows.”

He fell silent, staring with furrowed brow at the forest floor around his boots. It had come alive. Dozens—scores—of tiny black worms looped their way over the fallen leaves, closing from every direction upon his feet. He rose hurriedly and took a few steps sideways, not knowing what new horror this was and not wanting to know.

“A man cannot even rest for a moment in this forsaken wilderness,” he muttered.

Ahenotoc beckoned him onward. He looked worried.

“Leave me be,” Rhuan snapped, “lest I decide to avenge myself upon you for what your cunning has wrought.”

He found his bitter rage difficult to sustain, though. Ahenotoc had, after all, hauled him from the maw of the hungry river. And Rhuan knew he must bear his own heavy share of the blame for what had happened. His will had been what carried Wolfrun halfway across the world, to lands that would best have been left unknown. His promises of gold had sustained his men, and goaded them into this doomed adventure. His pride had left him fatally unwary of meddling in the contests of people whose wiles, and whose gods, so exceeded his expectations.

Ahenotoc cupped a hand to his ear and leaned back the way they had come. Rhuan frowned at this exaggerated mime.

“What?”

Ahenotoc repeated the gesture, leaning still more steeply downhill, spreading the fingers of his hand at his ear.

Rhuan listened, and soon enough he heard it too. A sound of vast violence, rendered indistinct by distance but retaining its horrible threat. Trees crashing, shaking, grinding against one another. The earth groaning as its fabric was twisted and torn. Stone and soil and timber all protesting at once, as they were reshaped, brushed aside, crushed.

“It is not done?” Rhuan said in disbelief. He looked at Ahenotoc, wide-eyed. “I thought it a beast of the river, a beast of the water.”

But no, he realised. Of course not. It was a God not of the river, but of the jungle, whole and entire. Here, where water, sky, earth, all the elements were so cruelly transformed and intermingled, such a monster would acknowledge no boundaries. There would be no frontiers it would not cross.

“It comes for us, then?” Rhuan asked.

Ahenotoc beckoned him onward.

Darkness fell like the descent of nightmare. The jungle became a hallucinatory welter of veering moonshadows, unexplained sounds, unseen logs and vines and holes. Rhuan’s skin became a muddle of lacerations and bruises. He struggled on, following Ahenotoc’s soft guiding whistles, only because always at his back, always drawing incrementally nearer, grew the mounting thunder of the serpent’s catastrophic passage.

That grim tumult came to dominate Rhuan’s senses and his thoughts. He imagined it to be the baying of an army of hounds, upon the trail of a stag. He heard, in the rending apart of the jungle, his own inevitable doom closing upon him. He could envisage the cloud of debris through which the huge serpent writhed in its pursuit; a formless, sharp fog of tumbling leaves, splinters, shredded bark.

He blundered clumsily into Ahenotoc’s back, and was wrenched from his bleak reverie. The villager set a hand on his shoulder and gently but firmly turned him about. And Rhuan found himself looking down upon a scene of strange, silvery beauty.

A giant of the forest, a tree so mighty it beggared the imagination, had fallen, toppling back down the slope. It had come to rest some way short of the ground, caught precariously on the lower boughs of the one tree sturdy enough to withstand its fall; but still it had torn open a huge rent in the canopy. Through this window, Rhuan now gazed out. At a sky strewn with such a thick dusting of stars it seemed to glow. At a moon so full and bright it painted the rolling, unbounded sea of the treetops with a silver sheen. At an immensity of space, and of life, that he would not have guessed the world contained.

And at the serpent’s track, a wound scored across that immensity. It looked as if some giant’s—or god’s—hand had reached down from above and gouged a fingernail across the surface of the world, cutting a weaving path through the jungle. It might have been the curving channel of a dark river, working its way toward them—but for the advancing head of that river, before which the trees rocked and quaked and broke.

Rhuan felt Ahenotoc’s touch on his arm. The villager, absurdly, stood smiling in the moonlight. He pointed at the sword sheathed on Rhuan’s belt.

“What? You want this?” Rhuan shook his head.

Ahenotoc pointed again. Rhuan laughed.

“You can’t part a man from his sword just by the asking, not even if—” The words suddenly felt foolish on his lips. He bit them back. He was, he thought with all the cold clarity of the defeated, a dead man without Ahenotoc’s aid, without his guidance. Lost, and alone, in a place he did not understand; hunted by a monstrosity his mind could barely grasp. The clamor of the behemoth’s approach was there, at his back, coming closer.

Reluctantly, Rhuan freed his sword and extended its hilt toward Ahenotoc.

In an instant, the little man sprang onto the fallen tree and danced his light-footed way up its angled bole. Rhuan’s beloved blade flashed, catching the fire of the moonlight. All confidence and lithe agility, Ahenotoc swung around outstretched branches and shrugged off the attentions of the tangled creepers that had been dragged down in the tree’s death throes. Rhuan craned his neck back to keep him in sight.

“We’ve no time for this,” he said. He could hear the serpent, drawing ever nearer; could hear the havoc of its ominous movement.

Ahenotoc flailed inexpertly at a long, straight spar projecting from the side of trunk. Rhuan winced at the sound of his sword’s keen edge being so abused. He bore it for a moment or two, but then could suffer it no longer. Even as he drew breath to protest, the branch gave way. Ahenotoc examined it appraisingly and then dropped it down to Rhuan.

It was old, hard wood, long ago stripped of its bark; longer than Rhuan was tall, just thin enough for him to encompass with his hand. Ahenotoc had broken it off in such a way as to leave a crude but sharp point. Rhuan regarded it sceptically. Ahenotoc gave a low whistle to draw Rhuan’s attention upward once more, then made enthusiastic stabbing motions and pointed at his own neck, behind the hinge of his jaw.

Before Rhuan could respond, the villager was off again, clambering still further up the ramp of the toppled tree. Rhuan lost sight of him, and found him again only when he came to a halt, perched amongst the interlocking branches that had arrested the great tree’s fall, and held it suspended. Ahenotoc leaned and twisted this way and that, examining the knot of timber with evident care and suspicion. Shortly, he began to cut. The sword sent chips of wood tumbling down toward Rhuan. He soon understood Ahenotoc’s intent. He found himself less alarmed by it than he should have been. It stank of madness, but madness seemed the most fitting of odors on this night, in this place.

Rhuan of the Grey Hall waited patiently for the beast to come to him. The jungle sang its droning song all around. He watched the tiny blood-hungry worms making their hunch-backed way toward him across the moon-lit leaf litter. Most, he flicked away before they could fasten themselves to his flesh. One or two escaped his attentions until they had taken hold on his hand or neck; those, he crushed between finger and thumb, making a smear from their soft bodies and the blood they had sucked from him.

The storm drew near: a brittle, rising thunder of destruction. He reached with his heart for Wen Iron-Arm, but there was, of course, no answer. He had no God of his own to set against that which approached. In truth, he was not certain it would have made any difference, even if his body had been flooded with borrowed divine might. He doubted now, as he never had before, whether his Gods were truly the fiercest of them all. This wild land he had discovered bred deities in its own image, and there was surely no place fiercer than this.

The jungle before him shook. The host of shadows shifted and coalesced. The trees shivered, from their mighty roots to the highest tips of their vaulting crowns. The insects fell silent. The serpent’s blunt boulder of a head pushed its way out from the gloom. Rhuan could smell it: mud and water and weed and earth. Its split tongue curled and trembled. Its lidless red eyes glinted with motes of the moon’s light.

Rhuan stood before it, spread his arms wide, and roared his challenge. He shook his makeshift spear in defiance. It came at him, a vast eruptive writhing that battered trees aside and ground rocks beneath it; a surging of darkness as if the whole jungle had come to furious life. He ran.

He sprinted beneath the huge mass of the half-fallen tree, and turned beyond it. The monster was there, on his heels, its jaws gaping as it thrust itself through the opening in his wake. He saw curved teeth like scythes; he saw scales the size of shields. He smelled its corrupt breath, all rot and doom. He met its implacable animal gaze. He heard, above the crash of the serpent’s advance, a flurry of blows overhead: Ahenotoc, hacking away at the last tenuous attachments by which he had left the great dead tree supported.

Rhuan threw himself aside as those jaws reached for him. The great snake gathered itself for another blow, and in doing so it jarred its broad back against the slanting tree trunk. With a last harsh crack of sword against wood, a branch gave way, and the world convulsed around Rhuan. A deafening groan, as of a glacier rumbling its way over rocks; a tremor rocking the earth upon which he lay; a blasted exhalation from that vile serpentine gullet.

He scrambled to his feet to find the giant beast pinned to the ground. The tree had fallen square across its neck and punched the jagged stumps of branches through even its armored hide. But this god had might yet flowing through its huge form. Rhuan saw its body rising in a huge arch, hunching up against the star-flecked sky, climbing higher and higher. It strained against the trap that had closed about it, and the forest shuddered. Some of the boughs that impaled it broke. The gigantic tree trunk itself shifted, began to turn.

Ahenotoc dropped from above. He fell recklessly, carelessly, and hit the back of the serpent’s head with a dull thud. It spasmed at the impact, and smashed him aside like a bull flicking away some irritant fly. But he left the sword planted behind its skull.

Rhuan darted in, seeking the place he had been told to seek: the underside of the jaw, in behind the bone. The serpent twisted itself toward him, its scales scraping over one another, the dark patterns of its hide shifting and warping, its body a bending wall, closing on him, overshadowing him. When he thrust with his crude spear, it glanced off the plated mass. Still the beast remained pinned, and hampered. It bent its head away from him, shaping its body for another titanic effort against its restraints, and as its neck curved, its scales splayed a fraction. Rhuan stabbed into the sliver of a gap that opened before him, and drove the spear in as deep and hard as his weary muscles would allow.

The great head snapped back toward him and knocked him from his feet. The spear came free as he fell back, and after it spewed a flood of steaming ichor. The noisome fluid splashed around him, and across his scrambling legs. It pulsed out in viscous strands, thickening as it came, congealing upon the forest floor in a dark, spreading slick.

Such convulsions shook the serpent then that it carved gullies into the earth, and drove up the leaf litter into great drifts and piles. It threw the fallen tree from its back. Its huge undulating form thrashed at the very canopy of the jungle. Debris rained down around Rhuan and he curled into a ball, hands clasped over his head. The ground beneath him bucked and hammered at him, ringing like the most dolorous of bells as the dying giant beat against it.

In time, there was a gentler rain of soft leaves, and stillness. Rhuan lay for a moment, listening to the rattle of his own heart, and then unfolded himself. He rose on unsteady legs, scraping dirt and dust and gore from his chest and knees. The stench of the serpent’s blood was sickening, almost choking.

It had opened a still wider clearing about itself in its struggles, and lay now, along its whole unmoving length, in moonlight. Rhuan looked upon it in awe. Four longships, five perhaps, could have been laid alongside it without matching it. Its eye, quite lightless, like an ochre stone, was twice the size of his fist.

Ahenotoc suddenly appeared atop the immense corpse. He grinned—a flash of white in the dark—though Rhuan saw that one arm hung limp and a bloody welt marred his flank. Ahenotoc hauled at the sword still lodged where he had driven it, and when at last he managed to drag it free, he dropped it down to Rhuan with an exclamation of what sounded like simple joy.

Rhuan took the sword up and looked ruefully at its notched and battered blade.

Ahenotoc thumped to the ground beside him, less graceful now, less sure of his balance. But still smiling. He patted Rhuan on the arm and said something brief and mirthful, nodding into the distance. Rhuan shrugged his incomprehension. The villager laughed again, and walked away. Without looking back, he extended his good arm and beckoned Rhuan after him as he sank into the gloom of the jungle.

Rhuan reached out once more, extended a final forlorn invitation to his god Wen of the frost-gilded north, to share in this moment of triumph; to look out through Rhuan’s merely human eyes and mark the glory of victory and of death once more evaded. Nothing. Nothing, save perhaps the faintest hint of winter’s metallic scent, and the fleeting prickle of an icy chill across his face.

But those sensations were memory, not presence. Rhuan was exiled from far more than just his home and hearth. There was no god here save the great, dead serpentine monstrosity laid out across the slope. And its ruin had been wrought not by divine might, but by entirely mortal wit and courage. Those were the powers to which Rhuan must give his humble adherence now. Whether they resided within in him or elsewhere.

He sighed and sheathed his sword. He gave a last, lingering look at the fallen behemoth, then followed after Ahenotoc. Already, he could already hear the villager’s light, fluting whistles calling him into the deep forest.

“Lead on, then,” Rhuan said. “Lead on. Show me the way.”

© 2009 by Brian Ruckley.

Originally published in Rage of the Behemoth, edited by Jason M. Waltz.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Brian Ruckley’s modest catalogue of published short stories is scattered across Interzone, The Third Alternative (now known as Black Static), and anthologies. His epic fantasy trilogy The Godless World was published by Orbit, starting with his first novel Winterbirth in 2006. His historical-horror-crime novel The Edinburgh Dead was published in 2011, set in his hometown of Edinburgh in the 19th century and featuring an unlikely blend of gruesome fact and fantasy. His main home on the internet is to be found at www.brianruckley.com, where all and sundry are cordially invited to have a good look round.

The Suicide’s Guide to the Absinthe of Perdition
Megan Arkenberg

You cannot stop an angel who truly wants to fall. This is the first thing you learn in Pandemonium.

The second thing you learn in Pandemonium is how to drink absinthe.

The Suicide sets the silver-tipped pen across the manuscript, weighting the sulfur-tinged pages with their leopard coats of coiling, sensuous handwriting against the cool breeze. Here in Pandemonium, on the patio of the tidy nameless café at the corner of Broadway and Mulciber Avenue, it is always an unseasonably cold April afternoon at the end of the nineteenth century, and the Suicide is always writing the first lines of the city’s only literary classic. New editions of The Suicide’s Guide to the Absinthe of Perdition appear irregularly, bound in soft green leather and stamped in gold leaf, illustrated with black ink in the style of Aubrey Beardsley. (Or maybe they’re genuine Beardsley; I don’t know what he’s up to these days.) According to the moldering dead-eyed waiters at the Suicide’s café, the year I died saw the debut of the most successful edition yet; there was an unsettling realism in the frontispiece of sugar cubes and angels’ wings, a morphine injection of Goya or Doré.

My copy of the Guide is a tattered coffee-stained fourth edition, a gift from the Suicide. The inside cover displays an apocryphal Oscar Wilde epigram. The Suicide signed it for me in a flourish of oil-green ink. Hell has very few traditions, but this is one of them: Whatever your poison, ouzo or sabra, vermouth or crème de cassis, everyone in Hell is an alcoholic, and we all drink with the Suicide eventually.

“Beastly cold,” the Suicide says pleasantly, pointing me to the other chair at the patio table. I sit down, my body shielding the manuscript from the wind. Four or five empty glasses litter the table between us, and the Suicide is already smoking a heavy opium-tainted cigarette. I decline the proffered case. “They always told us Hell would be hot, and the company excellent. Shows how fucking much they know.”

I submit a brief smile. A dead-eyed waitress with a nose like Sarah Bernhardt’s hands me a glass of something white and tongue-curlingly dry. It smells like perfume—like Chanel No. 5, that Freudian bouquet of maternity and seduction. “Milton got a few things right,” I say, for the sake of argument. “Darkness visible and all that.”

There is no sunlight in Hell. Here, darkness is the positive quality, snuffing the sickly glow of brimstone. It rains down on rooftops and café sunshades, slips through cracks in bedroom curtains, slides beneath locked doors like an unwanted letter. The damned carry umbrellas to keep it off their heads.

“Milton.” The Suicide savors the name, eyes closed, lips curving with just a whisper of pity. “There was a man who understood darkness. If I ever go blind, you’ll be my amanuensis, won’t you?”

“Sure,” I say. I’m flattered, although I know better. The Suicide loves everyone in Pandemonium, trusts everyone, drinks with everyone. I don’t trust anyone. The Suicide is the closest thing I have to a friend in Hell.

I imagined, once, that the Suicide might actually be an old friend of mine, someone I’d shared an apartment with back when I was alive. Someone I’d loved and trusted. Someone I’d watched die. Shows how fucking much I knew, before I was damned. We all think we know who’ll be waiting for us in Hell, but we’re all wrong.

When I was twenty-six, I watched my best friend step off the roof of a nine-story building. My friend had what the reporters called a history of depression—a melancholy disposition—some paint-an-inch-thick veneer of diagnosis that I can’t recall and haven’t tried to. I remember the paranoia, because that’s hard to forget. Opening my bedroom door at three in the morning to warn me about secret messages in the infomercials and sitcom reruns, drugs in the water supply, cameras in the lime-stained showerhead. A manic cocktail of delusion and psychosis, neurotic distrust of psychiatry, and somewhere behind that angelic pouty-lipped smile and those hurricane-blue eyes, the determination and the resolution to die.

We had last spoken about twenty minutes before, had argued between London souvenir mugs full of fucking awful coffee. The White Tower, Big Ben, the restored Globe Theatre. All the world’s a stage, and presents more woeful pageants than the scene wherein we play. My friend was working out a code in the crossword puzzle on the back page of a liquor distributor’s trade magazine. Twelve down: an anise-flavored liqueur, illegal in the United States until 2007. Eight letters, ends with an “E.”

“They’re telling me to do it today,” my friend said.

“Do what?”

“You know what.”

I took a sip of cold coffee. The hand resting on my knee was shaking visibly. It wasn’t the caffeine, although this was my sixth cup. “No, I don’t. Who the fuck are you talking about?”

Silence while my friend looked out the window. We lived on the third floor. A bird had built its nest on the narrow sill; it was a ragged thing, brown with streaks of gray. “They put something in the coffee,” my friend said.

It had a too-sweet aftertaste. I spat it out on the clean white carpet, where it spread like rust, or a bloodstain.

It might be possible to survive a nine-story fall; my friend did not. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. Or in its landing, head-first on the concrete, spraying blood and slippery gray tissue and sharp slivers of skull all over the sidewalk. The left eye socket shattered on impact, and the eyeball flopped out onto the cheek, round and soft and incredibly blue. I ran towards the body but a crowd was already closing around it. A trickle of blood with chunks of thick black hair in it swirled around my feet.

I was closed out of the elite circle of trained medical personal, doctors on their way to work at the clinic down the street. I remember wondering how their training was not, apparently, sufficient to let them admit that a body with its brains sticking to their shoes was irrevocably dead. Good night, sweet prince. And me in the gutter, closed out by the dismayed Good Samaritans and would-be miracle workers. Closed out, but that was nothing new.

Not everyone drinks absinthe in Pandemonium, but it is tacitly encouraged. The menu in the grove of Suicides is varied and extensive—Pernod and Sambuca, pousse-café of vinegar and virgin’s blood and silvery crème de menthe—but these feeble substitutes lack the class, the culture, the wormwood. It is so bitter, the wormwood of perdition. Once you’ve tasted it, even the trinity of coffee beans floating in your ouzo will seem as sweet as grenadine.

It is almost impossible to become intoxicated here. Many have tried, mostly fallen angels, but it never lasts long enough—no longer than an afternoon in April. So you drink and you drink, watching the slow traffic on Mulciber Avenue, your thirst forever unsatisfied, the patio lights flickering forever on the razor’s edge of night.

I live across the street from the Suicide’s nameless café, on the third floor of a Gaudi-esque chimera with no elevator, no air conditioning or heat, and unreliable electricity. All the luxury of a tenement with none of the charm, though it has a certain beauty—the desperate beauty of a mirage. The traffic below on Mulciber Avenue is never still: oil-burning automobiles and demonic streetcars, black-curtained carriages drawn by horses with bat’s wings. Everything stinks of sulfur and cheap gasoline, boiled cabbage and rotting flesh, but it could easily be worse. The more habitable flats—the ones with William Morris wallpaper and niches in the foyers for Chinoserie statuettes or Sevres bowls filled with rose petals—these are the ones that most frequently look out on the plunge of a falling angel.

The damned don’t know where the angels fall from, rooftops or bridges or clouds or the hard slippery eggshell of some goodly firmament—no light could hold out that far above the ground. Perhaps the angels and the darkness fall from the same place. In the hours before there might be a barometric tension in the air, a crackling of electricity that raises the hair on your arms, a distant stumbling of thunder. Not angels bowling, as grandmothers used to say. More like drunken angels in an unfamiliar house, tripping and bumping their shins.

The waiting is the worst. Looking up into that inhabited darkness and the searing flashes of lighting, blue as the afterimage of something pale and dead. You sometimes imagine that an angel’s eyes are watching you, that if you can only find the right words, the right gestures, you can convince It not to fall. But they aren’t, and you can’t.

I avoid the fallen angels as much as possible. They dress like the young tubercular poets of the romantic era, or like decadent fin de siècle dramatists who’ve whored and smoked and drunk themselves into premature old age—frilled white blouses, velvet evening coats, smooth furs and pinstripes, careless neckties in shades of purple and green. Canes in ebony or walnut with yellow ivory handles, patent leather shoes, silver cigarette cases with inscriptions from Horace, or Ovid, or Catullus. You don’t see so much as smell the stains in their dark wings—ink, and blood, and semen, and brandy.

You can see where their delicate kohl-and-carmine faces have been reassembled, the stitches as white and clumsy as the scars on my wrists. The demon-doctors in Pandemonium do their best, but there are always pieces missing or mismatched, jigsaw edges that don’t quite fit in a forehead or a jawline or a yellow-gloved hand. It is a very long way to fall. Death would be kinder, the crematorium finishing the work of a nine-day plunge, but how can you euthanize an angel?

They sit at the cast iron tables on the patio of the Suicide’s café, their wings held awkwardly over the backs of green-cushioned chairs. They keep to themselves, mostly, staring into the mouths of whiskey tumblers with broken-heart lipstick stains on the rims. A few have spoken to the Suicide. They claim not to remember Paradise, but everyone in Pandemonium knows this is a lie.

The absinthe of perdition is served with cold water and salt. You place the salt on a slotted silver spoon and pour the cold water over it, baptizing it in the name of your dissolution, your damnation, your despair. The water turns the absinthe cloudy and pale, with a taste like the ocean, but brinier—like tears, but not as sweet.

The Suicide spits out a stream of pale blue smoke, which slips out from under the table umbrella and is lost in perpetual darkness. It’s beginning to rain, scorching round drops that stink of sulfur. Rain in Pandemonium is almost a miracle—there’s always a drought here, and the dry unwashed sidewalks accumulate the residue of fallen angels. Blood and tissues and crusted feathers, variegated smears of grace like oil stains. “How’s this for an epigraph to the new edition?” the Suicide asks, and intones decorously: “The War in Heaven was fought between the angels who rebelled, and the angels who let them.”

Milton by way of Wilde, or vice versa—the peculiar and paradoxical aesthetic of Pandemonium. I lean forward, running my thumb along the edge of the hard leather folder that now protects the Suicide’s manuscript. “Good,” I say. “Great. And which angels are the ones in Hell?”

“Both, probably. Heaven’s an empty nest.” The Suicide does not laugh often, but the reflection of my wry smile tugs at the absinthe-sweetened lips. Thunder sounds in the distance like a shelf of liquor bottles knocking against each other, and the umbrella rattles over our heads. “Poor God. All those molted feathers, and nothing to cushion.”

“Yet the angels have to fall from somewhere.”

“All those molted feathers,” the Suicide repeats. I rest my chin on my folded hands, used to being ignored. Or heard and disregarded, which is not the same thing. “Do you ever imagine that if enough angels fell, the sidewalks would be so soft with feathers that nothing would break on impact? It would be like falling into a featherbed.”

“Listen,” I say. The other diners—a pair of fallen angels and a woman with the puce burn of an electrical cord around her neck—are leaving the patio, retreating to the yellow dryness of the café. “About the fallen angels. Have you ever tried to help one, afterward? After they’ve already fallen?”

The smile falters. Thunder rolls again, raising the hair on my arms like a caress. The stinging smell of ozone mingles with the sweet headiness of opium. “Yes,” the Suicide says. “Yes, once.”

“Me too,” I say.

Fallen angels look out for their own. That is to say that they hide their own, the sticky crippled messes on the sidewalks of Pandemonium, until they are able to walk again, to speak, to remember. I’m not sure if it’s kindness, or merely pride. Fear that the damned might see and comprehend too much. Every angel looks the same after the fall. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, and all that—these brains, this blood, these molted feathers are yours, or were yours, not so long ago.

If you are walking down the street when an angel lands, carrying your greasy paper bag of groceries or peering at the dusty junk in the store windows, the other angels circle you like vultures, beating you away with their canes and fans and parasols. Only the demon-doctors can pass through the wall of wings, and they are always blindfolded.

Only once did I try to help. I was new then, among the ignorant recent dead—that goes without saying—walking with my head lowered to my apartment on Mulciber Avenue. Something electric swept across my spine, and I heard the hollow echoing crack of a skull or a pinion. Before the other pedestrians could stop me, I was running back down the sidewalk. They say I muttered prayers under my breath—no no no please no, or not again, please God not this fucking shit again.

I was close enough to see the grace leaking in an iridescent puddle across the concrete when a fallen angel dropped in front of me. Its wings were open, talons extended, the stance more like a bear than any bird of prey. Something gray-red and clumpy already stained the breast of Its satin waistcoat.

“I only want to help,” I said.

The angel caught both my wrists in one cold, cold talon. “You can’t,” It hissed, giving me a shake. “You’re human, you’re damned, you’re useless. Why do you think you could make a difference?”

It raised Its wings higher, shielding Its face from the darkness. I choked on horror. I was no longer new enough to feel horror, but it was there, lodged in my throat like a sleeping pill. That face was familiar, that pouty-lipped smile—but the hurricane-blue eyes were gone, the empty sockets buzzing and crawling with flies.

There is a second way to drink the absinthe of perdition, but it is not very popular. You begin by soaking a cube of sugar in a fallen angel’s alcoholic tears. Hold the sugar between your lips, or on the tip of your tongue, and set it alight with the tip of your lover’s cigarette. Pour a shot of absinthe over a mirror and kiss—like Narcissus—your own reflection. Watch your face burning in the glass.

There is a rumor that Lucifer himself invented this method. They also say that this is how Christ drank His absinthe when He descended into Hell, and that is why Pandemonium now welters in a lake of fire.

The nightmares are always the same. I’m running and running over the damp concrete, but my legs aren’t fast enough. I scream until my lungs burst, but my voice isn’t loud enough. The fall, the landing . . . nothing changes, nothing deviates from the dictates of physics and anatomy and fate. The crowd presses around the body, as thick and useless as ever. And I batter my way through, as eager as ever—as though I don’t know what I’m going to find behind them, as though I haven’t seen it in a thousand other nightmares exactly like this one.

You’re human, you’re damned, you’re useless.

What they never tell you about watching your best friend’s suicide is that you must carry it like the weight of a city in your arms, heavy and awkward. Therapists and damp funeral flowers, sympathy cards and sinking your fingers into the letters on the headstone—it’s all just trying to find a place for it, trying to set it down, this utter tremendous weight. And you can’t keep carrying it. You have to let it go. You have to let go, or the weight of it will drag you down, down to the very depths of perdition.

The rain falls faster and faster, almost in sheets now, curtaining our table like a canopy bed. The Suicide takes my wine glass and holds it out into the blackness beyond the umbrella, filling it with water. Water from heaven, or the closest thing to it.

“We all learn eventually,” the Suicide says, offering me the cup. “Some slower than others, but everyone, eventually.”

“Learn what?”

“That you’re all worth saving. Even when you’ve fallen, even when you’ve let one fall.” The ink-stained hand brushes mine. I take the glass and drink, tasting anise, tasting wormwood. “What’s the opposite of perdition?”

Neither linguistics nor theology; I imagine I know what’s being asked. “Salvation.”

“No.” The Suicide looks at me, just looks at me, and for a moment I can almost believe that I am being seen. “Wrong opposite.”

The third way to drink the absinthe of Perdition is only used by the lovers of suicides, and rarely even then. You take a shot of absinthe straight and hold it beneath your tongue. Hold your begging, your railing, your pleading, your curses. Hold your protestations of innocence and your declarations of guilt. Hold your prayers. Hold your knowledge that this cup will not pass from you, your knowledge that you are useless, your knowledge that it was somehow all your fault.

When you have held your words for a lifetime, for an eternity, for an unseasonably cold afternoon in April, the absinthe will no longer taste of anise or alcohol but of wormwood, of desperation, of your own bitter sweat. Swallow it like so much despair. You will find that there is sweetness in the wormwood of perdition. You cannot stop an angel who truly wants to fall; this is the first thing you learn in Pandemonium.

The hardest thing to learn in Pandemonium is absolution.

© 2012 Megan Arkenberg

Megan Arkenberg is a student in Wisconsin. In the name of story research, she racks up late fees at the college library, gets dizzyingly lost along the shores of Lake Michigan, consumes a steady diet of M.R. James, and lusts quietly after the architecture and costume of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her work has appeared in Asimov's, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and dozens of other places. She procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance and the historical fiction e-zine Lacuna.

Author Spotlight: Robert Reed
Andrew Liptak

Thanks for coming back to Lightspeed to talk with us! First off, how did “Flowing Unimpeded to the Enlightenment” come about?

There might be several inspirations, but I want to talk about pundits. I have a long list of pundits that I don’t particularly like. Thomas Friedman is near the top. I don’t consider him as evil as some of his peers, or most of them, but he embraces certain qualities that make me nuts. He seems to know everyone who matters, and he burns a worrisome amount of fossil fuel going everywhere, and his house is enormous, and he has opinions that run inside well-tended ruts. But maybe what bothers me is that the man intrudes on my business, which is making predictions about the future—and he does a credible job of crafting a narrative that allows his readers to feel both informed and confident about tomorrow. I don’t generally like storylines that lead to clear lessons and optimism. Any half-assed examination of my career shows a careless skill at generating new principles and thought problems that make every past effort seem like a wrong turn. So if you want, consider this story as being my reaction to know-it-alls who aren’t as lost and despondent as me.

This story jumps around from character to character to show the main story: Why did you go this route?

I get bored. Changing viewpoints is a good way to fight boredom when I’m working. It challenges the readers, but long ago I gave up losing sleep over that issue.

How important are these random encounters in the long term when it comes to influencing our actions?

Who knows?

Not me.

You talk a little about the future of copyright protections in this story. In a world with continually changing technology and person-to-person interactions, how do you see copyright laws changing over the next couple years?

Over the next two years? Not much change. In twenty years, I have no idea. But if what I write is stolen or made free for the taking, then I will probably write for private files and maybe a few good trusted fans who will throw me some money and then promise not to share.

Hey, that’s kind of an interesting idea.

Kartar is also heavily involved in searching for extraterrestrial life and comes across the realization that civilizations may simply not talk with one another. If there is a wide variety of intelligent life out there, how do you think that they could connect with one another, if at all?

I assume that intelligence evolves along certain lines, and that nothing is new. Whatever humans are, we aren’t important. We don’t see our neighbors because they don’t want to be seen, or they have launched into a new realm or reality that we can’t fathom yet, or maybe we’re a game program playing out inside an artificial universe that has no purpose except to make us fucking crazy.

Lastly, what do you have coming up next that we should keep an eye out for?

I’m working on a trilogy in the Great Ship universe—my most robust universe. The first book, The Slayer’s Child, comes out next year from Prime Books.

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: Nancy Kress
Earnie Sotirokos

In “Art of War,” humankind is engaged in an interstellar conflict with an alien race that salvages our artwork to learn more about us. Do you think hostile aliens would take the time to loot the Louvre if Earth were invaded?

Who knows what aliens would do? They are alien. However, if they happened to conquer Paris anyway, I can see invaders studying artwork to learn more, just as archeologists now certainly study the art of any culture they are hoping to decipher.

Captain Porter is always on the verge of stress-induced seizures. Why did you choose to give him this condition?

I get tired of perfect, always capable heroes. Porter was born with this condition, and he has made a life for himself despite it, and despite the Mother From Hell. That is admirable. That is, in fact, heroic.

The Teli offset their violence by creating art. Are there any parallels between that mindset and the way we go about our lives today?

A few years ago, sociobiologist Geoffrey F. Miller published The Mating Mind, a book whose premise is that human art evolved, in accordance with Darwinian evolutionary theory, to gain a sexual advantage. Basically, art came into being to impress girls—the same reason that the peacock expends energy to grow a gorgeous, functionally useless tail. This may not answer your question, but it’s pretty interesting.

Was this story challenging to write?

Not as much as some, because there was less science to research. Since I’m not trained as a scientist, I have to do a lot of research whenever a story demands technical details of physics, astronomy, or biology.

What can we expect from you in the future?

I have a young-adult SF novel, Flash Point, coming out in November from Viking. The publisher is excited about it, and I am, too.

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: Benjamin Parzybok
Caleb Jordan Schulz

In your story, “Bear and Shifty,” Roger and Bear survive on the edge of civilization, fencing what supplies they can steal while avoiding capture by an alien race. Given the range of settings for this story, how did you settle on a Southwest desert?

I did settle on the Southwest. Before the conscious choice, I had more of a visual image of the setting as one that was inhospitable to human inhabitants, a setting for Westerns. While the story does not go into it deeply, I wanted canyon lands and cacti, deserts and dry pines—a setting that I imagined could be generally inhospitable to both aliens and humans, and one in which growing one's own food was a difficult proposition, (thus allowing them more of a motivation for behind-the-lines raids into enemy territory).

With the aliens and humans vying for territory and supplies, there’s a palpable tension and a sense of inevitable conflict, yet the history of this conflict is only hinted at. Could you give us a bit more of the backstory of the enmity between the humans and aliens?

Sure—when I was imagining this world, I really liked the idea of an invading alien force that was technologically superior to us, but had made numerous vital mistakes about the terrain and their enemy along the way. That—like, really, all wars—the war they waged had grown long and complicated, with infinite loose ends that never seem to quite wrap up. Even as they've become the dominant force on the planet, they cannot quite manage the insurgents, and years of attempts have only brought about years of increasingly sophisticated resistance. If you look at the Mayan resistance against the Spanish, it's incredible how many uprisings there were over hundreds of years. In this world, I imagined that a series of quick victories might allow the aliens massive domination, and an endlessly drawn-out latter half of the war.

The rich history of human vs. alien stories is incredibly vast. From where did you draw inspiration for this story?

This story started out as a character sketch. I was interested in drawing a sort of antithesis to the stereotypical Western-novel cowboy, a character-type that has often carried over to alien/space stories as well. Bear is jovial and fat, loves to eat and is regularly, persistently wrong. He's emotional and warm, and yet he can kick some serious ass—though he prefers not to have to—when it comes down to it. He's damaged goods, and it gives him a kind of invincibility.

Preston’s unfortunate predicament as a dual brings to mind visions of MK-Ultra and worse using advanced technology. Considering the exceptional reliance that humans have on technology, and that it increases more each year, do you see a danger that technology could expand to alter conscious thought?

I think technology already alters and dulls conscious thought, in so many ways. One of my favorite books of the last few years has been Feed by MT Anderson—in which, essentially, we all have an ad-sponsored version of the Internet embedded in our brains as well as a group-think chat-channel. While not explicitly altering conscious thought, this certainly hugely represses/alters it. We also have many chemicals that repress or enhance various parts of our chemical makeup, and I think all of these have an effect on conscious thought. Extrapolating from this, I think it's only a matter of time before technology is more completely integrated into our brains to alter and enhance, as well to provide utter escapism from, conscious thought.

On a lighter note—Sweet Os and garbanzo beans seem to be a staple part of available food in this story. If you had to survive in the borderlands and had to choose three types of canned or boxed food, what would be on your wish list?

Garbanzo beans would be high up there, I think. This is a tricky question probably better served by a nutritionist, but for me, I'd try my best to pick three items that had distinctly different tastes—say: salty, sweet, sour—and which came close to being a balanced diet. Maybe canned peaches, garbanzo beans, and something crunchy. I recently had blue corn chips with chia seeds in them, just . . . wow.

Finally, do you have any new projects you’d like to announce?

My next novel, Sherwood Nation, is forthcoming from Small Beer Press in 2013. I'm currently working on a futuristic, Arctic-based novel I'm co-writing with the writer David Naimon. We're hugely further along than I'd ever suspected we'd make it co-writing the thing, and odds are looking most excellent on the completion of that one 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, Crossed Genres Year Two anthology, Ray Gun Revival, and Innsmouth Free Press. In between his work for Lightspeed Magazine, he's a freelance editor, and blogs occasionally at: theright2write.blogspot.com.

Author Spotlight: David Barr Kirtley
Theodore Quester

In your story, “The Black Bird,” you play metafictionally with Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.” Even the title combines the two. What prompted such a mashup?

I wrote this story at the Clarion writers workshop in 1999. This is when Clarion was in Michigan. It was extremely hot and muggy that summer, and the dorms had no AC. The walls were also very thin, and the people across the hall from me were having sex constantly, and I could hear every word and/or moan, which made it challenging to sleep or write. So I was constantly hot and exhausted and drifting in and out of sleep, and when I’m too hot I tend to have really strange, vivid dreams. I had just read Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon a few months before, and for whatever reason I had this vision of scraping away the lacquer to reveal lead, and then scraping away the lead to reveal something else, and then scraping away that to reveal something else, and so on. I also had the idea that this black bird statue would be talking to you while you were doing this, which of course put me in mind of Poe’s poem. So that’s where the basic idea came from.

You wrote this story originally at Clarion. What was that like? How have you changed as a writer since then?

I don’t think I ever would have written a story like this if not for the workshop, because the workshop puts pressure on you to produce stories fairly rapidly, and this was such a strange idea that I was never quite sure what to make of it, and I don’t know if I ever would have felt confident under normal circumstances that it was thought-through enough to commit to paper. Even after I wrote it, I just had no idea whether it was any good or made any sense. When I finally showed it to my classmates, the response was very mixed. Some people liked it, some were indifferent, and some hated it. The last two people to offer their opinions were one of my classmates, Mike Canfield, and our author guest, Mike Resnick. Mike Canfield said, “When I finished reading this, the first thing I wrote was ‘This story is nearly perfect.’ Then I crossed out the ‘nearly.’” He then proceeded to lambast everyone who’d criticized the story as philistines. (Passions can run pretty high at Clarion—at least they did at ours.) Then Mike Resnick had the last word. He said something to the effect of, “All right, everyone who didn’t like this story, you’re all crazy. This is brilliant. If I got this as an editor, I’d buy it in a New York minute.” He then told me privately that if the story didn’t sell, he’d edit an anthology specifically for the purpose of getting the story into print.

In terms of how I’ve changed as a writer, well, back when I wrote this story I was trying to write as many stories as quickly as possible and just learn how to do it well—I think I wrote something like twenty-five stories in 1999. But a lot of those were really underdeveloped, and tended to be maybe 2500 words on average. These days I only write a couple stories a year at most, but they tend to be about twice as long, and are pretty reliably interesting and well-developed, I think. But my basic sensibilities haven’t changed much. I like quick pacing, witty dialogue, violence, philosophy, pop culture, and startling plot twists, and that’s remained pretty consistent from early childhood to the present.

This story has been reprinted several times. To what do you think does it owe its lasting appeal?

Yeah, the story originally appeared on Gothic.net, and then was reprinted twice by Mike Resnick—true to his word—in his anthologies New Voices in Science Fiction and The Dragon Done It, and now again in Lightspeed. I know Mike Resnick is a big Sam Spade fan, so it probably didn’t hurt that I just happened to hand him a story featuring one of his favorite characters. But other than that I think editors are interested in the story because it’s different. You may have read a million variations on robots or vampires or whatever, but how often do you read a story about Hammett, Poe, and philosophy? It sticks in your mind. I also think it’s short enough that you don’t get bored. It grabs your attention, then there’s a mystery, then it ends with a bang, all in 1500 words.

You studied writing at many places, including Clarion and the University of Southern California, and now you teach writing to young people at the Alpha workshop. How have your studies, and your own teaching, informed your writing?

Doing the MFA at USC and teaching at Alpha put me in contact with a lot of college-age students, which definitely informed stories such as “Blood of Virgins” and “Save Me Plz,” which involve college life and which are two of my favorites. I’ve always found that the best way to be sure that you actually understand something is to try to explain it to someone else, so teaching can be very useful in that respect, especially if you’re actually offering concrete suggestions about word choice and story structure. Unfortunately I think a lot of writing classes tend to give feedback that’s very vague and spacey and useless. I always try to give concrete suggestions. Rewrite the sentence this way, etc. Then half the time the students disagree with me, but that’s fine. At least then they’re thinking about what the choices are. And it’s certainly made my own writing a lot clearer, because I’ve spent so much time analyzing student writing and trying to articulate why their sentences often don’t make sense.

What do you have coming down the pipeline?

My most recent stories are “Power Armor: A Love Story” in Armored and “Three Deaths” in Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, both edited by John Joseph Adams. John and I have also produced almost seventy episodes of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, in which we discuss science fiction and interview guests such as George R. R. Martin, Richard Dawkins, Simon Pegg, and Paul Krugman. That’s taken most of my creative energy the past few years, but I’ve also been working on a longer project whose working title is “The Sword of Ontology.” It’s a sword & sorcery adventure set against a backdrop of constant religious and philosophical uncertainly. In Hollywood they’d pitch it as “Game of Thrones meets Lost.” But that probably won’t appear for years, if ever.

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: L.B. Gale
Robyn Lupo

The comparison to “Spindles” is, of course, Sleeping Beauty. Other fairy tales seem to be in here as well. Can you tell us more about this connection, and how this story emerged for you?

I love short stories that have fairy tale roots. Fairy tales, myths, and legends give storytellers a common language for effectively communicating big ideas. Roald Dahl has a fun version of Cinderella in which the prince turns out to be a sociopath (kind of like the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland). In the end, rather than going through life with a “someday my prince will come” mindset (that’s Snow White’s song, I know, but it applies!), Cinderella decides to ask the fairy godmother for a nice guy. Because we all know Cinderella so well, the choice of transforming the prince into something unrecognizable makes Dahl’s point instantly comprehensible. I like playing that game.

At the same time, I am more intrigued by tales that build off of other fairy tales than ones that explicitly retell them. So, while a tale like Sleeping Beauty and literary tales like Peter Pan and A Little Princess certainly influenced the core ideas of the story, I thought it would be fun to transmit them via a story structure that was more Groundhog Day than Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

We seem to have a paradoxical view of growing up; we often describe it as a process of “losing” things. The idea of losing something after sleep and having it all be a repeated process gave me my version of the Groundhog Day eternal return narrative structure, and once I had that, mixing in a little bit of Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan, A Little Princess, and a number of my own bits of inspiration followed naturally.

You use short section breaks to great effect in this story. Can you tell us more about this choice?

The best fairy tales have a dreamlike quality, and insofar as sleeping and dreaming are essential components of this story, I wanted the sometimes shorter, sometimes longer sections to fly in and out like a series of dreams. In addition, I hoped to contrast the linear nature of Evelyn’s curse (her repeated, ordered, numbered cycles of childhood) with what is ultimately a non-linear narrative. Roman numerals always seem so smug when they help organize a perfectly straightforward series of events, so I hoped to drop them down a peg by undermining their attempt to present Evelyn’s story in a clear and uncomplicated manner.

There seems to be a theme in “Spindles” regarding growing up, and parents’ reluctance to let that happen. Can you tell us more about this?

I feel that there’s something beautiful about parents who don’t want their child to mature and something sinister at the same time. In Peter Pan, the natural enemies for the children are not the pirates but their parents (it’s frequently been the tradition that the actor who plays Hook also plays Wendy’s father). But Wendy leaves her parents because they want her to grow up, and she doesn’t want that. I thought the opposite was more accurate: Children want to grow up and their parents are their enemies because they oppose that desire. Unfortunately, many young girls seem determined to blame their mothers for everything holding them back, but it amazes me how easily protective and ultimately oppressive attitudes that fathers display towards “their little girls” are seen as “cute” and “admirable.”

I have some experience with education, and I remember sitting in on public school PTA meetings about the possibility of adopting school uniforms. During the opening statements given by parents, those who were pro-uniforms listed numerous legitimate justifications (uniforms create a sense of unity, they eliminate bullying about clothes, etc.). Once the debate began, however, I quickly realized that the real reasons parents wanted uniforms were almost always misogynistic in nature (girls dress like sluts, they distract the boys, it’s unfair to the male teachers, etc.). There was such a great fear of young women being able to express themselves freely. The solution was to have both boys and girls wear polo shirts and slacks; basically, to have girls dress like well-dressed boys. It may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but the venom and anger behind the words of parents who were afraid that young girls were growing up too fast affected me deeply.

What would you like An Ideal Reader to take from this story?

There’s an excellent episode of The West Wing where the president has to deal with a political scandal of his own making. In the process, his opponents publicly castigate his wife in order to score points against him. Watching this unfold, he says, “The things we do to women.” I like to think that as this story unfolds, an ideal reader would feel what President Bartlet was likely feeling as he said those words.

At the same time, just as Evelyn goes through an incredible amount of cycles in this story, I hope that there are just as many ideal readers. Some might focus on the gender themes mentioned above, but some might come away just thinking about how dangerous that perfect moment of sleep is. No matter what else is going on in my life, if I find that perfect position, time, and place for sleep, I will inevitably succumb. If my life depended on it, I don’t think I could stop myself from falling asleep, which tells me that deep down I prefer the sleep to anything else. That’s a kind of frightening thought.

Do you have anything upcoming that you want us to know about?

In addition to a longer-term project and regular blogging on speculative fiction (at lbgale.com), I continue writing short stories that have a fairy tale element. I wanted “Spindles”to be a fairy tale that focused on an adolescent girl’s experience, so for my next short story, I’ve worked on a tale that showcases an adolescent boy’s travails. It’s typical fantasy stuff involving prophecies and wise guardians and such—save that it takes place almost entirely in all the McDonalds of the world. Needless to say, I had a great time writing it and a better time researching it.

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: Brian Ruckley
Jennifer Konieczny

Your story “Beyond the Reach of His Gods” was written for Rage of the Behemoth, an anthology of “heroic fantasy involving giant monsters.” What’s the best part of writing giant monsters? What’s the worst?

The best part would be fun, I guess, which is a pretty good best part for any writing project to have. Although other approaches are possible—I’m sure someone somewhere has written a profound and slow-paced meditation on personal relationships and growth involving giant monsters (actually, as soon as I wrote that I remembered the very, very good movie Monsters which is pretty much exactly precisely that, so there you are)—the obvious invitation in the premise “giant monster” is to go for the prose equivalent of a summer blockbuster movie. That’s an invitation to have some fun.

The worst part—I’m not sure it has a worst part, really. I found it easier than most stories I’ve written, in part because I (mostly) wasn’t going for anything much more ambitious than entertainment. It’s not like a writer’s out there trying to climb Mount Everest, saying, “Yeah, the worst part was when my toes turned black and fell off. That sucked.” About the worst that could happen to a writer is the “e” key breaking on the keyboard, because almost everything seems to have an “e” in it. Fortunately, that’s never happened to me.

Faced with the giant snake from “Beyond the Reach of His Gods” how would you react?

Run, squealing like a frighted maid, I’m pretty sure. Any other response strikes me as inherently misguided and ill-judged, which is why I’m never likely to be the lead character in a heroic fantasy yarn.

That said, I have a fairly profound fascination with and affection for the natural world in all its manifestations, so there’d be a certain temptation to hang around and watch in wonder. My fascination with wildlife doesn’t extend to getting eaten by it, though, so I’m pretty sure self-preservation would come out on top.

What are your favorite heroic fantasies involving giant monsters?

Ha. Good question, and one that elicits a slightly embarrassing response: I think my favorite giant monster fictions—or at least those that lodged most memorably in my mind—don’t come from heroic fantasy at all. That is in large part because they stem from my childhood, which is of course the time when emotive memories and attachments relating to books, movies, TV, whatever are most powerfully formed, and I wasn’t really reading heroic fantasy at that time.

I have a pretty clear memory of being very taken, as a young child, with Them—the old (1950s I’m guessing?) black and white movie I saw on TV that involves misbehaving giant ants. Seemed all too possible and alarming and interesting a scenario to the young me. Come to that, I was definitely interested in, though perhaps not quite so fascinated by, Godzilla; that’s about as iconic as giant monsters get in any medium, I guess.

King Kong, the other iconic giant, posed certain problems for me as a child, and still does today if I’m honest. My sympathies were, and are, so unilaterally with the ape that I found it all a bit stressful; I feel essentially no empathy whatsoever for any of the human characters in that story, and absolute bucketloads of the stuff for King Kong himself. Makes the whole thing more upsetting than enjoyable as a viewing experience.

You said on your site that “the basic idea for the story popped into my head more or less fully formed.” How often does that happen in your writing process? Can you describe your writing process for us?

It doesn’t happen very often at all. In fact, I think it’s happened precisely once, the fruit of which is this story. And it really was about as easy a story development process as I can imagine: plugging the phrase “giant monster” into my head immediately prompted the certainty that I wanted to do a jungle story (because that happens to be an environment I’ve got some personal experience of, and like), and virtually all the main components of the story volunteered themselves more or less immediately.

The closest I’ve come to it elsewhere would be my most recent novel, The Edinburgh Dead, I think. That’s a historical horror/dark fantasy yarn set in 19th century Edinburgh, and arose from me asking myself a single question: “What if anatomists weren’t the only people interested in buying fresh corpses from Burke and Hare (famed murdering bodysnatchers of the time)?” From that, quite a bit of the plot and details flowed very easily, partly because I’m a born and bred Edinburgh resident, so a lot of the city’s geography and history are at my mental fingertips; but it still entailed a good deal of research and plot-wrangling.

Normally, the writing process is a good deal more extended and unpredictable. More often than not, it’ll start with a really quite small nugget of an idea—a character, scene, theme, piece of dialogue—and going from that to finished text is reliant in large part on semi-conscious thinking about it over quite a bit of time. That initial idea gets added to and fleshed out in my head, and I rarely write much of it down. Only when I’ve got a reasonably complete framework in mind do I set finger to keyboard and start trying to structure the whole thing as an actual story.

In addition to short fiction, you’ve written a number of novels. Do you prefer writing one form over the other? And could you share advice for writing each?

I’m slightly surprised to say, after due consideration, that in some ways I prefer writing short stories. That’s coming from someone who’s sold precisely the same number of novels as he has short stories, so I’m not what you’d call an experienced or highly productive short story writer.

The thing about short fiction is that it’s simultaneously more demanding (in certain ways) and more achievable than long form. It is both necessary and possible for every word, every sentence, every phrase, in a short story to be considered, justified and understood by the writer. Your objectives can be narrower and often more precise than is the case when writing a novel; your control of structure and pacing can be—needs to be—highly conscious and directed and strict.

All of that means that finishing a competent short story can deliver a hit of satisfaction for the writer that’s harder, and takes longer, to achieve with a novel. Importantly—to me, and I’ve always thought to aspiring writers—if you’ve acquired the basic instincts of self-critiquing and the writing craft, you can often more easily see in short fiction what you’re doing right and what wrong.

I think the long tradition, now much diminished, of speculative fiction writers honing their craft through the production of short stories was a valuable one. There is no better way of training yourself to recognize in your work things like economy of language, effective closure and resolution, pleasing rhythms in dialogue and description and so on.

I’m not a great one for giving writing advice. To a considerable extent, I’ve always suspected that aspiring writers either figure things out for themselves or they don’t; that’s what decides whether they make the jump to professional writer.

That said, when asked for advice I tend to offer very general observations that I have found broadly helpful in any kind of writing. Unless you finish plenty of the stories you start, in whatever format, you will never learn as much as you could from them. If you think something you’ve written is irredeemably terrible, without even a germ of merit, you are probably wrong; if you think it’s a work of genius, incapable of improvement, you are almost certainly wrong. It is helpful if you can internalize and believe those principles. When you finish something—anything—put it aside for as long as you can, ideally weeks or months, and try not to think about it, let alone look at it. When you return to it, you will very probably see it more clearly, with new eyes; and there is absolutely nothing more valuable to a writer when regarding their own work than new eyes.

You’ve said your next novel, The Free, is a return to heroic fantasy. Can you tell us a bit about it and any other projects you’re working on?

The Free is a standalone novel, very much in the heroic fantasy vein. It’s about the last Free Company of mercenary warriors and magicians in a world emerging from revolution; their final adventure, really. It’s also about, in a modest way, freedom itself: its many flavours, its many illusions, what it costs.

There’s a loose, indirect inspiration from the world of movies, Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, The Wild Bunch, that sort of thing, though the influence is heavily filtered through a fantastical lens. I’m hoping it’ll be fun and exciting above all, but as seems to happen with much of my writing, it comes with some dark shading.

Other projects? A few things are simmering, but nothing far enough along to talk about, really. I blog at brianruckley.com, which is kind of a project; and I’ve got a regular comics column at SF Signal, which is definitely a project, albeit one that’s best described as a hobby.

Jennifer Konieczny studied English and History at Villanova University and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She currently resides in Philadelphia and enjoys volunteering as a slush reader, author interviewer, and editorial assistant at Lightspeed Magazine, and inflicting her medieval-studies self on her students.

Author Spotlight: Megan Arkenberg
Robyn Lupo

“The Suicide’s Guide to the Absinthe of Perdition” is a fantastically visual story. How did it start for you?

I honestly don’t remember! It’s as though the concept for this story didn’t exist until the first draft was already written. I do recall that right after I received my liquor license (Oh, the glamorous day jobs of the American college student!) I began compiling a list of names that, for whatever reason, intrigued me when I saw them on the shelf. I’d previously read up on absinthe and its drinking culture during my first burst of passion for Oscar Wilde: Now I was interested in all of its exotic anise-flavored cousins, Sambuca, ouzo, Pernod and the rest. But as to how I decided to situate the fruits of my research in Pandemonium—I don’t have a clue. I must have been reading Milton.

One thing I do remember about the first draft is how reluctant I was to include specific cultural references. In a story about absinthe, the atmosphere has to be fin-de-siècle, but instead of naming Beardsley and Wilde and green ink, I gave these vague hints about café patios and decadent poetry. Of course, that draft didn’t have anything of the texture I wanted. Once I took on a first person narrator and started naming names—putting whatever and whomever I wanted in Hell—the writing became a lot easier, and a lot more vivid.

How was the process different in writing this story from writing “How Many Miles to Babylon?”

Writing “How Many Miles to Babylon?” was a very straight-forward process. I knew my characters and my setting from the start, and the plot emerged clearly as I added the details—the darkness, the radio messages, the narrator’s step-daughter. Once I’d written the first scene, the story came together in about two weeks.

“The Suicide’s Guide to the Absinthe of Perdition” took much longer to draft—a year and a half, maybe two years. The first version of the story was actually the Guide itself, with directions for the three methods and short descriptions of Pandemonium, the café, the fallen angels. I sent it out to two or three places and collected some well-deserved rejections. There wasn’t enough emotional payoff. But I had other stories on my plate at the time—“Lessons from a Clockwork Queen” among them—so I set the piece aside.

I came back to it twice, once to give Pandemonium more texture and to add some second-person narrative that was separate from the Guide excerpts, and a second time to retell the whole thing through a first-person narrator. That was how I came to include the story of the best friend and the Suicide as an active character. Once I wrote a draft in first person, I couldn’t believe I’d attempted to write the story any other way! At the very least, it gave me new places in Pandemonium to explore.

Your aesthetic in this story seems to have a sort of awfulness as well as beauty. What made you choose this?

The pairing of the beautiful and the grotesque suits the fin-de-siècle and absinthe-centered culture of Pandemonium—I’m thinking of Gustave Moreau and the symbolists, Huysmans and À rebours, Wilde and Salome, and certain chapters of Dorian Gray. Beauty, terror, and the sublime are also a huge part of the appeal of fallen angels, from Milton to Doré. Pandemonium had to combine the richness and luxury of the Aesthetic movement with the brimstone and gore and decay of Hell. Hopefully, readers find the result as disturbingly appealing as I do!

It seems that the main source of torment for the souls is watching the angels fall. Is there more you could say about that?

It’s the same terror that permeates the worst kind of nightmare: knowing that something horrible is about to happen to someone but not being able to stop it. And those nightmares themselves are a lot like living with a person suffering a severe mental illness—the unpredictability, the helplessness, the guilt. So watching the angels fall has a specific awfulness for the narrator. It forces her to relive the worst experience of her life—the friend’s paranoia and suicide—repeatedly, indefinitely.

What’s next for you?

My writing output this year has been abysmal. I’ve raised starting stories I can’t finish to an art form. Fortunately, I’ve had short stories accepted for the erotic fantasy anthology Thrones of Desire (a new genre for me!) and Dagan Books’ Bibliotheca Fantasatica, and poems upcoming in Strange Horizons and Asimov’s. For my works-in-progress, I’m reading up on exorcism, Aztec mythology, and zombies. I’ve also started the second draft of a story about wine and Martian agriculture—putting that liquor research to work once again!

Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in November, in Lightspeed . . .

We’ll have original science fiction by Sandra McDonald (“Searching for Slave Leia”) and Tom Crosshill (“A Well-Adjusted Man”), along with SF reprints by Eleanor Arnason (“Ace 167”) and Tobias S. Buckell (“A Game of Rats and Dragon”).

Plus, we’ll have original fantasy by Jeremiah Tolbert (“La Alma Perdida de Marguerite Espinoza”) and Richard Bowes (“Seven Smiles and Seven Frowns”), and fantasy reprints by Aliette de Bodard (“As the Wheel Turns”) and Carrie Vaughn (“A Princess of Spain”).

For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella will be “West” by Orson Scott Card, and of course we’ll have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with bestselling authors Terry Brooks and Alastair Reynolds.

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!